The core axiom driving any cognising organism is to treat like cases alike. And this, of course, requires that it distinguish between this collection of things and that collection of things. These distinctions are not always easy. Are we in a state of civil society or are we in a state of war? Why does it matter? Because there are different sets of rules governing each. Notwithstanding ten minutes ago he just killed one of our comrades, a minute ago he raised a white flag and now we can’t shoot a prisoner of war. But in many civil societies we can execute a convicted murderer. A moral infant might find this baffling. But that’s because she’s too young to understand that rules are indexed to institutions which in turn are indexed to the function they’ve been instituted to serve. Both war and civil society demand constrained violence. But each demand demands very different constraints.

Some people think – the moral infant among them – that the laws of war have been agreed upon and written down, if not in stone then at least in ink. As with the laws of civil society, it’s not a law unless it’s enforceable, but unlike the laws of civil society, which are enforced by the state’s monopoly on the means of enforcement, the laws of war are enforced by mutual prudence. If you shoot our prisoners of war, we’ll shoot yours. If we target your civilians we can expect that you’ll target ours. So contrary to the morally myopic whinging of Americans and Israelis respectively, 9/11 and October 7th were fully compliant with the rules established for America’s “War on Terror” and for the Israeli’s occupation of Palestine “from the river to the sea.” The refrain of the moral infant is always the same: “We wasn’t doin’ nothin’!”

To say that the Americans and Israelis had it coming is to say nothing more than that. That they had it coming. It is not to say that the Americans should have, or even could have, kept their McDonald’s out of Saudi Arabia, or that the Israelis should have, or even could have, kept their bulldozers out of those olive groves. People are animals. Animals complete for territory and resources. Nature red in tooth and claw makes no exception for humans. But whether in victory or defeat, other animals don’t engage in moral dudgeon. But then, to be fair, perhaps moral dudgeon is just a species-specific evolutionary adaptation.

Enough throat-clearing. Now to the case at hand. In the course of its breakout on October 7th, Hamas took some 250 hostages. To what end? That is, why does anyone, in peace time or in war, take hostages? Well, presumably, to extract ransom. Typically ransom in the form of money, but in this case political concessions. Fair enough. But now let’s take a closer look at the logic of hostage-holding.

If the conventions governing the treatment of prisoners of war were in place, and if a given hostage is an Israeli soldier, then he’d be protected, not from captivity but certainly from mistreatment. But the conventions governing the treatment of prisoners of war are not in place between Israel and the Occupied Territories. In some measure this is because Israel does not recognise the Occupied Territories as sovereign, and so Hamas and Hezbollah are, for all intents and purposes, domestic terrorists. But as such neither is the resistance under the rules of civil society. So, as Hobbes would put it, the Geneva and Hague Conventions “have there no place”.

But what about the civilian hostages? Once again, they can’t be protected by the immunity of non-combatants, because, as the Israelis have been making clear for 76 years, that convention isn’t in place either. So what remains is the logic of hostage-holding itself, namely that they’re not hostages at all if they’re merely captives. Why? Because a mere captive can be liberated with impunity. But someone isn’t rescued from captivity. To be ‘rescued’ one has to be in immanent danger. Of what? Presumably of being killed. So when it became clear that the IDF was about to rescue those six hostages last week, they were righty executed, ‘rightly’ in the sense that not executing them would have made no sense.

So in reporting that these six hostages were murdered, the Israelis and their talking-heads allies in the West were talking deliberate nonsense. The IDF hoped they could have been rescued. Other hostages had been. But when they failed, the fault, if fault there be, lies with the failure, not with the hostage-holders.

Of course one might take the view that there is fault, and that it lies in the hostage-taking itself. That hostage-taking in war is as categorically indefensible as hostage-taking in civil society. But is hostage-taking, even in civil society, categorically indefensible? I’m sure there are Trolley-esque scenarios under which that claim would be sorely tested.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy

Tags: 9/11, Gaza, Hamas, Hezbollah, IDF, Israel, Just War Theory, October 7th, Palestine