(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . We Don’t Have to Be One OR The Other [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-11-11 The fruits of one of the worst human proclivities “Yo! Hold up! Time out! Time out! Y’all take a chill! You need to cool that shit out. And that’s the double truth, Ruth!” – Love Daddy, in Do the Right Thing (1989) “Who do you love more, me or my sister? One or the other—there’s no in-between!” Many of us who have children have heard them say something along those lines. To see everything as fitting into an either/or, no-in-between dichotomy is a childish way of thinking, yet adults throughout history have frequently slipped into it. The results have often been disastrous. Humans have an unfortunate proclivity to think in a binary, either/or way and quickly slip into an “us” against “them” mode. In many animal species, males fight to establish dominance, but generally stop before one of them is killed. These animals recognize fellow members of their species and try not to kill them. Humans also have inhibitions against killing our own species—if we recognize them as such. But our extraordinary brains can persuade us that they really are not members of our species, thereby turning off our natural identification with them. Psychologist Erik Erikson named this phenomenon pseudospeciation (the false reclassification of members of our species as a different species). It is what breaks humanity into warring factions. It is what enables people to kill, torture, rape, lynch, and commit all manner of atrocities against fellow human beings. We are experiencing this ruinous proclivity again with the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 and the Israeli attacks in response. Surely the Hamas terrorists had reclassified the people they butchered as “not-human.”. Almost more shocking than the terrorists’ total otherization of Jewish people was the endorsement of their unmitigated evil by people who demand zero tolerance for mistreatment of anyone based on the category of humans to which they belong … except Jews. They are rightly critical of some of the policies pursued by some Israeli governments, particularly those headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. They are right that some of those policies have contributed to the current terrible situation. They are certainly right that Palestinians deserve equal treatment and self-government. Indeed, as the New York Times has reported, Netanyahu played a role in what happened by bolstering Hamas in a reprehensible attempt to weaken the Palestinian Authority and avoid creating a Palestinian state. But none of that justifies—or, indeed, is even relevant to—the slaughter of innocents. The insistence that we take sides with Hamas against Israel is, to put it much too charitably, misguided. We can—if we profess to be decent human beings, we must—have empathy both for the Palestinian cause and for Jewish people in Israel and worldwide. All people of goodwill ought to be able to come together on the following points: Condemnation of the Hamas atrocities is a case where there is no in-between. Anyone who refuses to denounce the planned, systematic slaughter of men, women, children, elderly people, rape, beheadings, intentionally burning human beings and kidnapping people thereby forfeits their right to criticize “the other side.” Unadulterated evil must be condemned without equivocation. There can be no “but …” To rebuke Hamas and particularly its blatant violation of every code of human morality is in no way to oppose the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people. Saying that Israel has a right to retaliate to defend itself, including by attacking Hamas leaders and infrastructure inside Gaza, is not to give the rightwing Israeli government a blank check to wage war without taking all possible measures to minimize civilian casualties. To call for a humanitarian pause in the war is not to side with Hamas; it is to aid innocent Palestinian people. To recognize that Israel is a democracy that generally protects human rights is not for one moment to excuse the nation’s actions over the decades, most notably of building settlements on Palestinian land and evicting Palestinians to be replaced by Jewish settlers and of claiming Jerusalem as its capital. The outrageous antisemitism and Islamophobia that have been unleashed by the Hamas attack must both be denounced in no uncertain terms by everyone. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial makes clear the stakes: “The West spent the decades after the civilizational catastrophe of the Holocaust vowing never again to allow itself to slide into such barbarism. What we see now in the attacks on Jews is how that slide began.” As Love Daddy—whose name and his position looking down from a window above the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant suggest Spike Lee intends to be the voice of God or The Good—said, we “need to cool that shit out.” Now. {Robert S. McElvaine is a Professor of History Emeritus at Millsaps College, the author of eleven books, most recently, The Times They Were a-Changin’ – 1964: The Year “The Sixties” Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn, and writes “Musings & Amusings of a B-List Writer” on Substack.} [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/11/2205106/-We-Don-t-Have-to-Be-One-OR-The-Other?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/