“Honderich is the author of the most-translated living philosopher's
book on determinism and freedom, ‘How Free Are You?’ .. and the editor
of the most-used one-volume reference work of its kind, ‘The Oxford
Companion to Philosophy‘ ..”
By Paul de Rooij
LONDON (PalestineChronicle.com) - It is unusual to find philosophers
getting into the debate on current events; most of them are safely
ensconced in their ivory towers pondering questions of higher
importance. It is therefore gratifying to find some philosophers in the
trenches tackling questions pertinent to all of us -- trying to
understand current events and to untangle the meaning of
propaganda-frayed language. Paul de Rooij recently had the opportunity
to ask Prof. Ted Honderich some questions pertaining his latest book and
the furor surrounding it.
About Ted Honderich: he is a distinguished British philosopher,
has been Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at
University College London, and also taught at Yale and CUNY. He is the
author of the most-translated living philosopher's book on determinism
and freedom, “How Free Are You?” He is the proponent of an alternative
view of the nature of perceptual consciousness, and the editor of the
most-used one-volume reference work of its kind, “The Oxford Companion
to Philosophy”. His new book “After the Terror” addresses questions
raised by September 11. The British branch of Oxfam International
recently declined to accept a donation of £5,000 in royalties from the
book after a Canadian newspaper raised the issue of a statement made in
the book as to the rights of the Palestinians.
Isn’t the issue of the justification of political violence old hat?
The UN recognizes the right for an oppressed people to resist. There is
an enormous body of work in this area. So, why was it necessary to
traverse this ground again? Why did you write “After the Terror”?
I know the UN has recognized the right of peoples to self-determination
and to freedom from foreign occupation, and indeed recognized the
legitimacy of struggles by national liberation movements. But I have
been under the impression that the UN also condemns terrorism.
Certainly, its Secretary-General has done so, no doubt on the basis of
UN resolutions or the like. So surely the fact of the matter is that the
UN doesn't recognize the right of a people to engage in what is now the
most common form of resistance and liberation-struggle.
Claiming that the Palestinians have a moral right to their terrorism,
which I do, can hardly be old hat given the reaction to the claim. If
some people readily accept it, some of them out of anti-Semitism, many
are shocked or disturbed by it. The moral feelings of people at Oxfam GB
were shocked by it, as their public statements clearly show.
As for my reason for writing “After the Terror”, I was like so many of
us in being overwhelmed and then thrown into reflection by September 11.
In my own case, September 11 also came as a kind of charge against or
question about things written by me in the past, notably the book
"Violence for Equality: Inquiries in Political Philosophy".
The new book is an account of what you can call the moral state of the
world. It is only about Palestine in passing. Only a few pages are on
Palestine. The most important thing you come on, in thinking about us
and our world, is our omissions rather than our commissions. One large
thing we omit to do, most notably in connection with Africa, is to help
people with short and even brief lives -- half-lives and quarter-lives.
In one sample there is a loss of 20 million years of living time.
This is yet more terrible than what we positively do -- say aid the
Zionists, by whom I mean overt and covert supporters of and participants
in Israel's ongoing aggression against the Palestinians, the violation
and occupation of their homeland.
So what is your definition of terrorism? Isn’t terrorism generally
understood to be illegitimate violence? Resistance on the other hand is
legitimate, and may employ terrorism as a tactic. So how do you define
these terms?
Terrorism has a number of features, but fundamentally it is a kind of
violence, which is to say physical force that injures, damages, violates
or destroys people or things. It is this: violence with a political and
social end, whether or not intended to put people in general in fear,
and necessarily raising a question of its moral justification because it
is violence -- either such violence as is against the law within a
society or else violence between states or societies, against what there
is of international law and smaller-scale than war. It is illegitimate
in terms of law, but not necessarily in terms of morality.
Terrorism understood in this uncontentious way evidently includes
suicide bombings. As evidently, it also includes state-terrorism and
cat's paw terrorism.
You say resistance as ordinarily understood is "legitimate". Do you mean
it's ordinarily taken to be lawful? Then it itself can’t include
terrorism, and I guess it can't employ terrorism. If saying resistance
is legitimate means it is morally defensible, which is certainly
different, then it can't employ any old terrorism whatsoever, because
not all terrorism is morally defensible. But it is obviously possible
that some morally justified resistance can employ some morally justified
terrorism.
What terrorism do you justify, and how do you arrive at those
conclusions?
In the book what I say is morally permissible is the terrorism of the
Palestinians in the present situation. It seems to me very similar to
the terrorism of the African National Congress against the South Africa
of apartheid.
I also say that the only general kind of terrorism that is likely to be
justified, in the world as it is, is what you can call
liberation-terrorism: the violent struggle of a people to come to
freedom and power in their own homeland. The likely justification
depends importantly on the fact that the suffering that is caused does
have a probability of success. What is wrong with other terrorism is
that it is the causing of suffering for no probable gain, with no
reasonable hope.
You will notice that what I have said does not amount to a complete
answer to the question of what violence is justified. I don’t have one
worked-out. What does seem to me clear is that the Palestinians have a
moral right to their struggle. It seems to be a fact about morality that
one can be sure of a particular moral proposition, a particular case,
without having a complete answer to the large and general question in
the neighborhood.
How do I arrive at the conclusion about the Palestinians? Well, I have a
lot of reasons. The book gives various premises for the conclusion. One
is my fundamental moral principle, which is the Principle of Humanity,
about taking rational steps to getting people out of bad lives. Another
is that the Israelis certainly claim a moral right to their
state-terrorism and perhaps war. In consistency, which is necessary to
actually saying anything, the Palestinians can claim the same, and they
can do it truthfully.
Another reason for their moral right is that 50 years of history have
proved that the Palestinians have no alternative whatever to terrorism
in trying to secure freedom and power in their homeland. What they were
offered in the Clinton negotiations at Camp David was not a state, but,
if anything, a dog's breakfast of a state. That is proved, incidentally,
by the fact that everybody now speaks of their need for a viable state.
But still more has to be said in support of the moral right, and can be.
There is no simple proof of the claim about their moral right. That is
because there are no simple proofs in morality.
What do you think elicited the criticism of your book? How has your
book been received in academic circles?
The book has been seriously and respectfully received in meetings in
nine universities here and in America, including Oxford and Columbia.
There has been a little Zionist fuss, but not much. That has to be kept
in mind when thinking about the Oxfam business. As for newspaper
reviews, for starters, The Guardian lauded it, The Times said it was the
best reflective book on 9/11, and The Sunday Telegraph, owned by the man
who also owns The Jerusalem Post, said it was the worst book ever
written. All of those three reviews, to my mind, given the newspapers in
question, proved I must have written something decent.
Your arguments are ahistorical. Isn’t the historical context crucial
to understanding violence?
I don't quite understand what you mean by saying that my arguments are
ahistorical. The way the argument goes forward is pretty typical for a
moral philosopher. It is a kind of logical sequence, but most certainly
it does not ignore history. Another principal premise for my conclusion
about the moral right of the Palestinians is that they have indeed been
treated horrifically in their homeland for 50 years. Population figures
I give in the book for Arabs and Jews at various stages overwhelm the
familiar stuff about who did what in what year in terms of massacres,
negotiations and the like. The Palestinians are right to say they are
the Jews of the Jews.
My reflections are an attempt to try to give a good argument for a moral
conclusion about what is right and what we ought to be doing. To do so
is not just to engage in historical explanation, of course, but
historical explanation must enter into the thing.
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In the context of the Middle East violence is usually referred to as
“terrorism”. This word has become very politically charged, and its
meaning has changed from its dictionary definition. Has terrorism become
the violence of the “other”, actions that don’t require explanation? How
do philosophers cope with words whose meaning keeps changing - aren’t
you dealing with a moving target?
Of course the word has been kidnapped by the Israelis above all, and
used just for the violence of the Palestinians. "Democracy" is used as
mindlessly -- you might add as viciously. "Terrorism" is also used in
such a way as to suggest wholly irrational evil and whatever else. That
is pretty obvious. It is also one of the facts that affected me in the
writing of my book. I was outraged by the endless parade of Israeli
government spokesmen on television going on about the unspeakable
terrorism of the Palestinians and the murdered children of the Israeli
democrats. It turned my stomach, as it did many other stomachs.
But that is not to say that changes in uses of a word, and a word’s
being kidnapped, stand in the way of using it correctly. To my mind, I
do that. This is more or less necessary to actual thinking. It is also
necessary to strong argument. You just weaken your argument, on whatever
side you are, by self-serving definitions. It is plain that pretending
that terrorism can exist only on the other side is usually lying in the
aid of killing, maybe killing in the aid of taking more of another
people's land.
You mean that Israel is not a democracy?
I don't meant that. It is a hierarchic democracy, like the hierarchic
democracies of the United States and Britain. But that you are a
democracy, even a better one, most certainly doesn't legitimate you in
anything like the sense of making all your actions and policies right,
or even your main actions and policies. No chance whatever of that. Did
anybody even say it who was actually thinking about the matter rather
than engaged in doing something else?
After the recent Palestinian attack in Hebron, the Israelis engaged
in a wave of “retaliation”, and people living in Gaza, totally unrelated
to the original attack, were targeted. One Israeli soldier was quoted as
saying that “none of them are innocent.” On the other hand, when a
terrorist attack occurs in the West the condemnations always refer to
“innocent” civilians. What do you make of this, and are there any
innocent civilians? Does the civilian’s responsibility for actions of
their state diminish their innocence?
I think that lying is a part of such conflicts as the Palestinian one.
It enables people to do unspeakable things. They should say and let
themselves know what they are doing. This comment applies to both
Israelis and Palestinians. The Israelis and the Palestinians should not
engage in awful stuff about young children not being “innocent”. Of
course and unquestionably, these children and some other people who have
been killed are innocent in an ordinary sense.
These truths cannot possibly be overlooked, and nor can they be taken by
themselves to decide the main questions. To take but one example, we
British did not take it that our terror-bombing of Germany in World War
2, which in fact was called just that, was wrong because it killed
innocents and civilians and children. Remember Hiroshima too.
Israelis often justify their violent actions as a deterrent. Pulling
out of Lebanon without gaining anything was seen as weakness, thus
encouraging the Lebanese resistance. The other side of this story is
that any Palestinian action must be met 100X as a deterrent. So, is
there any merit to the deterrence argument?
I don't quite see what this comes to. You can engage in deterrence,
so-called, in a good cause, and you can engage in it in a bad cause. To
the extent that the Israelis are engaging in deterrence, they are
engaged in wholly wrongful deterrence. What they are trying to do is to
destroy the desire and will of a people to be free in the place to which
they have a moral right.
In the media, the Israelis are always portrayed as “responding” or
“retaliating,” thus justified in their actions. Palestinian actions are
never described this way. Can there be a “cycle of violence” with only
one party “responding”? Furthermore, Israeli violence is usually
unrelated to original Palestinian action, and it is usually called
“collective punishment.” So, do the Israelis have any justification for
their violence in this case?
There is all this use of language to a particular purpose, a wrongful
purpose. The main one, of course, as already mentioned, is the use of
the term “democracy” in such way as to suggest that what a democracy
does must be right, and the use of the word “terrorism” in such a way as
to suggest or declare that this terrorism is always wrong or barbarous.
It is just self-serving commandeering of language.
What is most important about it is that it does not amount to serious
moral argument. Nor will it in the end be decisive. It seems to me that
just about everybody in the world, including all supporters of Israel,
do in fact see through this vile stuff. Vile stuff with a vicious
purpose.
As for whether Israel does in fact have an argument for its own
existence, it seems to me very clear that it does. It also has an
argument for defending itself, where that actually means what the word
“defending” does mean. It does not mean attacking somebody else in order
to seize more land. What Israel does not have an argument for, whatever
wretched terminology and talk it goes in for, is the taking of more and
more land beyond its justified borders, these to my mind being its
borders before 1967.
Amnesty International in their latest report [1] recently stated:
“Israel has the right and responsibility to take measures to prevent
unlawful violence [referring to Palestinian violence]. The Israeli
government equally has an obligation to ensure that the measures it
takes to protect Israelis are carried out in accordance with
international human rights and humanitarian law.” What do you think of
the first sentence, and isn’t it in contradiction with the second
sentence?
I think this stuff from Amnesty as it stands is typical unreflective
moralizing, avoiding the issue. What Israel ought to do is give up,
withdraw from the homeland of another people. That is the main thing.
How they do this, how they go about protecting Israeli lives and what
they do to Palestinians in the process, is a secondary matter. It is a
large matter, but a secondary matter. Needless to say, they should cause
the least possible suffering and death, to the Palestinians and
themselves.
Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have proscribed any violence against
civilians, settlers, and even off duty soldiers. Violence in Israel is
proscribed completely. It seems that Palestinians are only allowed to
fight one of the most powerful armies in the world within the occupied
territories. What do you make of this?
Probably I disagree with it. I guess I disagree with it. My view of the
Palestinians’ moral right to their terrorism is most confident with
respect to the occupied territories, but I also extend it to Israel
itself.
Amnesty equates the nature of the violence perpetrated against
Israelis and Palestinians. That is, it will condemn to the same degree
when an Israeli is killed, and when a Palestinian is killed. It also
calls on “both parties to respect human rights, and to make human rights
central to their agenda.” Is AI’s stance valid?
Everyone should object to the terrible “even-handedness” of such
statements as the Amnesty one. Everyone should choke on such attempts at
“balance”. In an ordinary sense of the words, there is no place at all
for even-handedness and balance in actually dealing with the rapist
engaged in the rape of the woman with a knife at her throat. The rapist
has no rights that bear significantly on the question of whether he
should stop or be stopped. The analogy with Israel is not a wild one,
but exact.
If Amnesty were taking the view that any killing is as bad as any other
killing, it would be taking a view that is denied by all of history. If
it is saying that you can settle any question of killing by making a
declaration of a right to life, that is nonsense. It has the upshot, to
mention but one, that it would have been wrong to kill a single German
guard in order to save a thousand Jews from death in gas chambers in a
concentration camp.
A few months ago Cherie Blair, the wife of the current British Prime
Minister, stated: “As long as young people feel they have got no hope
but to blow themselves up, you are never going to make progress.” This
seemingly bland statement elicited a barrage of criticism, and a
statement from the Prime minister’s office announced that she retracted
the statement, and apologized for it. So, why do you think her bland
statement elicited this response?
It elicited this response as a result of Israeli and Zionist activity.
There is no puzzle about that. Cherie Blair's statement did not elicit
the response because people in general thought the comment was terrible.
In fact, probably, most people thought the opposite.
I understand that you recently arranged to donate £5,000 ($8,000) to
Oxfam GB, and that this was then rejected on account of the statement in
your book about the moral right of the Palestinians. Why did Oxfam
refuse your donation?
Well, there was a Zionist threat. But I think Oxfam could pretty easily
have accepted the £5,000 without thereby losing a larger amount of money
as a result of Zionists or others not making donations. Oxfam could have
done this by declaring that it would not dream of endorsing or agreeing
with my view, which it hated, but that regretfully Oxfam was obliged
legally and morally to save 2,000 lives, the lives of 2,000 dying
children, by taking the money. This is just obvious. Those who suggest
otherwise are trying to avoid a clear truth, for whatever reason.
So what happened has some other explanation in place of or in addition
to the Zionist threat. You get to it by reading Oxfam’s own statements.
What it comes to is that some people -- certainly not all -- in the
Oxfam GB office in Oxford were disturbed or outraged by my view. They
were upset, as I said in answer to an earlier question.
That is all right by me. Philosophers are used to disagreement. What
isn’t all right is allowing more people to die for certain of your
conventional moral feelings. That is neither a legal nor a moral
possibility for Oxfam. Its objects, which are defined in the foundation
document lodged with the Charity Commission, do not include refuting
moral philosophers it thinks are mistaken. In particular it can't do
this if it reduces their income to serve their real objects of saving
lives and preventing suffering.
Mr. John Whitaker, the Deputy Director of Oxfam GB, who has taken
responsibility for the decision to turn away the £5,000, should resign.
If he does not, he should be relieved of his duties by the Trustees of
Oxfam, who have authority over the charity.
There is also the fact that Oxfam’s acting on the moral feelings of some
of its officers raises a bigger question not about their raising of
money but their use of it. In particular, it raises a question about
their policy with respect to Palestine. For a start, this is a matter of
their political activity, which is one of their stated policies, and
their literature. Why aren't they putting out a lot of forceful and
effective literature against the violation of Palestine? Why is this
missing from the stuff we all get in our mailboxes?
Paul de Rooij is an economist living in London and can be reached at
proox@hotmail.com. He will forward legitimate emails to Prof. Honderich.
Notes:
1. Shielded from scrutiny: IDF violations in Jenin and Nablus, Nov. 4,
02
2. There is an extensive account of the Oxfam dispute by Ted Honderich
at www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/ATTOxfam1.html
-Palestine Chronicle (palestinechronicle.com).
Redistributed via Press International News Agency (PINA).
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