To be human means to put an equality sign between yourself and others. That’s what my father-in-law, professor emeritus of mathematics Abe Shenitzer, said one day in our kitchen. We wrote it on a sheet of paper that he held up and we took a picture of him holding it in front of himself. As the IDF continues to destroy Palestinian lives and the Israeli cabinet plans to reoccupy and settle Gaza, all I can think of is this: what would it mean to put an equality sign between Israelis and Palestinians? What does it take to be human in this conflict? I don’t for a moment mistake my place here. I am a relative outsider to the conflict. I enjoy dual citizenship in Germany and the United States, where I reside and teach. My friendship in, connections with, and scholarship on the communities and history of the Holy Land don’t give me more than a tangential voice. It is my Israeli and Palestinian friends who are suffering and worrying about the future. And because I have Israeli and Palestinian friends, and because I consider myself Jewish, I feel more responsible and implicated in this conflict than in others. I worry about the people of South Sudan, but it does not concern me directly. To be sure, this is an unsatisfying position, lacking in moral clarity. Should not all lives matter? But this would be an abstraction. Not every conflict in the world concerns me so directly. At the same time, as I am reminded by people close to me, the laser focused attention on the Middle East alone may be driven by emotional, political, and historical reasons that have nothing to do with the nature of the conflict itself. Rather, what is at play is the singular importance of the Middle East to our collective imagination, our traditions, our religions, and our hopes for the future. It is also a sign of the moment in human history, a history infused with apocalyptic urgency, where every battle – but especially battles over rights, presence, and dominance in the Holy Land – seems to be conducted as a kind of last battle, a Gog and Magog, even though the finality has nothing to do with the expectation that, in the end, there will be a new heaven and a new earth. At the end of the Anthropocene, there will be only wasteland and destruction. All wars being conducted now and that will take place in the near future are battles for control over the scarce resources left after humans have degraded the planet beyond its capacity to sustain the wasteful ways of the west. We must decide whether under these circumstances we still believe that what it means to be human is to put an equality sign between oneself and others, or whether the death of others (literally, or in terms of access to the fundamentals of a human life in peace and dignity) is a calculated risk we are willing to take to save our kith and kin. In other words, what we see unfolding here and elsewhere is a return to tribal warfare that limits humanity to yourself and your own people.
Putting an equality sign between oneself and others is work. We are not the same, nor does equality mean sameness. Men and women, black and white, trans and cis, Jew and Christian, Hindu and Muslim are not the same. What then does it mean to put an equality sign between oneself and others? The formula A=B states, in form of a general norm, that the universal (A) always stands in a necessary relation to the particular (B). If the particular (B) comes first (B=), equating it with A subsumes it under a universal (=A). We see that the order matters. When we say, Love thy neighbor, for he is like you, we start from a B (the neighbor), equating her with ourselves (A), and we do so under the norm of love (=). B=A means to see the other as equal to us. This neither denies that, in our own minds, we always come first, nor does it allow us to stand in isolation. Even though we are not the same, we are to love because we are equal. The formula expresses in abstract terms what is always already the case: our neighbor is like us. Hence, we must put an equality sign between ourselves and others. Everything else is wrong.
Modern political theory (Spinoza, Hobbes) starts from the natural right of each existent to strive for self-preservation, to strive to persist in one's being as best one can. Since this supposedly leads to a state of perpetual warfare we agree to relinquish some of our rights to some form of government that, in exchange, uses the power accumulated by way of every citizen having relinquished some of their natural rights to protect the lives of citizens from being subject to one another’s whim and violence. This simple model of the social contract seems to have every single individual look toward the state as the sole actor in the mitigation of conflict between individuals and groups. In fact, it does not even consider the possibility of groups acting as aggregates of particular interests. For Spinoza, the weakness of this model is mitigated by the religion of the prophets and the apostles who preach love of God and love of neighbor, that is, by the need to put an equality sign between oneself and others. As Nancy Levene reminds us in her perceptive book on Spinoza, man is not just wolf but also god to man. This doesn’t sound like much, but if Abe was right – and his views were backed up by the kind of experience that most of us have been spared – it might make all the difference. To see the other as not the same but equal to myself is to set oneself a task, namely, the task of looking at the other as real, as worthy of more than mere life (though that’s already a start), as equally endowed with natural rights and as justified as I am to seek to enjoy a life of safety and happiness. Now, this sounds a lot like the preamble to the US Declaration of Independence, where it says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These words are a confession of faith. They put an equality sign between all men and they ground this equality in the belief in creation. Why “creation?” Does it mean that we are dealing with a religious creed? I can assure you that Abe was not a believer. This is not what he had in mind. He loved poetry and music but he was also a hard-nosed scientist who admired Bertrand Russell. What he was speaking of was not the traditional view that human rights are grounded in divine creation or in natural equality as its equivalent. He was aware of the fact that modern evolutionary science vitiates against the idea of equality. Nor did he ignore that people first and foremost act out of self-interest. It would be quite silly to assume that words can turn us into altruists. This Holocaust survivor from Sosnoviec in Poland cried tears of sublime relief when he arrived in Tel Aviv for the first time and saw a Jewish soldier with a gun. What he saw as well, however, was that Israel could not win an endless war aimed to suppress the desire of the Palestinian people to live in dignity. Putting an equality sign between himself and others did not mean to love your enemy. But, much like Yitzhak Rabin, he understood that it would be stupid and shortsighted not to respect your enemy. He worried about the future of the Jewish state. What matters most to me right now is that, for Abe and others, the future was something that could, should, and must be forged by us. That there was a future, and if we screwed it up, it was our own responsibility.
In view of the atrocities committed by the Israelis in Gaza, to be human means to imagine the future, a future where Israelis and Palestinians can both persist and live in peace and dignity. Israelis cannot and must not decide on behalf of the Palestinians but they ought to act in a way that envisages a future where both communities can live and thrive. To put an inequality sign between yourself and others is foolish and shortsighted. It might work. But it will destroy one’s own humanity.
