Moral Relativism: Does the depredation of Israeli occupation justify the depravity of the Hamas Attack?

• Is the collective punishment of Gaza justified for Hamas’s barbarism?

Mia Khalifa is a former Lebanese porn star, a quite successful one who happened to be one of the most watched performers. If her X (formerly Twitter) feed is any guide, she is also eloquently opinionated.

“If you can look at the situation in Palestine and not be on the side of Palestinians, then you are on the wrong side of apartheid, and history will show that in time,” she posted.
It is this moral question that many who are outraged at the depravity of the Hamas attack on Israel during the weekend encounter as they survey beyond the carnage – though the depredation of the Israeli occupation in no way justifies the singular callousness of the slaughter of innocents.

Founded by the Holocaust survivors and industrial European Jews who migrated to the Biblical land, Israel was invaded by hostile Arab nations on the very first day of the new state. It overcame adversity, prevailed in three wars with its neighbours, turned the desert green and built a state-of-the-art technological powerhouse from scratch. It has a formidable military, yet one that is firmly under civilian political control. In a region full of hereditary monarchies and dictatorships, Israel was a democratic oasis, an Elysium of a kind. 
But, beneath its democratic contours, Israel built itself into a real-life module of the 2013 dystopian movie ‘Elysium’, which depicts a dystopian future where the rich live in the opulence of an earth-orbiting state station while the poor rot in the polluted, overpopulated and diseased earth.

Perhaps the main departure from the movie is that Israel built it on the earth, sitting side by side, divided only by parameter fences and checkpoints, guarded by the Israeli military.
Israel is the last remaining apartheid state in the world. Through intergenerational subjugation and sub-human treatment of 6.8 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has created a classic two-tire state, where the Jewish state exercises overwhelming control over the lives of Palestinians, who live in squalor, insecurity and subjugation. Palestinian Authority was granted nominal self-rule of Palestinian territories under the Oslo Accord; however, Israel continues to wield control over air, land, sea, and across Palestine territories, and “in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy,’’ Human Rights Watch observed in a report.
The 2006 election brought to an end the nascent democratic experiment in Palestinian territories as the two rival factions, PLA and Hamas, dislodged each other from their respective strongholds and consolidated power in West and Gaza, respectively. Israel had imposed a blockade of Gaza since its Hamas takeover, turning a sliver of 140 square miles, packed with 2.3 million people into an open prison. How cruel and all-encompassing the Israeli control over the territory is even students who received scholarships to study abroad were prevented from leaving the territory last year. 
As the evidence of the barbarity of the Hamas attack emerges, one rather unconvincing excuse made in the Palestinian territories is “if you treat people like animals, they will fight back the same way.”
Palestinians are victims of the callousness of their political leaders as well; PLA leadership, including the late Yasser Arafat and his Tunisian wife who robbed millions of dollars of donor money, are rent-seeking profiteers; on the other side, Hamas is a nihilistic terrorist group, hell-bent on the liquidation of Israel, and proxies of Tehran, where a theocratic regime is murdering women who refuse to wear hijab.

The unspeakable cruelty of Hamas in the multipronged attack on the Jewish holiday has very few parallels in its brutality: Hamas militants slaughtered young concertgoers in a desert music festival, from where 260 bodies have been recovered; civilians including elderly in wheelchairs were kidnapped and transported to the Gaza, and dead and unconscious women were paraded in the streets. Overall, 900 Israelis have been killed in the attack. All that brutality betrayed, more than the anger of the oppressed, an innate medieval hatred that is overpouring in the original charter of Hamas in 1988. That is the Islamic State light. Hamas is a murderous Islamist terrorist group, of which sinisterly binary worldview is much less a function of the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor but the product of the literal translation of the Islamic scripture with all its hatred to the nonbelievers. 
The Israeli subjugation is not even a remote justification for the monstrosity of the Hamas attack. There is a related question: Would Israel’s indiscriminate pounding of Gaza, which has already killed 600 Palestinians, including over 100 children, and complete siege of Gaza be justified in the light of the Hamas attack? No!  
Israel is unleashing a medieval form of collective punishment on 2.3 million Gaza residents, relentlessly bombarding the territory, including refugee camps, and completely cutting off electricity, gas and water supply, leading the impoverished region into a humanitarian disaster. 
 But, instead of the outpour of moral outrage that the West is usually known to indulge in whenever the country in question is not White, all you hear in the Western capitals is the not-so-tacit approval for collective punishment, shrouded in indifference.
It was the same reason that many nations, which are sickened at the brutality of Hamas, stop short of all-out condemnation.
One would call this moral relativism - the view that moral judgements are true or false only to a particular standing point. The most pivotal guideline here is much less a specific moral, ethical or legal conviction, but the differences are skin deep. As Kipling wrote: Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.
If you compile all the statements by the international community, they all could be divided into two basic categories: blanket support and solidarity and one that takes a broader view of the origin of violence. Generally, the good Samaritans in the West and their NGO captains indulged in the latter passion whenever the state that fights the non-state actor is one of Asian, African or Latin American of brown, yellow or black people. However, the tables have turned in Gaza, where the EU has rushed to suspend aid to Palestine - never mind that the PLA, which governs the West Bank, is a totally different entity and a rival of Hamas.
 Blood is thicker than water, a cultural lesson foreign policymakers should not forget. ( Even the realists, or more ground-to-earth school of the neo-classical realist who believe state reaction is guided by external pressure, contend that these state reactions are tempered and filtered by the men who interpret them and make these decisions subjective to their ideological, personal and cultural preferences.)
There is a funny side as well. Among the some who rush for the condemnation at the earliest are some of the unabashed apologists of the terrorist groups whom the greener pastures of the West have often overlooked for their moral relativism.

One such was a Twitter account of a Tamil  British Conservative, supposed to be someone who tries hard to endear to the Tories - which also took pain to point out that Sri Lanka had not condemned the Hamas attack. For that matter, nor has China, not even India, officially, though the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi has tweeted.
On a separate note, one tweep of Sri Lankan English Twitter pondered the similarity between Hamas and the LTTE. The similarity is that both are nihilistic maximalist terrorist groups. However, the difference is Hamas still a product of subjugation. In contrast, in Sri Lanka, when the LTTE blew up the first major bomb blast, killing 13 soldiers, the Inspector General of Police in Sri Lanka, the Attorney General, the chief advisor of the President and the architect of the 1978 constitution were all Tamils. 
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