Bob Kunzinger: Moral Absolutism | Do Not Kill Children

“Let me put this right out there at the top: It appears Israel’s campaign against Hamas in The Gaza Strip has expanded to eliminate as much of the Palestinian Race as possible, and to carry out on them what Hitler and the Nazis attempted to achieve against the Jews during World War Two.”

         This is how I started class last week.  

I decided to bring the students from my college class on Critical Writing and Thinking outside. Next to our building on campus is a small daycare center where a stream of cars pulls up to drop off and pick up kids; where parents kiss their three- and four-year-olds carrying backpacks with snacks and pillows and juice boxes and huge smiles as they head inside to meet new friends. A guardian waits with a clipboard and if two arrive together, they walk toward the building hand in hand. 

         We sat at picnic tables and watched the children jumping out of cars and into their morning routine. Birds darted between the trees behind us. It was all very peaceful; I chose this location on purpose. 

         I spoke softly. “Your assignment for the week was to research and write about the effects of the fighting in Gaza on Palestinian children. This was not to be how you “feel” about it; this is not an emotional plea. Sometimes, and this is a prime example, the absence of emotion better drives home the tragic events. Still, this is a search for accuracy and understanding about exactly what is going on inside Gaza.” 

         A young girl across the lawn waved randomly since two dozen adults watched her jump out of her Mom’s SUV. Everyone waved back and she smiled. 

         I took out my notes. “How many people researched Francesca Albenese?” Six students raised their hands. One shook her head in disbelief. Another started commenting on her findings until I stopped her. “We’ll get back to her.”

         “Gaza is roughly twenty-five miles long and six miles wide. It is about twice the size of Washington D.C. and it’s been inhabited since the fifteenth century B.C. Its two million residents occupy the exact same amount of land as Las Vegas with its six-hundred thousand residents. 

“Can you picture it now? Big population, not a lot of land. It is the same size as Raleigh, North Carolina, but with four times more people.”

I let this sink in and repeated the Raleigh reference. 

“Now…drop fifty thousand bombs on it. That’s what we’re talking about; send the Air Force above Raleigh and drop fifty thousand bombs. And by the way, about seventeen percent won’t work, leaving the live ammunition to lie waiting in the streets and farmlands and school yards of the Gaza Strip. That is of little matter, however, since the Israeli Army is apparently determined to eliminate the people who lived there.”

I told them more: Since October 7^th of 2023—just under six months ago, six months—32,000 Palestinians have been killed; 14,000 of them children. More than 1000 children are amputees, and close to 5000 more have life-altering injuries including blindness and parallelizing conditions. 

         17,000 children are orphans. 

         Starvation is rampant and the conditions in Gaza have been called by Save the Children one of the “slowest, cruelest deaths” on record. It is a holocaust, and the fighting between Hamas and Israel has been going on since well before October. But on October 7^th, Hamas gave Israel a reason to attack back, and now, without reason, Israel won’t stop, even for kids. It is Israel’s own Final Solution to the two-state problem. 

         For the children in Gaza still alive, there are only twelve hospitals still functioning, and those have no fuel and practically no clean water. There are no hospitals left at all in Northern Gaza.         There is only one toilet for every seven hundred children, so they defecate in the streets and streams, causing diseases such as hepatitis which contribute to the pandemic-level cases of respiratory diseases, scabies, lice, diarrhea and more.

It is criminal. 

“But, and this is essential to today’s discussion, something else nearly as criminal is happening while the Israeli government is carrying out these atrocities.”

         A student sipped her Starbucks; another opened his Chick-Fil-A bag and nibbled on some fries. I took a sip of water. A cardinal landed on a branch and took off. 

         I didn’t tell them what I thought: Somewhere behind closed doors in Israel someone had to have said, “Let’s take this chance to wipe Palestine and all of its inhabitants from the face of the earth.” There is no other explanation for the attempted elimination of an entire population, particularly with such a focus on killing the next generation. 

“This is what we’re going to write about next; our sources will be as objective as possible, including the Red Cross, Save the Children, Doctors without Borders, and in-country reporters from a variety of news agencies, including from Tel Aviv.”

A student who had been unwrapping a sub from the dining hall spoke up, reading from some scribbled notes. “I read in the NY Times that the only place left for the population of Gaza to go for help, or the possibility of leaving, is the Rafah region, an enclave in Southern Gaza. Six hundred thousand children are reported to have sought refuge there with one million children uprooted to face extreme malnutrition and famine. Thousands of children are dying weekly. But Rafah is now the focus of Israeli’s current military operation; they are attacking and destroying the area in an attempt to eliminate Hamas but to do so they’re killing all of the Palestinians.”   

         I looked at the chicken-eating student who had moved to his sandwich and asked, “Who is Francesca Albenese.” He squeezed a packet of mayonnaise onto his chicken. 

         “A specialist from the UN on human rights and conditions in the Palestinian territories,” he said. He pushed his fries away and said he was full. No one was hungry; none of us was thirsty. 

         “Right,” I said, adding, “Albenese reported to the 55^th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva a few days ago. Remember, she is an authority on the subject. She used a word to describe what was going on. You know the word?”

         We know the word. 

Genocide.

A student called out, “Professor, you said something just as criminal is happening. What is it?” 

“No one is stopping them. The United States has not levied sanctions on Israel for committing war crimes, and, yes, it is a war crime to kill 13,000 children while starving to death the rest of the population.” I looked across the street. After a minute I stood and looked at her. “A group of people on this planet is being systematically maimed and killed, totally eliminated by another group of people, and we know about it, and we’re not stopping it.”

         “A reporter from Israel itself called the conditions Apocalyptic,” the NY Times reader told us. 

         When speaking of Israel’s overpowering reaction to the October 7^th bombing by Hamas which killed 1200 people, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said, “It’s an entire nation that is out there that’s responsible.” It seems to many, including experts from universities throughout Europe, his ambition from the start has been, with the silent approval of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to eliminate the Palestinian race which has been in Gaza for three thousand years. 

         I watched twins walk from the door of the building to their father’s car, one holding each of his hands. They both had an apple and both were laughing. 

         “I think it’s not going to be over until either Israel destroys the entire Palestinian race or until we stop them.”

         I picked up my notebook: “Find the source of this quote: ‘Experts in Israel have determined that Israel is blocking all efforts to provide any relief to the Palestinian people, directly causing famine, starvation, and thousands of deaths weekly.’”

         A news report gathered from three different countries exposed that shipping avenues of food for refugees and starving inhabitants have been blocked. The US is sending troops to build a peer in the Mediterranean to provide food, but it is not enough and will take months, during which time half of the remaining Palestinians could starve to death, according to Albenese. The reporting agencies are not solely from Egypt and Jordan, but Israel. 

         On January 26^th, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered—ordered—Israel to comply with “the flow of aid” to “lessen the suffering” in Gaza. Instead, the report shows, Israel “erected unnecessary hurdles, complicated logistical processes, and an unpredictable vetting system, rendering the inspection regime overwhelmingly burdensome with layers of bureaucracy and inspection and limited working hours.” This is not a means to find Hamas fighters; this is a form of extermination. 

         I took a sip of water. “Okay, essay writing time. This one is to be researched and do not use first person. You need to verify your information with at least three separate expert sources, and you need to focus on simply answering the following question without subjectivity.”

         They prepared to write the question. I watched a young boy eating a donut and remembered a time when my son was a toddler and we walked past a donut shop where a homeless man asked for money. I only had a debit card, so I invited him to have breakfast with us and we sat in a booth and he asked Michael all sorts of questions one would ask a child. The man thanked us and when I said it was nothing, he replied, “Apparently not, brother. People prefer to walk by. Nobody helps. Thank you for helping me.”

         Nobody helps. 

         “Here’s the setup: If your neighbor comes into your yard and attacks you, you certainly have a right to defend yourself, maybe even a right to seek him out in his own house. I’m not sure. But do you have the right to go there and kill all of his children and other people’s children while trying to find him? So here’s your question: What is Moral Absolutism, and is this a situation where it applies? 

         A little girl fell on the sidewalk and stood up wincing then ran off with another girl. I wondered how my students would respond; I wondered if this generation of college students, who are more desensitized to the horrors of war and world events than any before them, who spent the past nineteen years saturated with reports about war in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Ukraine, in Haiti, and now Gaza, would understand the difference between children who die because of the unfortunate circumstance of war and children who are the focus of that war.  I thought about what their answers might be, hoping at least a few recognize that some actions are simply wrong and against the nature of humanity no matter what the context might be, and this is one of them. It is criminal for the United States, or any country who claims to have a moral compass for that matter, to idly stand by doing little more than pleading with a modern-day Herod.   

According to Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, Jewish law forbids the killing of innocent people, even in the course of a legitimate military engagement. Those few cases in the Bible in which this norm was violated are special cases. One example was when King Hezekiah stopped all the fountains in Jerusalem in the war against Sennacherib, which scholars regard as a violation of the biblical commandment.

According to 12^th century Spanish Rabbi Maimonides on besieging a city in order to seize it, “It must not be surrounded on all four sides but only on three sides, thus leaving a path of escape for whoever wishes to flee to save his life.” And his contemporary fellow Spanish Rabbi Nachmanides wrote that Maimonides rule must be strengthened, insisting that, “We are to learn to deal kindly with our enemy.” He preached often from Proverbs (Mishlei) 25:21: “If your enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he be thirsty, water to drink.” Proverbs is part of the third section, called Ketuvim, and contains guidance for living a wise, moral, and righteous life without exception or excuse. 

It seems fair to say that neither President Herzog nor Prime Minister Netanyahu has read Proverbs, and if they have, they certainly skipped the section about morality. 

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Copyright 2024 Bob Kunzinger

Bob Kunzinger’s many books include the memoir Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia (Madville, 2022). He lives in Virginia.