Their Legacy is Legitimacy- English summary

In this 2021 essay from the 24^th issue of HaShiloach, Dr. Elad Lisson describes the bizarre, dysfunctional, and ultimately dangerous standards of legitimacy in the modern West. He begins his exploration of this topic by describing the IDF’s behavior in recent conflicts with terror groups in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Lebanon: In each of these case studies, Lisson highlights a repeated pattern whereby the IDF engages in policy of extreme restraint in the face of terrorist violence until a breaking point is reached, at which point the military “lets lose the dogs of war.” The essay seeks to explore the causes and consequences of this “schizophrenic” pattern of behavior.

According to Lisson, the primary explanation of the IDF’s erratic oscillation between stoic restraint and large-scale offensives lies in the post-WWII West’s emphasis on and sacralization of victimhood. Within this moral framework, realized suffering – and not merely the likelihood of suffering – is what grants righteousness to victims, and serves as the only standard that can legitimize the use of force against one’s oppressors. Once “victimhood” is clearly established in the eyes of the public, the victim is granted unprecedented license to strike back against the oppressor. The result of this standard, in the phrasing of former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yallon, is that Israel must routinely “charge its legitimacy battery,” through the loss of Israeli lives, before it gains the freedom to take meaningful defensive or retaliatory action.

While intensified in the years following WWII, when a traumatized Europe became suspicious of any and all uses of force, Lisson traces the origins of this moral standard back to the Christian identification of divinity with Jesus’ sacrifice and suffering. As a result of this association, the Christian West has long viewed righteous suffering as the key to transcendence of worldly constraints; it is through profound self-sacrifice – and only through such sacrifice – that an innocent victim can ascend to levels of otherworldly purity and become identified with God’s righteousness and justice. Pointing to numerous examples throughout Christian history, Lisson argues that Christianity has repeatedly encouraged those under its influence to be extremely skeptical of worldly power while simultaneously dangerously uncritical of the behavior of perceived victims who acquire such power.

The moral problem with this new moral standard is what Lisson refers to as a “legitimacy trap.”  This trap refers to the pattern – repeated time and again in the context of Israel’s conflicts with its enemies – whereby the Israeli and international public sympathize with whichever side appears to be the purest victim at any given moment. As a result, when Israel appears to be a righteous victim of terror, it acquires broad license to defend itself and even take retaliatory action. But the minute it gains the upper hand in a conflict, sympathy immediately swings back towards the perceived victims of Israeli actions. Even as the “victimhood standard” sometimes works to Israel’s benefit, it also forces Israel to repeatedly leave itself vulnerable to its enemies, waiting for them to strike first before it can take defensive action.

The only solution to this tragic and dysfunctional standard, Lisson concludes, is for Israel to psychologically overcome the false equivalence of victimhood, on the one hand, and righteousness and legitimacy, on the other. In place of this broken moral standard, Israelis should recover an older understanding of “just war,” whereby the question of legitimacy is not decided on the basis of suffering, but on the rights of peoples to defend themselves within the bounds of morality – even if they are more powerful than those who threaten them:

Man and nation sometimes need to use power and violence against various threats they face. Such tools, on which life and death depend, should be used carefully and intelligently – and they should not be rejected in order to become a victim, or to attain some imagined privilege granted by victimhood. Proportional use of force over time, from the moment the threat is identified until the point of full-scale war, may actually reduce the frequency of violent clashes, as well as the scope of dead and damage left in their wake.

Dr. Elad Lisson lectures on philosophy at Herzog College, Bar-Ilan University, and Jerusalem College.

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