To Think About Horror in Serious Ways

Roger Berkowitz

David Marchese interviews Phil Klay on the humanity and inhumanity of war. Klay finds the humanity of war in its moral complexity, the struggle to see and acknowledge the reality of morally complex thinking that goes beyond ideological and partisan positions. 

War, understandably and probably necessarily in some ways, flattens thinking. But trying to hold on to a morally expansive perspective on war, one in which multiple things could be true at the same time — that the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 was an undeniable atrocity and also that Israel’s military response has been cruelly disproportionate — also seems necessary. Can you talk about that moral tension?
There are people who feel like you cannot acknowledge, or shouldn’t acknowledge too much, horrors that are not ideologically convenient. This is why you’ll have the Palestinian National Initiative on CNN, speaking thoughtfully about the suffering of Palestinians but then denying that Hamas targets civilians, which is an insane thing to say. There was a debate in Dissent, the left-wing publication, about whether Israeli casualties should be considered “pregrieved” because their deaths will be used as a justification for whatever actions the I.D.F. takes. At the same time, if you listen to more neoconservative commentators, they feel aggrieved that the mainstream media is covering the widespread deaths of Palestinian civilians — as if that’s not a valid news story. People urgently want you to feel the moral horror of what is happening, but within a circumscribed circle. I think that is morally blinkered.

Why?
The father searching for his children under rubble that had been his home in Gaza; a parent and child who were bound together and burned to death by Hamas— to think about the horror of that in a serious way means not immediately transmuting it into ideological fodder. You can make strong moral and political arguments, but if in making those you feel like you must obscure or ignore atrocity and horror, that’s corrupt intellectually and morally. It prevents you from actually understanding the complexity of the situation which you’re attempting to speak to and in the long term will make you less effective in whatever you want to do. Out of basic humanist principles, the idea that we must close our eyes to suffering that is not ideologically useful is morally degrading to ourselves. It’s repugnant.

This is maybe overly cynical, but why do you think that having a less ideologically rigid point of view is more effective in the long term than the opposite?
In the long term, if you blinker yourself to reality, it limits your ability to formulate positions that are based in reality and therefore formulate positions that will achieve something lasting and moral. You need to be open to complexity because whatever narrow thing that you want to achieve in the real world will, if it gets put into practice, be put into practice in the real world. Not in the ideologically antiseptic world that you’ve created in your head.

What might crack open in someone that they’re able to see the suffering of civilian others as just as grave a human concern as the suffering of civilians on the side they support ideologically?
In war, there’s a primary experience: a terrified father in Gaza as bombs are falling, unsure of whether he can protect his family; or the Israeli soldier trying to deal with Hamas’s tunnel network. There is a responsibility when you’re thinking these things through to sit with some of those primary experiences to the extent that you can, and think about them without immediately seeking to churn them into something politically useful. Because they mean more than whatever policy cash-out we get from them.