We like balance, fairness in everything we do. A square deal. Our financial lives are based on the notion of equivalency—getting what we pay for.  Equivalence is used as the basis for settling a score—He did it first!  It’s the central tenet of physics—for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Ethical equivalencies, though, have always perplexed me. It can be difficult to weigh one moral dilemma against another.

This afternoon, standing on the main street of Blue Hill, Maine, in a silent demonstration protesting the genocide in Gaza,  some questions of moral equivalency occurred to me. For instance:

1. How should we value the State of Israel versus the value of a three-year-old Gazan toddler purposely shot through her head by an IDF sniper—especially when we discover the sniping deaths of children are intentional?

2. What is the value, to a Palestinian community, of its blown-up hospital versus the economic value, to a U.S. community, of its General Dynamics plant—building the bombs that blow up the hospital?  

3. If we think of the State of Israel as the refuge of millions of Jews escaping hundreds of years of pogroms in Europe and the WW II Holocaust, how is that equivalent in value to the State of Israel perpetrating ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinians?

4. What’s the equivalence of the delight of kids throwing bits of stale bread to mallard ducks in a park pond versus the delight of grown men refusing bits of stale bread to starving Palestinian children?

5. What’s the moral equivalence between collateral damage and murder?  When innocent people are killed as a result of a policy not really intended to kill them, we call it collateral damage—as absurd as that sounds. If the same innocent people are killed intentionally, that’s murder. In Gaza there is no collateral damage; all civilian deaths are intentional.

6. How should we think about a country that claims to believe in a free press but intentionally kills as many journalists as it possibly can in the country it’s waging war against, while not reporting those killings in its own press?

7. About 83% of the dead in Gaza are civilians, at least 20,000 children and over 40,000 adults. The number of injured is much higher. And thousands more may be dead, uncounted, under the rubble. The casualty equivalence is about 2,000  Israeli soldiers killed. And 1,200 civilians. These are statistics. The lopsided statistics are explained by the lopsided distribution of arms. Israel is heavily armed with the most sophisticated weapons in the world including ships, planes, tanks, missiles, etc. Not to say nuclear bombs. Hamas had some primitive missiles, but mostly just rifles and grenades. Statistics tell us nothing about identities of victims, social worth, suffering, horror, justice, cultural harm, despair, desire for revenge, repercussions, trauma, etc.; they are merely scratched figures on a wall. Perhaps the statistics are the stupidity quotient for people who refused to negotiate intelligently. Or, in this case, they reflect the power differential and the stronger power’s obsession with ethnic cleansing. An indiscriminate massacre has no equivalence. It plays out as long as the stronger power’s voracious appetite for genocidal killing is unquenched.

8. The world watches, horrified, seemingly unable to intervene. Well, that’s not quite true. One country has the power to intervene non-violently and end the massacre—the United States. The U.S. supplies Israel with weapons. We could cut the supply. Unless we are willing to do that, we are equal partners in the genocide. Israel’s genocide is our genocide—another equivalence. Blood brothers. Brothers in blood. Brothers in shame.

9. For the weapons manufacturers this is not a moral question; it’s financial—supply and demand. They (Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc.) make billions as merchants of death. The evil twist is that the U.S. government gives Israel many billions every year to buy those weapons; i.e., U.S. taxpayers are buying the weapons for Israel, subsidizing our arms dealers to commit horrendous crimes.
   


10. The endgame—forced starvation and famine—has no equivalence. Unless we compare it to the Black Death in the Middle Ages. But the Bubonic Plague was not purposely inflicted as a weapon of extermination by one people on another.
    


11. There is also no equivalence between history and cleansed history, or what we might call de-loused history. History that doesn’t tell the full truth is not history, but propaganda. The louses make the version justifying themselves. It’s like the difference between an apple tree and an artificial tree. Only one provides sustenance. The real history shows 76 years of violent occupation and ethnic cleansing of Israel in Palestine. Only the truth explains how the world works and shows how resistance can change criminal policy. Paraphrasing Voltaire: “People who can be made to believe absurdities will be made to commit atrocities.”
    


12. Democracy is built on an idea of equivalence: the majority’s wishes are supposed to be equivalent to its government’s policy.  A majority of Americans are outraged and repulsed by the genocide; they want it ended. But our government justifies it, and our corporations profit. Our ethical behavior is being held hostage by our own government. So when we talk about hostages in this conflict, the real hostages are morality and its sister, truth. Call your congresspeople! Demand that the genocide stop.