On October 10, as the world was still reeling from the Hamas attacks on Israel three days earlier, US President Joe Biden stood in the White House State Dining Room and declared, “…there are moments in this life — and I mean this literally — when the pure, unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world.”
Around the same time, the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, "These innocents were killed for one single reason. For being Jewish and living in the State of Israel. It is an ancient evil…”And on October 16 in Australia’s own parliament, opposition leader Peter Dutton asserted, “what occurred nine days ago was the embodiment of evil.”
It is not only Hamas that has been condemned with that kind of language. Israel has been repeatedly accused of genocide in its attacks on Gaza. As Dov Waxman, the chair of Israel Studies at UCLA pointed out, ‘accusing Israel of genocide also contributes to a narrative that portrays the country as "exceptionally evil”’.
Describing incomprehensible violence – from either side – in the Israel/Gaza conflict as ‘evil’ sounds strong and decisive when you are standing at a podium or banging out an angry tweet. It gives the speaker a moral righteousness that challenges the audience to either agree, or side with the devil.
It makes good copy, but it is a disastrous way understand the crisis. Declaring a particular group or ideology as ‘evil’ in effect absolves us of any responsibility for comprehension. After all, if something is ‘evil’, to get your head around why someone would commit such atrocities means entering the mind of the devil himself.
This is not to suggest there is always moral equivalence. Or that everyone always has equally valid points of view. (That would be like saying, ‘well, the Nazis were only responding to their world view when they gassed six million Jews…’). Sometimes people are just plain wrong. But if there is one thing I've learned after almost 25 years as a journalist covering conflict, it is that nobody behaves irrationally. It may not be completely logical, but there is always a way of rationalising behaviour that is internally consistent, that fits an understanding of history and a world view.
In any conflict that can only truly end with a negotiated settlement (and that is most of them), we need to have the courage and intellectual rigour to stand in the shoes of those we disagree with. You can only truly say you’ve understood a war when you can convincingly articulate why each side thinks and behaves the way they do. And that is the only point at which we might begin to find a way through that doesn’t involve wholesale slaughter.
To be clear, understanding is not the same as justifying. Empathy does not mean sympathy. And nor is it weakness. The ultimate in courageous pragmatism is to recognise how someone you profoundly disagree agree with came to their position, however horrific it may seem through your own eyes.
In this case, it means understanding how deeply Palestinians see themselves as refugees in their own land, forced from their homes in the original 1948 “Nakba” or “Catastrophe” when the state of Israel was first formed. It means recognising how every attempt at reconciliation and peace with Israel has left them with less power, less land, and less autonomy, and that for some, violent resistance is the only rational path left. It also means understanding that however cynical its October 7 attacks might have been Hamas knew exactly what it was doing, making a bid for full political legitimacy among Palestinians divided between those they control in Gaza, and those under their rivals, Fatah, in the West Bank.
It also means recognising the devastating impact of Hamas’s terrorism on the psychology of Israelis. It is to feel their need not just for vengeance, but a victory so complete and decisive that such a thing can never happen again. It is to see how Israel regards itself as so constantly threatened by its neighbours that each conflict is fundamentally existential. And to understand how the far right in Israel’s complicated politics might be driving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military response.
As Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid recently wrote, ‘to describe the things we can’t comprehend as evil is a cop-out. It allows us to believe something is wrong with “them” but not with us. And, paradoxically, it exposes an unwillingness to take terrorists seriously, reducing them to “crazy” or “irrational” adversaries. They usually aren’t.’
Try our Poll Here
* Peter Greste is a Professor of Journalism at Macquarie University, and Executive Director of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom.
It makes good copy, but it is a disastrous way understand the crisis. Declaring a particular group or ideology as ‘evil’ in effect absolves us of any responsibility for comprehension. After all, if something is ‘evil’, to get your head around why someone would commit such atrocities means entering the mind of the devil himself.
This is not to suggest there is always moral equivalence. Or that everyone always has equally valid points of view. (That would be like saying, ‘well, the Nazis were only responding to their world view when they gassed six million Jews…’). Sometimes people are just plain wrong. But if there is one thing I've learned after almost 25 years as a journalist covering conflict, it is that nobody behaves irrationally. It may not be completely logical, but there is always a way of rationalising behaviour that is internally consistent, that fits an understanding of history and a world view.
In any conflict that can only truly end with a negotiated settlement (and that is most of them), we need to have the courage and intellectual rigour to stand in the shoes of those we disagree with. You can only truly say you’ve understood a war when you can convincingly articulate why each side thinks and behaves the way they do. And that is the only point at which we might begin to find a way through that doesn’t involve wholesale slaughter.
To be clear, understanding is not the same as justifying. Empathy does not mean sympathy. And nor is it weakness. The ultimate in courageous pragmatism is to recognise how someone you profoundly disagree agree with came to their position, however horrific it may seem through your own eyes.
In this case, it means understanding how deeply Palestinians see themselves as refugees in their own land, forced from their homes in the original 1948 “Nakba” or “Catastrophe” when the state of Israel was first formed. It means recognising how every attempt at reconciliation and peace with Israel has left them with less power, less land, and less autonomy, and that for some, violent resistance is the only rational path left. It also means understanding that however cynical its October 7 attacks might have been Hamas knew exactly what it was doing, making a bid for full political legitimacy among Palestinians divided between those they control in Gaza, and those under their rivals, Fatah, in the West Bank.
It also means recognising the devastating impact of Hamas’s terrorism on the psychology of Israelis. It is to feel their need not just for vengeance, but a victory so complete and decisive that such a thing can never happen again. It is to see how Israel regards itself as so constantly threatened by its neighbours that each conflict is fundamentally existential. And to understand how the far right in Israel’s complicated politics might be driving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military response.
As Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid recently wrote, ‘to describe the things we can’t comprehend as evil is a cop-out. It allows us to believe something is wrong with “them” but not with us. And, paradoxically, it exposes an unwillingness to take terrorists seriously, reducing them to “crazy” or “irrational” adversaries. They usually aren’t.’
Try our Poll Here
* Peter Greste is a Professor of Journalism at Macquarie University, and Executive Director of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom.