Israel, Palestine, And the Trolley Problem:
On the Futility of the Search for the Moral High ground
The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota (December 10, 2024). 98 Pages. ISBN-10: 1966360002 ISBN-13: 978-1966360001
Arguments about Israel and Palestine are almost always accusatory and polemical. Rather than learning from one another, opponents jockey for the moral high ground trying to find that one attack they believe proves their side to be completely on the right, without compromise. This means Israel’s advocates dismiss Palestinian land claims without due consideration and Pro-Palestinian voices falsely accuse Israel of the most heinous modern crimes: colonialism, genocide, and apartheid. None of this is productive or healthy.
In Israel, Palestine, and the Trolley Problem: On he Futility of the Search for the Moral High Ground, philosopher Jack Russell Weinstein interweaves philosophy, history, politics, and personal experience to expose the argumentative mistakes we all make too often. Mapping out moral psychology—how we actually make moral decisions—and using the famous Trolley Problem as a metaphor, Weinstein paves the way for a new, more empathetic exchange of ideas about today’s most puzzling moral dilemma: how to find peace in the Middle East.
In Israel, Palestine, and the Trolley Problem: On he Futility of the Search for the Moral High Ground, philosopher Jack Russell Weinstein interweaves philosophy, history, politics, and personal experience to expose the argumentative mistakes we all make too often. Mapping out moral psychology—how we actually make moral decisions—and using the famous Trolley Problem as a metaphor, Weinstein paves the way for a new, more empathetic exchange of ideas about today’s most puzzling moral dilemma: how to find peace in the Middle East.
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Preface (excerpt)
This is a book about how people discuss the conflict between Israel and Palestine; most of us do it badly. We say that we are arguing to find a resolution to the hostilities, but instead, what we tend to do is jockey for the moral high ground so that we can convert our preference to wholesale victory: “The Israel Defense Force [Israel’s army] is brutal therefore Israel has no right to exist”; “Palestinians hide terrorists among their general population, therefore their grievances ought to be ignored.” Isolated as two competing premises these claims are obviously absurd, but they are the positions that rule the day.
This is no way to talk about human suffering.
This is also a book about the war itself. What moral options do Israel and Palestine have left as they fight over contested land? I suggest there are none. The two nations have painted themselves into corners and any claims their advocates make to a moral high ground, whether large or small, are illusions. This means that advocates must invent reasons to prefer one over the other, but their positions—dismissing Arab Palestinian land claims and denying anti-Arab prejudice, or calling Israel a colonialist, genocidal, and apartheid state—are incorrect. Worse, these claims do more harm than good. In the pages to come, I aim to expose and dispel these falsehoods, hoping, contrary to past experience, that accurate communication will lead to greater empathy.
In the words of William Caraher, Director and Publisher of The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota (the publisher of this book), my conclusions are “as bleak as the war.” Sadly, he is right. There is little to be optimistic about.
I did not know in advance that this is where I would end up, but in retrospect, my analysis feels inevitable. I had originally intended to publish a 1500-word column about the antisemitism of misusing the term genocide. Instead, I wrote a monograph that has forced me to grapple with my own loyalties and to call into question how moralists argue about politics.
I am heartbroken at my own conclusions, but I needed to put them out there anyway, particularly because, to steal a famous slogan from a kosher hot-dog company, “I answer to a higher authority.” I wrote this essay so that I could look my eighteen-year-old daughter, Adina, in the eye.
In 2023 and 2024, while Israel mourned and Gaza burned, it would have been easy enough to pick a side and run with it. Almost everyone did, performing their partisanship through social media posts and “kidnapped” posters. I could feel myself getting sucked in with rage and fear, but Adina wouldn’t let me wallow in it. Whether on public radio as a philosophical commentator or through my more public-oriented writing, she warned me that if I got it wrong, I would soil her name along with mine. She knew that her friends would see her in me, and made sure that like it or not, her reputation was part of my equation.
Just as Adina is the future of Judaism and ferociously proud of her Jewish identity, she is also inextricably intertwined with her Muslim friends. She has taken every aspect of this conflict personally, living the life of a Gen Z cosmopolitan both on- and offline. Much of my own rumination happened during difficult and frequently emotional conversations between the two of us. What she reminded me of, repeatedly, is not just that this war affects real people, but that most of them were born into this conflict. As much as I was able to depersonalize the philosophical questions from the war footage, she could only see her peers.
This means that choice as a philosophical concept may be meaningless here. To condemn “Amira” because she chooses to hate Israel or shun “Maya” because she wants to oppress Palestinians, disregards the power of social and political institutions in people’s lives, especially young people. In the past, there have been very active peace movements that embraced all who sought them regardless of which side of the divide they lived on, but it’s unclear if anyone in either Israel or Palestine, at this very moment, has the freedom to challenge or even abstain from the dominant mobs that surround them. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is certainly doing his best to wave away the massive demonstrations aimed at changing his mind.
Any ethical analysis needs to straddle the historical forces that shaped the participants along with the lived experiences that fuel fear, rage, and suspicion. Neither Israel nor Palestine are monolithic entities; large numbers of people want peace but are being drowned out by the drum of war. Engaging in this nuanced way only made my conclusions bleaker, to use that word again, because it underscored that there will always be losers. Given the reality we live in, in this context at least, loser is a synonym for victim.
This is no way to talk about human suffering.
This is also a book about the war itself. What moral options do Israel and Palestine have left as they fight over contested land? I suggest there are none. The two nations have painted themselves into corners and any claims their advocates make to a moral high ground, whether large or small, are illusions. This means that advocates must invent reasons to prefer one over the other, but their positions—dismissing Arab Palestinian land claims and denying anti-Arab prejudice, or calling Israel a colonialist, genocidal, and apartheid state—are incorrect. Worse, these claims do more harm than good. In the pages to come, I aim to expose and dispel these falsehoods, hoping, contrary to past experience, that accurate communication will lead to greater empathy.
In the words of William Caraher, Director and Publisher of The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota (the publisher of this book), my conclusions are “as bleak as the war.” Sadly, he is right. There is little to be optimistic about.
I did not know in advance that this is where I would end up, but in retrospect, my analysis feels inevitable. I had originally intended to publish a 1500-word column about the antisemitism of misusing the term genocide. Instead, I wrote a monograph that has forced me to grapple with my own loyalties and to call into question how moralists argue about politics.
I am heartbroken at my own conclusions, but I needed to put them out there anyway, particularly because, to steal a famous slogan from a kosher hot-dog company, “I answer to a higher authority.” I wrote this essay so that I could look my eighteen-year-old daughter, Adina, in the eye.
In 2023 and 2024, while Israel mourned and Gaza burned, it would have been easy enough to pick a side and run with it. Almost everyone did, performing their partisanship through social media posts and “kidnapped” posters. I could feel myself getting sucked in with rage and fear, but Adina wouldn’t let me wallow in it. Whether on public radio as a philosophical commentator or through my more public-oriented writing, she warned me that if I got it wrong, I would soil her name along with mine. She knew that her friends would see her in me, and made sure that like it or not, her reputation was part of my equation.
Just as Adina is the future of Judaism and ferociously proud of her Jewish identity, she is also inextricably intertwined with her Muslim friends. She has taken every aspect of this conflict personally, living the life of a Gen Z cosmopolitan both on- and offline. Much of my own rumination happened during difficult and frequently emotional conversations between the two of us. What she reminded me of, repeatedly, is not just that this war affects real people, but that most of them were born into this conflict. As much as I was able to depersonalize the philosophical questions from the war footage, she could only see her peers.
This means that choice as a philosophical concept may be meaningless here. To condemn “Amira” because she chooses to hate Israel or shun “Maya” because she wants to oppress Palestinians, disregards the power of social and political institutions in people’s lives, especially young people. In the past, there have been very active peace movements that embraced all who sought them regardless of which side of the divide they lived on, but it’s unclear if anyone in either Israel or Palestine, at this very moment, has the freedom to challenge or even abstain from the dominant mobs that surround them. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is certainly doing his best to wave away the massive demonstrations aimed at changing his mind.
Any ethical analysis needs to straddle the historical forces that shaped the participants along with the lived experiences that fuel fear, rage, and suspicion. Neither Israel nor Palestine are monolithic entities; large numbers of people want peace but are being drowned out by the drum of war. Engaging in this nuanced way only made my conclusions bleaker, to use that word again, because it underscored that there will always be losers. Given the reality we live in, in this context at least, loser is a synonym for victim.
