Arlie Russell Hochschild's Stranger in Their Own Land stands as a phenomenal example of a liberal attempting to empathize with conservatives. To get into the minds of Louisana Tea Partyers, she employs the following model. Imagine that you are standing in line for the American dream. You have been told that if you played by the rules and waited your turn, you would eventually get to the front. Then the economy begins to turn poorly, calling into question whether you will ever get there. To make matters worse, you begin to see people behind you, who look different from you, stepping out of line to be escorted closer to the front. Sooner or later, you are going to begin to suspect that you are being cheated and that the game has been rigged against you.
I find this concept of a line useful for thinking about justice. Part of the problem with the sort of cosmic justice that dominates leftist thought is that it ignores the reality that human justice in the real world is a line in which only a few groups at the front are going to receive anything resembling justice. To make matters worse, not only will those at the back of the line not get justice, they are going to be left footing the bill for that justice given out to those in front. The reason for this is that history does not break down into neat perpetrators and victims. In practice, everyone is a mixture. When someone asks for justice, in practice they are asking for someone else to pay for that justice and then to be protected from having to pay out for anyone else's justice. Furthermore, considering the cost of all the injustice that has ever been perpetuated since the dawn of time, there are not enough resources to go around to satisfy everyone's sense of justice. Hence, as the little justice that is passed around to the few, it must be paid for by others.
Those at the front will defend their taking justice for themselves at the expense of those in the back by saying that those at the back committed some wrongdoing or at least, as the descendants or countrymen of the wrongdoers, benefited from this wrongdoing and should be allowed to bear the consequences of justice. The people at the front are likely not wrong. The problem is that other people, including those in the back, have their own narratives of injustice, many of which would flip the script and turn those at the front into the wrongdoers. And it is not obvious that these other narratives are wrong.
Take someone like me for example. I am a Jew descended from Holocaust survivors. In examining Allied understandings of the Holocaust as it unfolded during World War II, you see a consistent pattern where the Jewish nature of the suffering was downplayed. Jews were seen as simply one group, among many suffering under the Nazis. Hence no particular action would be taken to save them. Jewish life was not a priority even to the Allies and millions of Jews, who might have been saved, paid the price. I see the State of Israel as the main thing that protects us from being slaughtered again. In essence, having Israel is what keeps Jews close to the front of the line and protects them from the horrors of ending up at the back.
From this perspective, it was perfectly reasonable to demand that Germans, despite the deaths of over a half-million civilians due to Allied bombing, should pay reparations for the murder of Jews. I accept that the bombing of German cities was morally justified as the Nazi government had placed all of Germany outside of the social contract, rendering the lives of German civilians forfeit. Germans, the many terrible things that happened to them over the 20th century, were sent to the back of the line and suffered the consequences that go with it.
Similarly, Arabs should pay the price for a genocidal series of wars against Israel by having to accept not only the Palestinians who fled in 1948 but also those Palestinians currently living within Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank who are not inclined toward living in a Jewish State.
Part of being at the front of the line and having the Palestinians at the back is that we can pretend that we are not sentencing those Palestinians who remain in defiance of Israel to death and turning the rest of the Palestinians into refugees dependent upon the tender mercies of the world. As just people, seeking to defeat bigotry, we love even those "hateful" Palestinians. When things do not turn out to be peaches and cream for the Palestinians, it will, of course, be the fault of the Palestinians and the wider Arab world. If only they were more cooperative in accepting our version of justice, things would not have turned out so badly. So not only are the Palestinians destined to suffer, they are also meant to carry the blame for their own misfortune.
To be clear, unlike those on the Israeli hard right, I recognize that this is not a practical goal and should not be the basis for public policy. All I am saying is that this is what my vision of justice looks like. There are good reasons to be terrified of my justice as something monstrous. Of course, you should also be terrified of anyone else's justice, particularly those people who are not honest enough to acknowledge how bloodstained their justice would inevitably be in practice. Talking about such justice and putting it on the table is still important as a weapon to threaten the other side. Do not come at me with your version of justice and I will not strike at you with mine.
For you see, those on the Palestinian side of things, along with their allies on the Left, have an inverse line for justice. The chief source of evil in the world is racism manifested in colonialism and Zionism is the grand colonial project. As such, giving the Palestinians justice at Israel's expense becomes a moral task that worthy of taking the United Nation's attention. What might happen to those Jews who flee or find themselves living under Palestinian domination? Since the Palestinian cause is just, it is illegitimate to ask the question. If things take a tragic turn for the Jews, it can only be the Jews' fault for resisting the Palestinians in the first place.
Part of the difficulty in handling an issue like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that the facts are going to matter little in the face of one's starting narrative structure. Being at the front of the line for justice means that nothing bad your side does is really your fault. By contrast, being at the back means that all the bad things that happen to you are really your fault. You can list all the Israeli actions against Palestinians you want and I can just dismiss them as either legitimate Israel responses to Palestinian atrocities, hence the Palestinians are really at fault, or the actions of lone individuals that do not taint the righteousness of the Israeli cause. Of course, the Palestinians can play the same game.
This can, perhaps, best seen in the seemingly innocuous habit of newspaper headlines of describing Palestinian deaths in terms in active terms like "Israel kills" while describing Israeli deaths passively such as "Israelis die in a bombing attack," as if bombing attacks are simply unfortunate things that mysteriously happen that no one can be held responsible for. Even worse is when a particular point is made that the Israeli victims were settlers, implying that it was legitimate to kill them. This sets up a framework in which Israel is assumed to be the only party that can be held responsible and from whom demands can be made. If Israeli concessions lead to dead Israelis that is simply Israel's fault for not giving the Palestinians everything their justice demands.
If there is going to be hope one day for peace, it will require both sides to surrender any claim to justice. In return, each side will be protected from being subjected to the other's version of justice. Any attempt to pursue cosmic justice is going to turn into a Procrustean game in which reality is cut to pieces in order to fit one's personal convenience. Since we cannot give everyone justice, justice will become the highly unjust process of claiming that certain people do not deserve justice. On the contrary, those people will be sliced and diced and we will pretend that all of this is actual justice.
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