We should stop and discourage using the word ‘innocent’ in these discussions. The wrongness of killing an unarmed person, or bombing someone’s home, or rape, or conducting ethnic cleansing, or racist discrimination, or dehumanizing discourse, is not conditioned upon the ‘innocence’ of the victims.
And at the same time, true ‘innocence’, or even ‘civilianity’, is in extremely short supply in Israel due to mandatory conscription and the perpetual violence of the illegal settlements as a mechanism of ethnic cleansing, let alone the foundational crimes of the Israeli state and ‘softer’, less direct forms of complicity and support like taxation or employment in the massive military-industrial complex.
If we feel horror at the most brutal moments of the Palestinian armed resistance, it cannot be because those killed, injured, or otherwise hurt or frightened are innocent. It has to be because overwhelming brutality is horrifying no matter who it targets. But if we take that seriously, it’s undeniable that the Israeli patterns and policies of massively disproportionate response and collective punishment— never mind the founding crimes of the Israeli stare— are horrors of a much, much greater magnitude than individual, particularly brutal incidents of Palestinian vengeance.
In this discourse, the concept of innocence serves, on the one hand:
- to paper over the unique and extreme military orientation of Israeli society, the absolutely overwhelming participation in the military in Israeli society, the outsized presence of the military-industrial complex in the whole Israeli civilian economy, and the violencd of continued, illegal extraterritorial settlement in Israel; and on the other,
- to put conditions on which Palestinians deserve safety, and treat Israel’s disproportionate response as just by default— what Israel is doing is right except for how it affects ‘innocent Palestinians’.
Under such a frame, the primary aggressor and oppressor in an asymmetric conflict becomes the innocent, passive victim. At the same time, framing ‘innocent Palestinians’ as collateral damage transforms the primary effect of bombing an apartment buildings into something secondary, a mere side effect.
The concept of ‘innocence’ here serves only to obscure the moral and political realities. So reject it and correct it when it comes up.
[Thoughts have been brewing for a while, but making a post was inspired by this thread on Hexbear, in which moral uprightness or goodness is deployed to similar effect as the concept of innocence.]