A Modern Discussion About Thinking Behind The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Part 1

Today I’m breaking loose from the normally category based thought pieces I write in order to write about something which crosses over two key topics – philosophy and political affairs. The article’s title probably doesn’t give a lot away as to the content of this article simply because of the broad nature
of this two part article. Firstly I’m going to be addressing the well known
philosophical fallacy that “two wrongs make a right” in a way that
applies to the second part of the article which will cover the underlying reason that I see the Palestian-Israeli conflict occurring. First a word of caution – I am definitely an outsider in this conflict since I haven’t lived or visited the region, and have only observed the conflict via the Australian media and a diversified range of
sources on the net. I’m going to try by best to be balanced and fair in my discussion, but as everyone knows, its truly impossible to be unbiased about anything.

The notion that “two wrongs can make a right” despite being unethical or devastating to others is a rather complex logical fallacy that seems to constantly emerge in varying and sometimes surprising ways. To those of you who haven’t encountered this problem before, the essence behind ‘two wrongs making a right’ is that Person A (we’ll use a fictitious person called Max in this example) is permitted to do something despite believing that it is objectionable because Person B (called Tim) is also doing it. On the surface, perhaps I can understand why in some cases this would be necessary – for example, if a stranger attacked me, I would be exponentially more likely to attack them back than if I just saw them walking past me on the street, in which case the thought would never cross my mind. However, does attacking someone in self-defence now constitute being valid despite the fact that the original unprovoked attack is seen as wrong in the first place? In this scenario, I certainly accept that this is an example of a valid form of behaviour and would term it right to do so.

However, if Tim, the original ‘attacker’ were to place their hands up and surrender, would it still be right for Max to attack him? On the surface, probably not. If Tim surrendered, this means that he is no longer a threat to Max, and if he were to continue attacking Tim, he in turn would have become the aggressor in the same way as Tim was in the start of this example. Here, Max could be seen as being the one in the wrong. I know we’re skewing from the traditional example here, but there’s a reason for this.

If Max were to continue attacking shortly after Tim surrendered in this situation though, you can probably argue that this is substantiated. Tim, the complete stranger began attacking Max, and now he expects Max to believe that he wants to surrender? Maybe Max would continue to attack Tim simply because he doesn’t believe Tim. In this scenario, its suddenly no so simple to apply the tag right or wrong to either individual because both individuals could argue a valid point. This is one of the problems that I have with these older philosophical questions as they frankly have limited relevance in today’s world. Once a topic has been meticulously analysed using Theory A and Theory B, you throw a spanner like this into the works and suddenly the entire theory becomes too specific and irrelevant to provide any practical answers. I’m not suggesting that philosophical thought isn’t useful or that it shouldn’t play a role in how we think (this article thus far has been almost exclusively about philosophy), its just that we need to think outside the box of these relatively limited examples before we can truly apply them to issues which we face in today’s complex world.

In the next part of this article, I’m going to be applying this to the situation in Gaza which will hopefully constructively analyse how this concept can help bring peace to the troubled region.

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