LIVE WITHOUT HARMING!: LET US NOT MAKE THE INNOCENT PAY FOR THE GUILTY

No large collective is a monolith in which all its members are the same, such that it would justify punishing one member because another committed a grievance, as if they formed a single unit. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each group is made up of individuals, all different from one another. And no individual is responsible for any abuse committed by another person, regardless of whether they belong to the same national, ethnic, religious, or ideological group, etc.

Therefore, it is a great injustice to harm an innocent person under the pretext that it is a legitimate punishment or self-defense for the damages committed by a guilty party belonging to the same group.

Although it is quite clear that punishing an innocent person is an injustice, it happens with some frequency and, what is worse, with the consent or indifference of many. This is what is happening with the victimization of children and, to a lesser extent, adult civilians, both Palestinian and Israeli.

On one hand, successive Israeli governments and groups or individuals (especially ultranationalists/ultra-religious) have been committing human rights violations against Palestinian civilians, such as murders, mass evictions from their homes and neighborhoods, theft of property, violence, cutting off basic supplies, making their lives a living hell with bombings from which there is no escape, torture, etc. All of this is recognized by the UN and NGOs such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch.

Of the millions of victims, some are entirely innocent: children who have harmed no one and adults who have not done so either and who, moreover, are not accomplices to the outrages committed by Hamas. In this sense, according to polls, between 57% and 87% of Gaza residents sympathize with Hamas and are in favor of the organization’s attacks on innocents, but the rest are not. Therefore, if this minority is innocent (having caused no harm to Israelis, neither as perpetrators nor as accomplices), why must they pay for Hamas’s atrocities?

As for the majority of Gazan adults who are indeed accomplices in the murders and kidnappings of Israelis and people of other nationalities, no action can be taken against them as long as there is no evidence of that complicity.

On the other hand, when Hamas victimizes innocent Israelis, it justifies it as a reaction to the grievances that Jews have caused them. But, once again, ethnic Jewish Israelis are not a concrete block in which the grains of sand and gravel have been fused into the whole mass; rather, they are individuals who differ from one another, with very diverse modi operandi and ways of thinking. According to various polls, between 40-something and 98% of them are in favor of trampling on innocent Palestinians in multiple ways, but the rest are not.

The former (the so-called hawks) are guilty of the abuses committed against innocent Palestinians, as they use their voting power to elect political parties with a mandate to represent their will by committing these outrages. But the second group (the so-called doves) is innocent, just like the children. Therefore, it is absolutely unjust for Hamas to harm these innocent people.

And these injustices transcend borders, as many Western governments and individuals are positioning themselves in favor of the Israeli government, while many far-leftists and Muslims are giving their support to Hamas, when the fair thing to do is to condemn both. It is not honorable to be in favor of any victimizing side, but rather to be in favor of all innocents (whether Palestinian, Israeli, or of other nationalities) and against all the guilty, regardless of the group they belong to.

The true division is not between Israelis and Palestinians, nor between Westerners and Muslims, but rather, in varying degrees, between hawks and doves, the righteous and the unrighteous, the harmful and the harmless, the abusive and the upright.

And the same applies to many other conflicts, such as that of Ukraine-Russia. Russians have the right to resort to the legitimate defense of ethnic Russian Ukrainians in the Donbas victimized by the Ukrainian government, which for years has been committing the murder of civilians in that region, the destruction of their homes, and has forced them to live in precarious underground shelters without heating, greatly damaging the lives of millions of inhabitants to the point that more than 2 million of them (more than 40% of the population) have had to leave everything behind and flee to other countries or regions, etc. However, that legitimate defense cannot consist of committing the same human rights violations against innocent Ukrainian civilians that Ukrainians have been committing against the civilians of the Donbas.

Again, Ukrainians are not an entity, but a group of individuals with very different ways of thinking and acting. It is true that a large majority (between 59% and 85% according to various polls) wanted and want to recover the Donbas at any cost, even at the price of murdering and making a hell of the lives of innocent civilians, but it is also true that there is a minority of Ukrainians who wanted and want a peaceful agreement that respects the rights of the inhabitants of the eastern regions and allows them to freely decide their future by majority vote.

The Ukrainians in the first group are guilty, as they are the ones who pushed President Zelensky (who actually initially wanted to achieve peace in the Donbas) to trample on the innocent inhabitants of the Donbas. But the second group, as well as the children, are innocent, and therefore the Russian aggression against them is totally unjust. And as for the guilty, evidence of their guilt is needed first, and secondly, the reaction must be proportional to their degree of guilt.

As for the Ukrainian government, it is doubtful (to put it mildly) that it has the right to attack a region to prevent its independence when probably the majority of its inhabitants want that independence (as indicated by the polls and referendums that took place), denying them their right to self-determination through a referendum with guarantees, even if the dogma of territorial integrity is recognized in current international law. The fact that the law is international does not mean it is just. To give an example, until after World War II, international law recognized the dogma of the right of conquest, by which any state was legitimized to conquer another country, and the moment it conquered it, it had the right to all the lands and assets of that country (might is right)—an absolutely unjust dogma on which the abuses of colonial powers were based.

But, in any case, what there should be no doubt about is that Ukraine has no right to mistreat numerous innocent civilians, including murders, physical assaults, and torture, as reported by human rights NGOs such as HRW.

Because war does not justify everything. No matter how much of a conflict there is, armed or not, it is never just to harm innocent civilians. And as for the guilty, it is only just to act against a civilian when it is evident that they are truly guilty.

For all the above reasons, it is not the mark of a person of integrity to side with either the Russian or the Ukrainian government while they commit crimes against innocents, nor with the Russian people (mostly complicit with Putin, who enjoys a popularity that usually ranges between 60% and 90%, among the highest in the world, peaking every time he starts a military conflict) nor the Ukrainian people (also mostly complicit, according to sociological polls, in human rights violations against innocents in the Donbas), but rather to side with all oppressed innocents (on both sides) and against all oppressors, whether they are of Russian or Ukrainian ethnicity.

Again, this is not about bad Russians versus good Ukrainians or vice versa, but about hawks (Russian-speaking, Ukrainian-speaking, etc.) versus doves (also of all types of ethnicities), those who are about living and letting live and those who are about bothering others, the toxic and those with a noble heart, the benign and the malignant, all to varying degrees according to each individual.

Thank you very much and remember: to achieve a better world to live in, LET US NOT HARM any innocent person nor be complicit in it.