Trolley Problems for Normal People

Pitting justice against humanity

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Responding to anti-zionism with the trolley problem.

In its classic iteration, a trolley on train tracks is on a path towards five innocent people. You have the capacity to pull a lever, diverting the trolley from its path and onto an alternate route, heading instead for only one person. The trolley problem compels us to consider whether it is right to kill one person in order to save others.

In the anti-zionist¹ trolley problem, the trolley is headed towards uncountable civilians, all of whom have been tied to the tracks in one huge and horrifying pile by people who consider the existence of the trolley itself to be more outrageous than the sacrificing of countless men, women, and children to stop it.

The anti-zionist has the capacity to pull a lever, diverting the trolley from its path and onto an alternate route. The alternate route is clear, but the switch can only be activated by the words, “I believe Israel has the right to exist and I will no longer join in, nor tolerate, incessant calls for its elimination. Expecting religious, cultural, and ethnic homogeneity across the middle east is as outdated as it is unacceptable, and the Jews deserve to know that any question as to their right to have their own state is absurd.”

In this modified trolley problem, the anti-zionist must choose between willingly sacrificing tens of thousands of other people, and accepting that ceasing this never-ending war against Israel’s right to exist is the best way to guarantee peace in the region.

By pulling the lever, the anti-zionist, by definition, becomes a Zionist.

The (new) Zionist maintains the right to protest the Israeli government, protest illegal settlements and the treatment of Palestinians both in the West Bank and Gaza, and protest Netanyahu’s judicial reforms. The Zionist can protest every facet of Israel, as they might protest every facet of any other country.

Meanwhile, the (new) Zionist ceases to entertain ‘turn the clock back to 1948’ delusions, nor are they compelled to choose between Israeli or Palestinian safety. The Zionist’s belief in the existence of a Jewish state in no way mitigates their responsibility to the lives and livelihoods of all peoples.

It is not blind allegiance to Israel’s actions that makes one a Zionist, just as it is not blind allegiance to Australia that compels me to believe that this country has a mere right to exist.

As far as nationalism is concerned, there has never been a lower bar.

get it…

Zionism is a resistance movement.

Until the state of Israel is accepted as having a right to exist — until Zionism is the default global position — it is, by definition and by action, under threat.

While we may debate causality all we like, one thing remains undebatable:

Anti-Zionism is not an argument about what Israel does. It is a position pitted against the mere fact that Israel is.

Zionism, today, is a response to the existential threat of anti-Zionism. The word only remains in use because anti-Zionism continues to be a serious position — the tip of this position’s spear being a triumvirate of Iranian proxies: Hamas, Houthis, and Hezbollah.

Survival at what cost?

By refusing to engage her neighbours on their terms, Israel must suffer never-ending threats to her existence. To fail to engage would be to send the message that there is no reason not to carry out more October 7s . By engaging her neighbours on their terms, Israel bombs through entire neighbourhoods to eliminate targets ranging from high profile terrorists responsible for the deaths of thousands, to a few 17 year old radicalised Hamasniks firing a rocket launcher from an apartment building. We see images of the carnage on our screens day in and day out, no longer sure where Hamas propaganda ends and Amnesty International starts.

How many children do I need to see dragged out from under rubble, how many arms and legs detached from bodies convulsing on hospital floors? Why should disparate attributions of blame change what constitutes abject horror?

While I am disturbed by anyone who solely blames Israel for the countless dead, I am also disturbed by those who are unable to accept that Netanyahu’s Israel has not only committed war crimes, but has caused carnage the likes of which nobody can morally condone. For starters — how naive do you have to be to think any army, let alone in this situation, is not likely to commit war crimes? Armies commit war crimes.

Truth be told, I have no time for anti-Zionists’ opinions on these matters. You forewent your right to feign good faith commentary the day you took it upon yourself to announce that the entire state of Israel is less legitimate than any other state in the world.

Jews have had to contend with both Western and non-Western antisemitic propaganda, double standards, and anti-Zionism masked as academia for decades. This shared experience has significantly affected many Jews’ capacity to hear current criticisms of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. A boy-who-cried-wolf dimension to this entire crisis has made it incredibly difficult for Jews like myself to distinguish between blood libel and serious humanitarian concerns.

Jews have listened to bogus claims of genocide against them since the 1950s, where anti-Zionist Soviet propaganda began inverting the horrors of the Holocaust against its victims in a campaign for influence in the Middle East.²

For Jews, accusations of having built a ‘concentration camp for Palestinians’, accusations of ‘committing genocide’, and the usage of the word ‘Holocaust’ as a rhetorical device or propaganda exercise, are all stale footnotes from the antisemites’ playbook.

It is no wonder that today’s language on the conflict has the opposite effect of causing reflection or solemn re-appraisal among many Jews. These phrases began rearing their heads not in response to the Israeli bombing of Gaza, but in the days immediately after October 7. The blood hadn’t dried on those poor kids’ bodies when the Holocaust inversion began again. Parents were looking for their children’s bodies, mothers with babies were being dragged into tunnels under Gaza — where they would be beaten to death — and Jews all around the world were watching in horror as their middle class friends took to Instagram to share infographics about a “Palestinian Resistance To The Holocaust in Gaza”.

Criticism of Israel by those who have nothing to say about her neighbours’ indiscretions are a manifestation not of humanitarian concern, but racism. The racism of low expectations allows Israel’s counterparts to glue glass to their gloves unashamedly, while insisting Israel fight with one hand behind her back.

And still, as I am ever-bombarded with images of abject horror, I find myself lost.

Ironically, it is Israel’s fight for its right to exist — Israel’s fight against these anti-Zionist forces — that has created anti-Zionists out of the previously either apathetic or recreationally antisemitic.

The old adage, ‘you can’t bring a knife to a gun-fight’ is a whimsical way of saying that you need to meet your opponent where they’re at.

But what does one bring to a human shield fight?

A fight fought by men one degree of separation, if any degrees of separation at all, from the raped and burned bodies of Jewish civilians they saw livestreamed to social media by their neighbours?

What does one bring to a human shield fight started by people whose hatred of Israel has encouraged incessant suicide bombings, public shootings and stabbings, Intifadas, and days like October 7?

How does one lose a human shield fight? How does one win a human shield fight? How does one win a human shield fight without shooting through humans? Whose responsibility is it to surrender when too many human shields have been killed?

When in human history has someone refused to surrender on the grounds that the more civilians they push into the line of fire the more it hurts their enemy? (A line of fire that they encourage — Hamas are still firing rockets into Israel and fighting in Gaza).

Or better put — when in history has someone won by engineering the worst possible scenario for their own people?

What if those hiding behind the human shields had no intention of surrender?

What if those hiding behind human shields knew that maximising their own civilian casualties — the polar opposite of every historical precedent for how wars are fought — was their best chance at destroying Israel?

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What if justice never mattered?

We have seen wave after wave of antisemites and anti-Zionists respond to this trolley problem the same way. And as a result of this, we have seen examples of the very worst that humanity has to offer in the palms of our hands. Pieces of children, grey as rubble, strewn between chunks of reinforced concrete torn into pieces by Israeli bombs. At some point in between 1948 and today, Israel began untying her gloves. In the past year and a half she threw them out of the ring.

Israel could have laid waste to Gaza decades ago. How you answer the question, ‘why now?’, says a lot.

I am terrified by what Israel’s fight for survival might have done to her soul. And yet, watching her embroiled in a battle with not just the soulless, but their brainless foot soldiers worldwide, I’m struck once again with the same feeling of absolute despair I have been experiencing intermittently since October 2023.

We live in a world whose hand is led not by trolley problems, but inconsistency, algorithmically-tailored feeding-tubes of information, moral depravity, violence, manipulation, power, greed, and random chance; a world in which fundamentalists can orchestrate the devastation of their own land and people not by accident, but on purpose. We live in a world that would rather reward those using human shields than work with those trying to stop them.

We do not live in a world naturally geared towards fostering justice. Nor should we assume that the process of pursuing just ends will avail itself of just means.

And that said, we need to be prepared not to condemn, but to take very seriously those who ask us whether these means are worth it. For if we don’t take these people seriously — the Josh Szepses of the world, for example — then we’re no better than the anti-Zionist, whose hand refuses the lever as he commits others onwards to their bitter end.

I am a pacifist because I believe that war has the unique capacity to undermine the benefits of whatever it is that is being fought for.

I am a realist because life is not a trolley problem, and because principles like pacifism won’t get you anywhere when someone punches your lights out for looking at them the wrong way.

I am a leftist because I believe that the state has more of a role to protect its citizens from each other than to protect its citizens from itself, and I am a purist in that I will not allow ignorance, fashion, and identitarianism to redefine left and right.

And for today’s purposes, let me make it abundantly clear:

I am a Zionist because I believe in the importance of statehood, connection to country, indigeneity, and pluralism. I am a Zionist because I look at that lever and pull it — regardless of which trolley problem we’re talking about— and feel disgusted by anyone who wouldn’t.

The Homework:

As a Zionist, I am imploring other Zionists to draw your own lines in the sand on what you’re willing to uncritically watch happen. I want us all to consider what it would take for you to say, “I am a Zionist, and I am deeply disturbed by how this war is being conducted”.

This is not to conjure shame, nor is it supposed to destabilise any of us. It’s because I want us to experience what separates us from them — what separates the Zionist from the anti-Zionist — what separates the person who is able to compromise on one’s conceptions of justice for the betterment of others, and the person who wont.

We need to know what our limits are, as individuals capable of discussion, or individuals partial to discretion. We need to be prepared to pull that lever — and we need to understand that it is our preparedness to pull it that separates us from the more implacable, fundamentalist and inhumane.

I’m not asking anyone to pull that lever. I’m also not telling anyone not to. I’m asking you to have a conversation with yourself about what that might look like.

If you are reading this — and according to my stats, thousands of you will — can you please, please take a second to hit the like button. And if you’re feeling extra reasonable, subscribe here.

1. Anti-Zionism differs markedly from criticism of Israel. Anti-Zionism is a position on Israel’s right to exist, as opposed to being a criticism of her actions. Most people who identify as ‘anti-Zionists’ have misunderstood Zionism — which pertains solely to Israel’s existence as a state, and not her conduct.

It is this misunderstanding that sees the word ‘anti-Zionist’ being so frequently mis-used. When an anti-Zionist is advocating for a two-state solution, they’re inadvertently holding a textbook Zionist position — as any position that assumes Israel’s existence is a Zionist position.

When I use the word anti-Zionist here, I’m not speaking to those confused Zionists who are conflating being critical of Israel with with being anti-Zionist. I’m talking about anti-Zionism as someone who understands the importance of language, precision, and definitions. Anti-Zionism, I repeat, is a call for the elimination of the State of Israel.

2. Can you try to guess which decade each ‘anti-zionist’ or antisemitic piece of propaganda is from? Or perhaps to make it easier, can you work out which ones are pre-Holocaust and which ones are post-Holocaust? Does it strike you as peculiar that immediately after the Holocaust, antisemitic propaganda was re-branded as ‘anti-zionist’ propaganda? Does it not irk you that the same tropes and prejudices have been used to subjugate, exile, exterminate, and keep Jews stateless for centuries?