Justification as a Machine of Illusion: I Have Seen It
See, I set before you today a blessing and a curse…”
(Deuteronomy 11:26)
Some texts do not call for reply — they demand dismantling. Not because they argue, but because they operate as machines of justification: devices that wrap violence in spirituality and domination in the language of light.
Consider a recent Torah-ornamented op-ed: we are told we live amid “moral confusion,” that Hamas is pure evil and Israel a democratic victim. The piece stitches scripture, national myth and binary moral frames into a single command to “see clearly” — which means: see as I instruct you.
I. The Justification Machine
Justification is not explanation. It is absolution without accounting. It presumes the good is already on our side — a preemptive amnesty for whatever follows, provided the image of moral superiority is maintained.
Once installed, every airstrike becomes “defense,” every silence “prudence,” every lie a “higher truth.” This is political theology in action: a script of moral asymmetry where one pole monopolizes life, light and civilization, and the other is cast as chaos and death.
But no one is born Hamas, and no one is born Israel. Such forms are produced — through the filtering of affect, access to voice, and the occupation of time. To brand Palestinian suffering as “propaganda” is not only false; it is a filter of elimination, stripping humanity before it can even say: I am.
II. “See”: When Scripture Becomes a Slogan
Quoting Torah to sanctify military policy is not theology; it is the sacrilege of propaganda. When “See” becomes “See what I command — or be blind,” revelation is replaced by compliance.
In its Hebrew grain, Re’eh — “see” — is not obedience but risk: the risk that truth will shatter certainties. In the op-ed, it mutates into a ritual of tribal recognition: not “What is happening in Gaza?” but “Are you with us or against us?”
III. Time, Violence, and the Meaning of Choice
This is not a story of “two sides.” It is a field of trajectories of accessibility. When a child has no access to clean water, that is not moral ambiguity; it is structural suffocation.
The Possest–PQF framework offers another lens: time is not a line of moments but the gradient of what can or cannot become available. Where availability collapses under siege, bombardment, embargo and trauma, life is not protected — it is filtered out. In such a field, “justification” is not neutrality; it is collusion with a selector of who may breathe.
IV. No Freedom Where Violence Is a Ritual
The sermon claims uncertainty preserves free will — that immediate consequences would erase choice. Clever, and fatally evasive.
When bombs fall, hospitals fail, and electricity is cut, there is no arena for moral freedom. There is only the mechanization of death. This is not the subtlety of ethics; it is the occlusion of visibility: the one whose home is erased is not heard — or is heard only as a threat.
V. I Am Not Taking a Side — I Am Refusing a Veil
I am neither Palestinian nor Israeli. I write against the language that turns human suffering into narrative convenience and converts moral speech into a weaponized veil.
Justification is a filter that deletes the Other’s voice before it emerges. Any genuine spiritual insight begins not in certainty, but in the inability to unsee suffering once seen.
Conclusion
Perhaps the question is not “Whose side are you on?”
Perhaps the real question is: Are you still capable of seeing?
Not seeing what is presented, but what is hidden.
Not seeing what fits, but what disrupts.
Not justifying — but refusing to look away.
Justification is blindness dressed as sight. I refuse to wear those eyes.
