Forgiveness Means Going Soft on Justice

In the Middle East both the main protagonists embrace religions where forgiveness has never been seen as a duty, let alone as a virtue, but rather as a kind of moral weakness—and by “moral weakness” I don’t just mean a failure to keep a moral law but a deficiency in the implicit moral code itself. Nietzsche would have agreed: forgiveness is for wimps. The main moral standard for the main participants in the Middle East conflict is justice. To forgive people, they will say, means going soft on justice, by which they mean the full recompense and punishment which both sides believe they are…