4. Humanitarian Action as Rescue
Whoever saves one life, it is as if he saved the entire world.^1
We had to burn the village in order to save it.^2
If humanitarianism brings into focus the desire to defend a common humanity, it is,
as the first, Talmudic saying indicates, intimately bound to acts of rescue, of saving
lives. Indeed, a single act of rescue can take on immense symbolic importance in the
defence of the idea at least of a common humanity. For, as saving “the entire
world” or permanently deferring the death of a single individual are impossibilities,
the rescue of certain individuals remains at least a tangible possibility, and
consequently defines the texture of humanitarian action. Moreover, while it should
be clear from previous chapters that it would be erroneous to attempt to define
humanitarianism once and for all in terms of a specific set of permissible actions,
some notion of saving human lives necessarily remains central to the kind of action
at stake, when we set out and negotiate what humanitarian concern entails.^
This is driven home by the pervasiveness of the language of rescue across
the diverse contexts in which humanitarianism is discussed, one of the few
constants across the multiplicity of understandings of what humanitarianism is and
means. Obvious examples from the realm of practice include two long-standing
humanitarian organisations: the International Rescue Committee and Save the
Children. The most significant International Relations monograph on humanitarian
intervention is entitled Saving Strangers , while in Political Theory Michael Walzer’s
most important intervention on the subject is an article on “The Politics of Rescue”.^3
In fact, much of contemporary normative theorising relies on an implicit act of
rescue. Peter Singer’s famous drowning child has now been rescued on numerous
occasions, only to be thrown back to its doom again by battalions of eager political
1
Martin Gilbert, The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (London: Transworld,
2002), xiv. 2
3 American soldier in Vietnam, cited in Rieff, A Bed for the Night , 258.
Walzer, "The Politics of Rescue". Wheeler, Saving Strangers.