John Buttrick writes from his Vermont Rocker in his Concord home: Minds Crossing. He can be reached at johndbuttrick@gmail.com

In grade school, I had a teacher who made free use of collective punishment. For example, if the teacher, with her back to the students, experienced a rubber band zooming past her ear, she would threaten to punish the whole class: “You will all stay inside during recess if I’m not told who did it.” As you can imagine, there were many protests claiming she was being unfair. Author Professor Laura Lundy observes, “there can be very few of us who didn’t (perhaps still do?) feel outraged at a similar injustice at some stage in our school days.”

We should also have outrage over presidential candidates who advocate collective punishment at our borders. Responding to anecdotes about “terrorism,” they seek to restrict from entering the U.S. all people from majority Muslim countries. Such restrictions would punish all Muslim visitors, immigrants, and refugees for the actions of a few “terrorists.” It is a plan that assumes all Muslims support terrorists and all share a unified interpretation of the Koran. However, Muslim interpretations of the Koran are just as diverse as Christian interpretations of the Bible. Collective punishment would be an injustice on our borders.

These are only two examples of abusive collective punishment. But the most egregious examples may be found in war. From ancient times, war has resulted in villages burned to the ground and innocent citizens slaughtered. World War II introduced carpet bombings on cities by England, Germany, the U.S. and others as well as two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Now indiscriminate death comes from rockets and drones. Collective punishment continues even as ”International humanitarian law posits that no person may be punished for acts that he or she did not commit … This is one of the fundamental guarantees established by the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their 1977 Additional Protocols.” Yet, tit for tat, security, revenge, and fear seem to be motivators justifying collective punishment during war.

The current war between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has escalated collective punishment. A group of independent United Nations experts condemned such violence against civilians in Israel and deplored the “collective punishment” of reprisal strikes against Gaza. “They (Gazans) have lived under unlawful blockade for 16 years, and already gone through five major brutal wars, which remain unaccounted for,” several U.N. special rapporteurs said in a statement. There is “no justification for violence that indiscriminately targets innocent civilians, whether by Hamas or Israeli forces. This is absolutely prohibited under international law and amounts to a war crime.”

However, as well as violating Geneva Convention protocols, there are unintended consequences of collective punishment. Harkening back to my childhood school experience, I remember how we responded to the teacher’s attempt to divide us and catch the prankster. The class responded to the teacher’s threat by bonding together in an unspoken agreement to resist the teacher’s power over them. By refusing to name the culprit, students suffered collective punishment, but gained a bit of self-esteem. The teacher failed to identify who shot the rubber band and she lost self-respect. We powerless children learned to participate in the unintended consequences of collective punishment.

Ignoring the Geneva Convention protocols, collective punishment has been practiced for fifty-six years by Israel toward the Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza with the same failed results manifested as unintentional consequences. For example, after an incident of a few children throwing rocks at body-armored Israeli soldiers in Nablus, I witnessed checkpoints closed between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory and within the West Bank. In the name of security, collective punishment kept farmers away from their fields, students from their schools, sick and injured from hospitals, and workers away from their jobs. Also, at 2 a.m., Israeli Defense Forces broke into a Palestinian home in Jayyous, many miles and several check points away from Nablus, to take away a teenager for undisclosed reasons. The unintentional consequences of these actions resulted in no change in the quest for security. Also, Palestinian children and youth bonded in anger and became determined to resist Israel oppression.

It is time to recognize the impotence of collective punishment in the light of its unintended consequences. Such punishment fails in its effort to discipline the guilty. By including innocent bystanders, the guilty are freed from direct punishment. It generates opposition by the innocent and drives them to unify with expressions of anger and resistance. They seek to find ways to disrespect and weaken the unjust punishers while building some dignity for themselves. Collective punishment proves to be a failure.

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As citizens of a democratic country, it is only logical to lead our government away from complicity with Israel in collective punishment and toward implementing collective justice for all people. Valuing equal justice for all might leave some would-be-power-wheedling people behind, but it would be a bonding value for the rest of us. Also, U.S. encouragement to practice collective justice would suggest a common value and reinforce the bond of friendship between Israel and the United States.