Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Israel's Wars, Memes, and Rational Thinking

A number of respondents to my post yesterday about Israel's wars raised points serious enough for me to follow up.

RK started by assuming the author at the Economist knows many Israelis won't agree with him, but he's writing for the readers who will. Perhaps. As I've documented from time to time in the past, however, the intelligent folks at the Economist are constitutionally incapable of seriously grappling with the possibility that the Islamist war against mankind, and its cousins, the Arab rejection of Israel and the Palestinian determination to remove Israel, are profound expressions of culture religion and history. As the Economist sees it, there are unfortunate responses in the Muslim world to conditions that make the Muslims unhappy, but if the conditions are addressed fairly the grievances will disappear. In practice, this means seeking a calm rational middle ground on which everyone can agree, except perhaps some diehard fanatics who will be marginalized by their own societies.

This has been the Economist's way of seeing the world for as long as I've been reading them, since the late 1960s. Rational engagement will be answered with rational engagement - sooner or later, at any rate - and the task of rational people is to seek that engagement at all times. It's a nice idea, sometimes it's even true, and other-times it can be disastrously wrong.

RK then went on, if I understood him corectly, to poke fun at what he called "memes". I can see his point, in that memes are sometimes unthinking slogans that replace rational thought. At other times, however, they can simply be shorthand for complex sets of ideas, and all of us use them when we don't have the time or need to work through the entire book. Thus, saying the majority of the Palestinians prefers No Israel over a small sovereign Palestinian state, and will prefer waiting for the first if having the second gets in the way, can be summed in the meme "The Palestinians aren't interested in peace". Obviously, one could write an entire book documenting this, or a daily blog linking to demonstrations of it, just as one ought to be on the lookout for signs that the situation is changing, should we ever get to that point. But if one's careful to remember that it's merely useful shorthand, there's nothing inherently wrong in using it.

Anyway, memes are often vastly more potent in forming history and motivating its actors than nuanced treatises. Here are some examples:
The Jews killed Christ
No taxation without representation
Equality Fraternity Liberty
Die Juden sind unser Unglueck
Freedom is not Free
Don't tread on me
Heim ins Reich
Rule Brittania
Not in my name
Yes we can
Illegal Israeli settlements

Y. Ben David asked why I don't take the correct position that the Palestinians are seeking signs of Israeli weakness to bolster their determination to wait for our disappearance, to its logical conclusion that any future Israeli withdrawals will merely strengthen them. A reasonable question, with two possible responses. One, the Palestinians aren't monolithic nor eternally frozen. What may be true today may not remain so tomorrow, for example, and it might even be possible to change reality by taking action. So if there's a Palestinian minority willing to live alongside Jewish Israel and it can be strengthened by carefully removing the irritant of Israeli occupation, this might be worth trying. My second, more clear-eyed response, is that the whole project of Zionism is that the Jews do what's good for the Jews, while taking cognizance of the implications of their actions, of course, but not limiting themselves to the dictates of others. So if ruling over large numbers of Palestinians is bad for Israel, we need to figure out if the damage may not be even greater than strengthening their opinions about our being weak. Put more directly: We need to stop ruling over as many Palestinians as we can; we must do so in a manner that strengthen us; once we've done so, we'll still have to deal with massive Palestinian rejectionism and some eagerness to be violent, but our own position will be stronger. It will be easier to withstand Palestinian enmity and violence - which will of course continue - from a position of broad internal consensus and some international acceptance.

Rukn attributed to me the idea that some people are inscrutable and some foreigners cannot be understood. I never meant to say this. On the contrary. I spent a number of years of my life in a concentrated effort to understand the Nazis, and I think I partially succeeded. If I had the time to learn Arabic and follow the relevant sources, I don't see why I wouldn't be able to understand the Islamists. (On a much easier level, I have no problem in understanding Dan Yakir and his friends on our radical Left). The human intellect always has the ability to understand the human intellect, and human emotion can mostly comprehend human emotion.

My point was that too often, we don't give our enemies the dignity of trying to understand them; rather, we tell ourselves how we would see things were we in their position, and then we assure ourselves that's how they indeed think. The result is that there's no meeting of minds, but there is rampant arrogant misinterpretation. Had Dan Yakir tried to place himself in the shoes of that judge, he'd not have castigated him the way he did; instead, he applied his own interpretation to the words of the judge, and ended up with a travesty. Were the diplomats of the world to listen seriously to the Palestinians, they'd recognize that the Israel-Palestine conflict cannot be resolved right now by creating a tiny Palestinian state on the West Bank, and the eventual horror of dividing Jerusalem would not be discussed. Were the leaders of the world's powers to listen to the fabled "angry Arab street" so as to understand how it explains reality and what motivates it, rather than smugly assuring themselves they know how to soothe the poor barbarians, they might be developing dramatically different policies than the ones they're pursuing.

21 comments:

Silke said...

OT
but since we have been talking about "King James" so often here is something that I found especially concerning the Koran very interesting

As 2011 marks the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, Ernie Rea and guests discuss how sacred texts, such as the Bible, Koran or Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh Holy book, should be translated. Are translations given equal consideration by followers as the original text? Does it matter whether you understand the language of your Holy book? Is there a place for contemporary interpretations such as the comic book Bible?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00x3t7r

RK said...

1. Thanks for the detailed and considered response. I actually agree with a lot of it, especially the reluctance of many Western commentators to consider cultural factors. On the other hand, pundits are usually too eager to attribute conflicts to broad historical factors ("They've been fighting each other for centuries"; "The Israeli bunker mentality is due to the Holocaust"; "Muslims can't give up Palestine because it was once part of the House of Islam") It's lazy, and even though it pretends to be respectful of the people involved ("We must learn their history to understand how they think") it's actually somewhat insulting, since it ignores the actual proximate events that the parties cite as their motivations. To take an example I gave earlier, Israelis are way more likely to point to the second Intifada than the Holocaust when they're asked to justify their political views, and the yefei nefesh in the peace camp are overwhelmingly Ashkenazim, whose connection to the Holocaust is more personal. (I'm not telling you all anything you don't know.) Similarly, the Arabs I've talked to are more likely to complain about how they're hassled on buses or at checkpoints than to cite Israeli "colonialism" or apocalyptic religious views. (The fact that Christian Arabs often hold extreme views should discourage pat classifications of Palestinian nationalism as a cousin of the Islamist war on mankind. It's also telling that a lot of very level-headed Druze don't share your analysis of the situation, as Michael Totten among others has found out.)

That's not to say that they're amenable to a realistic peace agreement, but it partially explains why the polling of Arab political views reveals contradictory attitudes, often within the same poll, and why people can read so many different things into them. (Prof. Sammy Smooha has devoted his career to this, and his work is required reading.)

I haven't been reading the Economist nearly as long as you have, but I remember their attitude being more complex than you give it credit for. For instance, in a cover story two and a half years ago, they wrote: "But diplomacy, like democracy, is no panacea. Muslim resentment of the West has a complex pathology, dating back to the Spanish reconquista in medieval times; that is hardly something that can be undone. Still, it is worth addressing real grievances."

2. On the memes thing, I guess that was partly just an excuse to post the video. (Thanks to Silke, by the way, for the English-subbed version.) But I didn't mean to deny that slogans can be useful analytic tools. I was whining that a lot of the commentary we see just involves people staking out positions we already knew they held, and making snide remarks about people who hold opposing views. At this point, everyone knows what they believe about Israel, they know what the other side believes about Israel, and they know the other side knows what they believe about Israel. The best pieces, like Danny Rubinstein's article in Dissent, Yossi Yuval's series on Israeli Arabs, or your response to Akiva Eldar's piece a few days ago, tell us that we didn't actually what we thought we knew about Israel.

3. Yaacov's second response to Y. Ben-David is exactly right. Put differently, Y. Ben-David's argument proves too much. If Israelis have just made things worse by curtailing their territorial ambitions, other considerations be damned, then supporting settlements in the West Bank isn't enough. Israelis should go back to the old Jabotinskyite dream: שתי גדות לירדן, זו שלנו, זו גם כן. That would show the Arabs we aren't going anywhere!

RK said...

Let's see if my response goes up if I split it into two parts.

1. Thanks for the detailed and considered response. I actually agree with a lot of it, especially the reluctance of many Western commentators to consider cultural factors. On the other hand, pundits are usually too eager to attribute conflicts to broad historical factors ("They've been fighting each other for centuries"; "The Israeli bunker mentality is due to the Holocaust"; "Muslims can't give up Palestine because it was once part of the House of Islam") It's lazy, and even though it pretends to be respectful of the people involved ("We must learn their history to understand how they think") it's actually somewhat insulting, since it ignores the actual proximate events that the parties cite as their motivations. To take an example I gave earlier, Israelis are way more likely to point to the second Intifada than the Holocaust when they're asked to justify their political views, and the yefei nefesh in the peace camp are overwhelmingly Ashkenazim, whose connection to the Holocaust is more personal. (I'm not telling you all anything you don't know.) Similarly, when you actually talk to Arabs (at least, the unrepresentative sample I've talked to in Israel) they don't usually justify their grievances with apocalyptic religious rhetoric. (The fact that Christian Arabs often hold extreme views should discourage pat classifications of Palestinian nationalism as a cousin of the Islamist war on mankind. It's also telling that a lot of very level-headed Druze don't share your analysis of the situation, as Michael Totten among others has found out.)

That's not to say that they're amenable to a realistic peace agreement, but it partially explains why the polling of Arab political views reveals contradictory attitudes, often within the same poll, and why people can read so many different things into them. (Prof. Sammy Smooha has devoted his career to this, and his work is required reading.)

I haven't been reading the Economist nearly as long as you have, but I remember their attitude being more complex than you give it credit for. For instance, in this cover story they wrote: "But diplomacy, like democracy, is no panacea. Muslim resentment of the West has a complex pathology, dating back to the Spanish reconquista in medieval times; that is hardly something that can be undone. Still, it is worth addressing real grievances."

Anonymous said...

I appreciate Yaacov's response and apologize for not being as clear or precise as I would have liked to have been in my initial comments. I didn't want to impute to Yaacov the belief that some people are completely and utterly inscrutable, only to point out that there is a continuum between believing others think exactly as we do and believing others are radically alien, and that it's just as important not to err on one side as on the other. When it comes to analyzing Islamist groups, while it is important to take what they say seriously, it is also important not to fall into the trap that I believe writers like Raymond Ibrahim or Robert Spencer have, where everything must go back to taqiyya, the Islamicate, and the injunctions of Ibn Taymiyya. Islamists are not, on this line of thinking, utterly inscrutable, but understanding them requires esoteric knowledge and the recourse to arcane texts. I think this obscures more often than it clarifies. Further, just as it is important not to invest our enemies' worldviews with more arcana and dark arts than is necessary, it is also important not to act as if their worldviews are actually true. By way of example, I think it is very important to understand that Osama bin Laden believes he is engaging in a civilizational conflict with the West. Unfortunately, in responding to the threat of Al Qaeda, the U.S. has often acted as if there really is some epic battle going on between Islam and the West and so has actually done much to make bin Laden's fantasies a reality.

It is also necessary to separate true ideologues from normal people. It is here that I think my disagreement with Yaacov may lie. As I said previously, true ideologues are unlikely to change their viewpoint, and thus it is necessary to take seriously what they say. For most people, however, opinions and talk are cheap and easily disposed of when circumstances change. Further, the vast majority of people, unlike ideologues, don't have sophisticated worldviews in which they place themselves in the midst of some epic, historical struggle or mission (though, since opinions are cheap, they may mouth the slogans of the ideologues). Though I understand that most readers of this site disagree with me, I see this as being the case with most Palestinians. And given that even in the face of the occupation Hamas is unable to muster more than rhetorical or passive support from the vast majority of Palestinians, I don't see much reason to doubt that in the event of the establishment of a Palestinian state, the disappearance of the direct experience of military occupation, combined with the pressing concerns of everyday life, won't undermine that support for groups like Hamas who would return them to the misery of the struggle with Israel.

rukn

RK said...

1. Thanks for the detailed and considered response. I actually agree with a lot of it, especially the reluctance of many Western commentators to consider cultural factors. On the other hand, pundits are usually too eager to attribute conflicts to broad historical factors ("They've been fighting each other for centuries"; "The Israeli bunker mentality is due to the Holocaust"; "Muslims can't give up Palestine because it was once part of the House of Islam") It's lazy, and even though it pretends to be respectful of the people involved ("We must learn their history to understand how they think") it's actually somewhat insulting, since it ignores the actual proximate events that the parties cite as their motivations. To take an example I gave earlier, Israelis are way more likely to point to the second Intifada than the Holocaust when they're asked to justify their political views, and the yefei nefesh in the peace camp are overwhelmingly Ashkenazim, whose connection to the Holocaust is more personal. (I'm not telling you all anything you don't know.) Similarly, when you talk to Arabs, the complaints tend to be more banal than apocalyptic or historical. (The fact that Christian Arabs often hold extreme views should discourage pat classifications of Palestinian nationalism as a cousin of the Islamist war on mankind. It's also telling that a lot of very level-headed Druze don't share your analysis of the situation, as Michael Totten among others has found out.)

That's not to say that they're amenable to a realistic peace agreement, but it partially explains why the polling of Arab political views reveals contradictory attitudes, often within the same poll, and why people can read so many different things into them. (Prof. Sammy Smooha has devoted his career to this, and his work is required reading.)

I haven't been reading the Economist nearly as long as you have, but I remember their attitude being more complex than you give it credit for. For instance, in a cover story two and a half years ago, they wrote: "But diplomacy, like democracy, is no panacea. Muslim resentment of the West has a complex pathology, dating back to the Spanish reconquista in medieval times; that is hardly something that can be undone. Still, it is worth addressing real grievances."

2. On the memes thing, I guess that was partly just an excuse to post the video. (Thanks to Silke, by the way, for the English-subbed version.) But I didn't mean to deny that slogans can be useful analytic tools. I was whining that a lot of the commentary we see just involves people staking out positions we already knew they held, and making snide remarks about people who hold opposing views. At this point, everyone knows what they believe about Israel, they know what the other side believes about Israel, and they know the other side knows what they believe about Israel. The best pieces, like Danny Rubinstein's article in Dissent, Yossi Yuval's series on Israeli Arabs, or your response to Akiva Eldar's piece a few days ago, tell us that we didn't actually know what we thought we knew about Israel.

3. Yaacov's second response to Y. Ben-David is exactly right. Put differently, Y. Ben-David's argument proves too much. If Israelis have just made things worse by curtailing their territorial ambitions, other considerations be damned, then supporting settlements in the West Bank isn't enough. Israelis should go back to the old Jabotinskyite dream: The Jordan has two banks: This one is ours and that one too. That would show the Arabs we aren't going anywhere!

RK said...

Let me try posting this in multiple parts.

1. Thanks for the detailed and considered response. I actually agree with a lot of it, especially the reluctance of many Western commentators to consider cultural factors. On the other hand, pundits are usually too eager to attribute conflicts to broad historical factors ("They've been fighting each other for centuries"; "The Israeli bunker mentality is due to the Holocaust"; "Muslims can't give up Palestine because it was once part of the House of Islam") It's lazy, and even though it pretends to be respectful of the people involved ("We must learn their history to understand how they think") it's actually somewhat insulting, since it ignores the actual proximate events that the parties cite as their motivations. To take an example I gave earlier, Israelis are way more likely to point to the second Intifada than the Holocaust when they're asked to justify their political views, and the yefei nefesh in the peace camp are overwhelmingly Ashkenazim, whose connection to the Holocaust is more personal. (I'm not telling you all anything you don't know.) Similarly, when you talk to Arabs, the complaints tend to be more banal than apocalyptic or historical. (The fact that Christian Arabs often hold extreme views should discourage pat classifications of Palestinian nationalism as a cousin of the Islamist war on mankind. It's also telling that a lot of very level-headed Druze don't share your analysis of the situation, as Michael Totten among others has found out.)

RK said...

That's not to say that they're amenable to a realistic peace agreement, but it partially explains why the polling of Arab political views reveals contradictory attitudes, often within the same poll, and why people can read so many different things into them. (Prof. Sammy Smooha has devoted his career to this, and his work is required reading.)

I haven't been reading the Economist nearly as long as you have, but I remember their attitude being more complex than you give it credit for. For instance, in a cover story two and a half years ago, they wrote: "But diplomacy, like democracy, is no panacea. Muslim resentment of the West has a complex pathology, dating back to the Spanish reconquista in medieval times; that is hardly something that can be undone. Still, it is worth addressing real grievances."

2. On the memes thing, I guess that was partly just an excuse to post the video. (Thanks to Silke, by the way, for the English-subbed version.) But I didn't mean to deny that slogans can be useful analytic tools. I was whining that a lot of the commentary we see just involves people staking out positions we already knew they held, and making snide remarks about people who hold opposing views. At this point, everyone knows what they believe about Israel, they know what the other side believes about Israel, and they know the other side knows what they believe about Israel. The best pieces, like Danny Rubinstein's article in Dissent, Yossi Yuval's series on Israeli Arabs, or your response to Akiva Eldar's piece a few days ago, tell us that we didn't actually know what we thought we knew about Israel.

3. Yaacov's second response to Y. Ben-David is exactly right. Put differently, Y. Ben-David's argument proves too much. If Israelis have just made things worse by curtailing their territorial ambitions, other considerations be damned, then supporting settlements in the West Bank isn't enough. Israelis should go back to the old Jabotinskyite dream: The Jordan has two banks: This one is ours and that one too. That would show the Arabs we aren't going anywhere!

RK said...

That's not to say that they're amenable to a realistic peace agreement, but it partially explains why the polling of Arab political views reveals contradictory attitudes, often within the same poll, and why people can read so many different things into them. (Prof. Sammy Smooha has devoted his career to this, and his work is required reading.)

I haven't been reading the Economist nearly as long as you have, but I remember their attitude being more complex than you give it credit for. For instance, in a cover story two and a half years ago, they wrote: "But diplomacy, like democracy, is no panacea. Muslim resentment of the West has a complex pathology, dating back to the Spanish reconquista in medieval times; that is hardly something that can be undone. Still, it is worth addressing real grievances."

RK said...

2. On the memes thing, I guess that was partly just an excuse to post the video. (Thanks to Silke, by the way, for the English-subbed version.) But I didn't mean to deny that slogans can be useful analytic tools. I was whining that a lot of the commentary we see just involves people staking out positions we already knew they held, and making snide remarks about people who hold opposing views. At this point, everyone knows what they believe about Israel, they know what the other side believes about Israel, and they know the other side knows what they believe about Israel. The best pieces, like Danny Rubinstein's article in Dissent, Yossi Yuval's series on Israeli Arabs, or your response to Akiva Eldar's piece a few days ago, tell us that we didn't actually know what we thought we knew about Israel.

3. Yaacov's second response to Y. Ben-David is exactly right. Put differently, Y. Ben-David's argument proves too much. If Israelis have just made things worse by curtailing their territorial ambitions, other considerations be damned, then supporting settlements in the West Bank isn't enough. Israelis should go back to the old Jabotinskyite dream: The Jordan has two banks: This one is ours and that one too. That would show the Arabs we aren't going anywhere!

Barry Meislin said...

...the reluctance of many Western commentators to consider cultural factors.

Actually, it's the refusal of many Western commentators to listen to what the Palestinians are saying (and have been saying all along), along with their refusal to pay attention to what their doing.

http://www.hudson-ny.org/1734/palestinians-direct-indirect-parallel-talks

Barry Meislin said...

Speaking of memes, one of my favorites is:

PALESTINE FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA!!!

Fortunately for Israel, those who chant it are not really serious (right?).

After all, it's only a meme....

Barry Meislin said...

In my first post, "...(and have been saying all along)..."

should be:

"...(and have been doing all along)..."

Silke said...

Still, it is worth addressing real grievances.

I'm all for adressing real grievances but it shouldn't be a one way street. I for one can't remember a muslim head of state elaborating on adressing "western" or heaven forbid Christian grievances.

If only the "west" feels it is obliged to address grievances and doesn't expect its own grievances to be addressed in return that is again demonstrating an extremely patronising attitude which can be considered good manners only by those who consider themselves vastly superior to the party in need of grievances addressed.

Putin recently got a big concession from Erdogan. I doubt that Putin had addressed Erdogan's grievances and thereby managed to wrestle Erdogan into doing him the honour.

Zionist Juice said...

dear silke,

bitte:
das kommt einer comicversion doch schon sehr nahe:
http://www.youtube.com/user/gdashdcast

Anonymous said...

I appreciate Yaacov's response and apologize for not being clearer and more precise in my original comments. I actually think one of the points I was trying to communicate has been articulated rather well by RK in this thread. In saying that it's also a mistake to construe other people as inscrutable, I didn't mean to attribute that position to Yaacov, only to indicate that just as it's possible to err on the side of not taking other people seriously enough, it's also possible to err on the side of investing them with too much alienness. As RK, said it's just too easy to have recourse to broad, deep historical factors, rather than paying attention to proximate events. I like the examples RK cited but would add a trend in writing on the Middle East represented by people like Raymond Ibrahim and Robert Spencer in which everything must come down to understanding the "Islamicate," identifying instances of taqqiya, parsing Ibn Taymiyya texts, etc.

In regard to the issue at hand, I think where my disagreement with Yaacov lies is that while it's necessary to take ideologues seriously (with the caveats of the above paragraph), most people aren't ideologues. They're normal people, very much like ourselves, for whom talk and opinions are cheap. It's thus very easy to respond to a survey indicating one only accepts a two-state solution as a provisional step on the road to wiping out Israel, but it's a very different thing to do anything to act on those opinions. Further, it's very easy to abandon those opinions when circumstances on the ground change, the demands of everyday life become more pressing, and the immediate factors causing the desire to express those radical opinions (the hardships associated with the occupation) disappear. Further, given that in the current situation, very few Palestinians lend more than rhetorical support to ideological, rejectionist groups like Hamas, I find it easy to believe that the establishment of a Palestinian state will cause even that support to disappear.

rukn

Anonymous said...

I appreciate Yaacov's response and apologize for not being clearer and more precise in my original comments. I actually think one of the points I was trying to communicate has been articulated rather well by RK in this thread. In saying that it's also a mistake to construe other people as inscrutable, I didn't mean to attribute that position to Yaacov, only to indicate that just as it's possible to err on the side of not taking other people seriously enough, it's also possible to err on the side of investing them with too much alienness. As RK, said it's just too easy to have recourse to broad, deep historical factors, rather than paying attention to proximate events. I like the examples RK cited but would add a trend in writing on the Middle East represented by people like Raymond Ibrahim and Robert Spencer in which everything must come down to understanding the "Islamicate," identifying instances of taqqiya, parsing Ibn Taymiyya texts, etc.

In regard to the issue at hand, I think where my disagreement with Yaacov lies is that while it's necessary to take ideologues seriously (with the caveats of the above paragraph), most people aren't ideologues. They're normal people, very much like ourselves, for whom talk and opinions are cheap. It's thus very easy to respond to a survey indicating one only accepts a two-state solution as a provisional step on the road to wiping out Israel, but it's a very different thing to do anything to act on those opinions. Further, it's very easy to abandon those opinions when circumstances on the ground change, the demands of everyday life become more pressing, and the immediate factors causing the desire to express those radical opinions (the hardships associated with the occupation) disappear. Further, given that in the current situation, very few Palestinians lend more than rhetorical support to ideological, rejectionist groups like Hamas, I find it easy to believe that the establishment of a Palestinian state will cause even that support to disappear.

rukn

RK said...

Oops, it looks like the last part of my comment didn't post properly.

2. On the memes thing, I guess that was partly just an excuse to post the video. (Thanks to Silke, by the way, for the English-subbed version.) But I didn't mean to deny that slogans can be useful analytic tools. You're right that they often encapsulate complex and correct ideas. I was whining that a lot of the commentary we see just involves people staking out positions we already knew they held, and making snide remarks about people who hold opposing views. At this point, everyone knows what they believe about Israel, they know what the other side believes about Israel, and they know the other side knows what they believe about Israel. The best pieces, like Danny Rubinstein's article in Dissent, Yossi Yuval's series on Israeli Arabs, or your response to Akiva Eldar's piece a few days ago, tell us that we didn't actually what we thought we knew about Israel.

3. Yaacov's second response to Y. Ben-David is exactly right. Put differently, Y. Ben-David's argument proves too much. If Israelis have just made things worse by curtailing their territorial ambitions, other considerations be damned, then supporting settlements in the West Bank isn't enough. Israelis should go back to the old Jabotinskyite dream: The Jordan has two banks: this one is ours and that one too. That would show the Arabs we aren't going anywhere!

RK said...

Oops, it looks like the last part of my comment didn't post properly.

2. On the memes thing, I guess that was partly just an excuse to post the video. (Thanks to Silke, by the way, for the English-subbed version.) But I didn't mean to deny that slogans can be useful analytic tools. You're right that they often encapsulate complex and correct ideas. I was whining that a lot of the commentary we see just involves people staking out positions we already knew they held, and making snide remarks about people who hold opposing views. At this point, everyone knows what they believe about Israel, they know what the other side believes about Israel, and they know the other side knows what they believe about Israel. The best pieces, like Danny Rubinstein's article in Dissent, Yossi Yuval's series on Israeli Arabs, or your response to Akiva Eldar's piece a few days ago, tell us that we didn't actually what we thought we knew about Israel.

3. Yaacov's second response to Y. Ben-David is exactly right. Put differently, Y. Ben-David's argument proves too much. If Israelis have just made things worse by curtailing their territorial ambitions, other considerations be damned, then supporting settlements in the West Bank isn't enough. Israelis should go back to the old Jabotinskyite dream: The Jordan has two banks: this one is ours and that one too. That would show the Arabs we aren't going anywhere!

RK said...

Oops, it looks like the last part of my comment didn't post properly.

2. On the memes thing, I guess that was partly just an excuse to post the video. (Thanks to Silke, by the way, for the English-subbed version.) But I didn't mean to deny that slogans can be useful analytic tools. You're right that they often encapsulate complex and correct ideas. I was whining that a lot of the commentary we see just involves people staking out positions we already knew they held, and making snide remarks about people who hold opposing views. At this point, everyone knows what they believe about Israel, they know what the other side believes about Israel, and they know the other side knows what they believe about Israel. The best pieces, like Danny Rubinstein's article in Dissent, Yossi Yuval's series on Israeli Arabs, or your response to Akiva Eldar's piece a few days ago, tell us that we didn't actually know what we thought we knew about Israel.

RK said...

3. Yaacov's second response to Y. Ben-David is exactly right. Put differently, Y. Ben-David's argument proves too much. If Israelis have just made things worse by curtailing their territorial ambitions, other considerations be damned, then supporting settlements in the West Bank isn't enough. Israelis should go back to the old Jabotinskyite dream: The Jordan has two banks: this one is ours and that one too. That would show the Arabs we aren't going anywhere!

Silke said...

Elder of Ziyon has scanned and posted a piece by Moshe Dayan from 3 months after the 6-days-war. I am deeply impressed by the down-to-every-day-life easily understandable language the man used.

Something has changed - my bet is, it is not for the better, but then I'm old and Dayan there talks the language which seemed like a breath of fresh air to me and others back then and amazing enough it still does for me today. So either I am stuck in a time-warp of my own youth or something really was more straightforward and honest back then.

http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2011/01/moshe-dayan-in-life-magazine-after-six.html