Something very strange happens to otherwise sensible people when Israel enters the conversation.\n<\/p>\n
Reason loosens its tie, orders another drink and quietly leaves through the side door.\n<\/p>\n
People who would struggle to find Haifa on an unlabelled map suddenly acquire startling expertise in Ottoman land law, counter-insurgency doctrine, the Geneva Conventions and the precise moral obligations of a country at war. Proportion disappears. History becomes infinitely elastic. Cause and consequence exchange places. Terrorism develops a complicated backstory deserving several seminars and perhaps a sympathetic documentary.\n<\/p>\n
Israel, meanwhile, is expected to explain itself before breakfast.\n<\/p>\n
One hesitates to call this a medical condition. Doctors have quite enough to contend with. So let us settle for a political one: Israel Derangement Syndrome.\n<\/p>\n
The first thing to establish is that criticism of Israel does not qualify. Israelis criticise Israel with an enthusiasm few foreigners could hope to match. Anyone who has spent time among Israelis knows that placing three of them around a dinner table is usually sufficient to produce five political parties, two constitutional crises and an argument about who ruined the country.\n<\/p>\n
That is democracy. IDS is something else.\n<\/p>\n
It begins when Israel is subjected to rules invented especially for Israel, revised whenever Israel appears to have met them, and usually administered by people safely removed from the consequences.\n<\/p>\n
For years we have been told that Islamist terrorism must be understood in context. We must consider alienation, colonial history, economics, foreign policy, identity, grievance, trauma, discrimination and perhaps the weather.\n<\/p>\n
Then Israelis are murdered and context develops an entirely different function.\n<\/p>\n
Now it explains the murderer.\n<\/p>\n
A terrorist may possess an ideology, a religious worldview, weapons, financiers, military commanders, foreign patrons, political objectives and published statements explaining what he intends to do. Yet much Western commentary treats him like a tropical storm. Unfortunate. Destructive. Probably caused by atmospheric conditions.\n<\/p>\n
Israel, by contrast, acquires almost supernatural agency.\n<\/p>\n
Israel causes the attack against it.\n<\/p>\n
Israel causes the response to the attack.\n<\/p>\n
Israel causes the anger generated by the response.\n<\/p>\n
Israel causes the radicalisation produced by that anger.\n<\/p>\n
Give social media another forty-eight hours and somebody will have blamed Israel for the price of avocados.\n<\/p>\n
October 7 offered a particularly grim demonstration.\n<\/p>\n
For a few hours, murdering Israeli civilians was widely agreed to be bad.\n<\/p>\n
A promising beginning.\n<\/p>\n
Then came the qualifications.\n<\/p>\n
There was \u201ccontext\u201d. There were lectures about history. There were attempts, sometimes astonishingly rapid, to place the massacre inside a political narrative spacious enough to accommodate excuses.\n<\/p>\n
The dead were barely buried before the discussion shifted from what had been done to Israelis to what Israelis must now be forbidden from doing about it.\n<\/p>\n
That transition tells us something.\n<\/p>\n
We reached the curious moral position in which the murder of Jews required explanation while Jewish self-defence required permission.\n<\/p>\n
The treatment of Hamas has been especially revealing. Hamas can publish its ideas, preach them, repeat them, organise around them and fight according to them, yet Western intellectuals routinely insist upon discovering some more respectable explanation behind the one Hamas itself supplies.\n<\/p>\n
Apparently the one group whose stated beliefs we must never take seriously is the group firing rockets while stating those beliefs.\n<\/p>\n
An Israeli politician, however, need only say something stupid into a microphone and suddenly nobody is interested in context at all. The remark becomes evidence. Not merely of that politician\u2019s stupidity, which would often be quite sufficient, but of Israel\u2019s true nature, Zionism\u2019s secret purpose and possibly Jewish thought since Sinai.\n<\/p>\n
A Hamas document requires nuance.\n<\/p>\n
A sentence from an Israeli backbencher requires a conference at The Hague.\n<\/p>\n
Then comes proportionality, a word that has suffered terribly in public life.\n<\/p>\n
In popular discussion, proportionality is treated as if war were governed by playground arithmetic. If one side loses 1,000 people, the other must apparently stop once the scoreboard reaches the same number.\n<\/p>\n
That is not what proportionality means in the law of armed conflict. The legal question concerns anticipated civilian harm in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected from a particular attack. It does not require both sides to achieve numerical equality in death.\n<\/p>\n
Wars do not come with a moral handicap system.\n<\/p>\n
If they did, Britain would presumably have owed Nazi Germany an apology sometime in 1944 for excessive success.\n<\/p>\n
None of this places Israel above scrutiny. Military decisions can be questioned. Governments can be challenged. Alleged violations of the laws of war should be investigated. Israeli politicians are as capable of folly, arrogance and bad judgement as politicians everywhere else, perhaps with greater theatrical commitment.\n<\/p>\n
The problem appears when scrutiny turns into a fixation so intense that standards begin changing according to the identity of the country involved.\n<\/p>\n
Language is often where the trick becomes visible.\n<\/p>\n
Terrorists become \u201cfighters\u201d.\n<\/p>\n
Murderers become \u201cmilitants\u201d.\n<\/p>\n
Hostages become \u201ccaptives\u201d.\n<\/p>\n
Massacres become \u201cresistance\u201d.\n<\/p>\n
Antisemitism becomes \u201canti-Zionism\u201d, even when the speaker has wandered some distance from Benjamin Netanyahu and is now explaining the peculiar habits of Jewish bankers.\n<\/p>\n
And slogans demanding that Israel disappear are subjected to interpretive generosity that would make a medieval theologian blush.\n<\/p>\n
What, people ask, could \u201cfrom the river to the sea\u201d possibly imply?\n<\/p>\n
A water-management initiative, perhaps.\n<\/p>\n
Regional canoeing.\n<\/p>\n
A sudden mass enthusiasm for hydrography.\n<\/p>\n
One mustn\u2019t be hasty.\n<\/p>\n
The comedy becomes darker when Jews say that something sounds threatening.\n<\/p>\n
The same people who quite properly insist that minorities should be listened to when describing hostility suddenly discover cross-examination.\n<\/p>\n
Are you certain it was antisemitic?\n<\/p>\n
Could you have misunderstood?\n<\/p>\n
Was the man screaming \u201cZionist\u201d outside a Jewish restaurant perhaps making a sophisticated intervention in postcolonial theory?\n<\/p>\n
Might the threats simply have been anti-imperialist?\n<\/p>\n
There is an odd assumption at work here: Jews may experience hostility, but everybody else gets to decide what it means.\n<\/p>\n
This would be strange enough on its own. It becomes stranger when placed beside the geographical selectivity of contemporary moral outrage.\n<\/p>\n
People who have displayed no visible interest in the slaughter in Sudan, the Syrian killing fields, Iran\u2019s executions, Afghan women under Taliban rule or the persecution of religious minorities across the region can develop a remarkably acute humanitarian sensibility when Israel appears on the screen.\n<\/p>\n
Of course suffering in Gaza deserves attention. Civilian death deserves attention wherever it occurs.\n<\/p>\n
But one cannot help noticing the extraordinary calibration of public emotion.\n<\/p>\n
An Iranian protester executed by the regime receives a paragraph.\n<\/p>\n
A Syrian town destroyed during years of war barely disturbs the cultural calendar.\n<\/p>\n
Israel launches a military operation and suddenly half of London appears to have completed a postgraduate degree in humanitarian law.\n<\/p>\n
The moral awakening is impressive.\n<\/p>\n
Its postcode is even more so.\n<\/p>\n
This is why the obsession with Israel increasingly tells us less about Israel than about the societies doing the obsessing.\n<\/p>\n
Israel has become a screen onto which remarkably unrelated grievances are projected.\n<\/p>\n
Colonialism. Capitalism. Racism. American power. European guilt. Religious grievance. Revolutionary nostalgia. The disappointments of the Western Left. The anxieties of the Western Right. Occasionally all before lunch.\n<\/p>\n
Israel must somehow be a European colonial project despite the fact that a large share of Israeli Jews descend from communities expelled or driven from countries across the Middle East and North Africa.\n<\/p>\n
It must be a white-supremacist state populated by people of wildly different ethnic backgrounds.\n<\/p>\n
It must be simultaneously an American imperial instrument and the hidden master of American policy.\n<\/p>\n
At a certain point contradiction stops being an obstacle and becomes the organising principle.\n<\/p>\n
There is, of course, an older story lurking underneath all this.\n<\/p>\n
Europe has spent centuries finding Jews objectionable for mutually incompatible reasons.\n<\/p>\n
They were too separate, then too assimilated.\n<\/p>\n
Too rich, then revolutionary.\n<\/p>\n
Too cosmopolitan, then too nationalist.\n<\/p>\n
For centuries the Jew was condemned for lacking a country. Once Jews built one, they were condemned for having it.\n<\/p>\n
One might call that bad luck.\n<\/p>\n
Or pattern recognition.\n<\/p>\n
Zionism upset an old psychological arrangement. Jews ceased to exist solely as a vulnerable minority dependent upon the goodwill of others. They acquired borders, institutions, soldiers and the capacity to answer violence with force.\n<\/p>\n
This has produced a fascinating cultural problem.\n<\/p>\n
The dead Jew is extraordinarily popular in Europe.\n<\/p>\n
The dead Jew can be mourned.\n<\/p>\n
The dead Jew can be commemorated.\n<\/p>\n
The dead Jew can stand silently in a museum while politicians make speeches about tolerance.\n<\/p>\n
The armed Jew is more awkward.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cNever again\u201d is universally admired as long as it remains engraved on a memorial.\n<\/p>\n
Attach an air force to it and the mood changes.\n<\/p>\n
That discomfort matters because it reaches beyond Israel.\n<\/p>\n
Western governments and institutions have developed a habit of treating ideological violence as a communications problem. They search endlessly for explanations that remove agency from extremists while demanding ever greater restraint from the societies those extremists attack.\n<\/p>\n
The incentives created by this are hardly mysterious.\n<\/p>\n
If hiding among civilians makes civilian deaths politically useful, terrorists will hide among civilians.\n<\/p>\n
If kidnapping civilians brings international leverage, civilians will be kidnapped.\n<\/p>\n
If attacking a democracy produces diplomatic pressure on the democracy rather than on the people who attacked it, somebody will eventually notice.\n<\/p>\n
These are not particularly sophisticated observations.\n<\/p>\n
They become strangely controversial only when Israel is involved.\n<\/p>\n
Then the intellectual machinery starts humming. Definitions blur. Standards bend. Historical memory becomes selective. People who normally recoil from collective blame begin speaking casually about \u201cthe Zionists\u201d. People who insist that language can produce violence suddenly become relaxed about chants directed at the world\u2019s largest Jewish population.\n<\/p>\n
And everyone remains terribly pleased with their moral consistency.\n<\/p>\n
Criticise Israel. Please do.\n<\/p>\n
Criticise its government, settlements, ministers, military decisions, coalition politics and whatever fresh insanity has emerged from the Knesset before lunch.\n<\/p>\n
But when every war somehow becomes Israel\u2019s fault, every terrorist becomes Israel\u2019s creation, every Israeli response becomes uniquely wicked and every Jewish expression of fear requires external verification, something other than criticism is taking place.\n<\/p>\n
At that point Israel is no longer the only subject worth examining.\n<\/p>\n
So is the person doing the examining.\n\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Something very strange happens to otherwise sensible people when Israel enters the conversation. Reason loosens its tie, orders…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":255336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[2492,37],"class_list":["post-255335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-antisemitism","tag-israel"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117119334945786487","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}