At the start of a new week, I’d like to award the best and worst discussions of history in the past week in Israel.
The best take on the past came from Yoram Kaniuk, writing at Ynet (in Hebrew and English translation). Kaniuk writes about the government’s intent to legislate against commemorating the Nakba and Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar’s plan to revise a history textbook for Israel Arab children to erase a sentence about 1948 war saying, “The Arabs call the war the Nakba – a war of catastrophe, loss and humiliation – and the Jews call it the Independence War.”
Kaniuk, who fought in the War of Independence, writes,
I remember the Nakba. I saw it to a much greater extent than the education minister, who apparently only heard about it. It was a harsh, merciless campaign of young soldiers who spilled their blood while fighting a determined enemy that was eventually defeated. Yet the enemy that was defeated is not a geometrical unknown, but rather, a people that still exists. Its parents and grandparents fought well. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have suffered so many casualties.
I was wounded in battle, but I believe that the education minister must educate our young people to be heroes by teaching them that this war had losers too, and that they too have a narrative. They don’t have the country that was theirs but they have a history… The Nakba fighters fought heroically, but we fought better.
Kaniuk is not sorry that his side won in a terrible battle. The victory was creation of the state. It must not be the attempt to erase the history, and therefore the dignity, of the side that lost.
At the start of his poetic article, Kaniuk describes the fortress architecture of the Knesset. His description is accurate; the Knesset belongs to a period of Israeli design in which universities, synagogues, even a legislature were built, unconsciously, to look like fortifications. The Nakba law is an attempt to build fortifications against recognizing the past and the price that another people paid for our independence, he says. He concludes:
While inside the Knesset fortress I thought that maybe it is still possible, before my death, to turn this state into a Jewish State – not one populated by zealous masses called Jews, but rather, Jews like we used to be; a state where we respect those who fought against us and were defeated. When that will happen, we will see the establishment of an Arab state alongside us, and the city of Jerusalem, also known as al-Quds, will become the capital of two states, one Jewish and one Arab. And then peace will come to Israel. Amen.
To be Jews, Kaniuk suggests, we must be able to see history in more than one way, and to recognize the humanity of those who were our enemies, and to be able to look at truth without flinching. This is neither an ethnic nor a religious definition of being Jewish, thought it is rooted in our religious and national history. Were that we could adopt it as a common denominator, the highest common denominator, let us say, for Jewish identity here.
The most foolish take on history in the past week came from Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who ordered Israeli diplomats to circulate a photo of Hajj Amin al-Husseini meeting Hitler. The picture is meant to counter international criticism of plans to turn a hotel inside the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem into a housing project for Jewish settlers. According to various reported versions, the hotel or the land it is on was owned by al-Husseini – the best known Palestinian nationalist leader of the pre-1948 period – or his family.
Somehow the photo is supposed to convince foreign diplomats and leaders that the spot can only be redeemed from the stain of al-Husseini’s support for the Nazis by turning it into a Jewish housing development intended to prevent a political compromise in Jerusalem. An explanation of the connection has not been forthcoming from Lieberman. I won’t claim this is the most absurd exploitation of the Holocaust for political purposes – the competition is so intense – but it deserves dishonorable mention.
I was wounded in battle, but I believe that the education minister must educate our young people to be heroes by teaching them that this war had losers too, and that they too have a narrative. They don’t have the country that was theirs but they have a history, and no education minister can erase the defeated people from its powerful memory. The Nakba fighters fought heroically, but we fought better.
“Narrative” (נרטיב in Hebrew). Whenever you see that word instead of “story” or “history,” you know what’s coming.
That said, I agree with him, in spite of the tone of the article. The only thing I’d add: I see a lot more respect for the Arabs, who were defeated in 1948, on the Israeli right than on the left. Way more. What is the height of disrespect? To suggest, smiling, that if we do them a favor and give back half of the land we stole from them, then they should thank us and let us live in peace on the other half of the land we stole.
On Lieberman’s idea, also agreed – beyond stupidity. People have long since gotten tired of these Holocaust games.
great piece.
Jeffrey Goldberg put it well – saying that in the “first person to mention the Nazis game”, Lieberman lost…
Amen to what Ploni says. Kaniuk is trying to shift the guilt he feels at winning the war (like many or most Labor Zionists, deep down he feels that Israel is an abberation born out of antisemitism and if only the goyim had let his ancestors assimilate, as he most likely sees it, he never would have had to fight in 1948). Sure, he can torment himself over the “narrative” of the other side, and he may consider himself a “progressive” for doing so, but I don’t see ANYBODY in Britain or the US or Russia today saying “gee, those Jerries in the Wehrmacht certainly were idealistic and we should have more sympathy for what they were trying to do in taking over Europe, after all they felt justified in doing so according to their national narrative”.
This was a war of extermination directed against the Palestinian people. The acts of the Haghanah, Stern and Ergunn maket he SS look like Boy scouts. Deir Yassin amde Auschwitz look like a shopping mall. I look forward to the day when Yad Vashem is cleansed of kitsch and converted to a memorial to the genocide of the Palestinian people. Same for the museum in Zionist occupied Washington DC
Phillips Brooks: “Deir Yassin amde Auschwitz look like a shopping mall”.
I’d like to award the worst discussion of history in the past weeks to Phillips Brooks. He obviously flunked.
“While inside the Knesset fortress I thought that maybe it is still possible, before my death, to turn this state into a Jewish State – not one populated by zealous masses called Jews, but rather, Jews like we used to be; a state where we respect those who fought against us and were defeated. When that will happen, we will see the establishment of an Arab state alongside us, and the city of Jerusalem, also known as al-Quds, will become the capital of two states, one Jewish and one Arab. And then peace will come to Israel. Amen.”
Instead of indulging in self-flagellation and poetic whimsy, the gentleman would do better to engage with reality.
I quote briefly from Palestinian Media Watch:
“The Palestinian Authority makes no attempt to educate its people towards peace and coexistence with Israel. On the contrary, from every possible platform it repeatedly rejects Israel’s right to exist, presents the conflict as a religious battle for Islam, depicts the establishment of Israel as an act of imperialism, and perpetuates a picture of the Middle East, both verbally and visually, in which Israel does not exist at all. Israel’s destruction is said to be both inevitable and a Palestinian obligation.”
“The PA promises its people that in the future, the State of Israel will be completely erased and replaced by a State of Palestine. A Fatah member of Palestinian parliament, Najat Abu Bakr, told PA TV in 2008 that the PA’s public position is the old “stages plan”: i.e., to proclaim that what the Palestinians seek is the West Bank and Gaza Strip, while in fact the goal is all of Israel:
“It doesn’t mean that we don’t want the 1948 borders, but in our current political program we say we want a state on the 1967 borders.”
The newest PA schoolbooks teach: “Palestine will be liberated by its men, its women, its young ones and its elderly.” [Arabic Language and the Science of Language, grade 12, p. 44]
A music video playing on PA TV (Fatah) from 2007 – 2009 promises the liberation of “Palestine”, specifying numerous Israeli cities:
“We will liberate the Land of the religions … Palestine is Arab in history and identity… From Jerusalem and Acre, from Haifa and Jericho and Gaza and Ramallah, from Bethlehem and Jaffa, Beer Sheba and Ramle, and from Nablus to the Galilee, from Tiberias to Hebron.” (2007 – 2009)
Najat Abu-Bakr, Fatah Member of Parliament:
“It doesn’t mean that we don’t want the 1948 borders… but our current political program is to say that we want the 1967 borders.” (Source: Palestinian TV (Fatah) 25 August 2008)
plenty more on PMW’s website:http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=449
It is interesting to see how a “progressive” like Kaniuk is forced to flip-flop and continually update his beliefs in order to remain politically correct. Sixty years ago, he was told that Jewish nationalism was somehow compatable with universalist, socialist values. The Zionism he fought for stood for “progress”, the Arabs deep down, would welcome having the Jews come and develop the country for the Arabs and bring them advances such as indoor plumbing along with secularist values. Zionist Jews were “progressive” because they fought against Nazism and Fascism whereas the Arabs had been more or less sympathetic with them. This gave Kaniuk and his “progressive” Zionist friends the right to fight to establish the State of Israel. If you had told him about the “Palestinian Narrative” which denies the Jews have any link with the country, he wouldn’t know what you are talking about. Although I don’t know how Kaniuk felt after the Six-Day War but most of the “progressives” said they would never agree to redivide Jerusalem. This was the official policy of the Labor Party AND MERETZ up until 1999. Now, you see he and the rest of the them can’t wait to get rid of it.
However, as a good “progressive” Kaniuk has kept up with the times and the rewriting of history his camp enjoys doing (read Orwell’s books “1984” or “Animal Farm” in order to see how it is done). He believes that in order to grant “dignity” to to the other side, he must now view their revisionist history as a legitimate “narrative”.
Still, Kaniuk has some distance to go. He still believes that Israel has a “right to exist” which the Palestinian narrative he is desparately trying to understand and show respect for flatly denies.
Maybe he still celebrates Yom Ha’atzmaut, but as a “progressive” sensitive to the dignity and narrative of the Palestinians he welcomes, at the same time, their commemoration of the Naqba. In enough time, it is inevitable that he will stop celebrating the Israeli’s Independence, and he will whole-heartedly join in the mourning of his Palestinian friends at the creation of the state of Israel. Other ex-Zionists have done it, he probably will as well.
This is why his ideological is dying. Time moves on.
I see Kaniuk as the equivalent of an Israeli SS veteran making a pathetic attempt to justify his atrocities. It is no different than Eichmann trying to justify his.
You all know that Palestine was stolen from the Palestinians by a people with no claim to it. Before you throw your favorite claim of antisemitism in an attempt to quash my right to speak, let me remind you that your own professor Shlomo Sand determined that you are a nonpeoploe. Ilan Pappe and Gilad Atzmon have recognized the futility of your theft and have left Israel. Nadia el Haj has conclusively proven that there was no such thing as ancient Israel, further demolishing the myths of your foundation.
So what have we here. A group of “progressives” that have acknowledged that Palestine was stolen, but are hiding behind international law that said that theft of land prior to 1967 was ok but theft after 1967 is not kosher? Either you abandon Israel or you prove to be a version of Avigdor Lieberman without balls, hiding behind the letter of the law
Phillips Brooks – a history major you obviously ain’t.
I didn’t know Ilan Pappe left Israel, but it is certainly good news, if true. At least I got something out of PB’s comments.
Y.Ben-David, Ilan Pappe is now a Professor at an English University. Bad news for the UK, who are also landed with Azmon. Read all about Azmon’s latest lunacy on Oliver Kamm’s blog at Times online.
A couple more comments on that “narrative” thing, which seems to be a favorite theme around here, and how it relates to another recent topic here: Michael Walzer’s theory of just war. The two views are in tension with each other, if not out-and-out contradiction.
The postmodern view is that “narratives” are incommensurable: there’s no objective vantage point from which to judge which of two competing narratives is “right” and which is “wrong.” Walzer’s relevant point on just war, endorsed by Mr. Gorenberg, is premodern (medieval). (Walzer’s theory is actually a bricolage of mutually contradictory theories of just war from different historical epochs.) Walzer says in his response to Kasher and Yadlin that the two sides in a war “logically…cannot both have just reasons for going to war.” Do people realize how pernicious this doctrine really is?
What do you get when you believe both in postmodern “narratives” and in Walzer’s premodern (and, alas, contemporary) view of justa causa belli? It follows that many times a political narrative cannot give a just cause for war: if the Palestinians’ narrative justifies war then the Zionists’ narrative does not, and vice versa. So what’s left after you subtract justa causa belli, including justa causa for existential wars, the most basic question of political-historical survival – what’s left when you subtract that from political narratives? Sentiment. And that’s exactly what Kaniuk and those who think like him give us.
The alternative is to accept Walzer’s just war doctrine, and to reject the validity of competing “narratives.” Our narrative is right, theirs is wrong.
The other option, which I endorse, is to accept the validity of the narratives and to throw Walzer/Gorenberg’s just-war doctrine in the trash. As I see it, the Arabs were justified, pre-1948 at the very least, in resisting the Zionist settlers violently, including by terrorism (how else are you going to fight settlers?). I don’t have any better foundation for my view than Walzer has for his, but many people would agree, analogously, that the American Indians were justified in their use of terrorism against the European settlers. Note that this says nothing about how justified, if at all, the settlers were.
It’s arguable, but less convincing, that the Palestinians are still justified in using terrorism against Israel even post-1948, or at least post-1967. In any case, the Palestinians’ narrative is valid, they are not evil, they are not criminals for fighting Israel – they are a legitimate enemy, a justus hostis. Same with Israelis: at least since 1948 Israelis also have just cause for fighting the war.
So that’s where accepting the Palestinian narrative takes me. Should we withdraw from the territories? It doesn’t answer that question. Dismantle the state of Israel? Nothing to say about it. Ethnically cleanse all Arabs from west of the Jordan? No answer one way or the other. Sloppy sentimentality aside, accepting the Palestinian narrative means granting Arabs the status of justus hostis, legitimate enemy, and that’s about all it implies.
“In any case, the Palestinians’ narrative is valid, they are not evil…”
Mr Ploni, I should be interested to read your views on the Hamas charter.
Ploni, I don’t see how you make the leap from the incommensurability of competing narratives to the equal validity of such narratives. (For example, the fact that Kuhn believed that paradigms are incommensurable obviously didn’t mean he thought a given scientist wasn’t working within a specific paradigm, or that a scientist would accept the equal validity of other scientific paradigms.) In fact, affirming the equal validity of all narratives would itself presuppose a neutral vantage point, in direct contrast to the postmodernist/pragmatist view that holds that we are all adrift on Neurath’s boat.
Raghav – and let’s hope it doesn’t sink.
I’d agree with Ploni here, but for the caveat that this:
implies that narratives are either hermetic entities or monads, which they clearly are not. They’re not only composed of a multitude of stories, but also subject to change as new stories emerge and old ones take a back seat or are even forgotten. In this they are like all traditions.
Never mind all the clever stuff, the intelligent thing to do is not to be a character in someone else’s play. The bullets may be live.
Hey all you philosophers out there, Wittgenstein spent every afternoon in the cinema watching Hollywood films.
Raghav writes:
I don’t. I don’t believe that all historical “narratives” are valid, much less equally valid. I certainly reserve the right to judge and criticize the “Other” (as these “narrative” folks like to call him). I would have been clearer if I had written, above, “…and reject the possible validity of competing narratives.” I do believe that the Palestinian “narrative” in particular is essentially valid, though.
My previous comment was way longer than it needed to be, so I’ll repeat it in one sentence: Anyone who really believes both in these plural, incommensurable political “narratives” and in Walzer’s concept of just cause (“you can’t both be right”) has got some deep contradictions to resolve.
Charlotte, I don’t think I’ve ever read the Hamas Charter, but I don’t like what I’ve heard of it. That said, I don’t see much use in whining about it.
When I said that the Palestinians are not evil, I meant as a group. I don’t see Palestinian terrorism per se as evil.
Seems that Kaniuk and most of the commenters here are sort of conflating two different things. It’s my understanding that Israel’s war of independence was concomitant with, but not identical to, the Palestinian Nakba. The Nakba being of course the deliberate effort to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the land- not merely unintended “accidents of war.” And if I remember correctly, much of it was carried out after most of the fighting had petered out and the war was basically over.
Ploni, To understand Islamist Hamas’s core values and objectives, it is necessary to read the Charter, available online.
Hamas takes its genocidal authority from the Koran, ie a belief in genocide of the Jews as divine dictat. As I do not on rational grounds believe in revealed religion. I cannot evaluate Hamas’s objectives as set out in their Charter as being any less evil in intent than the Nazi final solution.
Joe, both your understanding and memory seem to have hijacked by anti-Israeli propaganda.
“The radio stations of the Arab regimes kept repeating to us: ‘Get away from the battle lines. It’s a matter of ten days or two weeks at the most, and we’ll bring you back to Ein-Kerem [near Jerusalem].’ And we said to ourselves, ‘That’s a very long time. What is this? Two weeks? That’s a lot!’ That’s what we thought [then]. And now 50 years have gone by.” [PATV, July 7, 2009]
With these words an ~Arab resident of a refugee camp recounts the reason why his family left Israel in 1948, in an interview on PA TV this month.
In recent years, Palestinian leaders, writers and refugees have spoken out in the Palestinian media, blaming the Arab leadership for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. According to these accounts, and contrary to the Palestinian myth that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were deported by Israel in 1948, the vast majority of the Arab exodus from Israel was voluntary, and the result of orders by the Arab leadership.
Furthermore, the fact that this information has been openly discussed by public figures and refugees in the Palestinian Authority media itself suggests that awareness of this responsibility may be widespread – even though Palestinian leaders continue to blame Israel for “the expulsion” for propaganda purposes.
The following statements in the PA media shed significant light on the events of 1948 and counter the attempts by the Palestinian Authority to hide this part of history.
1. Arab resident of refugee camp:
“This picture was taken a week before we left Ein-Kerem [near Jerusalem] in June 1948, in front of our house. The radio stations of the Arab regimes kept repeating to us: ‘Get away from the battle lines. It’s a matter of ten days or two weeks at the most, and we’ll bring you back to Ein-Kerem.’ And we said to ourselves, ‘That’s a very long time. What is this? Two weeks? That’s a lot!’ That’s what we thought [then]. And now 50 years have gone by.”
[PATV, July 7, 2009]
2. Jawad Al-Bashiti, Palestinian journalist in Jordan:
“Remind me of one real cause from all the factors that have caused the ‘Palestinian Catastrophe’ [the establishment of Israel and the creation of the refugee problem], and I will remind you that it still exists… The reasons for the Palestinian Catastrophe are the same reasons that have produced and are still producing our Catastrophes today.
During the Little Catastrophe, meaning the Palestinian Catastrophe, the following happened: the first war between Arabs and Israel had started and the ‘Arab Salvation Army’ came and told the Palestinians: ‘We have come to you in order to liquidate the Zionists and their state. Leave your houses and villages, you will return to them in a few days safely. Leave them so we can fulfill our mission (destroy Israel) in the best way and so you won’t be hurt.’ It became clear already then, when it was too late, that the support of the Arab states (against Israel) was a big illusion. The Arabs fought as if intending to cause the ‘Palestinian Catastrophe’.”
[Al-Ayyam, May 13, 2008]
Read the rest of the statements and article at http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=1102
Exactly, Joe. Unfortunately, most of the Western media contributes to the conflation by using phrases like “…the Israeli War of Independence (or worse even: the establishment of the state of Israel) – what Palestinians call the Naqba…”
Israeli independence or statehood is no such thing. The Naqba is the price the Palestinians were – are still being – made to pay for it.
Ploni, I don’t see the contradiction. To hold that competing narratives are incommensurable simply means believing in the proposition that there are no neutral, external values that can be appealed to in order to convince someone who adheres to a different narrative. That’s perfectly consistent with the belief that (at most) only one side can have just reasons for going to war.
Raghav,
“Justice” is determined according to a set of rules/principles/values. “Justice” is not value free; it is relative to its own framework of values.
If each side is in a competing narrative and there are no neutral, external values, then there are no common rules to determine what constitutes “just” reasons.
You seem to be rather conceptually confused.
Yes, and? On a coherentist account, the fact that there are no common rules to determine what constitute “just” reasons has no bearing on either the justification or the truth of the belief that at most one side in a conflict has just reasons. Coherentists, pragmatists, and postmodernists all still have an account of truth and justification — it’s just that foundational beliefs don’t play a role in that account. Perhaps the confusion here stems from the conflation of “just” (as in justice) and “justified” (a technical term in epistemology).
Do try to be less insulting in the future.
Raghav, you’re right of course that my “clarification” was incorrect as (mis)stated. I screwed up the “clarification” and misled everyone including myself. Incommensurability is not relevant; it’s a red herring. I appreciate your pointing out my error. I still think my original claim is correct, though. I’ll try one last time to formulate it precisely.
When Zionists ask us to accept the Palestinian narrative – if they mean it seriously and not as some condescending gesture – they’re asking us to adopt a perspective from which both the Palestinian and the Israeli narratives are valid. By that, I mean a perspective from which each conforms reasonably well to moral norms and historical fact (norms and fact as viewed from that perspective, of course). I think that my own perspective is one example of this.
Each narrative, if valid, justifies (in the sense of justa causa belli) its own side in wars, at least in the 1948 war. It would be a really lame narrative that didn’t justify a war for its own subject’s existence.
Walzer and Margalit assert that at most one side in a war can have just cause. Moreover, they explicitly declare that this is a logical necessity (see my quote above from their critique of Kasher and Yadlin). Therefore it holds in all perspectives, including the one we’ve adopted.
But that implies that at least one of the two narratives is invalid from our perspective, which contradicts the above.
I’m not very good at spelling out arguments precisely, and blog comments aren’t an ideal medium for that either. I’d appreciate further corrections. Even if my argument here is flawed, I still believe intuitively (and vaguely) that there’s a real contradiction in Gorenberg’s embracing both Walzer’s just war theory and these competing narratives.
Raghav posted: Coherentists, pragmatists,. and postmodernists all still have an account of truth and justification – it’s just that foundational beliefs don’t play a role in that account.”
If what you say is correct, then coherentists, pragmatists, and postmodernists’ accounts of truth and justification are intellectually bankrupt. Leaving out foundational beliefs because they won’t make your theory stand up to scrutiny is the same as leaving out the foundations of a building. They collapse! Obviously you are not a scientist. If you were, you would know that by Popper’s universally applied convention, any theory is only valid up to the time it is falsified. So let us put foundational beliefs back into the pot and see if your assertions pass the test.
The foundational beliefs of Judaism and Islam are the crux of the Arab/Israeli dispute. Never the twain shall meet. they are inimical. They inhabit different moral universes. If you want to talk in “Kuhnian paradigms”, Israel and its egalitarian Basic Law, founded on the egalitarian foundational beliefs of Judaism that all people are created equal in the image of God, is in one paradigm; The Palestianian Authority’s Basic Law states that the national religion is Islam and the law of the land is discriminatory Shari’a.
In Jewish Israeli terms, their war is just. In Islamic/Arab terms, their war is just.
PS the comments posted here are littered with false premises. ie. Ploni’s statement “each conforms reasonably well to moral norms..” Jewish and Islamic moral norms differ from each other.
I don’t intend to insult, it’s just my sense of humour. Philosophical humbug is no substitute for common sense.
Lots of theorizing and philosophical jargon bandied about here, but many of the arguments are philosophically weak. For example Ploni you wrote:
“In any case, the Palestinians’ narrative is valid, they are not evil, they are not criminals for fighting Israel..”When I said that the Palestinians are not evil, I meant as a group.”
“Palestinians” are not a single homogeneous group any more than Israelis are a single homogeneous group. Some Palestinians and some Israelis may be evil. There is no single “Palestinian” narrative as there is no single Jewish “narrative”.
You also wrote (ironically): “if we do them a favor and give back half of the land we stole from them, then they should thank us and let us live in peace on the other half of the land we stole.”
Assuming you are Jewish, your Jewish narrative is different from mine. Mine is based on empirical fact which conflicts with yours. My narrative also includes the fact that more than 850,000 Jewish refugees have had land stolen from them by Arabs since 1948, an area 4 times that of Israel. The world is silent.
You seem to have bought into the “Palestinian” narrative. Including the Arab propaganda trick of assuming the title “Palestinian” in 1964 under Arafat to fool history-challenged outsiders. As Michael Oren said:
“You don’t find the term Palestinian-Arab in any of the literature well into the 1950s. There’s a reason why the partition of 1947 calls for the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state, not a Palestinian state. The term Palestinian, before 1948, referred almost exclusively to Jews. The Palestine exhibit at the 1930 World Fair in New York was a Zionist exhibit, not an Arab exhibit. You could have gotten great Palestinian schnitzel. A genuine Palestinian meal you could have had there – schnitzel. Falafel then was unknown.”
Yes, there may have been many Jewish Palestinians of European background, but Jews have clung tenaciously to, and lived in, the Land of Israel since biblical times, despite the attempts of conquering and cruel invaders and subjugators, to steal it from them. The Arabs conquered “Palestine” in holy jihad, and Hamas and their ilk are still at it. They do not plead the cause of their enemies, the Jews of Israel; they say they have a right to recover Israel in holy jihad as they originally conquered it for Allah in holy jihad 1400 years ago. That is their definition and claim to be fighting a “just” war. Unless my memory is wrong, Jews were in Israel before them – by a few thousand years.
The genocidal Mufti of Jerusalem, devotee of Hitler and the Final Solution, which he sought to implement in the Middle East, was Arafat’s mentor. Any Jew with a brain in his head knows that the Jews of 1948 were fighting a “just” war. Ask the dhimmis of Yemen. I recommend a little less philosophy and a lot more history.
First let me commend the contributers to this blog for their cogent and well thought out comments. It is such a contrast to even the better blogs here in the US, even Salon .com who can’t seem to get a retort better than “Oh yeah and your mama wears army boots” or the like trash talk at times.
Having said the aforesaid I would like to take Y Ben David to task .I am one of your referenced “goyem” and I resent the term as being all inclusive and as repugnant as the terms used to insult Jews. Y you can perform the “Eighteen Position Kowtow ” for absolution.
Charlotte wrote:
My word, why haven’t philosophers taken note of this stunningly simple refutation? You’ve put whole departments out of jobs, you have.
Take a moment to re-read re-read section 5 of Two Dogmas of Empiricism. The basic motivation behind coherentism is the failure of several centuries of philosophers to reduce our beliefs to sense data and synthetic a priori.
And most philosophers of science don’t accept Popperian falsificationism as either a justification for scientific beliefs or as an accurate picture of how scientists actually operate. What counts as a falsifying evidence is a function of all the rest of your beliefs; any experimental result can be explained away by the equivalent of adding epicycles.
Gershom Gorenberg: To be Jews, Kaniuk suggests, we must be able to see history in more than one way, and to recognize the humanity of those who were our enemies, and to be able to look at truth without flinching. This is neither an ethnic nor a religious definition of being Jewish, thought it is rooted in our religious and national history. Were that we could adopt it as a common denominator, the highest common denominator, let us say, for Jewish identity here.
The Kaniuk article on Ynet is heartening; also Chaim Gans recent article in Haaretz.
Chaim Gans’ piece appeared on Haaretz June 27th 2009 Palestinians were made to pay an unfair price
Gans: “One of the favorite tacks taken by Israeli spokesmen, in attempting to justify the price that the Palestinians paid for the realization of Zionism, is to place full responsibility for that price on the Palestinians themselves. Their refusal to accept the Partition Plan of 1947 is the main anchor for this argument. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not, of course, resist reiterating it in his Bar-Ilan address.
But repeating this claim cannot promote peace, as it expresses a complete unwillingness by Israelis to recognize the heavy price paid by the Palestinians for the realization of Zionism.”
….“The constant reiteration of the fact of the Palestinians’ refusal to accept the Partition Plan, in an effort to make them responsible for the completely unfair costs we extract from them for the conflict, is to close our eyes to the great injustices that we are carrying out. Instead of understanding Zionism in a manner that includes recognition for the justice of the Palestinians’ opposition, even to its just elements, we deny the right of this opposition so as to create many unjust elements for Zionism.”
Denying the Nabka is another way to deny Palestinian’s their existence – to deny acceptance of their narrative while seeking acceptance makes no sense. How can you seek something from those whose identity you wish to deny? One can’t speak of the kind of justice that mostly all can agree upon if one only considers one’s own truth. Justice considers the whole truth.
Ploni wrote:
That’s now how I read the essay. To my mind, Kaniuk is (1) pointing out the futility (and undesirability) of attempting to inculcate the Jewish Israeli narrative among the Palestinians of Israel and (2) suggesting that the attempt is inconsistent with the respect owed to the Palestinians. As Gershom says, he’s not sorry his side won. Not to draw any comparison between the Palestinians and the CSA, but I’m sure many Northerners had deep respect for Southerners like Robert E. Lee and their narrative while believing, in the end, that secession was unjustifiable.
Discussions of the theoretical concept of the narrative and reality miss the point here.
Kaniuk’s point is that to deny the Nakba is to deny a narrative that is completely compatible with reality. The reality is this: Jews won, Arabs lost. Jews won because they fought better. Arabs lost for the same reason.
The most anti-Kaniuk comments here seem to represent the same position that Kaniuk criticizes, which is the position that there was no Nakba because the Arabs did not lose and the Israelis did not win.
This odd Israeli concept of victory could fill many more articles on its own, and it has. Tom Friedman does an excellent job of describing it in From Beirut to Jerusalem, as does Gershom Gorenberg in The Accidental Empire, among many, many others.
What Kaniuk brings up here, but does not discuss in as much detail as others have, is Israel’s (and the Palestinians’) desire to see themselves as victims. The problem is that both sides see their own victories as David and Goliath stories- stories where the victory is some sort of miraculous defeat of a more-powerful enemy rather than the result of a battle between two respectable parties.
When I think of the Palestinian culture of victimhood, I think of a scene from the movie PARADISE NOW, which is about two suicide bombers. When the bombers receive their orders and their bombs, they enter a sketchy, abandoned building with an old, decrepit video camera, but subtle hints in the movie’s set design and in the recruiters’ costumes let us know that this “gritty,” “underground” location is a front for the large amounts of wealth that are poured into terrorism. Palestinian suicide bombers appear as poor, desperate people, but there are powerful men behind them.
When I think of the Israeli culture of victimhood, I think of a Yad Vashem tour guide who spent most of the tour talking about Ahmadinejad. Every few minutes, he interjected, “Who does this remind us of? Ahmadinejad,” or “This is what will happen if the world does not stop Ahmadinejad.” Never mind that Israel and its ally the USA could easily neutralize the Iranian army in a week. I saw the museum as a memorial to the dead and as a symbol of Israel’s current prosperity; he saw it as a museum of weakness, meant to justify Israel’s paranoia.
The culture of victimhood is a much greater subject than I can do justice to here. What I really want to do is to steer this conversation away from the abstract idea of “the narrative.” Kaniuk’s point is not just that “multiple narratives can be valid.” His point is that victors must respect the defeated and not treat them merely as unruly, whiny people who should disappear.
If we are to go back to the question of “narratives,” a simpler way to put it is this: In the narrative of many Israelis – Lieberman being one example – the Arabs should not have been there in the first place and Israel is doing the best it can to make them as invisible as possible. News flash: they’re having kids like rabbits and every one of those kids has a mind. They’re never going to disappear.
“My word, why haven’t philosophers taken note of this stunningly simple refutation? You’ve put whole departments out of jobs, you have.”
You’ve hit the nail on the head, Raghav, how else do you think philosophers are going to pay the rent? Tap dancing? I suggest you take a look at theoretical physicist Lee Smolin’s critique of the history/sociology of string theory in his book “The Trouble with Physics”.
I might add that, as a psychologist, I’m pretty clued up on how the mind works. My background is in psychology, philosophy of science/mind, psychodynamics, and the history of ideas.
Why on earth are you asking me to re-read logical positivism? It’s past its sell by date.
“What counts as a falsifying evidence is a function of all the rest of your beliefs” You betcha. That’s why they cling on to “Man made global warming”. Political, and tax generating.
Charlotte thinks the paper that killed logical positivism is an example of logical positivism. I think we can safely say this thread is over.
“I think we can safely say this thread is over”. Crappy if/then sentence for a philospher. False logic.
Rhagav, your comment of 11.14pm was a lot more meaningful than all the other abstract theorizing.
“Coherentists, pragamatists, and postmodernists all still have an account of truth and justification – it’s just that foundational beliefs don’t play a role in that account”
Ragahav, sorry to upset you old chap, but that assertion is falsified by your comment “I’m sure many Northerners had deep respect for Southerners like Robert E. Lee and their narrative while believing, in the end that secession was unjustifiable.”
The belief that secession was unjustifiable was a foundational belief.
Benny thank you for your post. If something cannot be said simply and connect to the reader soon enough, all this “philosophese” becomes an exercise in self serving showing off ( perhaps interesting but nevertheless a jungle) to prove one is right at the expense of the discussion, (declared dead ) and where some newer or better notion is trying to arise.
The philosophese, beside being such a vehicle, is also another way of making something simple into something more complex and obscure than it need be or should be. The greatest minds we know have said simple things that touch a truth that seems more right perhaps than the ones we hold on to. The trick is to let go of what we hold on to.
George-
Unfortunately sarcasm doesn’t come across well in writing. I am going to let you in on how we Jews use the word “goy”. First, of all, in Biblical Hebrew the word means nothing more or less than “nation”. The Jewish people are themselves referred to as a “goy” in places in the Bible. Over time, the term has come to mean “non-Jew”, but most particularly as a non-Jew who doesn’t like Jews, as in the case where I used it above. That is obviously the meaning I was using above because many pro-assimilationist Jews claim that if only the antisemitic non-Jews had been willing to fully accept Jews who were willing to abandon their Jewish identity, the Jews would have disappeared long ago and there wouldn’t be any more “Jewish problem” or antisemitism. I was saying that many Leftist Zionists deep down believe that it would have been preferable if all the Jews had assimilated generations ago, but the existence of antisemitism forces the Jew to maintain his identity, and the only way to escape the persecution was to build a Zionist state. (I, of course, as a “right-wing Orthodox/religious pro-settler” Jew reject this assimilationist approach and really think that being Jewish and having Jewish values are a good thing).
A little joke:
A Jew finally decides he has had enough and goes to the office of the pastor of the local church. He tells him he wants to convert to Christianity. The pastor is thrilled, gives him instruction and then baptizes the Jew. After the baptism, the pastor asks the new convert if he could get up in church the next Sunday and say a few words about his experience to the congregation.
Sunday comes, the new convert is invited to the pulpit . He gets up, looks around at his fellow
Christians and opens his talk by saying:
“fellow goyim….”
Y-BD: (If I may butt in):“Over time, the term has come to mean “non-Jew”, but most particularly as a non-Jew who doesn’t like Jews, as in the case where I used it above.
The way it is used here ( see Webster’s dictionary) it is disparaging towards the non-Jew; in other words it is used by Jews who do not like non-Jews. It’s not about how the non-Jew feels about Jews.
Also- you say : “many Leftist Zionists deep down believe that it would have been preferable if all the Jews had assimilated generations ago,…”
How many? Sorry- I don’t mean to be sarcastic but this is quite an assumption.
Building a Zionist state might very well have helped escape from one persecution, but the way it happened and is happening is not so far helpful to that goal.
Raghav, just a thought. I am sure you have a foundational belief that you are not a brain-in-a-vat. Or, you would not get up in the morning.
Human beings like any other living creature depend on empirical evidence to live in the world. When people start to lose their sight, they are frightened and distressed to “see” nightmarish phenomena due to lack of sufficient incoming stimuli from the outside world.
We are all empiricists to some degree. .. Remember Galileo.
Benny wrote of Yad Vashem ‘When I think of the Israel culture of victimhood, I think of a Yad Vashem tour guide who spent most of the tour talking about Ahmadinejad. Every few minutes he interjected, “Whoe does this remind us of? Ahmadinejad.” Never mind that Israel and it ally the USA could easily neutralize the Iranian army in a week.’
I wouldn’t count on the USA, least of all under Obarmy. This is an extract from Dominic Lawson’s article “No, we are not all Hamas now” in The Sunday Times, 11 January 2009:
A Briton entering Yad Vashem might do so in the hope that he would see a compliment to his own nation’s fight against the Nazis. He would be disappointed. Instead, there is footage of a long dead emissary to London recording how Britain’s wartime foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, told him the plight of the Jews was not an important consideration in the war effort. Later, he would see pictures of British soldiers dragging Jewish immigrants from ships on the shores of Tel Aviv and of Holocaust survivors behind the wire of British camps in Cyprus, prevented from reaching the promised land. The message here is equally clear. No one will protect the Jews except themselves…………
This is not exactly the classical doctrine of deterrence: it’s supposed to stop people attacking you in the first place. Yet the Israeli attack on Gaza is part of the same policy of delayed deterrence. Paradoxical though this might seem, it is also essential if the process towards an independent Palestinian state is to havea future. For until the people of Israel believe that such a state – including the heights of the West Bank, which overlook Tel Aviv – is not a threat to their own existence, they will never support a government which abandons those territories, won in an earlier war of self-defence.
If you believe otherwise, go to Yad Vashem. ”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article5489436.ece
Y you are absolved :no “Eighteen Position Kowtow” required. I have to watch it now that I have a Chinese daughter -in-law and a granddaughter who is half Chinese and I may be called to task on when,where, and how it is to be performed.
” Sign of The Times” I was standing behind an elderly white woman at Borders who was holding a plethora of anti- Obama books ,so say I;, “what are you reading?” and she sayeth” we have to get rid of this guy and get some real American of American stock” So I retort;” I didn’t know of any American Indian who let it be known that he or she wanted to be President” and she retorted” I don’t like you”
Raghav, maybe Kaniuk did mean what you say: “Our narrative is right and, with all due respect, your narrative is bullshit, but I hope we won’t be stupid and boorish enough to try to convince you of that.” If so, then I’m not arguing not against personally. I think I’m arguing against Gershom Gorenberg’s position, but maybe I misread him too. In any case I’m arguing against a stance that seems common nowadays among the “yefei nefesh” (beautiful souls) on the left. My complaint is that their stance is not pro-Palestinian enough for me, ha ha.
Sorry if my comments were too “philosophical,” but Kaniuk started it: he used the word “narrative” (נרטיב ).
Suzanne-
I stand by my definition of “goy” as referring to antisemitic non-Jews. Jews have no problem with and the greatest respect for non-Jews who relate to us in the same way. I am sure all ethnic groups have negative names for those of toher groups with whom there is a history of hostility
(e.g. blacks referring to “honkey” whites or the Irish-American who wrote once in the Los Angeles Times that it wasn’t until he was 20 years old that he discovered that “damned British” was two words).
Y-B-D.
My experience with the term is that it is used disparagingly from one Jew to another but maybe also it is true that in practice Jews relate to non-Jews giving benefit of doubt about their anti-Semitism. I am just telling you my experience, in my family ( in which there was no doubt about how it was used) but it is corroborated by the Webster’s definition. There is a bit of a “two-faced-ness” about the usage of the term. It may be that other Jews in different circles did not use the term this way, I don’t know. I would not be surprised as we have such variations.
Meh. Is Tisha B’Av really the right time for jokes?