“We didn’t expect him to come back like this. However, we were not sorry to hear that he fell like a martyr.”
~ Mustafa Dogan, brother of the lone American citizen killed in the aid flotilla during a confrontation with Israeli commandos
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This tells you something about the mindset of the anti-Israel activist. After initially murky reports of the assault had solidified to reveal that Israel's commandos acted with professionalism and had only fired live weapons in self-defense after being overrun by the "peace activists" onboard that flotilla, the only legitimate criticism remaining for Israel is that its government would be stupid enough to send its soldiers into an obvious propaganda trap staged by Islamic radicals.
That whole aid flotilla was a farce. Was that truly so invisible ahead of the fact, or is the Israeli government even dumber than I give it credit for? These "peace activists," who would later be found to be armed with knives and clubs, claimed to the world that they wanted to deliver vital supplies to Gaza in defiance of what they considered an illegal blockade. But in addition to those supplies they brought along all the accoutrement of emotional propaganda. One of the activists even brought their infant child with them. It wasn't about delivering aid. It was about causing an event. They
intended a confrontation with the Israelis. They
intended to have their noses bloodied so that they could "prove" to the world more Israeli barbarism. And they
deliberately rigged that confrontation to be as emotionally charged toward their cause as possible. Israel's two mistakes were to board those ships at all, in international waters.
Apparently, most of the activists on that flotilla were simply dupes, or "tools" as we call it nowadays. Maybe some of them actually believed they were on an aid mission. That much is speculation. One of the facts is that only a handful of these activists actually attacked the Israeli soldiers. So I'm not suggesting that the entire flotilla, despite being duplicitous, was manned by Islamic radicals. Nevertheless it is certain that
some of the people in that flotilla were Islamic radicals, which almost guarantees ties to terrorist organizations, and lays bare the true purpose of the mission. And that brings me back to Mustafa Dogan's quote, clearly implying his dead brother's motives.
We have a problem here. Forget the flotilla. This debacle is just the most recent provocation in a much larger conflict...and it's not the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict." It's the conflict between secular humanism and religious dominionism. Pity the Palestinians. They've always been pawns, pawns of their Arab sponsors and now pawns of their Western sympathizers. Over the past decade, the very
premise of "pro-Palestinian" activism has become a farce. There may be some naive people out there who still believe that all of this antagonism is about liberating Palestinians from an unjust oppressor, but by and large the movement has become an anti-Israel campaign, not a pro-Palestinian one. It's specifically about undermining Israel, not about helping the Palestinians. You can see that in their actions, and, if you know what to look for, you can see it in their words. There are clearer ways to help the Palestinians, not least of which would include delivering aid by
not running a blockade and
not attacking an enemy military force.
It's hard to separate everything clearly, but I think what we're looking at is similar to the anti-choice movement's view on abortion. Anti-choice activists aren't really campaigning for unborn babies, even though that's what they claim they're for, and even though some of them actually do believe it. The true origin of anti-choice activism is sexism, the domination of femalekind, whether or not individual anti-choice activists realize it for themselves. I think the same thing applies here to the anti-Israel movement. They're not really for the Palestinians, even though they claim to be and, on some less fundamental level, certainly do sympathize with the Palestinians. No, the true origin of their anti-Israel activism is...well...that's the thing. That's the problem we have here. What is the true origin? The Islamic radicals in the anti-Israel movement can be taken at face value: They're out to dominate the world with fundamentalist Islam. The people on the flotilla who ended up dead were probably all Islamic radicals, and as far as I'm concerned every one of them deserved their fate. But what about all those Western liberal anti-Israel activists? What the heck are they doing on a ship side-by-side with their worst ideological enemies? What are they thinking that would cause them to abandon their ideology of social justice and collaborate with one of the greatest sources of evil in the world?
The simplest possibility is that they are classic fools. There's a difference between the truth and what people believe to be the truth. Conservatives are fools on just about every issue where they open their mouths: What they believe to be true is comically far removed from the actual truth. Liberals aren't immune to this; in fact they're almost as bad as the conservatives. The fact that they're usually on the just side of the issues often seems like pure coincidence more than any demonstration of philosophical integrity. And I've been at odds with liberalism whenever mainstream thought happens to land on the unjust side of the issues. So, that might be what's happened here. Indeed, mainstream conservative thought happens to be strongly in support of Israel, and, since we know that the view of one side of the ideological divide is a strong predictor of the view of the other side, it could simply be that left and right have somehow switched roles on this. That's a chilling reminder of how tenuous the general public's grasp of true critical analysis is.
But I don't actually think this is the root of what's going on here. It does seem to be in operation--that liberals are simply demonstrating their fallibility by following the wrong piper on this particular issue--but I just don't see this explanation as having the substance to account for the full breadth of lunacy here. Sure, some liberals are fool enough to believe that Israel is the bogeyman it has been made out to be, purely because Israel is vastly more powerful than the Palestinian people. Some, but surely not all. Too many liberals are too smart for that.
Another possibility is anti-Semitism, but quite honestly, for all its relevance, I think it's a red herring in this case.
No, my hypothesis focuses on a very different possibility...one that is more elaborate and more unsettling. I think the true origin in all this, the reason that Westerners could possible be so staunchly anti-Israel in defiance of fact and good sense, is cynicism. And not just any cynicism. I'm talking about probably the most potent form of cynicism there is: self-doubt, applied to civilization itself.
To preface: There's a double standard here, and it's not got anything to do with the anti-Israeli claim that Israel has free rein to commit crimes that no one else would dare be permitted to commit. It's that the anti-Israel faction completely ignores the context of Israel's actions, jades the objective facts, and spreads irrelevancies and outright lies, all in the furtherance of validating itself and discrediting a nation. I've seen more than enough of it to know that it's real and pervasive. That's why I don't call them the "pro-Palestinian" faction anymore; at some point they lost sight of lifting up the Palestinians and became totally bent on attacking Israel.
My working hypothesis is that there is some phenomenon of Western guilt at work here, that the sight of a stable, militaristic, Western-style democracy defending itself with deadly force against a vastly militarily inferior, non-Western, non-Christian enemy is simply too much for some liberals to bear. Above the customary din of the political pandemonium of the day, a few controversies become a vessel for more than their own internal stew of disagreements. Abortion, gay marriage, nuclear power, Israel...to name four. These special controversies come to stand for broad cultural conflict, social tension, dis-ease between strong movements, the changing of ways, self-doubt, self-loathing, and the continuance of life in an imperfect world. In a way they even become representative of cultures, a source of cultural identity. A good conservative protects the unborn, blah blah blah.
My hypothesis can explain why true national evil in the world--North Korea's concentration camps, Saudi Arabia's enslavement of half the human race, and the genocide in Sudan--is regarded with such lesser urgency and passion by the anti-Israel folks. Israel, to these people, is a symbol, a scion or side effect of something that began in the 20th century. It represents that liberal-seated opposition to all this power and technological sophistication we've built up for ourselves, as yet with no severe consequences. Israel is an impossibility in the minds of those who truly believe human civilization is destined to fail.
What's worse is that, if I'm right, this weakness of character transcends simple intelligence. I have a close friend who is staunchly, almost comically anti-Israel, and has no self-awareness of the extremeness of her position. She's also dazzlingly intelligent. For such a bag of notions to enthrall a person as intelligent as her, requires some special agent of villainy. One of the few agencies up to the task...is cynicism. Cynicism can dominate a person of any intelligence level.
But that's not all; there's more. This isn't just a Western self-therapy session run amok. The exponents of Islamic radicalism exert an influence in the anti-Israel movement, fanning the flames of hatred, dogma, and insularity. This part isn't a hypothesis at all; I know it firsthand. I've met such people while working at my university's newspaper, and elsewhere in Seattle. They're playing the anti-Israel Westerners for fools. Islamic radicals are like any religious radicals: They don't want social justice, egalitarianism and civil liberties, except as means to empower themselves to impose their way of life on others. They're civilization's recidivism. Never mind that we helped create it ourselves when we chose Islam over Arab nationalism decades ago; the Islamic fundamentalist movement is not our lackey anymore. It's our enemy, and we're not doing anything to solve the problem.
I'm not even talking about foreign policy. I'm talking about what's in the minds of the people. The right is ready for a good old-fashioned religious tribal war between Jesus and Muhammad. Ever dependable, the right! And us? The left? We're tripping over ourselves to show hospitality, inclusiveness, acceptance, and encouragement to a brand of religion that wants to conquer the world. One of my most spectacular frustrations with the prevailing liberalism of our day is that it has chosen multiculturalism over secularism, and in so doing it has become faux pas for a person to defend liberal democracy from a liberal standpoint. This is how cultures rot. The left as a whole is either going to have to retreat from the disastrous choice of an ignorant majority, or our contemporary experiment in secular humanism is going to come to an ignominious end. I mean to try and reform the left so that people have a viable secular choice that eschews Christian xenophobia and Islamic conquest alike without compromising the ideals of justice and diversity.
That's my hypothesis. Now, let me step back and point something out: None of this tells you anything about what I personally think of Israel. You know that I'm pro-Israel, and you could probably infer that I supported Israel's efforts to enforce its blockade, regardless of whether I personally agree with the blockade. I point this out to express to you how little Israel itself actually has to do with all of this. If my hypothesis is right, Israel itself is, aside from its symbolic value, insignificant. Here's something I wrote in a recent letter to my highly intelligent friend, after we got into an argument over the assault on the aid flotilla:
I stand by my choice not to discuss Israel with you further. I hope you will appreciate my discomfort at showing disrespect toward you when I say that mature debate requires mature debate partners. In your zeal to justify yourself, you've taken me for someone I'm not and condemned my position without my ever having articulated it. You've used your authority of experiences to try and insulate yourself from criticism. You've told me to read Chomsky as if I've never heard of the guy or as if I consider him as definitive a voice as you do. You've touted Democracy Now when more objective news media have described the ambiguities that Democracy Now in its partisanship wouldn't. You've talked to me about white phosphorous with the same emotional gravity as if you'd been telling me about the napalming of civilian villages in the Vietnam War. I have to put aside my respect for your judgment in other affairs and acknowledge that here you are being dogmatic to the exclusion of reason. I've seen it before; I know it for what it is. You've made up your mind, and any new facts are pressed to the service of your preexisting conclusions, or disregarded. Ergo, I won't involve myself in a discussion with you on Israel. The whole thing would be futile for both of us...
I don't get to say it very often, but I'm not an Israeli apologist. I'm not Jewish and I'm not conservative. I have plenty to say about the hardships and needs of the Palestinian people, the dangers of right-wing governance in Israel, and the alarming growth of the ultra-orthodox population there. From those beginnings, many constructive conversations are possible. But, in the anti-Israel movement, there are precious few people to have those conversations with me. They don't want to treat Israel as a legitimate belligerent in a cultural conflict. They want to treat Israel as an apartheid Nazi regime. What productive conversations can follow from that ludicrous of a starting point?
If I'm right, there's no way to reason with the anti-Israel people on the subject of Israel, because their snit comes from a higher place...that biting cynicism, that self-doubt, that resentment toward all civilization. I'm not sure such people can be reasoned with at all, but there are so damn many of them in the anti-Israel movement that I have to wonder: How many people in the Western side of the movement are just the usual tagalongs who take sides simply for the cognitive tranquilizer of conformity, and how many are truly in the grip of Nihilism?
One more thing. I am disturbed by the ease with which Western anti-Israel activists end up supporting the cause of Islamic radicalism. If you consider yourself a secular humanist, and are also anti-Israel, you need to think long and hard about whether your positions support your ideals.
Edit: Israel made two mistakes, not one. Some how the international waters part had gotten left out of my publication draft.
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