What starts in Palestine does not stay in Israel

Years ago, in answer to the question about why gentiles should care about what happened to the Jews, an answer was that the Jews were "the canary in the mine"; one needed to pay attention because the Jews might be first on the hit list, but others would follow.

A similar question could be asked now: why should sensible folk be concerned about the obsession with Israel and its alleged sins that disfigures so much of postmodern progressivism? The answer is, because the Jewish state is also a canary in the mine: the pathologies that Western reactions to the Israel-Palestine disputes have given rise to do not stay confined to that issue.

Pathology petri dish
Those particular pathologies include wicked facts, achievement avoidance, responsibility denial, fantasy Islam.

Wicked facts are straightforward--things which are true, but only Bad People mention or give significance to. That Palestinian media and schooling are saturated with crude Jew-hatred is a wicked fact, for example. That there have never been any serious Palestinian peace proposals is another wicked fact. (Especially if conjoined with there having been serious Israeli peace proposals, notably by Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmurt: the Palestinian Authority did endorse the Arab Peace Plan, but was hardly in a position to refuse to do so.) The Palestinian insistence on the right of return, a "right" with no equivalent for any other case of population transfers, essentially blocks any serious possibility of an agreement, another wicked fact.

That Palestinians are the only refugees to be denied citizenship by their ethnic confrere state(s) (because the Arab states wanted stateless sticks to beat Israel with) is a wicked fact. That the current state of Syria, Iraq, Libya and the past history of Lebanon might raise issues about what a Palestinian state would be like, or the virtues of Israel, is another wicked fact (or wicked implication, strictly speaking). Other wicked facts are that a majority of Israel's Jewish population is of Middle Eastern origins, or that Jewish refugees from Muslim countries outnumbered Palestinian ones from the creation of Israel.

They are not the same level of wickedness, but they are all things Good People don't mention, or pass over as quickly as possible.

A classic wicked fact is that Israel is the most stable democracy in the Middle East with the most liberal society. This wicked fact is also a case of achievement avoidance: one is absolutely not to see Israel as any sort of achievement. Thus, referring to Israel's vastly superior performance on queer rights to the rest of the Middle East is pinkwashing. If Israel does not represent any sort of achievement, then no awkward issues are raised by, for example, proposing the abolition of the most stable democracy in the Middle East with the most liberal society (aka the One State Solution).

The lack of serious Palestinian peace proposals, the corrupt failures of Palestinian politics, the systematic stoking of the politics of hatred, these are more wicked facts which are also cases of responsibility denial: as an "oppressed people" Palestinians are not to be held responsible for their own situation or their actions--even those that if done by Westerners would lead to furious denunciations. 

Finally, there is fantasy Islam, not merely in the sense that Islam is not to be seen as in any way a causal factor in the Arab-Israel or Israel-Palestinian disputes (both a wicked fact and a contradiction of responsibility denial) but the reason it is not to be seen as such is that Good People adhere to a fantasy version of Islam and Islamic history. 

That Palestinian politics and society is rarely, if ever, subject to anything remotely resembling critical scrutiny by the mainstream Western media means, of course, that Israel is always in the wrong and the cause of everything that goes wrong: the sins of Israel become THE story--indeed, the only possible story, given enough adherence to the notions of wicked facts, achievement avoidance, responsibility denial and fantasy Islam.

Not quarantined

The problem is, there is no quarantine that stops the pattern of wicked facts, achievement avoidance, responsibility denial and fantasy Islam being applied elsewhere. On the contrary, Israel-Palestine because a sort of petri dish, where these pathologies can be tested, developed, dry run and before being extended to other issues, and to Western societies themselves. If applying such is acceptable, indeed "good reporting", on Palestine-Israel then it is acceptable more generally. It is not that these notions were invented to apply to Palestine-Israel; it is that Palestine-Israel provides a media realm to prove their acceptability and develop their application.

Thus, that African-Americans (around 13% population) commit half the homicides in the US is a classic wicked fact. (If you doubt that, try using it as a response to Black Lives Matter.) Similarly, the current buzz term of white supremacy is an exercise in responsibility denial (due to the oppression of white supremacy nothing negative in the situation of African-Americans is in any way a responsibility of African-Americans). While Western civilisation has become, in postmodern progressive parlance, an entire zone of achievement avoidance.

One of the bridges from Israel-Palestine to the West in general is how issues to do with Muslims (particularly Muslims in the West) are framed. Thus, the depth of Jew-hatred in the Muslim (particularly Arab) world (wicked fact) and how embedded it is in Islamic Scriptures are not things Good People mention (fantasy Islam).

Which makes the Holocaust something of a problem. As James Kirchick points out in a recent essay, the push is on to universalise the Holocaust so that it in no way provides any shielding to Jews in general, or Israel in particular. In Europe especially, this is pushing at an open door because it has long been obvious that much of the European elite can never forgive Israel for the Holocaust, as the Holocaust tarnishes European elite pretensions to being the moral arbiters of the planet. 

Underlying wicked facts, achievement avoidance and fantasy Islam is a wish for a simple framing that buttresses moral pretension. The complex idea that yes, other folk were subject to the Holocaust and yes other genocides have occurred but the specific targeting of Jews was at the heart of the Holocaust is apparently too complex an idea: the diversity of real apparently just doesn't work for ease of Virtue. While dismissing the Holocaust as white-on-white crime points to the intellectual degradation identity politics naturally leads to. 

But the last is so far from an irrational move, it is a natural part of the pattern. One way the Jews are so awkward is that they demonstrate that a group which is oppressed and excluded from political power can nevertheless achieve considerable social success. (They are hardly the only group that demonstrates that, but they are a particularly salient group that does so, especially from a Western perspective.) So they seriously get in the way of blaming everything bad that happens to any group on white folk. Declaring them to be white folk (who therefore don't count in the oppression stakes) is a natural move to block that bit of inconvenient complexity.

If one bothers to become seriously knowledgable about the history of European Jew-hatred, then the strength of Jew-hatred in the Muslim world is hardly a surprise. Essentially the same patterns apply as applied in C19th and early C20th Europe--angst over modernity that seems threatening and foreign, hostility to a historically despised group that seems to be doing "unnaturally" well, religious hierarchies acting as gatekeepers of righteousness encouraging Jew-hatred as a tactic to buttress their own authority. The factors that led to rampant Jew-hatred (indeed, exterminatory Jew-hatred) in C19th and early C20th Europe are alive and well in the contemporary Islamic world. 

They are, indeed, if anything stronger in the Islamic world. Modernity was at least created within the West; Islam experiences modernity even more as a foreign intrusion. While the Catholic Church's investment in encouraging Jew-hatred (though continuous and extensive) could never reach the level it does among contemporary Islamic clerics because there are barriers within Christianity to full blown exterminatory Jew-hatred--the most obvious being that Christ and His disciples were Jews and that Love Thy Neighbour As Thyself was originally preached by a Jewish man to Jewish audiences. However far Christian Jew-hatred could extend, one had to take steps beyond Christian doctrine to embrace exterminatory Jew hated. (Which, over the centuries, plenty of folk calling themselves Christians did.)

Islam has no such internal barriers--Muhammad and his Companions were not Jews, his audiences were (mostly) not Jews. Worse, Jews were specific targets of homicidal retaliation by the Prophet and the Quran has many negative references to Jews, which a famous hadith takes further (also). 

Taking Islam as a belief system seriously (rather than concocting a fantasy version of it), taking a critical look at patterns within Islamic societies (rather than treating such as a collective aggression against Muslims) and taking Jew hatred itself seriously, all give grave grounds for concern about where the level of Jew-hatred within Muslim countries leads. But if one is committed to the deep stupidities of wicked facts, achievement avoidance, responsibility denial and fantasy Islam, then all this becomes invisible. For the Virtuous, Ignorance is Strength. 

But, having been tried and tested and shown to be completely acceptable in reporting on Israel-Palestine wicked facts, achievement avoidance, responsibility denial and fantasy Islam are all now coming to a media outlet near you. What starts in Palestine does not stay in Israel.

ADDENDA Richard Landes points out a quite different and, at the sharp end, murderous effect of such journalism back in Europe.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer]