May 07, 2002
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Underdog Uber Alles
Victor Davis Hanson describes an important source of anti-Israel sentiment in the West:
Thus, for some Westerners, it is not so much the facts of the last 50 years in the Middle East that drives their hatred of Israel. Nor the plenitude of Arabs and paucity of Israelis nor, perhaps, even worry over the price of gas for their Volvos and SUVs nor their fear of bombs and germs, nor envy of Jews. Rather, the Palestinians are weak and the Israelis are strong. So like the hosts of disadvantaged in America Mr. Arafat and his minions are deserving of injured-party status as their birthright, getting a pass from liberal censure to mouth hatred and prejudice. In turn, the Israelis almost like white affluent Republicans in America are thought to be so strong and confident precisely because they are exploiters, and thus are held collectively responsible for the oppression and current plight of their long-suffering "victims."
Partly Marxist, partly ignorant, and mostly naive, these insufferable and affluent European and American leftists see their solidarity with Palestinians as inseparable from their own embarrassed personas. It is easy, cheap and safe to right the injustices of the world by marching, shouting, and signing petitions, rather than by living among, marrying, seeing daily, or materially aiding the "other." It can all be done in a few seconds on campus, on television, or in the suburb — without any true self-introspection about what really ensures one's own rather comfortable material existence in the university, media, or government.The truth is that Westerners' support or hatred for Israel increasingly tell us far more about ourselves than they do about the real situation in the Middle East.
He's right. I don't think anti-semitism can explain the incredibly selective identification of terrorism, war crimes and territorial gripes by the U.N. and Europe. It's a gigantic Argumentum Ad Miseracordiam - an underdog cant' be wrong. In fact, the example given in the link above fits nicely:
"I did not murder my mother and father with an axe! Please don't find me guilty; I'm suffering enough through being an orphan."Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at May 7, 2002 01:08 PM | Technorati inbound links
It must be admitted, though, that Israel gets a lot of mileage in pro-Israel circles (myself included) from a sense that it is the underdog, outnumbered and out petrodollared in a hostile corner of the world.
Posted by: Matthew Yglesias on May 7, 2002 07:22 PMThe interesting thing is that terrorism has a tendency to make even military superior countries look like underdogs.
The refrain is "You can't deal with terrorists" so even though I am not much of a fan of Ariel Sharon, on the other hand Israel seems like the underdog in that it generally cannot engage in the sort of tactics that its opponents do. The Palestinians can send suicide bombers to night clubs, but the Israelis are so far constrained from just saturation bombing Jenin, for example (the interesting thing about Jenin was just how disproportionate press coverage of the alleged massacre was compared to legitimate massacres carried out by Palestinians against clearly non-military targets).
Posted by: Brian Carnell on May 8, 2002 10:52 AMRichard Reeves reported that the Nixon/Kissinger philosophy, in the mideast as worldwide, was to support the underdog (which at the time was Israel). They figured that by keeping all these conflicts in stasis, they wouldn't get so bad that the US had to become involved.
Really the US, when it does nothing, is seen as tilting the scale to Israel. In the balance of power model, as the lone superpower, it is theoretically probable that every other country in the world will eventually align in opposition to the US.
As for Hanson, his premise is not a valid point to start this argument. He rules out the idea that Palestinians have any kind of rational case at all against Israel's policy, and Europeans might see that. Let's see either the Europeans oppose Israel's policy because they're anti-semites, or the Europeans oppose Israel because they're liberal underdog cheerleaders.
When you discount the rational reasons, it's very easy to start assigning pathologies to Europe's stance. I cannot understand how people who go on and on about the rational efficiency of the economic market refuse to apply the same rational choice to the political market.
Posted by: Eric on May 8, 2002 12:05 PMHanson's commentary is absolutely on the dot. His exegesis threw me back a few years to a rather noisy pro-PLO gathering at a major British university. The panelists, most of them sporting the traditional Palestinian tablecloth-like headdress in a show of solidarity, I guess, to PLO terrorism, came from upper-crust families. None of them had ever experienced any kind of hardship, deprivation, or, indeed, war. But they were all avowed "Marxists." They were all "combat ready" (on paper.) They railed against Israel. They spoke fervently of "colonialism" and "oppression" and the "right" of the Palestinians to destroy every last Jew in Israel. The harangue went on and on and on... When a (very brave) Jewish student dared rise to speak about the contrast between Israeli democracy and the Arab "republics," he was nearly attacked by some in the audience. It was all very scholarly and according to the rules of free speech on campus. One of the panelists later made a revealing comment over pints of ale at the local pub: "Bloody Jews... They simply won't give up." Recently, I heard that this same panelist is a key contributor to the Blairite campaign to atone for the sins committed by the British Empire, including figuring out ways of compensating victims of slavery (which is widely practiced TODAY in a number of ARAB countries).
Posted by: Titos Katsonis on May 9, 2002 10:53 AMich will das mehr im internet über israel ausgestellt wird!!
z.B. hauptstadt :jerusalem
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