One of the virtues of pre-digital print media as well as television is that even when people went around in circles, they did so slowly. As a result, watching two strongly opposed sides debate an issue where there was almost zero chance that anybody was going to budge an inch didn’t quite feel like you were stuck watching an endless and continuous cycle of the same arguments forever and ever.
As far as Israel and Palestine go, that moment is long since past. In the 1970s, it wasn’t just that the argument was in relative slow motion, it was also that it felt mutable—that perhaps there could be a peace agreement, perhaps the issue could be settled with a two-state solution. Camp David opened up that feeling again, and then Oslo before Rabin’s assassination did once more. Since then, it’s felt hopeless in terms of any possibility of a resolution, and discussions in online forums—or even in print and television that are exposed to or cued into the acrimony over the issue in public culture.
At this point, it doesn’t matter where you read or view the debate. You will see the exact same discursive moves, the exact same argumentative strategies, that you would have seen five years ago, ten years ago, twenty-five years ago. New events don’t really perturb any of the back-and-forth. Despite how awful October 7th was, despite how awful the catastrophic retaliation has been in Gaza, the rhetorical infrastructure has remained unchanged.
What I’m most struck by no matter where I go is that the people who square off against one another make the same opening gambit every time. They assume that the other person (or people) in the conversation know nothing about the issues at hand, even if the other person is presenting as having a strong opposing opinion. This move encodes an assumption that the other person couldn’t possibly have another opinion if they were informed, as if opinions on the issue are completely derived from a command of facts and evidence. From there, the game gets played out in a predictable fashion. Generally there will be about four successive attempts on each side to provide further facts or evidence, possibly accompanied by a sort of desultory attempt to refute the evidence provided by the other side. (Though that often just gets by-passed because frequently the two sides do not even want to grant the epistemic legitimacy of the evidence cited by the other, as if contesting their evidence as such would trap them in the other’s paradigm.)
The final move is usually a statement of disgust with the other person that goes something like this: You are determined to know nothing, you are refusing reasonable dialogue, and therefore either are under the sway of some sinister manipulator or you are a sinister manipulator and a moral monster. In the current confrontation, the accusation that students are being controlled by malicious faculty or “outside agitators” is an especially common version of this move—and yes, it tends to work in both directions, because both sides have strong reasons to try and minimize the agency and responsibility of protesters and counter-protesters and assign blame to some unnamed or insinuated party who is not in the discussion. In a sense, that is what enables a partisan to begin the same rhetorical gambit over again in the next conversation, wholly unchanged by the last go-round. The final condemnation clears the board and empties the cache.
Could it be otherwise? Well, sometimes it is. There are people who are really in dialogue, people who are really thoughtful in their critical appraisal of others, people who are inviting an honest conversation and being turned down.
But for the average social media confrontation, one of two things would have to change. In terms of the charges and counter-charges of moral depravity that often end these exchanges, what participants should understand is that those are negotiations.
What do I mean? Simply this: you cannot expect that the other party in an argument like this one recognize the moral legitimacy of your point if you aren’t going to reciprocate in a way that is binding, persistent and symmetrical.
If you say, “You have to acknowledge the unacceptable monstrosity of a particular event, policy, or action” and the other person says, “No, you have to acknowledge a different unacceptable monstrosity that matters to me”, then both people might think for a second, “Are we talking about the same moral principle?” If one person says, “Military action that targets non-combatants deliberately is anathema” and the other person says, “Military action that is indifferent to harm to non-combatants amounts to deliberately targeting them”, those are really close to agreement. If the first person insists that no, these are radically different principles, they’re looking to refuse any agreement and to end the discussion in the typical way.
If there’s a will to actually close the gap, then we have a negotiation. To agree that both actions are unacceptable monstrosities, the two parties have got to agree first that they will say this both together, at the same time, and that this mutual saying is irreversible. That both parties will emerge from this moment of recognition permanently changed, urgently committed to each other’s moral cause. Two people arguing need to make the commitment to say at once together, “October 7th AND the vengeance-driven bombing of Gaza are both unacceptable, no qualifications required” and enter all further conversations changed by that mutual saying.
It is possible to refuse if you really think the principles involved are not close, but that is the kind of moral asymmetry that these kinds of conversations tend to exclude altogether. People who think that Israel has a special character or a special status or a special indemnity from normative moral commitments are simply not going to acknowledge that at any point in these kinds of confrontations until the end, and it is often less acknowledged than made evident by the back-and-forth. People who think that anti-colonial struggle is morally indemnified or that only some nationalisms are legitimate are also not necessarily going to say that up front. The striking thing about most morally driven activism on all sides is the way that the rhetorical infrastructure in public arguments is fundamentally liberal rather than openly radical or ethnonationalist.
Which shows that these kinds of public exchanges are really not about convincing the other guy: they’re a form of theater performed for audiences who feel ambivalence about both sides, and thus involve pantomiming the terms and claims that the audience is presumed to prefer.
Suppose people in these arguments don’t want to just start by treating the other person as an idiot and conclude by condemning the other person as a monster, but would actually like to just stick to the facts. Would really like to do that, rather than pretend to do it, and what they want is to do that in consequentialist terms, since the argument about moral monstrosity tends to be more deontological.
This is where folks both cite historical scholarship and turn with hope to historians, since our expertise is centrally invested in interpreting causality. What the hypothetical consequentialist wants to know is just “what caused October 7th to happen?” or “what is the cause of the Israeli government’s ongoing destruction of Gaza?”. If they’re hoping to escape the cliched exchange of charge and counter-charge, perhaps they’re thinking a historian will provide an evidence-rich analysis that accurately assesses causality and therefore properly assigns blame.
In the conventionalized exchanges, antagonists can usually exchange tit-for-tat blows back to what they regard as the originating event that blames the other guy. Common assertions in these back-and-forth battles:
Gaza wouldn’t have happened but for Oct. 7th;
October 7th wouldn’t have happened but for Israeli attempts to impoverish and control Gaza and seize the West Bank through settlements;
Retaliation against Gaza and control over the West Bank wouldn’t have happened but for Hamas’ attacks from Gaza and the second intifada and onward;
Hamas’ election and the second intifada wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Rabin’s assassination and the betrayal of the Oslo peace process;
The assassination and the ending of Oslo wouldn’t have happened if the Palestinian leadership had accepted what was offered to them;
Lately, I generally see the chain of exchanges end at about this point. More experienced combatants in these arguments can keep going back through the first intifada, the first West Bank settlements, the invasion of Lebanon, the PLO’s terrorist actions including Munich, the 1973 and 1967 wars, the Nakba and the 1948 war. But mostly in the present round the argument has ended by the time they get to Oslo and they’ve moved on to calling each other moral monstrosities.
The problem for historians is that we know we can’t resolve battles over causality via a superior command of evidence in a manner that will compel people to acknowledge the truth. There’s a simple reason for that, which is that tendentious people pursuing a political project have a will-to-truth that will grant them a facile ability to ignore any inconvenient fact. You know there’s no point to guiding someone through the details if they’re going to start spouting off about how nobody really lived in Israel until Ashkenazi Zionists started coming there after the Balfour Declaration, that it was all just some Ottoman estates with itinerant Arab workers who had no fixed residence. Or if someone is just going to completely deny or ignore that Mizrahi Jews were expelled from other countries in the Middle East for unmistakably antisemitic reasons and have nowhere to be except Israel.
More importantly, historians know that chains of causality have no natural or intrinsically factual point of termination. If I trace Zionism back into European antisemitism, I don’t stop with the Dreyfus Affair. If I trace the expulsion of Jews from Middle Eastern countries, I don’t stop with a simple sweeping statement that before Israel’s creation, Jews lived in harmonious peace with Muslims throughout the region. If I trace Jewish identity back to the Near East in the time of the Roman Empire, using historical evidence as the guide rather than scripture alone, then I have many, many other histories of belonging and community in the region to trace in the interval between then and now, quite a few of which might weigh on the long centuries since.
If I try to make a claim about the legitimacy of self-determination as a historical doctrine, I cannot stop with applying it to Israelis or Palestinians, Jews or Arabs, in how the doctrine evolved over time, and what it has been taken to address as well as what claims it neglects. If I take an interest in the security of religious and cultural minorities within the nation as it has existed for the last two centuries and in other political forms before and since, I can’t constrain that interest to just this subject matter.
If, that is, I’m trying to deliver the whole picture to people locked in an adversarial argument. But I never will deliver it because causality and comparison aren’t objective acts. They’re not arbitrary, either—there are facts based on evidence that really matter here, that many strongly committed people don’t want to hear or consider. But every historian has to make decisions about the scope of their inquiry that are not purely factual, that are not straightforward.
In talking about October 7 or its aftermath in Gaza, should I confine myself to narrowly proximate causality? That seems both empirically wrong and morally blind: what is happening now is not just a matter of the last two years or so. Should I allow myself to start talking about who lived in the Valley of Meggido in 1895 and about Herzl’s Der Judenstaat in 1897, on the other hand? That seems rather distant, a way of relating the causality of the moment to a long sequence of antagonisms that tends to make this moment seem less contingent, and more the product of a kind of poisonous destiny of pre-destined antagonism. Should I slip into talking about Biblical Judea and Samaria as the origins of Israel? That makes me an unmistakable partisan of one side who is conflating history and myth in service to a legitimating ideology. But should I deny altogether that there’s a connection between Jewish history and the location of Israel? No, that would be equally non-factual.
You have to make choices about how long and how complex your causal arguments are. It might be intellectually seemly to try and make those choices before you start trying to assign a consequentialist kind of blame for human suffering but I don’t think that’s how it works. You always know in advance what you’re trying to repair, restore, and judge before you start.
Facts here will not save you, any more than you can win an argument about morality just by shouting the loudest. A moral argument only concludes in something more than conflict by a negotiated desire for peace, and a causal argument about the facts only leads to clarity if everyone involved in it has honesty, humility and a real commitment to knowledge-making that can’t be untangled from a desire for justice.
Image credit: Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
Yes yes. I hope that within some of the encampments there were opportunities to talk through the difficulties and complexities of these, or such, questions. Outside such places of possible reflection, I feel little hope. At least, I feel stymied by being offered only the reduced options of “pro-Palestinian” or “pro-Israel.”