Not a million miles from the subject matter of other recent posts, this critique of the Israeli far left during the recent conflict merits your attention:
Israelis paid no attention this time to "stop shooting, start talking," because there was no plan behind the slogan, no debate about now-existential problems.There's also this relishable passage:What kind of Middle East will we have after the Hezbollah War? How do we respond to the threat of missile fire at our civilians, weapons that could contain biological or chemical weapons the next time around? What will this war do to Syria's and Iran's standing in the region?
Anyone failing to have constructive proposals for these questions is simply irrelevant.
The truth is that there is a deep arrogance behind this type of... "left-ism." It's appeal is relevant only when we win. Its criticism is valid only on the assumption that we are the victorious and evil side. But in this case? It seems we are neither.
Even if we made terrible mistakes, we are not the guilty party. Anyone with eyes in their head sees the Iran[-]inspired Islamic brand of fascism, and no elaborate explanations are needed to understand why it is evil.
But even more unusual for this branch of the left is that this time, it is unclear even that we are the stronger side. There... are huge forces gathering against us, bold, ruthless, and well-armed. This radical leftist arrogance, which grew out of the occupation, assumed that we were always Goliath. But here in the New Middle East, there is a new Goliath.
Over 40 years of occupation the intellectual basis of the radical intellectual left has been gradually rotting. It has but one reaction to every war; therefore, it has no ability to say anything concrete about justice. It has no criteria by which to distinguish between just war and unjust wars.
It doesn't matter what the war is, "radical" writers will issue yet another version of its permanent Bertolt Brecht poem: Our generals are admiring the beauty of their own uniforms, while they're killing children, etc.
[B]elieve it or not, the Other actually exists apart from our own discourse. This may be a real philosophical shock to these new academics, and I don't want to upset anyone, but it now seems that there among those many others out there, some have built missile bases, or so rumor has it, and apparently these missiles have been outrag[e]ously, outside the boundaries of our Israel-Occidental discourse.Read the whole thing. (Thanks: L.)So perhaps it really is a good idea to listen to the other side. And to remember that others are not just representations, nor are they submerged behind our own representations. Not all of these others are oppressed angels. They are human beings, there's good and bad in them, and some of them want peace while others can act with astonishing barbarity.
