Tag Archives: Palestine

A thought on Gaza

Posted on by under Uncategorized

I haven’t said very much here of a direct nature about Gaza. That’s partly because I know less about Gaza than I do about the West Bank, and partly because I think there’s less to say about what’s been happening lately in Gaza than what’s been happening for awhile in the West Bank. But abstracting from questions of detail, I think there’s something to say, so I might as well say it. If I’m missing something, and being uncharitable to Hamas, someone can explain that to me, but as things stand, I don’t see any reasons for charity toward them.

I was having a conversation about Gaza the other day with my father and one of my cousins. My father and I are Pakistani-American; my cousin is Pakistani. All three of us have a great deal of sympathy for the cause of Palestinian rights, but none of us has any sympathy for Hamas. We’re all fairly argumentative people, but we quickly came to the following consensus about events in Gaza:

1. It makes no sense for Hamas to be officially at war with Israel and then to complain when Israel blockades Gaza. (And sophistry of this variety doesn’t help.)

2. It makes no sense for Hamas to attack Israel and not expect to be attacked in return.

3. It makes no sense for Hamas to attack Israel’s civilians and then complain to the world about its own civilian casualties at Israeli hands. (On the whole, I agree with the Israeli position that Hamas is using its civilian population as innocent shields, but this is a complex issue that requires separate treatment.)

4. Displays of pro-Hamas sympathy of the kind described in this article should elicit our criticism and rejection, not excuses or encouragement.

5. Finally, there’s a good analogy to be made between what Hamas is doing in Gaza and what the Pakistani Taliban is doing in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal agencies in Pakistan. There’s also a good analogy to be made between what the Israeli government has been forced to do in Gaza and what the Pakistani government has been forced to do in Pakistan’s northwest. The preceding analogies are driven by the sad fact that there’s a good analogy to be made between Hamas and the Taliban.

By the way, the consensus view of the three of us—including my Pakistani cousin, who lives in Pakistan—was that military action (ideally in the form of drone strikes) is the only way to deal with, i.e., defeat, the Pakistani Taliban. I’d like to think that Hamas is somewhat more reasonable than the Pakistani Taliban, and can come to a more reasonable settlement with Israel than the Taliban has mustered with Pakistan. But I wouldn’t bet on it. (Incidentally, could I have written the preceding sentence in Taliban- or Hamas-controlled territory without inviting the Islamic police to arrest me for suborning a violation of sharia? “Betting,” after all, is a paradigmatically unIslamic activity, and as its charter makes clear, Hamas believes that Palestine is to be ruled as an Islamic waqf under sharia. Thanks, but no thanks.)

We didn’t happen to discuss this, but like it or not, there’s a bit of an analogy to be made between Israel and Pakistan. The one is a Jewish state that aspires to be the moral equivalent of a secular republic while insisting, quixotically, on retaining its Jewish character. The other is an Islamic state that aspires to be the moral equivalent of a secular republic while insisting, quixotically, on retaining its Islamic character. Neither state professes to see any contradiction in doing so. Each state found it expedient a few decades back to support the enemy of its enemy—Hamas against Fatah in the case of Israel, and the proto-Taliban mujahidin against the USSR and India in the case of Pakistan. Both now find themselves on the receiving end of the depredations of the theocratic monsters they themselves helped create. Maybe one lesson here is that in the long-run, it doesn’t pay to outsmart oneself like that.

There’s a lesson here for the United States, as well. An interventionist foreign policy has a tendency to induce its practitioners to promote their “interests” abroad by supporting the enemies of their enemies, in the hope that doing so will induce one enemy to destroy the other and enable a kind of defense-in-depth-on-the-cheap. Such policies seem clever until the enemies of one’s enemies become one’s plain old enemies (often in alliance with yesteryear’s enemies, on the premise that those erstwhile enemies can now be treated as friends because they’re the enemies of one’s current enemies). At that point, of course, the policies come to seem irrationally self-defeating. One possible lesson is to stop intervening everywhere, and stop insisting on a conception of one’s  “interests” that requires a defense in depth. Perhaps a non-interventionist policy that seems fairly clever in the here and now might, with the passage of time, retain its aura of cleverness in the future, and save us from a lot of trouble.

PS., For good non-mainstream coverage of the Israel/Palestine dispute, I’d recommend Ibishblog, the blog of Hussein Ibish, a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. I don’t always agree with what he has to say (he probably wouldn’t entirely agree with what I’ve just said above), but this article and this one say things that you might not have expected to hear from a partisan of the Palestinian cause, and aren’t likely to hear in the mainstream press.

SFL, Partisanship, and Candor: The Case of the Hertog Foundation

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Students for Liberty has a new blog post up advertising Economic Liberty Seminars in NYC and Jerusalem, “sponsored by the Hertog Foundation, an educational philanthrophy in New York.” Three anomalies should stand out about this post.

The first is that unlike most posts on SFL’s blog, it’s unsigned. The author is listed as “Guest Author,” with no further identifying information.

The second is the sheer vagueness of the subject matter to be discussed at the seminars. The reader is told that the seminars will explore “fundamental questions of capitalism and democracy,” and “the relationship of political and economic liberty.” One obvious application of these topics to the Israeli context would be a discussion of the justifiability of Israel’s occupation and settlement of the West Bank (or for that matter, its blockade of Gaza). But there is no mention whatsoever of those obvious topics. In fact, reading the advertisement, and clicking back through material on the Tikvah Center and Hertog Foundation, one is led to wonder whether the organizers of the seminar believe that Palestinian Arabs exist, and if so, whether their situation matters enough to be named and discussed in any explicit way.

This is a point worth bearing in mind, incidentally, the next time some defender of Israel gets in your face about Israel’s commitment to the equal rights of its Arab and Jewish citizens or denizens. I don’t doubt that many Israelis have some such commitment. The interesting question is whether Israel’s American defenders–and in particular, its supposedly free market defenders–have the relevant commitment. I doubt it, and if you wonder why, I suggest looking through the websites of the Hertog Foundation and Tikvah Center with the following question in mind: is the intellectual agenda expressed by these organizations one that shows active engagement with the need to come to terms with Israel’s Palestinian Arabs, or is it one that demonstrates a desperate desire to ignore their existence?

A third anomaly, related to the second: If you look at the personnel and activities of the Hertog Foundation and Tikvah Center, and you’re at all familiar with how the polemical end of the Arab/Israeli dispute works, you’ll probably infer that the Foundation and Center are academic branches of what Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have described as “the Israel lobby.” But if you look for any candid, explicit acknowledgement of this obvious fact, you will not find it. (Nor will you find any clear indication of how exactly the two organizations are funded, despite the sheer abundance of funding on offer in this, a time of “retrenchment” in post-financial crisis academia.)

What you will find instead is a slick, skillful, disingenuous exercise in plausible deniability. Every activity sponsored by the Foundation and engaged in by the Center has the same political orientation. Virtually every person associated with them is an active partisan on one side of the debate. Few if any Arabs are involved in the organizations’ activities  (I didn’t see a single one; I’m just hedging in case I missed any), including its Fellows Program. But if you straightforwardly ask the question, “So are these organizations just the academic expression of a lobbying enterprise for a foreign government?” not only will you not find the answer, but you’ll likely be accused of anti-Semitism. And if you wonder why NYU houses such an outfit, people will accuse you of the conspiratorial belief that “Jews control academia,” and sarcastically start invoking the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Before anyone does that, I should hasten to add that the problem here is hardly confined to pro-Israel organizations in American universities.  It extends to supposedly academic centers for the study of Islamic civilization funded by Saudi money, and essentially partisan outfits within universities whose purpose is advocacy for various Third World causes under outward cover of academic neutrality or multiculturalism. It’s just that those things don’t typically show up at SFL.

One wonders why not. After all, if pro-Israeli advocacy is an expression of free-market capitalism, why not pro-Egyptian, pro-Tunisian, pro-Qatari, or pro-Islamic? Better yet, why not advertise pro-Arab and pro-Islamic organizations that flaunt their pro-Arab and pro-Islamic credentials, that pretend that there are no non-Arab or non-Muslim minorities in Arab/Muslim countries, and that interpret “freedom” and “capitalism” to mean “freedom for Arabs” or “capitalism for Muslims?” Finally, why not advertise organizations discreetly geared to an Arab/Muslim membership, but that cannot admit out loud that that is their self-conception?

A couple of years ago, I tried to call the bluff of such an organization–the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies–by sending a painstakingly constructed application for their annual Israel program. I didn’t get in, but I made sure to be interviewed, and spoke my mind in the interview. (As I said, I didn’t get in.) That’s my suggestion here, as it is for dealing with any such partisan organization with academic pretensions, be it pro-Israeli, pro-Muslim, pro-Arab, pro-Pakistani, left-wing social justice oriented, libertarian, or Objectivist. Take their rhetoric literally and at face value and insist that they live up to it. The results will be instructive, but don’t expect them to be pleasant.

The power of philosophy: Hamas, Gaza, Human Shields, and Hypocrisy

Posted on by under Uncategorized

The front page of this morning’s New York Times has a thought-provoking article on Gaza, “Civilians as Human Shields? Gaza War Intensifies Debate.” The issues discussed in it are difficult and complex, and the article as a whole is well worth reading. There’s a vast literature out there on human shields, as well as on Gazans-as-human-shields, and it would be silly to try to discuss any large swatch of it in a single blog post. Just two quick observations, then:

(1) People sometimes cavalierly claim that philosophy is irrelevant to “real life,” but this article is a vivid, if unintentional, refutation of that claim. For better or worse, the language of “human shields” (or innocent shields, or innocent threats, etc.) is now all-but-taken for granted in discussions of the ethics of warfare, as is the presumption of civilian or non-combatant immunity from military attack. That wasn’t always the case. Moral philosophers made it the case by making the relevant arguments in “obscure” books and journals, and lawyers followed their lead and institutionalized the philosophers’ claims. Military commanders eventually made compliance with those philosophical and legal principles a matter of “honor.” But the bottom line is that the terms of today’s debates about the war in Gaza were set by the writings of yesterday’s philosophers– specifically by the writings of the generation of philosophers (Walzer, Nozick, Nagel, Judith Thomson, etc.) who achieved academic prominence during the worst days of the Vietnam War, and turned to philosophy as a means of processing what they observed. If that doesn’t count as evidence of philosophy’s relevance to “the real world,” then questions of evidence are themselves irrelevant to the discussion.

(2) In a related article, an unnamed State Department official is quoted as saying the following:

 “What we’re trying to figure out is how we can get to the point where the violence can stop and these bigger key issues can be addressed over the longer term,” said a senior State Department official, who asked not to be identified in keeping with the agency’s protocol for briefing reporters.

The biggest key issue is the Israeli occupation and settlement of the West Bank. But American credibility on that issue can be gauged by the fact that the last time it was called on publicly to re-affirm its own assessment of Israel’s settlement policies–at the UN, in 2011–it refused to do so. Putting the point less charitably, it couldn’t summon up the integrity or courage to do so. The US has consistently claimed to be opposed to Israel’s settlement policies but has just as consistently refused to condition support for Israel on Israel’s ending that policy. And so the policy has continued, with pro forma American disapproval, and de facto American support. Any intelligent person would have to wonder how long such a charade could go on.

After almost five decades of this pattern, the State Department wants us–and the Palestinians, and the rest of the world–to take the United States’s supposed interest in “bigger issues” on faith. But fideism doesn’t work in politics anymore than it works anywhere else. Fideism, secular and religious, is after all one of the “root causes” of the Arab-Israeli conflict as such. What makes the US a dishonest broker in the dispute–not that it has to be a broker at all–is its equivocal attitude toward faith-based politics. Unfortunately, that attitude has its basis in philosophy as well–yet another confirmation of philosophy’s relevance to “real life” and of its power over people oblivious to the power it has.

“Pairwise”

Posted on by under Uncategorized

It belatedly occurs to me that my last post misuses the term “pairwise.” A pairwise comparison is a comparison of one pair of things as against another pair, not a comparison of two items that are paired against one another. I was using “pairwise” to mean the latter, but that’s a mistake.

Incidentally, I haven’t set out a formal list of “policies” for this blog, but one of them will surely have to be that I promise not to make substantive changes to a post after the post has been published. I will, however, correct copy-edit level mistakes, as long as they don’t substantively change the point I was originally making. I guess you might object that any change, even at the level of grammar or punctuation, affects some substantive point somehow, but I’d respond that the changes I regard as “copy-edit level” are too minute to count as substantive in the relevant sense. They improve the clarity of the original argument without changing its content. Anyway, when in doubt (when I’m in doubt), I’ll tell you that I’ve made a change after I hit “Publish.”

I take it that the preceding policy differs from what one finds at some other blogs, where bloggers routinely modify their claims in response to criticisms, don’t inform their readers that they’re doing so, and then proceed as though the criticisms in question were misplaced. That’s obviously dishonest, and I’m surprised that readers are less critical of the practice than one might expect them to be.

Pairwise civilizational verdicts and the Arab Israeli conflict: a sketch

Posted on by under Uncategorized

I recently had a “debate” about Israel and Palestine at the Bleeding Heart Libertarian website. I wrote my post at the suggestion of Roderick Long (Auburn) in response to one by Fernando Teson (Florida State University College of Law); Long posted it as a guest blog at BHL as well as at his own website and at that of the Center for a Stateless Society. (I’m not an anarchist myself, but I occasionally consort with anarchists, e.g., when they post my decidedly non-anarchist writings on their blogs. By the way–thanks, Roderick!)

One topic that repeatedly came up in the debate, and that repeatedly comes up in debates like this, is what I call inferential license via pairwise civilizational verdict. The basic idea is this: you’re trying (in moral terms) to adjudicate a dispute between two parties, X and Y–where “X” and “Y” are typically distinct “cultures” or “societies,” and in this post-Huntingtonian-but-still-Huntingtonian age, therefore belong to different “civilizations.” In order to adjudicate the dispute, however, you assume that you’ve got to begin with premises that express a kind of global moral verdict on each society. That’s the pairwise civilizational verdict. Once you have that verdict in hand, you can then use it to regulate whatever inferences you want to make about the dispute. If, for instance, you find that X is morally superior to Y, you then systematically give greater weight to X’s claims in the dispute, and greater plausibility to evidence that seems to favor those claims. That’s the inferential license. Put the two things together, and you have a classic recipe for coherence-without-input-from-the-world. In other words, you have a recipe for generating a coherent (or apparently coherent) grievance-narrative that feeds all claims about the conflict through a filter that favors one side in the conflict. As I’ve argued elsewhere (but in somewhat different terms), that’s fundamentally what I think the Arab/Israeli conflict is.

There are at least two sets of questions lurking here. One concerns the legitimacy of making pairwise civilizational verdicts as such. Roughly: are they legitimate, and if so, how or why? Another concerns the legitimacy of using such verdicts to regulate disputes. Supposing that they are legitimate, should one use them to regulate particular disputes; if so, how and why?

Here’s a very quick thought on the first set of questions (the “are they legitimate” questions). It seems to me that the idea of a pairwise civilizational (or cultural or societal or national or ethno-national) verdict is a highly equivocal one. Suppose that I say that culture X is superior to culture Y. The claim should provoke some obvious preliminary queries. For one thing, we have to be clear about the values for “X” and “Y”: what exactly are they, what are the truth conditions for claims about “them,” and how do we justify those claims? They also have to be comparable entities; we can’t be engaged in the moral equivalent of comparing apples and frog’s legs. Finally, we have to know how defeasible they are. How many exceptions (or what kind of exception) would defeat a generalized verdict about the superiority of one culture to another?

Given that (which is a lot to give), the “X is superior to Y” claim is ambiguous as between any of the following six claims:

1. The norms we associate with X are superior to those we associate with Y (not that we have any empirical evidence of causal connection; we’re going by associations).
2. The norms expressed by X are superior to those expressed by Y (assuming we have a way of identifying when a norm is expressive of a culture).
3. The political regime of X is superior to the political regime of Y, and superiority of political regime reflects superiority of culture.
4. The average citizen/denizen of X is morally superior to the average citizen/denizen of Y.
5. More of the citizens/denizens of X are morally superior to more of the citizens/denizens of Y.
6. The worst aspects of X are not as bad as the worst aspects of Y.
This isn’t the place for a full “chisholming” of these claims, but I think they require chisholming before anyone can be very confident about the legitimacy of any particular pairwise verdict. I also think that the more chisholming they undergo, the more problematic the overall strategy will come to seem. I don’t mean to suggest that pairwise cultural or civilizational comparisons are always or necessarily wrong or unjustified. I just think they’re more complicated than some overly gung-ho moral realists (or ethno-national tribalists) have realized.
(Thanks to David Bernstein, Mark Friedman, Sergio Mendez, Alice Raizel, and Michael Young for inspiring this comment, in some cases by exemplifying the confusions I’m implicitly criticizing.)

Sari Nusseibeh’s Retirement at Al Quds University

Posted on by under Uncategorized

My friend and colleague Sari Nusseibeh recently announced his retirement as President of Al Quds University in Jerusalem. (He was also one of the University’s co-founders, and teaches in the Department of Philosophy.) I was Sari’s guest at Al Quds last summer, where I was invited to give three lectures on topics in political philosophy of relevance to the Arab-Israeli dispute. With Sari’s help, I also got comprehensive political tours of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, did some sightseeing, went swimming in the hottest swimming pool I’ve ever experienced, and drank some of the best tea I’ve ever tasted. It was the experience of a lifetime for me, and I owe Sari (and his colleagues) a debt of gratitude for it that I can’t imagine ever being able to repay. (I also owe my Felician College colleague Fahmi Abboushi for putting me in touch with Sari on the occasion of Reason Papers’s 2012 symposium on Sari’s book, What Is a Palestinian State Worth?)

It’s remarkable that while here in North America, academics are bemoaning the death of the humanities and of the malaise of academia generally, Sari managed in a few decades to build a major university essentially from scratch–in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Booker T. Washington’s founding the Tuskegee Institute–I actually gifted Sari a copy of Up from Slavery–but on a grander scale. When I’m tempted to complain about academic life at home, I find myself thinking about what Sari has managed to do at Al Quds, and stop. Times may be tough for small liberal arts colleges in the US, but at least we don’t operate under the conditions of a military-bureaucratic occupation (or for that matter, the relentless anti-intellectual pressures exerted by religious fundamentalists).

Sari has narrated his own story better than anyone can, but I didn’t want to let the moment go by without offering a (non-alcoholic) toast in tribute to what he’s accomplished so far. The next time you confront someone who derides philosophy as a pie-in-the-sky endeavor, direct them to the life and work of Sari Nusseibeh. Like Socrates, he’s managed in theory and practice to bring philosophy down to earth–and at the center of life, where it belongs.