Tuesday, 1st of August, 2006

Here’s a stunning blog post from Lisa Goldman on the affect the conflict has had on the (relationship between the) editors of Time Out Beirut and Time Out Tel Aviv.
Read it all to get an idea of the effect of this war, but also a tiny bit of a concept of what is at stake for Israel. There’s no doubt they’ve made many very bad moves, but it may be that responding with full force to Hezbollah was not one of them, as such. It’s worth never forgetting what a tenuous position Israel is in in the area, although it’s worth tempering that somewhat against the natural Jewish paranoia.
This isn’t to say that I don’t utterly deplore the way that Israel has variously blamed civilians for not getting out in time (when often they have no means to get out of areas after they’re leafleted), declared civilians to be basically terrorists purely based on their location, and destroyed so much. It’s a tragedy - for Israel’s standing in the world and for the tremendous number of Lebanese who have had their lives turned upside down, suffered, died…

So yeah. It’s all gone to shit, and a peaceful Middle East seems more distant than ever. The thing is, how many fanatics of one provenance or other there does it take to bring it all down? Not many. If we can’t convince every rabid rabbi and mad mullah that there’s a middle ground where everyone can live together in harmony, then someone’s just going to provoke the other side all over again at the critical points.
It seems like there’s no way to surmount this “people problem”, but I guess we have to “keep the faith”, by which I mean that we have to behave, in our actions, plans, rhetoric and hope, as if there is a peaceful future possible. If we don’t, it will never happen.

This ties in with something I’ve been thinking of recently, which is to do with “being realistic”. It seems to me that the Left often likes to hold different groups up to different ideals. The Left wants a world where there are no borders, no bosses, no oppressors. It seems often to say to Israel, the US, etc: “Don’t pursue your own interests. Just stop oppressing those Palestinians! Stay out of Lebanon!” and so on, but it fails to treat everyone else the same way. You have to be willing to question the motives and actions of the Palestinians as well, of Hezbollah; but as far as my point goes here, you also have to be realistic. You may wish for a world where borders and differences don’t matter; but you can’t get there by expecting one side (”your side”, or “the West”, or “the Establishment”) to already organise their lives, States, infrastructure, as if that world were already here. If Israel dissolved its army today because it believed in a world without war, then it would be annihilated, pure and simple.
There’s a more nuanced way that still “keeps the faith”, works towards a better world, but by being realistic, by acknowledging the way things are, can actually do its job better. As Peter Singer says in A Darwininan Left, progressive movements owe it to themselves to learn from science and respect truth, because it’s with the tools thus gained that they can make the world they want.

Well, this has been a rather rambling and unfocused post. I hope it made a tiny bit of sense. Other further reading:
Why Truth Matters by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom
and lots of the various blogs and feeds I try to keep up with these days (you can see most via the link, but can’t mark them as read or anything without being logged in)
Some interesting commentary on left-vs-right arguments viz this conflict at Polemica

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