The other day, a colleague who is temperamentally optimistic stopped by my office to compliment me on my Samuel Huntington column. "Of course I think he was crazy," my friend said, "but he was important, so I'm glad you wrote about him." I asked my friend why he thought Huntington was crazy, but he didn't explain himself. My guess is that Huntington taught and believed in things that were difficult for someone like my friend, who believes every contentious situation can be remediated if reasonable people would just sit down and talk, to accept.
That exchange came to mind when I read the first comment on Noah Millman's extremely depressing but hard to refute analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. In brief, Noah explains why the Israelis are doomed to do what they're doing, the Palestinians are fated to do what they're doing, and why the US is powerless to do anything to stop it. The first comment on the post began:
Noah, it's upsetting to me the way you have become a detached strategic analyst talking about the black and white chesspieces on the board, with no words in support of Israel and its cause.
In other words, if the truth of the analysis is unacceptable, attack the character of the analyst.
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Why is it cynicism? Attacking the presumed motive of the analyst does not obviate the analysis. If his analysis is wrong, show us where. But faulting him for failing to think happy thoughts is pretty weak.
Well Rod, Millman argues that Israel is engaged in a game of deep strategery whereby the current violence causes a backlash that brings about the election of a center-left government that will withdraw from the West Bank, not to make room for a Palestinian state as the world might hope, but simply to give Israel smaller, tighter borders.
Seriously, he's arguing without evidence that Israel is killing all these children not primarily to incapacitate Hamas but for temporary domestic political manipulation.
But earlier, he makes the claim that no other response to the rockets was possible anyway, because anything else would be "tit for tat" and thus appear "weak." It's the old "middle easterners are all Klingons and cannot show weakness" motif.
Oh, and also, that the U.S. cannot possibly exert any pressure on Israel to move toward two-state talks, at all, no way, no how.
It's incoherent, baseless, and cynical in the extreme.
Any time you look at things squarely someone will call you cynical or stupid or both. Count on it.
Noah illuminates the Israeli situation extremely well but doesn't shed as bright a light on the internal Palestinian situation, perhaps because those politics are more fractured.
Jeff Jacoby wrote something very similar about the Northern Irish situation, right on the eve of the major breakthrough in that peace process. Which was made possible, by the way, when the British got past Thatcher's destructive hardline and decided to talk to everyone.
Ha! The breakthrough was made possible when the British bought off the leaders, and when the women and children of both sides got together and decided that they would not support the fighting anymore.
That exchange came to mind when I read the first comment on Noah Millman's extremely depressing but hard to refute analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian situation.
Depressing? Why? It's about seeing Gaza quite realistically as an illustration of something common: right wing extremists of each side and their allies or minions fighting to destroy or discredit each other (and slowly succeeding). That is in fact what right wing extremists do historically; fighting the Evil Other constitutes their social identity and utility. When they are all finally ground down or overpowered by violence, or in some cases disarmed by elections, peace breaks out.
In I/P I suspect the generations that came of age before 1948 are the utterly irreconcilable enemies. They remember an ethnically exclusive past and insist on its restoration and complete sovereignty, the Other being utterly alien and intolerable to them. When they have died out accommodation will begin.
I wouldn't know about your friend, but my problems with Huntington are his sticking by standard conceits of conservative Anglo-American historical narrative. He ducks around accounting for the corrupt values and forms taken into American culture from British feudal and colonial culture. Nor is there due acknowledgment of the endurance and development, let alone possibly much greater Modern suitability and potential, of those adopted from American Indians. That and some acknowledgment that Latinos might not mentally live in postcolonial Latin America forever would undo his dismissals of Latinos and Latino culture.
Finally, historical Quakerism mostly and broadly fits his 'Anglo-Protestant' theory, indeed explains some of the features and maybe some of the origins, plausibility, and endurance of the phenomenon. But Quakerism was originally what might be termed post-'Anglo-Protestant' and plausibly the major actor in the decline and fall of New England Puritanism. In being a major root of white American political liberalism, maybe a certain amount of religious liberalism, it contained and has sown seeds of further and ongoing transformation (some would say: destruction) of 'Anglo-Protestantism'. Is a theory that implies its own transience really a good theory?
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