Published Pieces
Published Pieces
Times of Israel Blog
It is no easy feat, walking the tightrope of critical support. Chaim Weizmann described the world in 1936 as ‘divided into two parts — those places where the Jews cannot live and those where they cannot enter.’ The liberal Israeli finds themself trapped in the past. Nothing has changed. Lately, trying to talk to people both inside and outside of Israel has left me feeling uncomfortably two-faced. I am not happy with my country. And I am not happy with the criticisms levied at it. How did we get here?
The simple answer is that most of the external criticism of Israel misses the mark by a long shot. So does the majority of Israeli government action. Foreign perspectives tend to be unrealistic and naive at best, or broadly antisemitic at worst. Within Israel, where the people who live and breathe the local politics make astute, productive, observations, their complaints have no influence on the ruling coalition. The result is an uncomfortable overlap where anti-Zionist critique is partially justified by the current Zionist regime. Those of us who struggle to reside in a healthy moderate zone find the ground under our feet shrinking daily.
Israel’s current government is enacting a series of policies that are immoral, unjust, and harmful to the Jewish people, as well as the Arabs with which we share the land. Israel, as it is acting now, harms us, and yet we need it more and more. The state exists as a bastion of safety for the Jewish people at a time when fascism, populism, and reactionary hatred is on the rise globally (and in accordance, as has always been the case, so rises the tide of antisemitism). These two positions generate a contradiction that should be laid bare:
You can, and should, both stand with, and against, Israel in its current state.
The state of Israel deserves to exist, as justified by the basic right of a people to self determine and reject persecution. Antisemitism both current and historic attests to the fact that Jews are an oppressed people globally. Furthermore, the basic right of a people to self determine applies just as much to Jews as to any other minority group — as established in the UN general assembly resolution 1514. The call to end colonialism, meaning freedom for peoples subjugated in their land by external imperial forces, applies just as much to the Muslim empire that colonized and subjugated historic Palestine as it does to the British that later did the same. Zionism, in its simplest form, is the right of the Jewish people to self-determine in their homeland, the land of Israel. It’s goal has always been that of continued Jewish safety and autonomy alongside its non-Jewish neighbours. In theory this is simple, but the road towards it has, in practice, been challenging.
The Jewish quest for freedom takes place in direct parallel to the Palestinian one. While there is no Palestinian state, and never has been, in the last 100 years a unique Palestinian people has emerged. They too are entitled to self determination in the lands in which they reside, irrespective of ancestry or historical legal agreements. This right has been denied them by the surrounding Arab nations of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt — and also, just as much, by Israel. The current Israeli regime has seemingly no interest in peaceful coexistence, breaking from much of past political and popular sentiment. The Palestinians deserve, as human beings, to be delivered from the plight imposed upon them by a government that is afraid to cede any control.
The two movements are hoplessly intertwined. Everybody knows the situation is inherently cyclical at this point. The Jews feel they cannot budge or they will be destroyed, and the Palestinians feel the same way. Radical elements have strong-armed the efforts of entire nations, degrading them in the process. Israel’s current government is redirecting funds away from public services towards ultra-Orthodox communities and building settlements in territory it controls militarily in order to maintain power. On the other side is the terror organization Hamas, a military industrial complex with the resources of a small country (and the support of at least two others), as well as the Palestinian Authority, a hive of corruption that pays lip service to coexistence as it funds violent crime.
In such a situation it’s hard to see a reason to stay. The conflict is intractable and there is nobody to root for. So why stay at all? And why even support a side? On this question, putting aside the fact that most Israelis have nowhere else to go, I think the first thing that must be said is this: sometimes there are only lesser evils to choose from. Yet, you can recognize the wrong of one’s own side without abandoning it wholly. In fact, you must.
You must because if all the reasonable voices leave then the situation can only get worse. But, beyond that, you must because loyalty is essential to building a functional future. And loyalty isn’t worth a damn if your side is always correct. In such a case one wouldn’t be performing loyalty but justice. But if loyalty contrasts directly with justice, what is the value of loyalty? An ancient virtue meets a logical challenge. The answer is not complicated. The virtue of loyalty lies in a broader realm. We recognize that nobody and nothing is without flaw — we learn this early enough, and with time come to accept it even of ourselves. Loyalty, then, is faith in the greater value of somebody or something, even in a moment of darkness. To recognize potential, even when the horizon is bleak. This faith is essential for basic social function, and for future growth. If we gave up on our friends because they made a mistake the world would become a lonely and miserable place. This is why loyalty is essential if we want to make progress. Everybody needs someone to stand by them and, often, it is this loyal support, even when you are at fault, that allows you to move forward, to learn and to grow. It is the necessary unconditional care of a mother, without which we would grow twisted and sad. But more importantly, it doesn’t mean blind support. Loyalty means sticking by even when times are rough — but not sycophancy. A truly loyal friend has to be able to tell you that you’re wrong. Otherwise they’re not really standing by you at all.
Loyalty is what allows a people to stick together through hard times and to change from within. Both Israel and Palestine must change from within if there is any hope for a peaceful future. But calling for change is very different from calling for an end. And I find myself arguing this point on both sides. That Israel should indeed exist. And so should Palestine. Even if we’re not ready for that future yet there is more than enough space in the discussion for this kind of nuance. Yet somehow marching for Palestine in Israel is very different from marching for Palestine outside of Israel — none of that essential nuance is preserved. Cynicism is not helpful. Neither is naivety. Most criticism or support of Israel is cutting one way and naive in another. To see Israel as a paragon of virtue, at war with barbarians, is harmful to both sides. But those that call for a one state solution claiming, in spite of all evidence, that the Palestinians are yearning to build an egalitarian utopia — would the Israeli boot only be lifted from their throat — are no better. It matters less, then, what ‘side’ you choose, but rather how you work from your vantage point. Towards coexistence, or conflict?
Rape cannot be resistance. And shackles cannot be security. So how do you walk the tightrope of critical support? Perhaps for now two faces are simply necessary, for balance. One for the inside, to stay loyal and present, even when you see your side as wrong — to be a dissenting voice and criticize what should be criticized; and one for the outside, to reject those that would expand your criticism into condemnation, and weaponize your battle for betterment into a war for the destruction of the Jewish state. We can work towards merging these faces by striving to make space for nuance wherever we go. Two faces, facing apart. Tools to push back on either side, to expand the ground on which the liberal Israeli can stand until it encompasses all of Israel, and until all people can live together in peace.
Times of Israel Blog
There is something notably lacking in a broad subset of the discussions held on the protracted conflict raging in the Holy Land; particularly by people who claim to champion the Palestinian cause. Its absence makes it very difficult to understand, or even speak properly about, the cycle of violence that persists in the region. What is so often ignored is the reality of Palestinian terror, or ‘political violence’ as wikipedia calls it, against civilians within Israel.
The world was shocked by the extent to which civilian blood was shed on October 7th; this shock only highlights how few people were aware that the targeting of civilians within Israel proper (as opposed to the West Bank or Gaza) is a constant occurrence. While people complain that Israel fails to distinguish between civilian and military targets, the Palestinian cause has never even proposed that it should make such a distinction. This is because, at its root, large swathes of the movement consider the very existence of the state of Israel to be an injustice — not the occupation of the West Bank, or the encroaching settlements, or the blockade of Gaza. Ignoring the obvious challenges this belief presents to the peace process, it creates a situation in which resistance-action, supposedly for the benefit of the Palestinians, actually harms them by damaging Israeli faith that there is a partner for peace in the region.
The average Israeli has no interest in ‘maintaining the occupation’ or ‘oppressing non-Jews’, though this seems to be a prevalent narrative in anti-Zionist discourse. Israelis are real people and would rather get on with their lives. The reality of a mandatory draft is that nobody wants to do the work. Nobody likes fighting. Nobody wants to get hurt. The 18-year-olds called up consider it slave labour. But when the average Israeli waits at a bus stop they can never know which incoming car is going to plow through the crowd. When they get on a train they never know who is going to choose that very moment to begin a suicidal shooting spree, or try and stab them in the back. These fears are not unfounded. Since 2000 almost 1,500 Israeli citizens have been killed in terror attacks. It’s important to note that many of these attacks do not occur in the occupied territories. Many take place in Tel Aviv, Israel’s centre of progressive, left wing, thought. These attackers are not locals defending their land from settlers, but individuals that chose to cross the border into Israel to perpetrate violent acts. If they consider themselves refugees, or expelled, they are so from a place they have never actually lived, attacking people who have never lived anywhere else. It is this fear — that at any moment even the Israelis that condemn the occupation, hate Bibi, deplore the settlements, and care deeply about Palestinian rights, could be attacked in the streets — that motivates the average Israeli to serve in the IDF.
The occupation, therefore, represents for Israelis the potential for control over what would otherwise be their own wanton slaughter. It manifests, in practice, as series of control points (borders, checkpoints) and as the constant activity of security forces (IDF, Police, ISA) to thwart potential attacks. It is well known that this infringes on Palestinian freedoms. What is not well known is that for every attack that succeeds tens if not hundreds are thwarted. It’s very difficult to find data on how many attacks are prevented every day, for obvious reasons, but soldiers that serve in the West Bank report constantly foiling plots to kill Israelis — claims supported by the caches of weapons/explosives confiscated from the houses raided. There is constant complaint and criticism regarding IDF raids in the West Bank, but very little consideration of why soldiers would choose to put themselves at risk by entering dangerous territory, unless there was an actual strategic purpose. That purpose is the identification and prevention of these violent acts of terror. Ultimately, it is effective.
Now, in practice, I don’t think that Israel can hide behind its guns for ever. Control with a choking, vice-like, grip is not a long term solution, and only peace can bring true security. But naivety on the behalf of Israelis will bring neither peace nor security. Israelis have to contend with constant threats to their lives, and so asking them to stop the occupation is asking them to leave themselves wide open to attack. The width of Israel, at its middle, is less than 15km. It is incredibly easy to get to Tel Aviv from the West Bank. The border fence itself is incredibly porous, and while it is effective in reducing these attacks, it can’t stop them entirely. This risk means that steps towards peace must come from the side of the Palestinians. They have to prove that if Israel weakens its security apparatus it won’t pay in dead Jews. If you want to expand Palestinian freedom, you have to show that it won’t cost Israeli lives. The Palestinian authority has failed, profoundly, to limit the terror that emanates from the West Bank, leaving Israel to mange it in a process that only tightens tensions and breeds violence.
It must also be noted that, purely numerically, the Palestinians have suffered greater losses — this whataboutism is exactly the reason conversations about Palestinian violence either go nowhere or never begin in the first place — but Israeli violence does not spawn in a vacuum, and it is not maintained for it’s own sake. Terror attacks within Israel proper are common enough that the average Israeli fears a regular threat to their person. This is the perception that underlies support for parties like the Likud and continued support for the occupation, even from those who criticise its moral and legal standing. Israel is a democracy, and Israelis will vote in accordance with their own interests. While peace is a priority, security is paramount, therefore fearful Israelis will vote for aggressive security measures. In this way Palestinian violence hurts Palestinians more than anybody else. And this is why it doesn’t matter who has lost more. It is the justified perception of danger that motivates Israeli voters. Violence radicalises the Israeli population. This became abundantly clear on October 7th, but began long before. It’s been frequently claimed that the war in Gaza will bring about a new generation of terrorists, but people tend to forget the inverse of this claim: October 7th destroyed the faith of many Israelis in a peaceful solution. It crystallised the worry that there are people, merely kilometres in every direction, that want to kill every single Jew in the region. Israelis don’t see Palestinians as fighting for their ‘liberation’ in the now occupied territories. They see them as fighting to destroy the entire Jewish state. Under such conditions why would any Israeli want to dismantle the occupation? They have been told, verbatim, by the Palestinian leadership and civilians alike that the IDF is the only thing keeping them alive. You cannot ask them to sign their own death warrant.
If Palestinians were to constrain their ‘resistance’ to the West Bank (this means not shooting a single rocket from Gaza) for any reasonable amount of time, Israelis that live within the green line could start to feel a sense of security that would allow them to support withdrawal, like they did from Gaza in 2005. If the average Israeli could say to themselves, in good faith ‘I live in Israel, not Palestine, and therefore I have nothing to fear from people trying to liberate Palestine,’ it would change perspective of the entire country. Unfortunately, this is not the reality. The pro-Palestine movement does not want to create a Palestinian state next to Israel, but rather a Palestinian state instead of Israel. Even the more moderate Palestinian leadership, Fatah, encourages violence against Israel, with their pay-for-slay program. This means that in practise there is no good faith movement from within Palestine working to create the conditions under which Israel could remove the occupation without endangering its civilians.
The average Israeli is well aware of this. How could they not be? You’d be hard pressed to find somebody who hasn’t lost a friend to these attacks. But the international community is completely unaware because shootings and stabbings in Israel proper are so regular they hardly make the news.
This is the lived reality of Israelis, and their half of the story matters too. If peace is actually your objective, and you believe that dismantling the occupation and creating a Palestinian state will bring about that goal, then you should advocate for the creation of a situation in which it is in Israel’s interest to take action towards those ends. To show Israelis that this future is possible. But violence against Israeli civilians acts as a direct counter to these goals. You will never convince the Jews to allow themselves to be vulnerable by trying to murder them. Supporting Palestinian violence as ‘resistance’ only degrades the situation for the Palestinians themselves. Real peace will come when the Palestinian people decide to condemn violence from within instead of paying for it with international aid and celebrating it with sweets. To reiterate: violence against Israeli civilians doesn’t represent resistance to the occupation, but resistance to the existence of the Israeli state. And the Jews have nowhere else to go, so they will never stop fighting back.
The lived reality of diaspora Jews is that everywhere they have been, they have been subject to oppression, expulsion, and calls for extermination. While the rest of the world may have (at least officially) left this in the past, in Israel this reality persists; the explicitly stated aims of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are to destroy all of Israel. Their calls for the destruction of the state of Israel come loud and clear. Polls in Palestinian Territories show that the majority of the civilian population believes in this goal. They do not recognise the validity of the existence of any Jewish state between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea.
There is no end to the criticism Israel deserves, and as long as there is state sanctioned violence, no matter the potential justifications, there ought to be those who keep a sharp eye on the state and censure it. This provides a valuable incentive to do better. With that said, Israeli violence serves the purpose of protecting Israeli lives. Palestinian violence serves no other purpose than endangering Israelis. There is no realistic argument to be made that it protects Palestinians, or that will make things better for them or bring them any closer to a day where there is peace in the region. The notion of violent resistance is merely the progeny of the single minded preference for war over peace that the Arab world has displayed for over 70 years now. It is clearly not serving the Palestinians. It’s time to try a different tactic. There must be a movement within the Free Palestine camp to condemn Palestinian violence and support a moderate, non-violent, path towards a two state solution. Quite simply, until Israelis do not fear for their lives in the streets of Tel Aviv, Palestine will never be free.
Times of Israel Blog
Expanded:
Or
The weaponised word salad of the Pro-Palestine movement and how to counter it.
The events of October 7th 2023 have catapulted the discourse around the ‘legitimacy’ of the existence of the state of Israel to the forefront of public consciousness. There is far more talking than listening and discussions are conducted for victory, not truth. In such instances rhetoric tends to overpower logic and can make it difficult to discern perspectives from facts. Such an environment becomes especially toxic in the modern milieu of legal and social democracy (the former through votes, the latter through likes).
It can be very difficult then, in this maelstrom of propaganda and fury, for the honest and intellectually curious individual to find solid footing. This isn’t helped by the, now overtly, biased media outlets on which we rely. I’d like to assist the well intentioned layman in this essay by drawing attention to, and explicating, one of the most common tools used to spread disinformation: language itself.
As George Orwell put it in his essay Politics and the English Language ‘The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism.’
‘When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer…'
To understand the effects of language on thought it’s important to examine how language itself is not value neutral. The simplest example of this is to consider the word ‘quality’. A ‘quality’ of something is its standard, or feature, and yet to describe something as being ‘quality’ is to attribute it value. The Palestinian movement has a long history of abusing language by making outrageous claims and then withdrawing to 'technical definitions' when challenged. This technique plays off the difference between the value laden nature of language and it’s facade of neutrality as merely a ‘tool’ for communication. It is actually a tactic promoted by the modern left, although popular amongst all authoritarian movements (think 1984 newspeak), and there's an interesting philosophical history to it. (For those interested see Foucault’s concept of knowledge/power and Derrida’s deconstructionism). The subtle power afforded by the abuse of language comes from weaponising the seemingly neutral realm of communication itself.
In the case of this specific conflict there are several phrases that have been forcibly inserted into the discourse. When people say the word genocide it comes with all the connotations of the Nazi death camps in WWII. This is why the pro-Palestine movement is so adamant about labelling this war a genocide. It's as offensive as it possibly could be to Jews — to compare them to Nazis. At the core this is the goal: To offend and reject Jews, and to paint them in the worst possible light. When challenged, they retreat to the 'technical definition' referring to intent, claiming to know the inner workings of Israeli minds better than the Israelis who deny the accusations (this highlights a separate problematic issue: the ‘official’ definition of genocide itself is based on intent, which is subjective, and therefore places the burden of proof on the internal mental features of the perpetrator*).
A parallel discussion that helps clarify this point is the heated debate around abortion in America. While one side is pro-Life, the other is not pro-Death. And the antithesis to the pro-Choice movement is not pro-Rape or pro-Coercion. Phrasing clearly effects perspective. So, are we talking about a defensive war, or an offensive genocide? The language we use to describe the situation determines our reality to a greater degree than the facts on the ground.
This general trend persists, and can be noted in a series of other terms that have been strong-armed into the Israel-Palestine debate lexicon. Apartheid is a term used to refer to the racist regime of discrimination in South Africa. When people call Israel an apartheid regime they're attempting to draw a comparison with South Africa, specifically to condemn Israel for being racist. When the facts are considered honestly, that Israel treats its Arab citizens better than any other country in the Middle East, or that Arabs can vote, and have representation, and are equal in the eyes of the law, critics retreat to talking about the West Bank. When shown that the West Bank is not a part of Israel, and therefore not subject to Israeli laws, they retreat to complaining about settlers. This is a legitimate complaint, but its far away from the original implication that Israel is comparable to South Africa. This is the radical claim — retreat to technicalities technique at work.
With that said, it's important to acknowledge that Israel as a state isn’t perfect, and to understand why Israel would have a system that discriminates within its borders (Note the Nation State Law of 2018). Israel has an interest in prioritising some citizens over others because Israel, like all states, exists for a purpose. The purpose of the state of Israel is to protect a historically oppressed group (Jews) by allowing them to self govern in their homeland. If Israel wants to appeal to liberal democratic/Western values it needs to allow all people equal rights under law, but if Jews become a minority in their own country (and Jews are a massive minority in the region) then the state will fail to perform its function. This is the tension between Israel’s Jewish and Democratic character. So Israel might consider enforcing a system of inequality before the law (which would lead to accusations of apartheid) but it would be entirely incomparable to South Africa. While the South African regime was built on a premise of white racial superiority, Israel is built on a premise of minority protection. This distinction is what is intentionally being erased by accusations of ‘apartheid’.
To reiterate:
Israel is an attempt to provide an oppressed people with a homeland, under the modern conception of self determination and in response to the historic treatment of Jews at the hands of non-Jewish leadership.
South Africa wanted to maintain a system of racial superiority upheld by a minority foreign population (who importantly were already the ruling class elsewhere).
These are not comparable. The weaponisation of words like apartheid hijacks the connotation of the words to smuggle implications. What the pro-Palestine movement wants to say is that Israel is a racist supremacist state, and therefore should be dismantled, like South Africa was. This is anti Zionist, and it is also antisemitic because it applies a double standard to Jews. There are many countries that provide legal priority to certain groups, especially when it comes to maintaining some level of ethnic nationalism (China, Japan, Ireland to name a few) that don't receive the same treatment.
Any reasonable discussion of the issue, with the facts on the ground acknowledged, leaves us far from justifying an easy accusation. It would be, as many things in Israel are, a complicated and nuanced issue. Such accusations are, additionally, deeply offensive, but offending Jews is not a problem because Jews don't count.
The problem with this kind of loaded rhetoric is that it is manipulative and hard to argue with. Note how many words I needed to use just to refute the one? And if we’re being honest, how many people are more likely to recall simple ideas over lengthy explanatory rebuttals? Levying loaded, accusatory, catchy accusations that take time and mental effort to dismantle is a tactic in and of itself. Such manipulation is powerfully insidious because it robs you of your agency to make up your mind about the conflict by assuming the conclusion in the premise. In such an environment, your thoughts aren’t your own. If we're arguing whether or not it's an apartheid state, we've already accepted that a legal system that prioritises one people over another is a bad thing (yes, it is antithetical to Western democratic values, but protecting minorities is not antithetical to liberal values, and this tension exists in all democratic systems). Analogies hide as much as they reveal, and so every time Israel is compared to something else, ask yourself, what do they want to show me, and what do they want to hide?
I will address a few more examples to drive the point home, before I reach for solutions.
I worked at a summer camp as a councillor for teenagers, and one day an Australian girl approached me and asked me something in a deeply bashful manner:
‘Adam can I ask you a question?’ ‘Is Jew an insult? I was told that I can’t call people that?’
I laughed. Here was another prime example of how the war over the the value of words was being fought, and this front has been open for a thousand years. I answered her simply:
‘Some people are Jews, some people are not. It’s not an insult to call somebody a Jew. The people who believe it is an insult have already decided that to be Jewish is a bad thing and then, after the fact, use the word that way. It’s like being called a woman. You’re a woman, and you’re not insulted when somebody calls you a woman. And yet if somebody complains that you “throw like a girl” it doesn’t mean inherently that you throw badly, but it means they’ve already decided that girls throw badly. Do you see the problem?’
I think I made my point clear, and the same confusion is now heavily prevalent in a more insidious way. As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained, antisemitism is a virus that mutates. Under the Romans it was first a condemnation of a social minority, and later an issue of faith. Under the Nazis it was a problem with the Jewish ‘race'. Now it is a condemnation of a movement, and that movement is Zionism. Many people therefore, have found themselves confused. Is Zionist a slur?
The simple answer is: absolutely not. Zionism, by definition, is the support for a Jewish state in the homeland of the Jews. Any intellectually consistent liberal should support this. It is the right afforded to minority groups to self determine. It’s a right that Muslims, Christians, the Japanese, the Irish, and many other ethnic and religious groups have and are not questioned for having.
The more complicated answer, goes back to ‘throw like a girl’. If you’ve decided, as a premise, that the Jews shouldn’t have a state, then support for a Jewish state is a bad thing. The people who use Zionist as a slur, then, are engaged in the same bad faith argument that I highlighted above. They wish to conceal the premise in the conclusion. To be a Zionist is touted as being inherently anti-Palestinian. It is to be an imperialist, to be a murderer, or a white supremacist, or any other number of generically negative descriptors. None of which fall categorically under the definition of the term. Such a move leaves outside observers feeling confused, and rightfully so. But for those without the courage or the intellectual curiosity to question it such assumptions often slip by unchallenged.
Two more phrases that are forcibly inserted, and that tie into each other, are settlement and colonialism. Israel is described as a ‘settler colonial project’. Here the language is being abused to a degree that makes it almost unrecognisable. Unpacking such phraseology is difficult, but important. It works on multiple levels, leaning on the value laden ‘colonialism’ to play the classic bait and retreat. When Israel is described as a ‘settler’ state the immediate implication is that all of the country was ‘settled’ by foreigners. When referred to in Arab media there is no question that this is the claim. All of Israel, from the river to the sea, is foreign occupation of Arab land. It does not matter that there were Jews in the land for millennia who did not ‘settle’, it does not matter that many were exiled from their countries in and fled as refugees to the land, it does not matter that the early Jews coming from abroad to live in the region purchased land and immigrated like anyone else. It does not even matter that the very presence of Arabs in the Levant is itself a result of settlement. What matters is that the term ‘settler’ has implications that a westerner knows implicitly. It conjures images of European settlement in the Americas, in Africa, and Australia. Of a foreign people who came, took, and would not leave. When the claim, that all of Israel is a settlement, is questioned the accusers can retreat to talking about Israel’s settlements in the West Bank. The West Bank settlements are problematic for a whole host of reasons, but they do not justify the broader claims made that all of Israel is a settler state. Opposition to the settlements does not make one an anti-Zionist. See again how the technique allows for extremist claims to be made about the illegitimacy of the whole state, and then withdrawn from if actually pressed on. Something similar happens with claims of colonialism.
In an age abounding with academic critical theory, post modern analyses of complex problems have given way to flat abominations that represent exactly what post modernism intended to criticise. The valuable critical lens of post-colonial thought has devolved into a popular and reductive meta-narrative. As the story has become: Greedy white people enslaved poor non-white populations, and the modern world is a product of such a dynamic. Of course any serious post modern thinker would reject such a simplistic world view, but nuance is not for the masses. Instead we have a situation in which colonialism has become a condemnatory buzzword implying a one-way direction of extortion and exploitation. While I won’t comment on colonialism as a whole, it’s easy to see the problem with a simplistic view of history, and the power such a story invests in the world ‘colonialism’. This narrative has become the default, and is the premise slipped into the conclusion when Israel is accused of being a colonial entity.
There are several problems with this kind of argument. First and foremost, it represents a blatant abuse of the English language in refusing to acknowledge the very simple fact that the meaning of words change over time. While early Zionist settlers openly admitted to wanting to create a ‘colony’ in Israel, their phraseology represented the common parlance of the period, specifically the age of empires (in contrast to the modern age of the nation-state). The equation, then, between their attempt to create a colony, and the colonialism of the age, seems straightforward. Jews made a colony, therefore it is colonialism. But this kind of reasoning is lazy and anachronistic. The colonialism discussed and condemned in modern historical analysis refers to the imperial policy of setting up foreign colonies of grand empires for the purpose of resource extraction. This is what the analogy, that draws comparisons between the colony of Israel and the colonies of America or India, attempts to conceal. There was no Jewish empire that the jews all came from and could return to, and the goal was never resource extraction but homecoming and nation-building. Furthermore the comparison takes, as its premise, the one-directional reduction that Europe oppressed the world, and that nobody who isn’t white has ever done anything bad. It erases the pressures that forced the Jews out of Europe and out of West Asia. It erases the imperial history of the Arab-Muslims in the region, the Jewish connection to the land, and the violence directed from the former to the later. All this with a word. As you can see, language is not value neutral.
So when somebody declaims Israel as a ‘settler colonial state’ they are not arguing a point in good faith, but packaging myriad biases into buzzwords. This is what allows them to call violent acts of rape and torture ‘de-colonial resistance’ (Such terminology serves to ‘intellect-wash' atrocities with reference to critical theorist Franz Fanon). If it is de-colonial, it is both justified and good. When pressed, the masks shifts a little: ‘Decolonisation was never going to be peaceful’. Fanon actively advocated for violence. Note, they won’t say ‘The removal of the Jews must be violent,’ but that’s what is meant. As Orwell puts it, ’The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.’ As the good can be painted bad, so the bad can be painted good. Language is not neutral, and it’s abuse is making honest discussion and comprehension impossible. Ultimately this makes it even more difficult to criticise Israel (and there is much to criticise) and makes real change less and less likely. Orwell again: ‘language [should be used] as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.’
How should Israelis, and any honest intellectual or free thinker, combat this?
Honestly, I don’t have a clear-cut solution, because it’s complicated. But we can identify two potential courses of action. It may require a reverse weaponisation of language in kind. I object to this because I think it's dishonest, and because it will create a situation in which both sides exist in distinct camps unable to communicate at all, and therefore unable to resolve issues (this is what the weaponisation of language is already doing, it is not a force for peace, merely a weapon to crush the Jewish state). Despite these worries the enemies of the Jews have never shied away from being dishonest, so it was always going to be an uphill battle, and the situation may require unfortunate concessions.
A more optimistic option is one that treats all individuals as agents that engage intelligently and honestly with the relevant questions and reaches for a deeper understanding of the problems at hand. As pointed out before, to debunk the use of a single word ‘colonialism’ or ‘genocide’ requires an extended explanation of the comparison between the literal meaning of a word and its implication/value. In a world where a seeming majority are not willing to engage in a nuanced and honest manner, the task becomes to distinguish between those who argue to win and those who argue for truth. The former can be disregarded, or perhaps made aware of their own intellectual dishonesty (‘Why do you believe this?’ Is often a good starting point to transition the conversation away from point scoring towards understanding, similarly ‘Are you asking me or telling me?’), and this leaves energy to devote to the latter group who will listen and consider before responding. The goal is to investigate the conclusions hidden in the premise so that they can be unpacked and scrutinised. The answer to ‘Do you condemn the genocide in Israel?’ Should not be a yes, or a no, but a rejection of the premise.
Orwell provides some help on this front: ‘This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.’ Terms like ‘settler colonialist state’ attempt to cement a reality that does not exist, and can only do so if left unchallenged. Orwell points out that this happens insidiously, ‘if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.’
For those who feel like they are losing rhetorical footing to the weaponised word salad of buzzwords and BS, hopefully this will help explain your sense of confusion. It is a challenging but important battle to fight.
*Kate Manne in her book ‘Down Girl, The Logic of Mysogyny’ generates a full bodied takedown of ‘definitions’ based on the intentions of the perpetrator, arguing that we cannot define misogyny as a ‘hatred of women’ because it would leave the eradication of misogyny up to men to say ‘Well, I simply don’t hate women, so there!’.
Mental Floss
“What is the meaning of life?” is simultaneously one of the oldest questions in philosophy and a relatively new concept: While the quest for purpose stretches back farther than the ancient Greek thinkers, it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that Arthur Schopenhauer really started asking the question of der Sinn des Lebens (“the meaning of life” in his native German). He concluded that it is the “will to life,” or the instinctive striving, and that peace comes from eradicating that will. Many thinkers have addressed the question of the meaning of life to various ends, and their work can help us confront the same problem ourselves—though their conclusions are rarely straightforward.
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) earned himself the title of the “father of modern ethics” while living what is widely accepted as an exceptionally boring life. So boring, in fact, that according to legend, his neighbors claimed to be able to set their watches by his daily walk.
Because his work came before Schopenhauer’s, Kant didn’t specifically address the question “what is the meaning of life,” but his work engaged with the theme directly, and is so seminal that it’s worth addressing. It’s likely that Kant would have answered one of two ways.
Kant wanted to create a moral system that would allow a person to derive the content of their moral actions (what ought to be done in any individual instance) from the definition of morality (the very essence of the word ought). He felt that this would allow us to formulate a morality based entirely on rationality, which would in turn allow us to discover synthetic a priori knowledge—knowledge derived purely from reason, as opposed to experience that tells us something previously unknown about the world—regarding the moral value of our actions. The result is his “categorical imperative,” which he outlines in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals:
“I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.”
According to Kant’s view, an action can be deemed acceptable only if the underlying motivating principle, or maxim, could be applied universally without contradiction. The classic example is lying: If everybody lied, then nobody would believe anybody, making it impossible to lie. This only tells us what not to do, but it has profound implications: If we consider ourselves and the world we live in hard enough, we can derive objective standards by which to live.
Kant’s second possible response can be found in his Critique of Pure Reason, in which he attempted to respond to ideas posited by Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). Kant outlined what he believed were the conditions under which experience is possible, arguing that all knowledge is the result of a dual process: “Intuition and concepts therefore constitute the elements of all our cognition, so that neither concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way nor intuition without concepts can yield a cognition. Both are either pure or empirical.” In other words, thought is a combination of sense data gained through what Kant called our “Intuition” and interpretive frameworks called “Concepts.”
But Kant didn’t believe that we could receive all of our sense data or our concepts unfiltered. He felt that there were a priori forms of these faculties that shaped how we could experience the world—and that one form that concepts take is cause and effect.
So when Kant said “the pure or universal laws of nature, which, without being based on particular perceptions, contain merely the conditions of their necessary union in experience,” he was making the case that universal laws (like cause and effect) are actually the product of our minds at work, allowing us to have comprehensible experience. By this reasoning, cause and effect (and space and time) don’t necessarily exist outside of our minds. The upshot of this is that life, an effect, might not have any meaning, a cause, outside of the processes of our minds.
Kant reconciles these views with the ultimate philosophical cop out—he turns to God—but these strands are picked up and expanded on by other great thinkers.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is one of our most misunderstood philosophers thanks to the way his sister and literary executor, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, twisted his works after his death. Per Britannica, she “edited them without scruple or understanding” and “gained a wide audience for her misinterpretations.” Even so, he was a deeply troubled thinker whose work would go on to influence millions.
Nietzsche rejected Schopenhauer’s idea that all life is driven by a “will to live,” noting that some beings die for their goals. Instead, he suggested a “will to power” in which living beings want to “vent” their strength (in other words, affirm and actualize their unique individual potential).
But what is our individual strength? Nietzsche rejected Kant’s preference for pure reason, instead turning to psychology to solve the problem: “For psychology is once more the path to the fundamental problems,” he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil. According to Nietzsche, you must cast off societal, religious, and historical expectations in order to become a “free spirit” or one who thinks for themselves (a philosopher). Only this will allow you to move “beyond good and evil,” or the morality that the world imposes upon us. Instead, he writes, we must search for what is “at the bottom of our souls, quite ‘down below,’ there is certainly something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined, chosen questions. In each cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable ‘I am this’; a thinker cannot learn anew about man and woman, for instance, but can only learn fully—he can only follow to the end what is ‘fixed’ about them in himself.”
In Nietzsche’s view, with enough psychological introspection (although he notes that this may not always be enough, or perfectly accurate, on its own), we can find our own unique purpose—buried under layers of society and convention—that we should then strive to actualize at any cost.
Albert Camus
Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French-Algerian philosopher, author of The Stranger, and a leading thinker of the group associated with the philosophical movement existentialism (though Camus rejected the association, and his position in relation to the movement remains an area of active discussion). His ideas about the meaning of life can be seen as a successor to Kant’s second potential conclusion. Camus realized that it’s human nature when seeing an effect to look for a cause. He also accepted as a premise that all previous attempts at finding an objective “meaning” of life had failed. Existentialist philosophers call this gap—between our need for an explanation and reality’s inherent lack of one—“the absurd.”
Camus likened human existence in the face of the absurd to that of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, a man punished by the gods to roll a rock up a hill for all eternity … only to have it roll back down just before he succeeds. Camus’s response to this situation is to live lucidly in defiance of reality. As he wrote in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” By realizing that meaning is there to be made instead of handed to us, we actually gain the ability to find things meaningful—and are therefore better off for it.
Times of Israel Blog
My flight from Tel Aviv touched down at Heathrow on Monday the 2nd and I took the Jubilee line to Kings Cross before switching for my journey to Cambridge. I was nervous, starting third year, but excited to catch up with my English friends after a summer apart. A week later, on Friday night, I said Kidush — blessed the wine — at dinner before we convened for the start of term BOP (Semi ironic Cambridge slang for Big Old Party). We’d convened at my girlfriend’s house and I was working hard to convince everybody to book tickets to Israel over New Years, while they were still cheap. The atmosphere was jovial; I was tipsy, as is expected of a good Freshers Week.
Since that night most of my waking moments are consumed by the struggle not to cry. I’ve spent these days, in the idyllic, sunny streets of a bustling beginning of a Cambridge term, alternating between shock and despair. The pressure has sat in my face for so long I feel like I’m wearing a rubbery mask. I might as well be. I can’t talk to anybody about this. As I look around me, there is no indication here that my home is under existential threat.
My dad called me at 8am on Saturday morning and I rolled over and ignored him. He rang again two hours later, at which point I’d read the news and seen the images. Israel was under attack, there were armed terrorists in the streets, and they’d taken hostages young and old. Bodies were mutilated and paraded to mass applause. My friends all dragged me to brunch where I watched hungover students chat about last night’s hookups. The dissonance made me nauseous.
At first I was simply dumbstruck at the horror of the reality. Israelis are well acquainted with the hatred of their neighbours — we live with the constant knowledge that violence could spark at any moment — but it’s rare that the security system fails to such an extreme degree. With time a creeping anxiety set in. I served in a special forces team during my mandatory service. I knew full well that the appropriate military response would likely be a ground invasion, and that the casualty rate for such an operation would be far too high. My team was drafted the next day and I was stricken by the dilemma: Do I fly back to die?
This question persists as I sit through lectures and don’t hear a word. For the people around me nothing has changed. I can’t talk to anybody. An email went out to the student body offering thoughts and sympathy. Despite this, the University refuses to condemn the slaughter. The Palestinian society has released a statement in support of Hamas, deciding to turn to justification before bothering with sympathy. I see students wondering the campus in Keffiyehs, a symbol of Palestinian solidarity. I hadn’t seen any before the border was breached and partygoers were massacred.
As of now the bodycount from the party alone sits around 260 — This is what it took to elicit outward support for Palestine. If I dwell on this too long it makes it difficult to breath. I was aware that on a university campus the general student sentiment sways Left. I consider myself Left leaning as well, but I didn’t realise how much of this sentiment is blind. In 2014 Hamas was convicted of torturing Palestinians and blaming it on Israel. Hamas regularly hides weapons caches in schools and hospitals. Hamas states in their charter, explicitly, that they reject the peace process in favour of Jihad. I’m not convinced that these beliefs are shared by Cambridge students, even muslim ones, even Palestinians, so the only justification I can think of is ignorance.
And this raises a separate question: How does a population of highly intelligent and engaged individuals remain so detached from, so ignorant of, the reality? The truth is beyond complex but the simple answer is propaganda. Propaganda and a modern first-world detachment from the realities of armed conflict. I can’t talk to anybody about this. So much effort is put into spreading lies and disinformation that nobody knows what is true, and support collapses along identity lines.
You don’t have to endorse Israel’s government (I don’t) to condemn the killing and kidnapping of civilians. The ignorance has evolved. It has transformed into a wilful ignorance of the humanity of Israelis. Of the history of the Jews. The hyper-academic rhetoric of “decolonisation” “Orientalism” and “oppressor/oppressed dynamics” hides the 2600 year old reality of Jewish discrimination. It hides the identities of the dancing boys and girls who were gunned down on Saturday morning. When Israel is described as a “European colonial project” people forget that there is no “Jewish Empire” to mimic that of the British or Dutch. When they say that European Jews stole indigenous land they forget that half of all Israelis are victims of violent expulsion from local Arab countries (Where are all the Iranian Jews now?).
I have a friend who flew home from New York a few days ago to fight. He said he couldn’t live with himself if he hadn’t because, in his words, “Ayn Li Eretz Acheret.” “I have no other land.” This is a well-worn sentiment in Israel. As a Jew with dual citizenship I’ve often wondered how true it is, but after witnessing Jewish owned businesses attacked in London, and seeing the responses of students around me, it’s hard to feel otherwise. I can’t talk to anybody about this either, they wouldn’t understand.
At what point does it stop being politics? How many civilians need to die to overcome the cognitive bias? There are already more Israeli casualties today than were incurred in the 1982 Lebanon war. Coming back from my lectures I see, scrawled in graffiti on an electricity box “FREE GAZA”. I wonder if this is what they intended to celebrate when they wrote this? I wonder if the senseless violence makes any difference to them? I wonder what they’d say if they could meet the friends my friends will never meet again? I can’t talk to anybody about this. The world feels very hostile, all of a sudden, until I remember that it is because I am here, in England, while my friends and family are there. I can’t tell if this makes it better or worse. The ignorance I witness in a place dedicated to knowledge sickens me.
I have since spoken to my team. They’re in good spirits and are training hard. They don’t know what’s to come, but they’re resigned to it. One summed it up neatly: “It’s our shift now, like the generations that came before us.” This is what it means to be the New Jew. The Jew that is done being a victim. This is what it means to be Israeli. They know full well that this is serious, but the most important thing we learned serving together is how to maintain a sense of humour. And they said nobody will hold it against me if I don’t come back. When the team gets the dog shift nobody resents the person who’s left to rest.
Cambridge Language Colletive
Etgar Keret has said that his punchy style is inspired by his own asthma. Struggling to get out even a short sentence inspired a certain urgency that in turn became a word economy with powerful effect. I’m sure there was a lot more than just asthma that inspired his style — Keret began writing in response to a lost sense of personal identity during his mandatory military service — but it’s particularly poignant to consider the conversion of forced brevity into strength. It’s interesting that he chooses to use less words, rather than more, in the service of his most foundational themes: nuance and complexity. But, in a way, it makes sense. He states in an interview: “I loved the time when they would invite writers to interpret reality because it was so complex,” encapsulating his own perception of his purpose as a writer in his distinctively concise manner. There is something sharply incisive about this attitude. Equally incisive is his style. His sentences are short and informal, but in no way lacking. With each one he seems to be saying that the world is too complete in its complexity to be appreciated as it should be.
Keret simplifies just enough for us to begin to be confused, and no more. Here, art is working directly to engage and enrich life with a directness that is almost noble. He begins his anthology The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God with a short story of the same name and sets the tone. The subject matter is doubly simple and intellectual, his personal critique of utilitarianism: a bus driver who will not stop for anybody even a second late because the fifteen minutes he could be saving them are less than the thirty seconds wasted when multiplied across all of his passengers. It is both philosophical and accessible, performing the signpost function of informing the reader that these stories are thinking stories, made to be engaged with, mulled over, chewed a bit. Keret contrasts the efficiency of the bus driver’s logic with the heartbreak of a man’s need to get to a date with a beautiful girl, providing a familiar criticism of utilitarianism – its impracticality in matters of life and love – before flipping it again as the man is stood up. The reader is left without a conclusion but the point is made clearly: our assumptions and systems need questioning, especially in the face of reality. Keret uses this premise to force the reader to stare into the essence of the stories to come, and then abuses this focus by setting up similar philosophical-seeming premises without equally accessible ‘meaning’.
If you’re still in this headspace four short stories later then he’s got you. Keret’s Uterus is obscure and complex, using the impossible image of a ‘beautiful uterus’ to combine symbolic meanings without coherent release. The story is silly, confusing, and satisfyingly circular without ever really getting to a point. Keret’s ‘beautiful uterus’ is loaded with biological and cultural significance, without actual reference towards a distinct meaning. If you’re still trying to explore the philosophical underpinnings and their representations, as is implied you should be by The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God, you’ll be left befuddled. A uterus so beautiful it was displayed in a museum, rescued by eco terrorist-pirates and released into the wild amongst the dolphins? Good luck fitting that into your predetermined worldview, or any box you have on hand. As Keret says in an interview: “Ambiguity is a global taboo… We live in very very strange times where people want to control everything.” By encouraging you to analyse his work through a structured framework, Keret has set the pins up just to knock them down. He performs this narrative catch and release at both the macro and the micro level. In Goodman he begins by talking about the murder of an innocent minister and his wife. He has the narrator and his girlfriend receive the news and continues ‘Later, in bed, we were really getting into it when suddenly she started crying. I stopped right away, ‘cause I thought I was hurting her, but she said I should go on, and that her crying was a good sign actually.’ At first it seems as if she’s crying in response to the murder, but immediately this is shown not to be the case. Inclusion of details that are seemingly irrelevant raises the very question of relevance. The world is richer, but less linear. What do we consider essential? Does this presume some kind of underlying, necessary essence? It’s only after the fact that we can reassemble the pieces and align them into a neat little narrative in line with what we already know to be the case. Hindsight tells a story, but present facts are just that: facts. We trim the fa(c)t, choosing what we like in order to make sense of what is presented to us. Keret’s stories deny us this neatness. His worlds are, like the world that we deny, messy.
It’s no surprise that an Israeli author feels the need to express that “reality is very fluid”. Keret’s own life, as seen in his nuclear family, seems unable to decide on what world it lives in. His brother is an anti-state Anarchist peace activist and his sister is a settler in the West Bank. An interesting feature of having an entire country draft to the military after high school is that it breaks the school-university-job track that most people in the Western world are bound to unconsciously. Once the illusion of structure is gone it doesn’t come back, and the rigid frameworks of modern life feel like awkward suggestions. Many Israelis don’t start studying till their late twenties, but when, or moreso if they do, it’s because they want to, not because they ‘should’ (although, interestingly, Israel has one of the highest rates of college-aged citizens in the world).
Breaking the Pig, the story of Pesachson the porcelain pig, sets perspectives at ends. The next, Cocked and Locked, is a totally distinct yet similar inversion of place and perspective. Each story builds up and strips down interpretations of events as they progress, playing with the paradox of passed opportunity and reformed beliefs. Keret weaves complex nets of meaning that attach in a circular fashion to deny simple interpretation. Most end with a miniature reflection, considering or reconsidering the narrative. It’s the power of hindsight that allows us to contextualise our experiences, but this context is frequently what muddles us up. Some of Keret’s pieces take on a magical-realist tone, but many don’t. In both the realist and the magical we end with the same sense of perspective sliding uncertainty, unified in the conclusion that it’s not that simple. What’s funny is how we lack this sentiment day-to-day, in a world infinitely more complex than any vignette. Keret manages to shake our certainty by encouraging deep consideration of a carefully curated set of instances. In this way, his work mirrors a Zen Kōan — What is the sound of one hand clapping? Would it have been better if they’d not found Rabin the kitten?
When I started this piece I had the anti-government pro-democracy protests in mind (as did Keret in his interview), but at the time of writing Israel is at war. The subject matter is now somehow more relevant than before. Keret talks about cutting through rhetoric to understand the nature of the Judicial reform that he resents. Now there is far more rhetoric, and annals of history, to cut into. I’ve heard almost no informed opinions on the current conflict, but, nonetheless, many many opinions indeed. The biggest mistake that I’ve noticed repeatedly is one of selective perspective. A focus on the children’s ward in a Gazan hospital will embitter you to the nature of the situation entirely, and probably leave you cynical and hurting. Zoom out only a couple of kilometres and you’ll reach the homes of Israelis slaughtered without warning. A little further and you’ll encompass the West Bank, and 75 years of occupation. If you step even further back and look at the region you’ll see Israel against the backdrop of it’s neighbours, a shining light of democracy and semi-secularism in a war torn region rife with extremism at worst and state mandated religion at best. Abstract yourself in one direction and you can read oppressor oppressed dynamics into the Israel-Palestine relationship. Go back not much further and we see relationships inverted. You can consider thousands of years of Jewish history, of pogroms and genocide — in the Middle East and Europe — and yet still maintain a sense of light and hope. Layers of perspective, bitter like an onion, flip flop sympathy from side to side.
Etgar means challenge in Hebrew. His mum gave him his name after he was born three months early and wasn’t expected to live at all. It is a name of defiance, and seems to sum up a legacy that he inherited from her before passing it onto his readers. Discussing his latest work, he explains that his mum “rebelled against any attempt to sum her up.” It seems as though Keret too is rebelling against definition, not for himself, but for all of us. This doesn’t, however, result in a kind of abstract postmodern neo-nihilism. Instead, what links all of Keret’s stories is a human connection that persists across his best efforts to veil it: the recognition that it is perspective that both gives and takes meaning, but originates from within us. His work, then, reads as a celebration of complexity and stands isolated as a bastion against the binary worldview that has spread across academia, media, and modern mass consciousness.
If you haven’t had a chance, I strongly recommend you get a copy of The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God.
Cambridge Zine - Dispatches
A month into my first term, my sister sent me two texts one after another. “How’s Cambridge have you found a wife?” And then immediately “any nice Jewish girls on campus?” I laughed. No, I responded, being still distinctly single, but it was funny - usually she only sends one text. She is absolutely dying for a sister-in-law but in the past the assumption that any potential candidates would be of the faith was a given. We live in Israel. My future wife’s religious beliefs aren’t necessarily that important to me (and my sister was definitely asking facetiously) but it gave me reason to pause, and think. This wasn’t the first time I’d been forced to consider what it means to be a Jew at a university with three colleges names after Jesus. After only a few months I was quickly experiencing what I had previously known only as a statistic: there just aren’t that many jews around.
Having lived in Israel since fourteen I’ve never really known what it means to be a Jew in isolation; to be honest, its strange. In Israel I don’t have to remember when the Holidays are because everybody is celebrating around me. I don’t have to explain that bagels are for cream cheese and salmon — this is common knowledge. Also, the hummus is great. Now that I’m away from home the responsibility falls on me alone. Not being particularly religious, the question of how and when to practise my faith is suddenly, for the first time in my life, relevant. I can no longer just go with the flow. Towards the end of Michaelmas term, I left the cosy confines of our college bar and cycled out into the cold to see the giant menorah lighting (Nine pronged Jewish candelabrum) in front of the University library. They were handing out small, personal menorahs for us to take home. I brought one back with me to college. At that Friday’s formal hall I got permission to light my small set of candles opposite the two story Christmas tree. I also drew a menorah on the blackboard at our college bar and titled my art piece in big block letters: “Happy Hanukkah!” Every night I added a little chalk flame. By the sixth night somebody had scrawled “Free Palestine” over it. I didn’t know how to react to that — I still don’t — so I left it as it was and moved on with my life. I too would like to “Free Palestine,” but I didn’t see what it had to do with the chalk drawing and my holiday well wishes. I realised I was carrying a second burden. I now have to think, and be proactive, about the Jew I want to be for me, but also about the Jew that I am for the people around me.
When a friend of mine felt comfortable cracking anti-Semitic jokes in my presence (only two weeks after meeting) I needed time to consider my response. Some of these jokes I'd made before at home, among Jewish friends, but it felt entirely different in this new context. I want to believe that nothing is too serious to be laughed at, but I also felt that the jokes came without an understanding of the context within which they were problematic. There was also a social element — If I think they’re funny, and laugh, does that display assent? Am I normalising antisemitism? Maybe she “gets it,” but does everybody else who hears them? Assuming I do take issue, am I to respond publicly, in the moment, or to take her aside later? What should I say to her that won’t sound patronising? After all, the goal is not to chastise but to foster understanding. Whatever the situation, I felt I needed to be intentional and authentic. In all cases this seems to ring true. I am learning what it means, to me, to be Jewish, alone. I hope to use intention and authenticity as my road map to navigate the uncertainty that lies ahead. And I will have to make my own hummus.
Cambridge Zine - Dispatches
Midway through my second Cambridge term I came to the realisation that I had been, for lack of a better word, “cancelled.” What this meant in practise was somewhat ambiguous. I am not on social media – there was no cascade of unfollows, thumbs downs, or dislikes. Instead I had been cancelled, at least supposedly, in the real world; people were being discouraged from interacting with me.
I found myself on the other end of a grudge I wasn’t aware was being held. I didn’t quite understand what had happened, or when, but it felt bad. Somebody was going around telling my friends to stay away from me. Then I became aware that an entire group-chat had been created specifically for the purpose of excluding me from conversations and events. I began to sense, as I meandered through college, that these friends didn’t want me around. Nothing had happened, and yet one day things were different. This was two weeks into my second ever term at university, and I was confused. (This isn’t a sob story though, but rather the tale of a slap in the face I probably needed.)
In Fresher’s week I’d made some friends and stuck with them all through term. I identified as part of a group. It might sound childish, and it probably was, but my undergraduate peers and I had clustered quickly and clung to each other for social support. It’s easy to understand why. Cambridge is huge, formidable, and notorious. I remember reading one piece of advice after applying over and over: “If you’re not nervous, think again”. But nerves are a part of life and they’re easier to manage with a crew at your back. We were even called “clique” — semi affectionately. It was comfortable.
Outside of this “clique”, however, I have another friend who likes to hang-out one on one. She’s shy, and quiet, and an absolute pleasure to spend time with — but she seems to lose her voice in big groups. So, we drink lots of tea. Enjoying her company makes it easier to reflect on how I spend time with other people, especially the friends that I interact with primarily in large groups. It helped me to notice how I interact with them, whether we met individually or as a collective. I think a lot of people have a sense that they, and others, behave differently when they are in a group. We formed, and met predominantly as, a group. I wasn’t aware of this as we were slotting ourselves into place, one beside another, but with time I came to recognise it for what it was.
In cementing our assorted assemblage so early we had all eased our transition into a daunting new environment. The process, after the fact, was almost archetypal. People have subscribed themselves to group identities, for security, across the all of history. When I discovered that things were being said about me behind my back, I was suddenly separated from that bubble of comfort. At first, I didn’t know what to do, and it seemed to me that I had lost all of my friends entirely. In reality, even removed from the group, I lost none of the strong individual relationships I had formed within it. My day to day routine remained almost entirely the same — and yet I had a feeling of loss.
I became quite fixated on this sense of loss. Nothing was gone in any real sense but, the group identity I hadn’t realised I was leaning on was no longer there. It was weird, missing something that I hadn’t even realised was important to me.
To put it mildly, I am a bit of a mopey person. So, I proceeded to mope for days on end, not dramatically, but sullenly and by myself. It was childish, but the entire situation felt childish, and I was unable to pull myself out of it. I walked around in a frump, and yet I was without a real care in the world: I had good friends and more time to spend with them individually. My degree is fun (English for goodness sakes!), and the sun has been shining an awful lot lately. In the face of all this, on a walk one day, my girlfriend decided to drill some sense into my wall of funk. “This is going to sound harsh,” She prepped me “but it’s naive to assume that the people you meet in your first week of your first undergraduate degree are going to be your best friends for life.”
Suddenly there was lavender on the air, the trees cast crisp sparkling shadows, and a bird was singing, at the very least. Her criticism embarrassed me in its correct simplicity. It cut through how fixated I’d become. I’d lost all perspective in only two months. We go to great pains not to settle for love, but often don’t notice ourselves settling in our friendships. We can’t stand to be alone for a minute, even to wait for something better. Ive seen people cling to groups that were only unhealthy for them, unwilling to risk friendship-bachelordom. In her wisdom she helped me realise that I can, and should, choose the people I want around me purposefully and slowly. And that’s just what I intend to do. It’s ok to not find your people at first, or after a while, or ever. It’s better than settling out of desperation. I clearly have a lot to learn at university, and most of it lies well outside the realm of medieval literature.
Cambridge Zine - Dispatches
I've noticed something lately: I haven’t heard the word “polarised” used this often since my third grade science class. Every discussion feels like an argument and nobody seems to agree on anything. It’s kind of weird actually. In a world of binary delineation, many people end up holding beliefs that don’t serve them. I believe this is what has become of the Left/Right political dichotomy.
In the spirit of “Boats Against the Current” [The theme of the issue this was submitted to] I would like to make an argument against both the politcal Left and the Right that will hopefully leave everybody feeling attacked — and ideally with something to think about.
Specifically, I’d like to address the simple question: Who is responsible for my life? And relate it to a psychological concept called “locus of control”, that divides neatly into external and internal. I believe that it is this binary distinction that undercuts (at least, partially, ideologically) modern political divides.
A quick example for clarity: Dave is poor. Why?
Should Dave have an external locus of control, he will feel that his poverty results from a poor economy, lack of inherited wealth, and unfortunate working environment.
Should Dave have an internal locus of control he will attribute his poverty to lack of work ethic or capability.
The political relevance is obvious.
Locus of control has, in recent years, become popularly accepted as an aspect of personality psychology. What this means on an individual level is that one’s locus of control is often not a perception of the world chosen actively, but rather developed passively, like other aspects of our personality. Additionally, there seems to be a lot of evidence supporting the idea that certain personality traits correlate with political beliefs. This implies, by extension, that our beliefs are not chosen logically, as a collation of our understanding of facts we know about the world, but rather are a result of our unique developmental process.
How we apply these beliefs, however, is just as important as what they are. Generally speaking, rational, mature adults feel that, in the spirit of fairness, their attitudes should be consistent; How they treat others is how they should treat themselves. We assume, therefore, that the ideals that should govern a country are the same as those that apply to our private lives. This preference for consistency is understandable, but does not benefit us. This is the crux of my argument.
Let me clarify: I believe that different situations demand different worldviews. Put like that it sounds obvious, and yet, conceptually, most arguments between the right and the left don’t take this into consideration.
I should preface this by saying that the personal/public distinction that I am making is not one of “at home” versus “outside”, but rather what attitudes we take towards ourselves, versus the attitudes we take towards others. Returning to the concept of locus of control, we can examine how having an internal, versus external, conception relates to public and private life. Specifically, regarding the attitudes we take towards failure (if everybody succeeded all the time it wouldn’t matter what attitude we took).
If you have an internal locus of control in your private life, you are inclined to feel a sense of control over your own life. If you fail, you must take responsibility for your failure, but this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Rather, you are able to recognise your role in the undesirable outcome and alter your behaviour going forward. This allows for self accountability a sense of agency, and the development of self worth.
If you have an internal locus of focus regarding other people however, you are inclined to believe that when they act badly, or fail, it is a result of a lack of motivation, ability, or sinister intention. You are less inclined to see the challenges they face, but rather their own shortcomings. This can breed resentment and a sense of disillusionment regarding others.
If you have an external locus of control regarding yourself, you are likely to feel that things happen to you. If you fail, you will view it as a result of external factors and feel discouraged to try again. If the causes of your failure lie outside yourself, then what use is there trying to change in response? An external locus of control, therefore, promotes a mindset that that avoids responsibility, accountability, and agency, and by extension causes an individual to feel disempowered.
The same external locus of control, applied to others, allows you to recognise them as individuals despite their failings. You will be more inclined to understand the difficulty of their situation, and to appreciate them irrespective of their situation. This fosters compassion.
This is why people on the right hate “liberal snowflakes”. They feel that the application of an external locus of control to themselves allows them to play the victim at every turn, taking no responsibility for their own lives and always blaming others .
This is why people on the left hate “conservative boomers”. They feel that they have no compassion for people who’ve encountered difficult (read: underprivileged) circumstances, outside of their own control.
My argument, therefore, is one against consistency. Apply one attitude to yourself, and another to others.
There is no objective correct attitude to take. Studies show that on average, social mobility is a myth, and predominantly children grow up to occupy the same socio-economic station as their parents. There is also good data to support the idea that individuals with a growth mindset (the belief that someone can increase their own capacity or talent over time) outperform their peers without one. Put simply, there is no way of quantifying accurately where our locus of control actually lies, either within or without. These are general attitudes that we hold independently of the nature of reality. All we can do is choose them intentionally, as opposed to passively. And we definitely mustn’t let polarised group-think make these decisions for us.