Letter from Israel: Postmodernism Alive and Killing

[Dave Stratman <Newdem@AOL.COM>]

Hi everyone--

Here is an article from Israel, interesting both for its surprising 
description of current Israeli popular opinion about the settlements and for 
its perceptive analysis of "postmodernism." While it is not about testing, it 
is certainly pertinent to questions of taking a moral stance towards the 
issues of the day, whether they be the daily attack on the children in our 
schools or the daily attacks on innocent Palestinians and Jews in the Middle 
East. 

Dave Stratman
Editor, New Democracy
<A HREF="newdemocracyworld.org">www.newdemocracyworld.org</A>
5 Burr Street
Boston, MA 02130
617-524-4073
************
LETTER FROM ISRAEL
Ran HaCohen
March 16, 2002

Postmodernism Alive and Killing

While scores of Palestinians and several Israelis are killed every day now, 
while one of the world’s strongest armies is bravely proving it can turn even 
wretched refugee camps into ashes, I feel rather uncomfortable talking about 
ideology. Still, I’ll do it. In a previous column I analysed several 
arguments of the right-wing ideology of Israeli occupation: a rather simple 
task, actually. More difficult, and more interesting, is the question: how do 
parts of the Israeli progressive camp live with the Occupation? I’d like to 
explore this question this time, by demonstrating just one aspect of the 
consciousness of secular young Jewish Israelis, university students from the 
upper classes. Their consciousness makes them feel radical, pro-peace, 
anti-occupation, doomed to live among backward fanatics; but at the same 
time, the very same consciousness enables them to accommodate themselves to 
the Occupation: perhaps not support it, but definitely not disturb it. The 
intellectual fashion called "Postmodernism" – declining in the West, alive 
and kicking in provincial Israel – plays an important role here. Let’s see 
how some postmodernist clichés (oversimplified? reduced? banalised? maybe) 
are translated into direct political (in)action in the specific context of 
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its present bloody stage.
    
A Class Experiment

Here is an experiment I made in class. Suppose, I said, we have four basic 
positions towards the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories: (1) 
dismantle them all; (2) dismantle most of them; (3) dismantle only distant 
and isolated ones; or (4) dismantle no settlements whatsoever. I now asked 
class which of the four positions they believed was the most popular among 
Jewish Israelis. Almost all the students believed the most popular was either 
position 2 or 3, i.e. dismantling some or most of the settlements (but not 
all or none of them).
(The reader is now encouraged to pose this question to her/himself. What do 
you think?)
Finally, I introduced an opinion poll on this very question, conducted last 
month by the Tami Steinmetz <A HREF="http://www.tau.ac.il/peace/";>Centre for Peace Research</A> in Tel-Aviv University 
and published in Ha’aretz on the 5th of March. According to this opinion 
poll, the most popular opinion is to dismantle ALL the settlements: this 
position, which is generally categorised as "extreme leftist", was supported 
by 32% of Israeli Jews. 14% supported dismantling most of the settlements, 
28% supported dismantling small and isolated ones, and 24% of Israeli Jews 
opposed dismantling any settlement at all.

The Media

It is no coincidence that my students believed the Israeli people was much 
more pro-settlements than it really was. I had expected it; I believe many 
readers share the same mistake too. Our main source of information about what 
people think, feel or believe is the mass media. The media portray the 
Israeli people as much more pro-settlements than they really are; it 
definitely does not reflect the fact that the biggest group among Israelis is 
the one supporting the evacuation of all the settlements. This bias has 
far-reaching implications, but let’s keep this for another occasion.

The Government

Counted together then, an overwhelming majority of 74% of Jewish Israelis 
(or, if we add the Israeli Arabs as well, 80% of all Israelis), support 
dismantling at least the isolated small settlements. Only a minority of 24% 
of the Jewish (or 20% of the entire) Israeli population think all settlements 
should stay. Now where does Israel’s Government stand in all this? -Not with 
these 80% of the three first positions taken together, but even more extreme 
than the farther end of the 20% minority position. The Israeli Government has 
not even considered dismantling any single settlement, and it rejects even 
the American demand to freeze settlement activity. In fact, settlements are 
constantly expanded and new ones are created every few weeks; <A HREF="http://www.peacenow.org.il/Default.asp?Redirect=4&ReportID=131";>"Peace Now"</A> has 
more on that. If democracy simply means doing the will of the people, Israel 
is definitely not a democracy and has not been one at least since 1967 
(opinion polls on the settlements issue have proved quite stable along time).

Postmodernism

If you find all this appalling, wait till you hear what my students had to 
say about it. Here are some of their comments. Remember we are dealing with 
students of cultural studies, of theory and criticism, well trained in 
Derrida and Lacan. We have good reasons to think all of them are progressive, 
pro-peace, certainly no supporters of the settlements or the occupation. You 
may wonder: so what did they object to? It wasn’t always clear. First, they 
were admittedly shocked by having to talk about the present; when I asked if 
other courses applied to "here and now", one student seriously answered that 
the closest they had got to "here and now" was reading Jacques Lacan (died 
1981)... But I think the point they really wanted to stick to was that every 
(political) statement should be deconstructed, and that constructive thinking 
aimed at changing things was unsuitable for a sophisticated, responsible and 
critically-oriented mind.
(a) Several students noted that "you cannot talk about what people want, 
because people are stupid and do not know what they want." By the way, when I 
asked whether anybody in class considered him- or herself stupid, no hands 
were raised. "Do I scent Baudrillard here?", I asked; the whole class nodded 
enthusiastically. The French thinker, author of "The Gulf War Did Not Take 
Place" (ask Iraqi victims), indeed claims that the masses know nothing and 
wish to know nothing. Here is a political translation of this arrogant, 
futile claim: people know nothing, people want nothing, you cannot say they 
oppose the Occupation because they have no will. Asking people what they want 
is a wrong question. In fact, I even heard the logical consequence of this: 
the government should not take the will of its people into consideration. The 
Israeli Government couldn’t agree more.
(b) One student said: "All this is not that simple. Some of the people whom 
we count as ‘extreme leftist’ and who support dismantling all the 
settlements, may at the same time oppose <A HREF="http://www.seruv.org.il/defaulteng.asp";>refusal to serve in the occupied 
territories</A>. Now this clearly indicates that there is no ruth." There is No 
Truth. Another favourite postmodernist cliché. Since there is no Truth, we 
cannot resist anything and we cannot support anything, since in order to do 
that we need some Truth to rely on. But Derrida says that there is no Truth 
(which is, by the way, an absolute truth...), so we cannot take any stand at 
all; we can only deconstruct and resist any stand that anybody else takes.
(c) "The methodology of the opinion poll can be questioned. Other polls may 
give quite different results. Therefore you cannot rely on it." Here we have 
the purest form of radical scepticism, quite typical of postmodernism too. I 
agree, of course, that everything can (and should) be questioned; of course 
one could (and should) check if other polls give similar results (by the way: 
they do). But this wasn’t the point the student was trying to make. The point 
was: Whatever could be wrong, should be treated as if it were wrong. Any 
empirical finding should be discarded: not as soon as we actually have a 
contradictory finding, but as soon as we can imagine one. Being all blind and 
deaf, we have no access at all to any kind of reality, we can’t say anything 
about reality, and all we can do is mock those who erroneously claim they can 
see and hear.
(d) "Governments should be judged by what they say, not by what they do 
[sic!]. By saying that he is willing to endorse the Mitchell Plan (which 
demands freezing settlement activity), Sharon has actually frozen the 
settlements, and you cannot refute a claim that at the bottom of his heart he 
even wishes to dismantle them all." I believe this is an offspring of the 
postmodernist insistence on discourse: words are more important than actions, 
language is the essence of everything, discourse analysis is the key to 
everything. Thus every utterance of a politician turns into a holy text that 
should be interpreted ad infinitum (but remember we have no way of telling 
right interpretations from wrong ones), whereas facts on the ground are 
polluted disturbances we cannot relate to.
    <A HREF="http://antiwar.com/hacohen/pf/p-h031602.html";>Text-only printable version of this article</A>
Ran HaCohen was born in the Netherlands in 1964 and grew up in Israel. He has 
a B.A. in Computer Science, an M.A. in Comparative Literature and is 
currently working on his PhD thesis. He teaches in the Tel-Aviv University's 
Department of Comparative Literature. He also works as a literary translator 
(from German, English and Dutch), and as a literary critic for the Israeli 
daily Yedioth Achronoth. Mr. HaCohen's work has been published widely in 
Israel. "Letter from Israel" appears occasionally at Antiwar.com.
Archived columns
<A HREF="http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/h031602.html";>Postmodernism Alive and Killing
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