Saturday, April 2, 2011

Setting boundaries

When someone is condemned, we tend to automatically assume that it was a certain action that triggered the condemnation. The person criticized will often look for ways to change their behavior to avoid further confrontation. This means that an act of communication, such as verbal criticism, in a good number of cases will trigger a reply of 'real world' actions.
This may be a justifiably cooperative behavior in interpersonal relations, but when it comes to international politics and diplomacy, our approach may need to be rather different. Here an issue in communications, such as condemnation of Israel by various human rights groups, need not translate into actions on the ground.
Organizations that routinely criticize Israel all have their agendas: it is their raison d’ĂȘtre to declare and condemn. Some of them have a majority of members that seem impossible to please with whatever actions. In such an environment, it should be seriously examined whether criticism depends in any way on what Israel actually does. There are certainly methods to run an analysis to determine the correlation between events and reactions. It shouldn’t be assumed, before any systematic case study is conducted, that it is within Israel's power to change those reactions by trying to adapt its behavior.
The way to deal with verbal assaults is first and foremost with verbality. An accusation is to be refuted by means of good communication, not by mixing up two different realms, those of public statements and of practical actions.

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