Eye of the beholder

Turkish President Abdullah Gul in an opinion piece in the New York Times suggests:

"In the coming 50 years, Arabs will constitute the overwhelming majority of people between the Mediterranean Sea and the Dead Sea. The new generation of Arabs is much more conscious of democracy, freedom and national dignity. In such a context, Israel cannot afford to be perceived as an apartheid island surrounded by an Arab sea of anger and hostility. Many Israeli leaders are aware of this challenge and therefore believe that creating an independent Palestinian state is imperative.

In a previous post we noted that issues of communication should be resolved by communication. Here's another example when something that exists in language - the metaphor of Israel as an apartheid island – is expected by the writer to induce real world actions.   

Israel is not an apartheid state by any sensible definition of the word. But there is more in the Turkish President’s article that deserves a remark: it’s the absurdity of claiming that if Israel is perceived as such, then Israel should respond by adjusting its policies towards a Palestinian state.

In a way, Gul’s advice for Israel is good as gold: the country really can’t afford to remain silent about being bullied into actions with false metaphors that are spread around, to audiences that don’t question them. It really needs to start articulating what an illusion it is to assume that changing its policies will improve its international image. If Israel is wrongly perceived as an apartheid state right now, when in fact it isn't, there is no reason to think that similarly wrong perceptions will suddenly seize to exist after Israel has made its latest round of concessions.

The cognitive mistakes that are inherent in metaphors like “apartheid state” or “Gaza as a prison camp” will not go away unless their illogical nature is revealed. They are in the eye, or mind, of the beholder and can only be changed when the vision of that beholder is corrected.

How the Iron Dome will backfire

Israel recently deployed the Iron Dome defense system to intercept rockets fired towards its territory.

Or was that really the purpose?

Maybe the Iron Dome was created to allow Israel to suppress the Palestinians with even less fear of their rightful retaliation than it was possible up till now. After all, during the Cold War the US and the Soviet Union had an agreement to keep defense systems to a minimum… This analogy proves that defense is the most dangerous of all weapons, because it encourages the aggressive entity to lose any self-restraint they may have. Even the mighty United States felt the need for such confinement of defense systems, all the more so do poorer people, such as the Palestinians, who have less sophisticated weaponry than their enemy.     

In fact, the shield is a cunning tool to humiliate the Palestinians. It shoves a wall of impenetrability in their faces as if saying that no matter how hard they fight for freedom and justice, Zionist wealth will always ensure that all resistance is futile.   

The fact that the Iron Dome can only intercept larger rockets is due to Israel spending most of its military funds on weapons of lethal attack instead of peaceful protection. This so-called defense system actually shows how Israel can’t be bothered to truly defend its population. Smaller rockets that get through the shield will keep endangering the citizenry, among them, obviously, the Arab and Bedouin segments of the population.  

But otherwise, the Iron Dome has the merit of making the Gaza blockade redundant. There’s no need to collectively punish the residents of Gaza any longer when Israel is capable of shooting down the rockets it finds disturbing. From now on, all Israeli actions within the Gaza Strip must be interpreted as unjustified aggression against civilians, and a no-fly zone needs to be enforced over Israel to stop such assaults...

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No, this is not a joke. This is to show the astonishing power of good narratives and the lack thereof.
If Israel is unable to present a convincing argument as to why the Iron Dome is what it claims to be, she may be able to intercept rockets but will be undefended against narratives that turn the situation upside down, and that are sure to find substantial audiences.

There are ways to fight these and similar statements, and the narratives they build on. For now we are only stating that the problem exists; the methods to neutralize them will unfold in the course of this blog.

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’être 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.