Tribal mindset
The television news reporter was on the streets of Tel Aviv tonight. He was gathering vox pops from “ordinary Israelis” about the conflict currently raging on their northern border. A woman with an Israeli-American accent expressed concern and regret about the civilian deaths in southern Lebanon. But, she pointed out, those people had been warned. The Israeli government had told them to leave their villages, so it wasn’t Israel’s fault that they were getting killed.
I was struck by the odd way that people – even educated Israeli-American students with tie-dyed t-shirts who probably have all manner of liberal social views – will develop a fundamentalist tribal mindset that allows them to judge Them and Us by radically different standards.
If the Syrian army announced that it was soon to begin carrying out airstrikes against Northern Israel, would the people living there voluntarily leave? Because the Syrians told them to? The memory of what happened when their own government asked Israeli settlers to leave illegally occupied territory is still fairly fresh.
You see, by and large, people try to avoid being driven from their land by foreign armies. By anyone in fact. So me? I blame Hezbollah for the deaths in Northern Israel. I blame the people who launched the missiles and those who told them to… aware that they may well be condemning decent, peaceful human beings to violent deaths. I certainly don’t blame the victims of terrorism because they refused to obey orders from the very people launching bombs at them. Indeed, to blame a dead child in Haifa for its own death at the hands of Hezbollah attackers is a peculiarly twisted thing to do.
Similarly, when a dead body is pulled from the rubble of southern Lebanon, it takes a twisted fundamentalist mindset to blame the person whose life has been stolen. All bombing is terrorism.
The creation of “the other” is a very powerful thing, and Israel, a state developed by terrorist organizations, has never really learned to “grow up” and act like a nation. So it issues the kind of vague warnings terrorist groups do (“it is your fault, better get out!”) and speaks in terms of collective guilt (“all Arabs are at fault”) and in phrases of bitter revenge (“if one rocket is fired from a village we will wipe it from the map”). None of this can lead them to “victory” anymore than German WWI occupation policy in Belgium stabilized that situation or German WWII policy in Czechoslovakia stabilized that – it is instead a proven prescription for eternal war – and eternal war is not a logical plan for a nation. Unfortunately it can be a seeming short term good for irresponsible politicians, be they Americans or Israelis.
August 2nd, 2006 | 2:03pm
by The Narrator
The thing is, though, that a great many did obey the orders to leave, and then were bombed in their cars and vans on the roads like so many rats forming an orderly queue in a shooting range. I don’t know why details like this get lost time and time again.
August 2nd, 2006 | 2:17pm
by Joel
Oh, I am aware of that Joel. I was merely addressing this apparently mainstream Israeli view that those who did remain are in large part responsible for their own deaths. The idea that Israeli civilians would leave their homes when instructed by leaflets dropped by the Syrian airforce. And the idea that Syria could not be held responsible for any subsequent Israeli deaths as a result of bombing.
August 2nd, 2006 | 2:23pm
by Jim
Narrator… I’ve got a long and involved theory on the use of psychoanalytic techniques to better explain and understand the motivations and behaviour of large groups of people. Be it corporations, institutions or even entire nations.
My theory is based partly on the ideas of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, partly on the ideas of cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, and partly on psychedelic revelation. It’s still a bit rough round the edges though… not yet rigorous enough to be encased in text.
But when you say that “eternal war is not a logical plan for a nation” I’d argue that’s utterly irrelevant. Israel, as a nation, is incapable of acting in a rational / logical way. In my view it’s suffering from the national equivalent of severe paranoid psychosis (the causes of which can be easily understood).
August 2nd, 2006 | 2:35pm
by Jim
I’m sure you were aware of it Jim, but the Israelis who use the leafleting as somehow getting them off the hook, or indeed any who mention the leafleting in such a manner, usually parrot-fashion, either aren’t aware of it or have reconstructed their brains to somehow find it an unimportant detail, after all, the Israelis were so kind as to leaflet before bombing. Robots mouthing hollow words.
So far more people have died in human stampedes after stoning the devil at Mecca. Give it a couple of days and we’ll be bored of the entire thing.
August 2nd, 2006 | 3:19pm
by Joel