Juan Cole – Michigan professor and popular Leftist “hey, he’s got a PhD” quote factory – is in many ways typical of the academic Left. He is so immersed in his insular, self-congratulatory community that he simply doesn’t find out when certain slogans and catch-phrases turn into absurd, self-denying caricatures of themselves. Marxists who still speak of the “objective” or “self-evident” demise of capitalism are a little like that, although there are no real Marxists outside of the Ivory Tower so that example doesn’t work. Democrats who insist that the Killian memos are “fake but accurate” are a little closer, although that misses the academic dimension we’re trying to capture. Regardless, Cole suffers in the same way that all people who live in a political and cultural echo chambers suffer – he doesn’t know how stupid he sometimes sounds.
From Cole’s New Years predictions:
The Israeli-Palestinian struggle will continue in staccatto (sic) fashion, because the Israeli government remains expansionist and land-hungry. Because the Sharon government refused to negotiate with real live Palestinians over the Gaza withdrawal no framework for peace was erected. Israeli troops will go back into Gaza from time to time.
Why “expansionist and land hungry?” Surely, anybody coming to the situation for the first time would observe that in the last decade, Israel has done virtually nothing but give away land. In the north, the country has withdrawn from Lebanon. In the east, 98% of Palestinians were living under Palestinian rule when they started their most recent war. So when trying to demonize Israel, why would anybody drop “expansionist and land hungry” as the most likely adjective?
Simply because that’s always been the catch-phrase for demonizing Israel. It’s old school, 1980s “Israel wants to invade Jordan and kill all the Palestinians” Chomskyesque, Saidesque libel. But between posts from ZNet, articles from The Nation, and speeches from the anti-Semites at ANSWER, Cole can go entire years without ever having to encounter a reasonable (or new) opinion about Israel. So he just never got the memo that PM Sharon was really giving away land. Either that, or Cole really believes that there are still settlers in the Gaza Strip. Which we think even he would agree would make him pretty stupid. So, in an effort to slip in a libel against Israel ‘not negotiating with the Palestinians over leaving’ becomes the same as ‘not leaving.’
Now, we’re actually a little closer to Cole than makes us comfortable – we actually agree that PM Sharon did not have some epiphany and embrace the idea of Palestinian statehood. Rather, the Prime Minister realized that there is an international front to the Israeli-Palestinian war, and that if he did not redeploy on that front he would be overrun. But that doesn’t mean that there are still settlers in Gaza. It doesn’t mean that the Palestinians don’t have their own land for their own state. It doesn’t mean that the phrase “expansionist and land hungry” is any less stupid.
Hatred of PM Sharon is so deeply ingrained on the Left that language becomes collateral damage. We understand what Cole’s trying to say – that Sharon didn’t give the Palestinians enough for a viable state. Ignorant, but grant it for the sake of argument (that’s what happens with these rabid anti-Zionists – to borrow a line from Ann Coulter, you have to accept the small lies just to get to the ones of Holocaust denying proportion). But the particular way that Cole abuses language is revelatory – why that particular accusation? Because in the community he writes for, the truth of that phrase is taken as a given – that it’s patent nonsense tells you much about the community in which Cole feels comfortable asserting it as a self-evident fact. Because that nonsense was once the fashionable party line, and because nobody’s really told the academic Left that the party’s over, it persists as a symptom of ingrained, unreflexive ideology. The Left’s mental block regarding PM Sharon can be described precisely: in an insulated community where hatred is embraced because it is fashionable and not because it is connected to any facts, changing the facts will not change the hatred. You can’t reason a community out of what it hasn’t been reasoned into.
PM Sharon did historically unprecedented, dramatic things – risking his political and physical life in the process. He provided strength and hope during one of the darkest times in Israeli history, and he did while preserving his and the state’s humanity:
Despite being besieged by murder-bombers and hounded by the Europeans, the United Nations, and many in our state department, Mr. Sharon nevertheless did what all such gunslingers do. He said “no more,” and plowed into the West Bank to hunt down, kill, or capture the culprits. He barked out that he probably should have had Arafat shot years ago. He promised to bring a terrible retribution to the West Bank, which harbored, cheered, and aided killer bombers. He said all that and more — without make-up, scripts, or damage-control spinners and handlers.
Yet the reality was that his soldiers were far more humane than Russians who blew up entire neighborhoods in Chechnya. His men probably killed fewer civilians than did our outnumbered and trapped heroes in Mogadishu. Unlike the Kuwaitis, Sharon did not ethnically cleanse Palestinians; unlike the Jordanians he did not murder them in the thousands; unlike the Syrians he did not wipe out an entire town and pave it over; and, of course, unlike the Arab heroes, Nasser and Saddam Hussein, he did not gas civilians.
No, he sent combatants house-to-house, to pry out killers from boobytrapped parlors, in narrow streets where gunmen shot and then ducked into living rooms. No matter — he was Mr. Sharon and his soldiers were Israelis, and so the world dammed this new Sherman come alive. A corrupt international community that ignored thousands who were beheaded, incinerated, and blown apart in the Congo, Bosnia, India, and Rwanda has demonized him for a “massacre” in which less than a 100 Palestinians were killed in efforts to apprehend the murderers among them.
Remember that when you read Chris Hitchen’s attack piece on PM Sharon – it’ll help you understand why he’s writing it, and why he doesn’t know better. For a Hitch article, the whole thing is uncharacteristically muddled and disorganized. It also includes the on its face idiotic phrase “a wall is a wall is a wall” and an exhortation to read a lie-filled Chomsky book (how sadly predictable). But at least Hitchens recognizes that PM Sharon – for reasons of his own – created facts on the ground that are beneficial to the Palestinians, and to that extent he is far less bound to easy Leftist catch-phrases than people like Cole. In steadily moving away from the Leftist echo-chamber of his previous years, he can see a little beyond the horizon of fashionable phrases when reality insists that he do so. But old habits die hard.
