Mere Rhetoric Cleans Out Our Inbox I: Book Reviews - Life is Complicated
In the last month or so, we've received emails alerting us to two book-length works on the Israeli-Arab conflict. The interesting thing here is that they both revolve around Arab intransigence, but for opposite reasons: one believes that Arabs hate Jews because Israel appears weak, while the other thinks that Jews engender backlash in proportion to their successes.
This dynamic is not new - Abba Eban long ago commented that there is a fundamental schizophrenia about Israel in the Arab world: Israel is simultaneously a paper tiger that can be overrun by any sufficiently committed Arab leader and the stronghold of an all-powerful international Jewish conspiracy that is responsible for all the world's harms. Neither of these two books explores the tension in this dynamic - instead, they take a position on one side or the other. Samson Blinded holds that Arab militancy rises whenever Israel appears weak, while The Crux of History argues that global anti-Semitism is a result of the revolutionary kernel in Jewish thought.
What these books do recognize, however, is the over-whelming urgency of the Israeli-Arab crisis. As Iran develops nuclear weapons and openly declares its intention to vaporize five million Jews, the analogies to Nazism are coming to seem less and less hysterical.
Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict by Obadiah Shoher
This work is divided into sections like "The inadmissibility of vacillation", "Prospects for War and Guarantees of Peace- Doubtful", "The Need to Reconsider Values". It seems deeply indebted to works like Paul Eidelberg's Demophrenia: Israel has lost its Jewish character, attempts to make peace with Arab countries is suicide because they will be emboldened by perceptions of Israeli weakness, the only thing Israel can do is kill or be killed, and so on. And like such books, it suffers by putting on pretenses of academic method and rigor - the work would be much stronger if it emphasized its most salient aspects as a catalog of Arab intransigence. The attempts to link the Arab-Israeli conflict to high-level political philosophy weaken rather than enhance the credibility of the work. The author would be well-served to simply stack up all his evidence that Arab publics will never accept Israel - the obvious conclusion being that giving land to maybe-not-so-horrible temporary dictatorships in exchange for pieces of paper is counterproductive.
For those familiar with the intricacies of Arab-Israeli peacemaking, there's nothing particularly new or revelatory in this work. Arab nations have repeatedly violated peace agreements with Israel, etc etc. Furthermore, the sentiment expressed by the work (coated with a thin veneer of Classical studies), is outright-dangerous. There is a kind of unabashed, Stoic acceptance of horrific violence - a kind of 'we're willing to accept the burdens of immorality' realist machismo. It is exemplified in statements like "Israel must occupy the capitals of enemy states... Enemy civilian losses should be ignored," but it drives the entire work. This kind of sentimentalism is as dangerous as it is transparent - enemy civilian losses should never be ignored, if only so that we retain a sense of guilt at the atrocities of war. This kind of 'we must accept the terrible costs of what must be done' ritualism should be called out for being nothing more than a facile abdication for careful thinking and delicate planning. It's very easy for the self-proclaimed realist to declare sagely that compromises and trade-offs weaken Israel, but the psychological satisfaction that he receives from that pure and untroubled position is precisely the reason to be so suspicious of him.
On the other hand, interspersed with awkward and poorly elaborated invocations of Machiavelli, there are some facts and footnotes that make the book valuable both for the total newcomer and for anyone looking to refresh their knowledge of the specifics of Arab intransigence. Ignore testosterone soaked passages like "from the Arab point of view, Israel looks weak, repeatedly asking for peace. She ignores the Arab mentality. Arabs must be forced to the peace table". Instead, use the book as a kind of quick reference regarding the repeated Arab betrayals of Israeli peace deals.
The Crux of World History by Dr. Francisco Gil-White
Dr. Francisco Gil-White, a former UPenn Psychology professor ostensibly terminated for being "too political", is the current director of a center for Historical and Investigative Research. He has placed online the entirety of his soon to be published book The Crux of World History.
A couple of things about the site and the book. Any site that has to prominently display a link to an article titled "Is this website doing 'conspiracy theory'?" is already somewhat suspicious. And the apologia itself is sketchy at best - the main argument seems to be (1) that it's not a conspiracy theory if it's true and (2) that you can look everything up yourself. Of course, the entire point of a conspiracy theory is that it takes seemingly (and almost always actually) disconnected facts and weaves them into a dark plot. "You can see the evidence for yourself" is always the conspiracy theorists' emphatic claim of justification.
We haven't really gotten a chance to go through the entire book yet, but it trashes the ancient Greeks and Romans so it's likely to suck in that newcomer-stumbles-into-highly-specialized-academic-setting-and-offers-revolutionary-new-theories kind of sucking. But we do want to call your attention to the book partly because of Gil-White's online introduction:
I am predicting that soon -- very soon -- there will be another antisemitic genocide. It will take place in the State of Israel, and it will be directly carried out by the antisemitic forces of the Muslim world. The Western world will look the other way. Later, it will build Holocaust museums and people will put on grave looking faces and shake their heads. Or perhaps they will celebrate. It all depends on which direction culture takes in the coming years. But though time may be running short, this genocide can still be prevented. In order to do so, good people in the West must understand what is at stake. They certainly don't understand it now. They have no clue why there is hatred of Jews, and they are utterly confused about their own antisemitic prejudices.
Why is there antisemitism? The Crux of World History answers this question.
We're not sure about his answer, but both his search - and the urgency with which he is undertaking that search - are justified.
We feel kind of bad giving these works these kinds of reviews. Fundamentally, both of the authors are on the right side - Israel faces an urgent and existential threat the magnitude of which has not been seen since the late 1930s. But the solution is neither to abstract the problem into socio-psychological academic-ese or to urge a steely resolve in the face of indiscriminate violence. The solution will have to be muddier, less grandiose, and more pragmatic: slowly establishing defensible borders, constantly urging the world to hem in Iran, developing military technology, etc. The quick solutions are very rarely solutions at all.
This dynamic is not new - Abba Eban long ago commented that there is a fundamental schizophrenia about Israel in the Arab world: Israel is simultaneously a paper tiger that can be overrun by any sufficiently committed Arab leader and the stronghold of an all-powerful international Jewish conspiracy that is responsible for all the world's harms. Neither of these two books explores the tension in this dynamic - instead, they take a position on one side or the other. Samson Blinded holds that Arab militancy rises whenever Israel appears weak, while The Crux of History argues that global anti-Semitism is a result of the revolutionary kernel in Jewish thought.
What these books do recognize, however, is the over-whelming urgency of the Israeli-Arab crisis. As Iran develops nuclear weapons and openly declares its intention to vaporize five million Jews, the analogies to Nazism are coming to seem less and less hysterical.
Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict by Obadiah Shoher
This work is divided into sections like "The inadmissibility of vacillation", "Prospects for War and Guarantees of Peace- Doubtful", "The Need to Reconsider Values". It seems deeply indebted to works like Paul Eidelberg's Demophrenia: Israel has lost its Jewish character, attempts to make peace with Arab countries is suicide because they will be emboldened by perceptions of Israeli weakness, the only thing Israel can do is kill or be killed, and so on. And like such books, it suffers by putting on pretenses of academic method and rigor - the work would be much stronger if it emphasized its most salient aspects as a catalog of Arab intransigence. The attempts to link the Arab-Israeli conflict to high-level political philosophy weaken rather than enhance the credibility of the work. The author would be well-served to simply stack up all his evidence that Arab publics will never accept Israel - the obvious conclusion being that giving land to maybe-not-so-horrible temporary dictatorships in exchange for pieces of paper is counterproductive.
For those familiar with the intricacies of Arab-Israeli peacemaking, there's nothing particularly new or revelatory in this work. Arab nations have repeatedly violated peace agreements with Israel, etc etc. Furthermore, the sentiment expressed by the work (coated with a thin veneer of Classical studies), is outright-dangerous. There is a kind of unabashed, Stoic acceptance of horrific violence - a kind of 'we're willing to accept the burdens of immorality' realist machismo. It is exemplified in statements like "Israel must occupy the capitals of enemy states... Enemy civilian losses should be ignored," but it drives the entire work. This kind of sentimentalism is as dangerous as it is transparent - enemy civilian losses should never be ignored, if only so that we retain a sense of guilt at the atrocities of war. This kind of 'we must accept the terrible costs of what must be done' ritualism should be called out for being nothing more than a facile abdication for careful thinking and delicate planning. It's very easy for the self-proclaimed realist to declare sagely that compromises and trade-offs weaken Israel, but the psychological satisfaction that he receives from that pure and untroubled position is precisely the reason to be so suspicious of him.
On the other hand, interspersed with awkward and poorly elaborated invocations of Machiavelli, there are some facts and footnotes that make the book valuable both for the total newcomer and for anyone looking to refresh their knowledge of the specifics of Arab intransigence. Ignore testosterone soaked passages like "from the Arab point of view, Israel looks weak, repeatedly asking for peace. She ignores the Arab mentality. Arabs must be forced to the peace table". Instead, use the book as a kind of quick reference regarding the repeated Arab betrayals of Israeli peace deals.
The Crux of World History by Dr. Francisco Gil-White
Dr. Francisco Gil-White, a former UPenn Psychology professor ostensibly terminated for being "too political", is the current director of a center for Historical and Investigative Research. He has placed online the entirety of his soon to be published book The Crux of World History.
A couple of things about the site and the book. Any site that has to prominently display a link to an article titled "Is this website doing 'conspiracy theory'?" is already somewhat suspicious. And the apologia itself is sketchy at best - the main argument seems to be (1) that it's not a conspiracy theory if it's true and (2) that you can look everything up yourself. Of course, the entire point of a conspiracy theory is that it takes seemingly (and almost always actually) disconnected facts and weaves them into a dark plot. "You can see the evidence for yourself" is always the conspiracy theorists' emphatic claim of justification.
We haven't really gotten a chance to go through the entire book yet, but it trashes the ancient Greeks and Romans so it's likely to suck in that newcomer-stumbles-into-highly-specialized-academic-setting-and-offers-revolutionary-new-theories kind of sucking. But we do want to call your attention to the book partly because of Gil-White's online introduction:
I am predicting that soon -- very soon -- there will be another antisemitic genocide. It will take place in the State of Israel, and it will be directly carried out by the antisemitic forces of the Muslim world. The Western world will look the other way. Later, it will build Holocaust museums and people will put on grave looking faces and shake their heads. Or perhaps they will celebrate. It all depends on which direction culture takes in the coming years. But though time may be running short, this genocide can still be prevented. In order to do so, good people in the West must understand what is at stake. They certainly don't understand it now. They have no clue why there is hatred of Jews, and they are utterly confused about their own antisemitic prejudices.
Why is there antisemitism? The Crux of World History answers this question.
We're not sure about his answer, but both his search - and the urgency with which he is undertaking that search - are justified.
We feel kind of bad giving these works these kinds of reviews. Fundamentally, both of the authors are on the right side - Israel faces an urgent and existential threat the magnitude of which has not been seen since the late 1930s. But the solution is neither to abstract the problem into socio-psychological academic-ese or to urge a steely resolve in the face of indiscriminate violence. The solution will have to be muddier, less grandiose, and more pragmatic: slowly establishing defensible borders, constantly urging the world to hem in Iran, developing military technology, etc. The quick solutions are very rarely solutions at all.
