When people speak or write, they don't get to unilaterally declare what they mean. We're not Humpty Dumpty and words do not mean exactly what we want them to mean. We can decide more or less depending on circumstance, but our words are never entirely ours. It's an unfortunate byproduct of speaking and writing to someone else - they get to / have to do some work to figure out what you meant. Again, of course, they get to do so to greater or lesser degrees depending on the context of your conversation and how loaded your words are - so it's not that "anything goes" - but they definitely get to do so to some degree in every case. So for example, if we say "we like cartoons", that will more or less get interpreted the way we want: as an expression of our undying affection for drawn, talking animals. But if we say "Peres is an Oslo Traitor just like Rabin was an Oslo Traitor", that could mean something very specific to us - but because that phrase is loaded with so much historical baggage, we don't get to act all shocked and surprised when someone interprets that as a justification for murder. "I didn't mean it that way" is an excuse for people who weren't careful enough to anticipate the predictable consequences of their language. And at least in the West we don't absolve such people who neglect predictable consequences of their actions.

Now, this Peres thing. Aussie Dave from Israellycool poked fun at him Wednesday night, we took exception Thursday morning, he responded by Thursday afternoon, and we responded back. Now Dave has responded, both assuaging our ego on the matter of whether he likes us and calling us frazzled. Tsk. It appears that his claims are two-fold:

(1) Peres is an ego-maniac who places his own ego above "all else", including the security of the State of Israel ("I do not doubt that Peres has Israel's interests at heart, or that he believes his way is the correct way. I just happen to believe that he thirsts for international recognition, and acknowledgement of his achievements. And this thirst supersedes all else.")

(2) Peres was being ego-maniacal when he was speaking to the press about being an Israeli who has the credibility because of his Noble Prize to go overseas and address the world's leaders ("I therefore posit that my interpretation of Peres' reaction is a valid one. No less valid than Omri's (who is relying on the middle section highlighted in blue)."

(3) While many people do not like Peres because they think he is a traitor, Dave doesn't like Peres because he is an ego-maniac ("Omri is correct that many people do not like Peres for this reason alone, but couldn't be more wrong in accusing me of having a pretext. My conclusions about Peres' motivations are not based on what I consider to be his misguided decisions... I just happen to believe that he thirsts for international recognition")

(4) It's appropriate to mock Peres on Israellycool because Israellycool mocks ego-maniacs without consideration of their politics ("I have poked fun at other egotists who share many of my beliefs (see my posts on Shmuely Boteach if you don't believe me). Anyone is fair game on Israellycool. I am an equal opportunity offender.")

There's also a sub-debate about tone and respect going on, although to be honest we don't understand what the debate is since our point was that the phrase "we like..." was used genuinely when we said it and for comedic effect when Dave said it, and Dave writes "Actually, I do like Omri... Granted, I repeated his turn of phrase for comedic effect". But we've spoken to our therapist and we're over the slight now. On to the issue of whether center-right bloggers get to make fun of Peres in the way they want to, without thinking of the fact that mocking Peres means very specific things in the political community that they participate it.

Claim (1) - that Peres places his own ego above the security of the State of Israel - is a slander. It's a slander that we can't prove or disprove - we think there's a line somewhere in Judaism about who's the only person who gets to know what's in people's hearts, and we're reluctant to tread on that guy's toes - but it's a slander nonetheless. Claim (2) is equally undecidable - although we think that purely from a logical standpoint, it's much easier to make the claim that the Israeli press was wrong when they were bemoaning to Peres how no Israeli leader is welcome in Europe than when Peres snapped back that his Nobel Prize opens any door in any European capital. But since motivations can't really be proven or denied - and more so, since they don't really matter to this debate - we'll bracket them and ask about what's really at stake here: it's not "why would someone [Dave] pick on Peres". It's "what's going on when center-right bloggers and readers take cheap shots at Peres".

Yes, in theory, claim (4) - Dave's equal opportunity claim - is true. Dave could have slammed anyone else for being egotistical. But he didn't. And that matters. Let's put it another way. When tens of thousands of people march in the streets protesting Israeli checkpoints, we don't object to their actions because Israeli checkpoints don't exist. Israeli checkpoints do exist. We object because we find it suspicious that, given that there are checkpoints all over the world, tens of thousands of human rights activists would choose to focus on Israeli checkpoints. When someone takes yet another predictable cheap shot at Peres's "self-aggrandisement", we don't object to the low blow because Peres is modest. We object because we find is suspicious that, given that we're talking about Israeli politicians here, a center-right pro-Israel blogger would choose to focus on Peres's "self-aggrandisement". Did Bibi, Barak, Ya'alon, Livini, and Peretz all fail to pay their cell phone bills this month? Have they disappeared from the face of the Earth? You'd think we would have heard something.

And that, of course, brings us to the critical statis point: Dave's third claim, that his motives about taking pot shots at Peres are one thing while what "many people" (who happen to be quite rightly admiring readers of his) think is another. No doubt Dave himself has very particular motivations for writing about Peres that are different from what the vast majority of people in our political community think when they hear attacks on Peres's motives. But Dave is not writing for Dave. Israellycool is not Dave's diary. Dave is writing for the considerable number of people who read his blog. And we've checked our hit logs - it is indeed a considerable number.

So here's the crux of the debate:

With due respect, that's not how the world works. It's not just that in theory, if Bibi, Barak, Ya'alon, Livni, or Peretz made the same kinds of statements Dave would have called them out for it. It's that everyone knows that Israeli politicians are self-aggrandizing ego-maniacs - what is going on when someone takes the time to point that out about a specific politician. And not just any politician, but a politician whose efforts on Israel's behalf have been denigrated on account of his ego. And not just denigrated, but denigrated at times to such an extent that it crossed the line into open incitement ('Peres is endangering the State of Israel because of his own ego - he must be stopped'). Speakers and writers don't just get to pick up tropes and figures that have long and meaningful histories and claim them as their own. In the extreme, stupid multiculturalist case, that happens when someone says something that's objectively offensive about, let's say, Chicano power. Then someone says "that's insulting to whites" and they respond with "well that's not the way I meant it". The proper response is "well you don't get to decide what things mean all on your own".

And what's more, Dave knows that that's true. Literally the next paragraph after he writes "I am not taking anti-Peres potshots due to membership in some political community" - literally the next one, not an inch down - he writes:

Which is, of course, precisely our point. When people with lots of readers make choices about whether write about certain things, they're not just throwing words into the air. Some people's blogs are vanity projects. Israellycool is a recognized voice and agenda-setter in the small community of people that we call bloggers and blog readers. Which is why having them devote half of their Wednesday posts to mocking Peres matters. For most people on the rich (not Dave), mocking Peres for his ego provides the same cheap thrill that DKos denizens get whenever someone makes a crack about how Bushitler is stupid [insert obligatory reference to people who live in their parents' basement mocking Yale MBAs here]. The problem is that building a political community on that foundation guarantees that it will collapse later. Snarky cheap shots at Peres set us off because they're in a very real way pathological - they fulfill a certain community-building function, where everyone uses jokes to confirm that everyone is on the same page. It's glib ideological back-patting as a substitute for reasoned argument and news gathering, and the consequence is that communities become insular and unthinking. They end up oscillating between being very sarcastic about something everyone agrees on and expressing what everyone agrees about with more vehemence. It's like a giant, extrapolated version of the New York Times letters section, where instead of making arguments people just repeat their ideologically derived conclusions as if they were arguments.

So really, this is more just a request that people stop making bad arguments about Peres. In the first place, those arguments are untrue - he doesn't care more about power than about Israel, otherwise he wouldn't stick to his (perhaps wrongheaded) beliefs about how to achieve peace. And while we're at it, we've been having this debate on the blogosphere for a couple of years and we still haven't heard a compelling answer to the assertion that Sharon would not have been able to win Intifada II during 2001-2003 without Peres's tireless work going from European capital to European capital and assuring leaders that he was looking out for the humanitarian situation (we know, we know - who cares what if the goyim will ban Israelis from Europe? Answer: the 90percent of Israeli Jews with passports). Taking pot shots at Peres in center-right pro-Israel forums is not done in a vacuum: it's historically unjustified and politically corrosive, and people ought not do it.

UPDATE: Quick reaction to Dave's comments section from the last post: (1) "Aussie humor is too coarse for Omri" -- Chrisse. Oh please. (2) "Dave is shamefully attacking Peres" -- Anon. Kind of, but not really. Dave was mocking Peres, albeit a little heavyhandedly. It's just that mockery of Peres in the political community that tends to read and respond to him is understood as an attack on Peres - just like us mocking Barak for sounding like an uneducated baffon for not being able to pronounce his 'r's on CNN is different than when an anti-Semitic Muslim cleric on the UC Irvine campus says the exact same thing to a room full of smirking radical Muslim students. Who says something and who it's being said to matter for what it means.