Wednesday, March 28, 2007
The LA Times published a response to the Saree Makdisi bizarro-world piece from a couple weeks back (after all, they're two equally valid sides to the same coin, right?). This one's written by Judea Pearl: Why do homo sapiens recognize Israel's right to exist?
The unique demand to recognize Israel's "right", not merely its "existence," reflects the general understanding among students of history that the core of the conflict and its resulting sufferings lies not in resource or border disputes, but in a deep ideological resistance by Palestinian Arabs to accommodate any form of a Jewish homeland in any part of Palestine since the end of World War I, accompanied by a persistent denial of any historical connection between the Jewish people and their national birthplace. For the record, Jews have accepted Palestinian Arabs as equally indigenous to the land and equally entitled to independent sovereignty, while Palestinian Arabs, and their Arab neighbors, have rejected any two-state solution offered since the 1920's, including the Peel Commission recommendation of 1937, the United Nations' 1947 decision, and the Camp David offer in 2000.
Noting that the first and second rejections took place prior to the emergence of the refugee problem, and that the territories rejected in those cases were vastly broader than the West Bank and Gaza, it is only reasonable to assume that a deeper, ideological resistance propels Arab hostility toward Israel, a resistance that transcends borders or refugee problems...
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It's true enough, though it's also far too kind to label Makdisi's profoundly malevolent, contortionist spasm of casuisty a mere "bizarro-world" or fantasist send-up. It's too kind precisely because Makdisi marshals a full range of language and semiotics in the service of malevolence, in the service of an entirely debased, even nihilistic, valuation. "Semiotics" is probably the better term since it more consciously includes praxis, and Makdisi certainly has some hard-nosed and thoroughgoing practical intent in mind; not in the least embarrassed by his foray either. Indeed, it reflects a corrupted practical intent of the first order, reminiscent of Orwell, yes, but perhaps having an even better analog in Foucault, Lyotard, et al., the sophists and sophisticates among the postmodernists. As such, an extension of the ideas matter and ideology matters set of themes and social/political intentions.
(And the following parenthetical note was hilarious: "after all, they're two equally valid sides to the same coin, right?")