Ruining the World's Consensus

Ruining the World's Consensus

The Guardian's Comment is Free section hosts the Agha-Malley column published in the New York Times yesterday (post above). (Their URL is called israel-palestine-two-state-solution, which may indicate someone wasn't paying attention).

The comments start off with some very edgy statements from the small pro-Israel team that tries, valiantly and futilely, to combat the poison which infests the comments part of Comment is Free. Their task is so hopeless and frustrating that one can appreciate why they're losing their own ability to think calmly. After their comments, however, the usual irrational animosity kicks in. Irrational and dripping with malice it may be, but not necessarily incoherent. I especially liked this comment:

Justice here - the implementation of instruments of international law and respect for UN institutions (to which Israel owes its 'existential' incarnation and survival) - is not an essentially contested concept relative to any particular world-view, but carries universal precepts grounding global peace and common jurisprudence since the world started putting itself back together in 1945. The frustration of the emergence of a Palestinian state is due almost entirely to the gross delinquency of successive Israel governments and the UN Security Council in honouring the obligations of the UN's founding principles. Defaulting to the failed and destabilising formulae of partition and recidivist nationalism would constitute acknowledgement that a member state has been rewarded for wrecking the post-1945 consensus ... and it is no surprise that Israel takes all the awards in public opinion polls concerning the biggest threat to global peace.

In English: The world healed itself in 1945 by creating a New World Order, based on justice, universal values and international law. Israel's existence contradicts all these. If the World Order doesn't fully work it's because Israel has been wrecking the consensus all this time. That's why Israel is so universally hated. You bet there shouldn't be a two state solution: that would mean the Israelis won.

There's no need to argue with this hallucinatory mishmash. We do need, however, to be aware of it, to understand that many people agree with it, and to accept that it's a worldview that regards itself as drawing on universal morality and a respectful reading of history, tied together in a rational system. It draws on the Enlightenment, in other words - as all of the world's worst monstrosities these past few centuries have.

taken from Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations