Stories help us to make sense of the world. We defend, affirm, and reaffirm them and when our stories are challenged or disproved, it creates anxiety. Once stories make sense to us, we invest in them and make them our own. But then, our stories own us.
Living in England during WWII, German-Jewish philosophers Horkheimer and Adorno wrote: “[To] call someone a Jew amounts to an instigation to work him over until he resembles the image.” This insight is at the core of my work. If the new Jewish state turned out to be democratic, liberal, tolerant, and Western, it would have been an assault on all those stories starting with the notion that “Jews aren’t like us…”, and all of our stories about Jews start that way. The tool to protect the truth of our stories and make Israeli Jews resemble the image of a Jew was to ensure it would be in a constant state of war and conflict. This shouldn’t be surprising; Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, tells the story of the Athenian people and state becoming ever more intolerant, irrational, paranoid, undemocratic and illiberal under the strains of constant, ongoing war. This has certainly been true in the case of modern Israel.
From 1947-1952, the UN set up the conditions and framework for the Zionist-Arab conflict in the Middle East that continues to this day. The international community not only applied solutions that were anomalous, that is, they weren’t being used to solve any comparable problems, but they were also anachronous; the solutions had been tried in the League of Nations era and found not only to not solve problems, but worse, to create more of them. The application of these policies, sure to produce and amplify conflict, serves to make Israeli Jews match our stories about them, and it is working. The primary insight of my work is to overturn the notion, central to historical and political science scholarship for at least the last 70 years, that the international community has been working in the Middle East to settle the conflict. On the contrary, the international community has been working to ensure that there is constant conflict so that preconceived notions and stories are affirmed.
Most of us know, from bitter experience, that the hardest problems to solve are those where we are invested in the continuation of the problem. So we struggle against ourselves. The narrative itself perpetuates the status quo. To change, we have to walk away from stories we have inherited and hold dear. There is nothing so special about the conflict in the Middle East that fundamentally separates it from many other conflicts that have been settled since WWII. What makes it special is our involvement and investment. The conflict is of course soluble, but we must overthrow the ancient, powerful stories that block the way. We will have to choose: do we want a settlement, or do we simply want to affirm that our stories are true?
Rethinking the Middle-East Conflict 