I think a big part of it is that is being angry that the other put you in a position that you had to be cruel in the first place.

Of course, in reality that could be true or total fantasy or anywhere in between.

Sure it isn't that the Jews just don't want to give any land back? That that fact pisses the Palestinian off? That BOTH harbor cruel intent toward each other?

Just a pity there's not simply a drug that can make cognitive dissonance go away. Then people wouldn't have to expend so much energy in self-justification, blame-the-victim, post-decision reinforcement, confirmation bias and all the rest of the delusionary bullshit that helps them maintain their positive sense of self.

Sure it isn't that the Jews just don't want to give any land back?

Yes. If that were all there is to it, they could accomplish it in a much less berserk way. But no one ever oppresses another group of people rationally. It drives you crazy.

Or is it that in western cultures people are trained to be cruel? I’m not sure that humans are actually born with an innate sense of cruelty rather it is drummed into us from the time we are young. In fact we are trained to be a combination of cowards and bullies to the point that even if we are aware of it and want to change it we find it difficult to shrug off. I think there are many possibilities for the human condition and cultures that nurture ideas like winners and losers, different levels of classes, “there’s a sucker born every minute and to the take them” is only one type of reality but since we are indoctrinated in that manner we tend to assume it is the only possibility. I think that to believe that there is only one possible human condition is a very cynical and narrow view of humanity even if it is true for certain cultures that people are cruel. If people can be trained to be cruel from birth isn’t it possible that the opposite could also be a reality?

Rob, why limit it to "Western culture"? Gandhi is reported to have said, when asked what he thought about Western civilization, that it would be a good idea. I agree, but I feel the same way about Eastern civilization.

Duncan,

You are right that I should not just limit it to western culture though of course it is the one I am most familiar with. I didn’t intend my comment to be a kind west versus east since there have been many other cultures besides those two and it would also be a gross generalization to think that eastern peoples contains only one type of culture. But that is what I am trying to convey which is there are many possibilities even for western cultures. A long time ago I took an anthropology class on North American Indians and it was interesting that there was so much variance between the tribes. There were war-like nomadic tribes, peaceful non-aggressive tribes, and even one that developed a monetary system which interestingly was the only tribe that also developed different classes like we have in our own tribe today.

I’m not sure that humans are actually born with an innate sense of cruelty rather it is drummed into us from the time we are young.

I don't think humans are born with an innate sense of cruelty either. I think it's actually against our nature. That's why it's hard to stop being cruel once we have started -- It messes us up mentally.

they unconsciously feel compelled to act even more cruelly toward Palestinians than they have already.

I'm not sure how much of it is unconscious at this point.

And this post is a great example of why I keep coming back here. Lots of bloggers could link to that story about Israeli soccer fans, add a WTF? or a "These people are animals," and leave it at that. You make the effort to wonder if this is representative of something that affects all people, including yourself, and throw in a movie clip besides.

Nice work.

Methinks cemmcs is partially correct, and that we're born with an inevitable capacity towards cruelty, as well as a yearning for the opposite. Undoubtedly that tension mucks things up. Got to get ourselves back to the garden, as Joni Mitchell said.

It really doesn't make a lot of sense historically to talk about "The Palestinians gave Israel most of their country". There were Turks and then Brits involved. And if you want to say that neither of those groups should have a right to say who could own that land, you should probably also say the same thing about the Arabs. It all depends on how far back in time you want to travel to decide the conqueror to reward.

There were Turks and then Brits involved. And if you want to say that neither of those groups should have a right to say who could own that land, you should probably also say the same thing about the Arabs.

You know, my intuition is that when it comes to the allocation of Palestine, there might be a difference between the legitimacy of the views of the Turks, the Brits, and the Palestinians. I can't quite put my finger on what the origin of that difference might be, however. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

I don't know, but I suspect that Western civilization is probably most sociopathic, otherwise it wouldn't have been so successful. Not that the others are much different, but they just don't have the edge. I remember I was thinking this when reading Guns, Germs, and Steel. Maybe because it's younger, I don't know.

irony of the day: in the meantime, david mamet has become a hardcore zionist. he has literally entered judged competitions in order to be crowned the greatest apologist for isreal's war crimes, and won.

maybe he should have read his own plays, instead?

You are missing Mamet's point. Dell is a con-man. He is isn't telling Ross "something accurate about the world.". Dell is using a rhetorically seductive line of reasoning to convince Ross that, in selling what legally belongs to his boss, he is in fact acting in a principled manner.

The argument about people beating up on those they owe things to is designed to appeal to Ross's indignant self-righteous sense of entitlement. See how it works from a narrative viewpoint? The root truth-value of the assertion is secondary to its function-to seduce Ross into chasing his fantasy of getting what he deserves.

This is a key moment in many of Mamet's plays-the mark is made to believe he acting not in self-interest but from a moral stance.
Your literal reading of Ross's con illustrates your own self-delusion and wishful thinking. You want the text to read as something it's not. The moral content is the bait and you went for it. Sucka!

I believe what Rob wrote about people being "trained to be cruel" is generally accurate. One of the major ways they receive this "training" is in the worship of hired killers, taught from earliest babyhood. I mean, of course, the great admiration accorded the military.

I am sure others are aware of this site and have heard of the Stanford Prison Project...if not check out the site...Its a good explanation of how otherwise good decent people can do bad.-Tony

http://www.lucifereffect.com/

Just move along, no rhetorical analysis here.

'He forgets nothing but he forgives everything' – in that case, he will be doubly hated, for he makes doubly ashamed – with his memory and his magnanimity.

- Nietzsche

I'm sorry, what was the point of those Qassam rockets? Hamas was walking around with a big "kick me" sign taped on its back. And they put the sign on their own back.

Human cruelty? I'm sorry, weren't Hamas torturing and assassinating their political opponents? Rational thinking? Who in this mess hasn't invoked God/Allah/Yaweh at some point? Which side doesn't want the other side drowning in the Mediterranean? My guess is that cruel chants about Jews can be heard somewhere in Islam if one investigates. Did folks here know that the Heil Hitler chant was based on an Ivy League football cheer picked up by Ernst Hanfstaengl when he was in college? Hanfstaengl had a cutesy nickname, Hooty or Footsy, something like that.

I'm trying to figure out here where the moral high ground is. Israel's greatest sin seems to be doing what the other side does, only better. Kill civilians? Check. Terrorize? Check. Invoke religion as justification for bad acting? Check.

Take a tour of the region. Egypt. Human cruelty? Move along. Lebanon. Syria. Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran. I'm trying to find that shining city on the hill. Maybe in Pakistan. Over the hill in Afghanistan? Maybe in Libya. Maybe in Algeria. Maybe in Somalia. Are we there yet?

Bob, let me gently suggest that you seem to be responding to something other than this blog post.

Jonathan -- is Arabian culture any more native to the Levant than Turkish? The Arabs were just as much conquerors of that region as the Turks and the Brits. And the Jews also, but you have to go back a bit farther. Unless you want to count the recent changes as a new conquest, which is fine. But if the Arabs want to argue that the land was unfairly conquered from them after they conquered it, perhaps they could lay that charge on the Turks. Or on the Brits, who did not give it to them after taking it.

A person willing to get a little Marxy might find in Richard Sennett's "Authority" an interesting theory explaining this cruelty as part of being social animals accustomed to authority living in cultures without directly accountable authority structures. In short, if you can't hurt the invisible hand hurting you but you really feel like you want to hurt something, what are you going to do? One option is acting out on others, which conveniently distracts all involved from the motivating cause.

There's also a great illustration of this kind of cruelty in von Trier's 'Manderlay'.

Jonathan -- don't get me wrong. The land was taken from them. I guess the difference was that all the Turks wanted was rent money. When the Jews bought the land they actually wanted to move in.

Growing up in the South, I can tell you that cruelty is passed down from generation to generation. One woman who I went to school with now cannot believe that she used to argue with me - in the late 70s - that "blacks were better off as slaves because they can't take care of themselves." It came straight from her parents, no doubt justifying the Jim Crow South in which they grew up, following directly from the post-Reconstruction South that their parents and grandparents felt the need to justify.

If you don't indoctrinate your kids in your own worldview so they perpetuate the class system you yourself have perpetuated, who will be around to serve you in your old age?

I think turning kids' minds against the fundamental sense of fairness that each child knows in their gut to be right is the most universal cruelty.

Territory has always been fought over and won through bitter struggle. Why is it that only the Jews are expected to respect the ancestral rights of the dispossesed and pack up?

Bob is totally correct about Arab imperialism. Talk to Berbers today about the Arab occupiers of Algeria and their imposition of Arab culture on the native population. Ok it happened twelve hundred years ago. So what?

What is the solution? Massive population transfers based on racial origin (cf Abba1 asking for Israelis to move back to Gdansk-nice one!) to rectify historical errors? Mass suicide of the occupying peoples?

Palestinians in the Arab world are denied the ability to assimilate locally on the grounds that this would dilute their identity and reduce their desire to return. This has the cynical effect of keeping them as secondclass residents for decades in countries where they could have thrived and prospered.

One senses that the problem with the Jews is that are not dark enough or poor enough to feel sorry for.

Why is it that only the Jews are expected to respect the ancestral rights of the dispossesed and pack up?

Why is it that everyone on earth has green hair?

What is the solution?

What is the solution to it being dark in my room after the sun goes down? Oh, if only there were something I could do about it!

Bob in Pacifica: EXACTLY!

John Caruso:

Right on. And I would answer your home invasion with force, applied by the state, which holds the monopoly on force in our society.
The day that the Security Council has the necessary resolve and votes to expel Israeli settlements by force, that will be the day that might makes right.

Convenient for Euro colonizers of America that the clock starts in 1945-everyone else is grandfathered in I guess.

NATIONS take land because they CAN. The rest of the ENTIRE world just stands and watch because there is little they are willing to do. (ask YOURSELF, are YOU willing to travel to some location and fight, as in man a firing position, for the "right" cause.) The Persians seem to be willing to support the people of GAZA in this particular instance, so the SOLUTION IS to bomb Iran into the stonage. (its what U are willing to pay for) The Israelis hate the Palestinians because they FEAR them, they are cruel to them because THEY CAN.

Territory has always been fought over and won through bitter struggle. Why is it that only the Jews are expected to respect the ancestral rights of the dispossessed and pack up?

Seth has quite a good point here, and I suspect I see it because I tend to agree to an extent.

Is it because the Israeli's continue to expand? Even though we supposedly live in the 'enlightened' present, they seem to want their own American Indians experience?
Is it because the Jews never really won a bitter struggle to get that land, they were 'given' it? Is it possible that subconsciously the world views Israel as the worst kind of winner, the one who 'cheated'? Let yourself think about where that leads the Israeli mind.

I'll tell you who I really feel bad for, and it's the Jews. They are presented here with a moral dilemma that tests their identity to the core. It would be very tough for an individual to deal with this crisis, for a culture how impossible?
It is going to take a spark of great wisdom for them to do the right thing.

But even if there are no cops around, the fact that there is 'law on the books' means - officially - that one side is the criminal and the other the victim.

You seem to be getting dangerously close to admitting it, Seth. Once you admit it, the next step is talk about enforcing the law, punishing the villains and compensating the victims. So, you better start backing off now.

Quite simply, the Zionists are either unlucky or they have been lazy, waited too long. Ethnic cleansing and genocide have become illegal. I feel their pain, but it's too late, sorry. Ironically, it's an attempt to exterminate their own favorite ethnic group that caused these things to be outlawed. It must be frustrating.

Actually I don't feel bad for them.. this is the kind of thing that makes you strong. But fuck, stop the stupid killing.

I have no doubt that when they get around to enforcing these laws the Israelis will the first and only culprits to be so charged. After that it can be business as usual again.

Those in power make the rules. It always works that way. That's why every sane country seeks nuclear weapons.

Sketchy and unexpected as may be I think Seth's core question "Why is it that only the Jews are expected to respect..." is legit and needs a definitive answer. Not as phrased, which is specious, but why the actions of Israel are subjected to such intimate scrutiny and such adamant partisanship.
Why is it any different for Israel to run an apartheid dominance game on the Palestinians than it was for the US to do it to Native Americans? I think answering that question definitively would move things along.
Otherwise it's a sort of "Okay then! Now we'll all be moral actors on this little world stage. Hymie, you're first."
Musical chairs with arbitrary ethical outcomes once the music stops.
If Israel isn't special, why are we all talking about it? Well pre-Gaza anyway why.
Why should any particular group or state be required to act selflessly, when all around it are the machinations and devices of other selfish groups and states?
One way to answer that might be that contrary to popular mythology we're climbing as a species out of a swamp of ignorance and brutal amorality. Trying to get somewhere we haven't been yet.
That these moral structures are an attempt to gift the humans of the future, our children as it were, with something that can free them up for even higher advancement.

Or as Stalin said, "How many regiments does the Pope have?"

Tim-if you think the Israelis were "given" the land and didn't fight for it or develop it, build it etc., then your history is quite deficient. The UN Mandate gave legal cover to an arduous decades-long process of struggle.

Actually, a precedent was created when the UNSC used military force to expel Iraq from Kuwait.

And that's the business as usual. Arabs/Muslims are the new Jews. Jews are Judeochristians along with the Europeans and Americans.

Roy-ah yes, all Humanity is morally evolving and climbing out of the muck save those nasty territorial particularist "Hymies.". Perhaps some eugenics are in order to save Mankind?

Or, rather, "along with all other Europeans and Americans"

Yes certainly, Arabs/Muslims are the new Jews...except unlike the actual Jews they possess some 54 nations, not just one new one.

But wait! I have discounted the Andalusian tragedy! The loss of Spain from dar al-Salam has rankled pure hearts from OBL to abba1!

All "new Jews" suffer while Spain remains within the Euro-Zionist claw.

Yes, but these days you don't need to run those gas chambers for years to kill a lot of people. There is no safety in numbers anymore.

Also, they are surprisingly meek, peaceful, and good-natured, a vast, overwhelming majority of them. You really have to keep kicking them in the nuts for decades to make them do something; and when they do, it'll be some pathetic suicide bombing.

I can only assume this has carried on because it provides a handy example of the very lens described in the original post?

It will be a great leap forward if every defender of Israel realizes that Israel's theft of Palestinian land is morally the same as white America's theft of land from the Native Americans. No more pretense, just an open admission that "yeah, we stole it, so what, everybody does it." Then some whining about how only Israel is criticized, which is false. Iraq didn't keep Kuwait, Indonesia didn't keep East Timor, and France (and colonists who'd been there 100 years) didn't keep Algeria, and as for Native Americans, they're not forced to live on reservations anymore. They have a right of return. And btw, maybe some of you youngsters (if some of you are young) don't remember this, but South Africans of the white persuasion used to complain about how their country was singled out, when so many other African countries were run by brutal thugs.

I don't think Israelis should leave--it's their home now for a few generations. And I think a one-state solution right now which just lead to a Lebanese-style civil war. But it's a little boring to read about how Israel is singled out, when so far all this singling out hasn't actually meant that they were forced to stop stealing land and murdering Palestinians.

David -- but China is still in Tibet.

And, well, yeah, the white South Africans were singled out. They are gone and most of the African continent is still run by thugs of an appropriate melonin level. So I'm really not sure where you were going with that data point.

No Seth, all of it, all of us, including "those nasty territorial particularist etc". Everybody. Climbing out of the muck of history and superstition and ancestral moral fall.
You, and no lack of others, try to make your own position more morally definite by making mine less morally defensible, but you have to fake it to do that, and it isn't me you're responding to, or my thoughts and feelings about this.
Donald Johnson sort of answers the why Israel question, by saying it's not true. Sort of. Some cavil could be raised as to what exactly Native Americans would be returning to should they exercise their rights in that regard.
I think a fuller answer as to why Israel seems singularly accused for things it has in common with many other states would point out the criticism in the US itself gets vehement in correspondence to the soft and singularly partisan presentation of Israel in US media.
The Eelam rebels are invisible here, their cause unknown, their casualties unremarked on, even as they fight on to the end. Heroically as far as I'm concerned. The death toll in Sri Lanka's awfully big, but you wouldn't know it from anything I'm seeing. The heinous motives at work there aren't even slightly bi-lateral, it's a clear-cut case of militarist oppression versus freedom and its defenders.
Yet most US news readers don't have much of a picture of what that is or is about. It doesn't seem important to them. Again the media.

I know this is like terrible of me to bring up, but didn't the Nazis also have to pull out of countries they'd invaded and occupied and colonized? And pay reparations to the people they'd injured?

A year or so ago I read a book about a notable American Catholic priest of German extraction who became some sort of liaison between the Vatican, the American army (who also, eventually, pulled out of the countries they'd occupied, more or less), and German Catholics. On at least one occasion he intervened (successfully, as I recall) on behalf of Germans who'd been living for a decade in housing expropriated from the Jews, and who couldn't see why they should have to move out just because Germany had lost the war. I mean, they'd been living there a long time, and it felt like home by that time, you know? And the Jews who'd been taken away didn't need the place anymore. A land without a people for a people without a land, y'know?

Oh, and another difference between the Zionists and the previous regimes who'd controlled Palestine before them: the Zionists not only wanted to "move in", as Fritz so delicately put it, they wanted to start a new state that would be for Jews alone, and drive out the Palestinians. The Palestinians hadn't always accepted domination from outside, either -- in 1834 they revolted against Egypt when the viceroy took over Palestine. They were unsuccessful, and about 10,000 were killed, but it wasn't only Jewish outsiders they didn't want to be ruled by.

Fritz--I was going with the thought that just because the white South Africans complained about being singled out didn't mean we had to sympathize. And not all of Africa is run by thugs--also, most people (maybe not you) would agree that not having apartheid South Africa destabilizing its neighbors by supporting murderous groups like Renamo and Unita (which between them caused 1.5 million deaths) probably makes Africa a less bad place.
But anyway, Fritz, if that's the best you can do I wasn't writing for you, but for anyone who might have taken the "singled out" argument in good faith.

And I agree with Roy's point about the US and Native Americans--we've got nothing to brag about in this country. But if Israel defenders are going to use our crimes as their defense, then maybe they should follow the logic a little further.

It's also true that the reason criticism of Israel is so vehement in some parts of the American left is precisely the fact that its supporters in the US have been spreading so much misinformation (to use a polite term--"lying" might be more to the point) about it, and also accusing anyone who goes beyond a certain point of antisemitism. For a while you weren't supposed to sympathize with the Palestinians at all, except as victims of their own leaders (which is where most American politicians remain). Then you could , if you were a Serious NYT-style liberal, criticize Israeli settlements, but not morally equate their real estate practices with the horrors of Palestinian terrorism. Oh, my, that would never do. Then you could say that yeah, the occupation was bad, but not quite as bad as terrorism, and anyway, everything was just fine until 1967. We still aren't at the point in mainstream America where one can just say "Yeah, Israel is the latest case of settler colonialism, with the inevitable atrocities on both sides but they got into the game a little late, so they've had to lie about it."

Which doesn't commit one to any particular solution. But a little honesty would be nice.

And to be fair (as I recently told a Christian Zionist friend of mine), the root cause of the I/P conflict is Christian antisemitism. It was to atone for centuries of oppression against Jews that so many Christians have decided that Palestinians who had nothing to do with it should pay for the crimes of Christian bigots.

Seth: All those words and only 1 good point. Sheesh.
No reason to feed the trolls people.

I'd say my spot-on analysis of Mamet is worth at least two points.

I'd say my spot-on analysis of Mamet is worth at least two points.

I didn't go to Yale for nothing!

Thanks John.

Save the oocytes--that link brought back memories. Those were exactly the arguments that people made then and not just white South Africans.

Rob -- to paraphrase Perry Anderson's words. Without the British providing police protection, Arabs would have slaughtered the Jews who bought land in Palestine and settled there.

I agree.

Fritz, you're an idiot.

Fritz, why would they suddenly start slaughtering Jews - after about 2 thousand years of not doing anything like that?

Abba1-see Hebron massacre (c. 1928?)

Duncan-My point exactly. The Nazis were not "made to pull out" of occupied countries through moral suasion or the "rule of law." There was a little conflict known as World War II fought to destroy the Nazi state and force it out of occupied territory. The war killed tens of millions of people. Look it up.

Maybe some fine day the world will awake to Zionist expansion and its threat to the entire planet and launch a total war against the state of Israel. Then your argument will achieve the parallelism you seek.

Meanwhile Koenigsburg (Kallinin) is a Russian exclave and hopes for a Prussian homeland have been extinguished. Sudetenland is firmly Czech (three million native ethnic Germans were expelled). Hawaii is a state. Tibet is overrun by Chinese settlers, as is East Turkistan, both conquered in 1950. Greenland is run by Denmark. The Lapps lack real sovereignty, and South Ossetia chafes under the rule of Tbilisi owing to the whims of Stalin.

Should Israel remove itself to the Green Line? YES!! Is it the worst place in the world? No.

I'm so glad Seth has been able to establish that Israel is not "the worst place in the world." I'll promptly remove that point from all of my anti-Israel propaganda.

Right, the Hebron massacre. But what about the 2 thousand years (or so) before the Zionist project started? You know, back in the day when people living in Palestine were all Palestinians, and only then Arabs, Jews, Greeks, and Armenians.

Why would an Israeli chant rhyme in English?

Um... because both lines end in the same word?

la la la, la la la, more of this is coming without tight resource management plans for sharing and conservation and repair, you can justify anything by holding it up against a fight over holy land, but you only get what you make, whether or not you prayed full price for the materials

Donald Johnson, I think most of the territory on this subject has been covered, but a tip of the hat for your observation about current events having been arrived at from historical Christian anti-semitism. What's going on in Gaza today is essentially a continuation of WWII.

What happened in 1948 was continuation of the WWII: a persecuted European sect got radicalized, went to the ME, did some terrorism and ethnic cleansing there, and built a colony. Just like another European sect a few hundred yeas before in North America.

But what happened since 1948 is not a continuation of the WWII, because instead of calming down this group keeps getting more and more radicalized, has been for 60 years now.

WWII doesn't explain it. This is deliberate, persistent, laborious indoctrination and inciting, this is a phenomenon of its own.

For what it's worth, I applaud the spirit of your post here Mr. Schwarz, in it's alarm and integrity, however, I have a hard time believing this story in so far as the Israeli soccer matches chant.

Unless this can be confirmed in Hebrew, I suspect it is an disinformation ploy, a psyop plant meant to under cut moral outrage over Gaza, in others words a set up. Which will benefit the Israeli agenda once it's dis-proven, a game theory ploy to minimize, govern and short circuit the growing backlash.

However, if indeed true, then we are negotiating with insanity...

Uncle $cam: Its insanity, and its not negotiating with it, WE'RE JUST PAYING FOR IT, straight up. Simply a contractural agreemnt between US and many parties at hand, U-pay-cash-U-get-a-show, like buying a ticket at the corner theater.