On the messed-upness of Palestinians

You broke it, you bought it

You’ve probably seen this.

What on earth is going on here? Beats me. You might think you have an explanation, but I think you are wrong.

R.G. Collingwood was a British philosopher from back in the good old days when, if you were clever enough, Oxford would just let you keep hanging around after your degree, reading books for money, and writing whenever you felt like it. One of the things he wrote when he felt like it was his intellectual autobiography, which is a little gem of a book you can read in an afternoon, and think about for the next two months. I quote liberally:

A YEAR or two after the outbreak of war, I was living in London and working with a section of the Admiralty Intelligence Division in the rooms of the Royal Geographical Society. Every day I walked across Kensington Gardens and past the Albert Memorial. The Albert Memorial began by degrees to obsess me. Like Wordsworth's Leech-gatherer, it took on a strange air of significance ; it seemed

Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man from some far region sent,
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.

Everything about it was visibly mis-shapen, corrupt, crawling, verminous; for a time I could not bear to look at it, and passed with averted eyes; recovering from this weakness, I forced myself to look, and to face day by day the question: a thing so obviously, so incontrovertibly, so indefensibly bad, why had Scott done it? To say that Scott was a bad architect was to burke the problem with a tautology ; to say that there was no accounting for tastes was to evade it by suggestio falsi. What relation was there, I began to ask myself, between what he had done and what he had tried to do ? Had he tried to produce a beautiful thing; a thing, I meant, which we should have thought beautiful? If so, he had of course failed. But had he perhaps been trying to produce something different ? If so, he might possibly have succeeded. If I found the monument merely loathsome, was that perhaps my fault? Was I looking in it for qualities it did not possess, and either ignoring or despising those it did? …

The Albert Memorial. Before Modernism, people had the liberty of despising merely bad buildings.

… During the War, in the course of my meditations on the Albert Memorial, I set myself to reconsider this 'realist' attitude towards the history of philosophy. Was it really true, I asked myself, that the problems of philosophy were, even in the loosest sense of that word, eternal? Was it really true that different philosophies were different attempts to answer the same questions ? I soon discovered that it was not true ; it was merely a vulgar error, consequent on a kind of historical myopia which, deceived by superficial resemblances, failed to detect profound differences.

The first point at which I saw a perfectly clear gleam of daylight was in political theory. Take Plato's Republic and Hobbes's Leviathan, so far as they are concerned with politics. Obviously the political theories they set forth are not the same. But do they represent two different theories of the same thing ? Can you say that the Republic gives one account of 'the nature of the State' and the Leviathan another? No; because Plato's 'State' is the Greek πόλις, and Hobbes's is the absolutist State of the seventeenth century. The 'realist' answer is easy: certainly Plato's State is different from Hobbes's, but they are both States ; so the theories are theories of the State. Indeed, what did you mean by calling them both political, if not that they were theories of the same thing?

It was obvious to me that this was only a piece of logical bluff, and that if instead of logic-chopping you got down to brass tacks and called for definitions of the 'State' as Plato conceived it and as Hobbes conceived it, you would find that the differences between them were not superficial but went down to essentials. You can call the two things the same if you insist; but if you do, you must admit that the thing has got diablement change' en route, so that the 'nature of the State' in Plato's time was genuinely different from the 'nature of the State' in Hobbes's. I do not mean the empirical nature of the State; I mean the ideal nature of the State. What even the best and wisest of those who are engaged in politics are trying to do has altered. Plato's Republic is an attempt at a theory of one thing; Hobbes's Leviathan an attempt at a theory of something else …

… The clue, once found, was easily applied elsewhere. It was not difficult to see that, just as the Greek πόλις could not be legitimately translated by the modern word 'State', except with a warning that the two things are in various essential ways different, and a statement of what these differences are; so, in ethics, a Greek word like δεῖ? cannot be legitimately translated by using the word 'ought', if that word carries with it the notion of what is sometimes called 'moral obligation'. Was there any Greek word or phrase to express that notion? The 'realists' said there was; but they stultified themselves by adding that the 'theories of moral obligation' expounded by Greek writers differed from modern theories such as Kant's about the same thing. How did they know that the Greek and the Mantian theories were about the same thing? Oh, because δεῖ (or whatever word it was) is the Greek for 'ought’.

It was like having a nightmare about a man who had got it into his head that τριήρης was the Greek for 'steamer', and when it was pointed out to him that descriptions of triremes in Greek writers were at any rate not very good descriptions of steamers, replied triumphantly, 'That is just what I say. These Greek philosophers' (or, 'these modern philosophers', according to which side he was on in the good old controversy between the Ancients and the Moderns) 'were terribly muddle-headed, and their theory of steamers is all wrong'. If you tried to explain that τριήρης does not mean steamer at all but something different, he would reply, 'Then what does it mean ?' and in ten minutes he would show you that you didn't know; you couldn't draw a trireme, or make a model of one, or even describe exactly how it worked. And having annihilated you, he would go on for the rest of his life translating τριήρης 'steamer'…

… Having thus with regard to the supposed permanence of philosophical problems found the 'realist' conception of philosophical history false at every point where I could think of testing it, I turned to another aspect of the same conception: namely the 'realists' ' distinction between the 'historical’ question 'what was So-and-so's theory on such and such a matter ?' and the 'philosophical' question 'was he right?'

This distinction was soon condemned as fallacious. I will not here explain, since the reader can easily see it for himself, how it broke down in the light of the question 'how is the so-called philosophical issue to be settled ?' and the answer that it could only be settled by what I was simultaneously discovering to be the sophistical methods of 'realist' criticism. I will rather point out that the alleged distinction between the historical question and the philosophical must be false, because it presupposes the permanence of philosophical problems. If there were a permanent problem P, we could ask 'what did Kant, or Leibniz, or Berkeley, think about P?' and if that question could be answered, we could then go on to ask 'was Kant, or Leibniz, or Berkeley, right in what he thought about P?' But what is thought to be a permanent problem P is really a number of transitory problems p1 p2, p3, . . . whose individual peculiarities are blurred by the historical myopia of the person who lumps them together under the one name P. It follows that we cannot fish the problem P out of the hyperuranian lucky-bag, hold it up, and say 'what did So-and-so think about this?' We have to begin, as poor devils of historians begin, from the other end. We have to study documents and interpret them. We have to say 'here is a passage of Leibniz; what is it about? what is the problem with which it deals?' Perhaps we label that problem p14. Then comes the question 'Does Leibniz here deal with p14, rightly or wrongly ?' The answer to this is not quite so simple as the 'realists' think. If Leibniz when he wrote this passage was so confused in his mind as to make a complete mess of the job of solving his problem, he was bound at the same time to mix up his own tracks so completely that no reader could see quite clearly what his problem had been. For one and the same passage states his solution and serves as evidence of what the problem was. The fact that we can identify his problem is proof that he has solved it; for we only know what the problem was by arguing back from the solution.

If anybody chooses to deny this, I will not try to convince him. Everybody who has learnt to think historically knows it already; and no amount of argument could teach it to a person who had not learnt to think historically. How can we discover what the tactical problem was that Nelson set himself at Trafalgar? Only by studying the tactics he pursued in the battle. We argue back from the solution to the problem. What else could we do ? Even if we had the original typescript of the coded orders issued by wireless to his captains a few hours before the battle began, this would not tell us that he had not changed his mind at the last moment, extemporized a new plan on seeing some new factor in the situation, and trusted his captains to understand what he was doing and to back him up. Naval historians think it worth while to argue about Nelson's tactical plan at Trafalgar because he won the battle. It is not worth while arguing about Villeneuve's plan. He did not succeed in carrying it out, and therefore no one will ever know what it was. We can only guess. And guessing is not history.

A teacher who puts into his pupils' hands a philosophical text, and invites them to attend to a certain passage, may therefore say to them, 'This is a confused passage ; we can see that the author was thinking about some problem or other, and we may reasonably conjecture that it was a problem somewhat like that discussed in such and such a passage by So-and-so. But he is muddled about the business, and no one can ever tell exactly what it was that worried the poor man.' He may say this; but if he does, his pupils will not greatly cherish his memory in after life. He had no business to waste their time on a passage of that sort.

Did you just scroll past that? Don’t worry, so did everyone else. The TLDR is that understanding human action means understanding human thought, and understanding human thought means reconstructing the problem the human was attempting to solve when he formulated it. If he failed to solve that problem, then you can’t work out what that problem was, and thus his action is literally incomprehensible.

In a big shock, Collingwood’s solution to all the problems of philosophy did not solve all the problems of philosophy. He is being overly prescriptive (and skip to the last chapter to see where this got him), but this is a good heuristic, and very liberating too. To acknowledge that someone you know is a FUP is to stop the bewildering search to understand why they act the way they do. Palestinians are FUPs. That is not the beginning of the explanation, but the end of the road. You can pursue the avenue of morbid psychology, and diagnose them with ‘Being a FUP disorder’, but you are just wasting your time. Instead, let us reflect on what it means for us that Palestinians are FUPs because, after all, that’s the only reason we care about it all.

The Iron Wall Confidence Trick that failed

Just like a dog barks, and a cat urinates all over your patio furniture, the familiar characteristic of the Right Wing Zionist is that he will tell you that he, unlike the softies of the Left who built the state while his forebears threw grenades at bus-stops for no discernible reason, understands the Arab, does not patronize or condescend to him, but can speak to him at his own level from a position of mutual comprehension. The Right Wing Zionist may have just turned up from Brooklyn, he may still be in Brooklyn right now, but this will only make him more insistent on telling you how much he just intuitively gets the Arab mindset, which he read about on Arutz 7.

The conceit goes all the way back to Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall article:

Our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine , in return for cultural and economic advantages. I repudiate this conception of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are five hundred years behind us, they have neither our endurance nor our determination; but they are just as good psychologists as we are, and their minds have been sharpened like ours by centuries of fine-spun logomachy. We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico , and their Sioux for their rolling Prairies.

To imagine, as our Arabophiles do, that they will voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism. In return for the moral and material conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people; it means that they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system.

Though the policies changed, the rhetoric didn’t. Kahane could barely complete five consecutive sentences without returning to the motif:

But it’s all just crap. The first great test of the Revisionist’s claim to understand the Arab came with the Western Wall controversy, of 1928-29. That Jews could use the area for prayer was established by long precedent, repeatedly affirmed by the Ottomans in the late 19th and early 20th century. Fanatic madman, Hajj Amin Al Husseini, was trying to use the wall as a wedge issue in his campaign to cement control over the Arab community, and, like the rightoid shithead he was, pursued a dual strategy of provoking and funding violence against Jewish worshippers, whilst also spreading rumours of Jewish intentions to take over the Temple Mount among the Arab public. The Zionist leadership was trying, with mixed success, to handle the issue through a mixture of appeals to the British administrators, and domestic and international hasbara campaigns.

That’s cucked and bugman, though, and so, tired of Jewsniping impotently from the sidelines for a year, the Revisionists decided it was time for them to step in. In order to demonstrate their enormous understanding of Arab psychology, they unveiled a truly brilliant and strategically adroit plan, so cunning in its methods and delicate in its design that it could not fail to win the day. They would - get this! - organize a gang of oafs to march to the wall and shout stuff. This would ‘assert Jewish pride’ and ‘demonstrate resolve’ and ‘show that Jews are not victims’ and other important goals of Retard Revisionist Zionism. That it happened to be precisely what Hajj Amin Al Husseini had been trying to engineer the whole time was but a minor detail. When you truly understand that Arab mind like a Right Wing Zionist does, you don’t even have to game out his plans.

Fast forward a few months, of course, and there were riots all over Palestine, and over 100 Jews were dead, many of them murdered in appallingly bestial fashion. To cap matters off, after imposing their Iron Wall on the Arab rioters, the British authorities decided it was time to review the policy of open Jewish immigration, with the Hope Simpson Enquiry paving the road to the White Paper, and ensuring the doors of the Holy Land were slammed shut just in time for the Holocaust. Great job, knobhead. But when YOU HAVE SUCH AN INCREDIBLY GREAT GRASP OF ARAB PSYCHOLOGY, you don’t have to say sorry. You just blow up a hotel or whatever.

Look at a map bro.

There are two fundamental flaws in the Iron Wall conceit of understanding the Arab better than the ‘Arabophile’ The first is that’s it was totally made up by LARPers based on it sounding cool. The second is that the Revisionists needed manpower, and, because they had no success getting smart normal people, they had to fall back on dumbdumbheads. Even if you actually did have some real insight into the Arab psyche, the dumbdumbheads won’t let you use it, because they don’t care and just want to feel big. If I go to the Old City and throw stuff, the Arabs will definitely get the message. What message, I don’t know. It’s not at all that I am just a retard, this is all for some kind of purpose. Really.

In the pre-war Yishuv, retarded morons were a distinct minority, but with the wave of expulsions from Arab countries following 1948, Right Wing Zionism hit the jackpot. Not only did it acquire a latent electoral majority just waiting for a sufficiently unscrupulous actor to exploit it, it also got a great new argument. No longer did Right Wing Zionists have to merely assert that they understood Arab psychology better, they could prove it because THIS IS THE MIDDLE EAST! Yes, only Jews from Iraq and Morocco can understand deep, spatially conditioned concepts like ‘if an Arab hits you, you need to find some other Arab and hit him’. Whitey can’t keep up; too busy learning algebra.

Which line is shorter?

Sure, there are some flaws in this theory. For a start, European Jews in the Labour Zionist movement began showing up in the first decade of the 1900s, and, within 50 years, had built a country under extremely adverse circumstances, while winning wars against multiple other states at once, whereas MENA Jews never achieved anything at all ever. For a second, it sure looks like Israel’s military history is divided into two parts: the period when MENA Jews were second class citizens with no say in how anything was run (this is how they tell it, not me), and the period after they achieved a measure of equality, with the first being characterized by relentless, near miraculous success, and the second unremitting failure.

The truth is that the Middle East is a mess because it is full of people whose thought process extends to ‘but this is the Middle East’ and then respond to real or perceived disrespect by chimping out, then cry when other people chimp back. Those Middle Eastern countries that have managed to turn lemons into a measure of lemonade don’t do it by inciting their dumbest and most violent people to start provoking everyone around them. They do it by taking out Pakistani generals on loan to kill them.

A more balanced picture

To all this, the Israeli rightoid has a readymade answer. He dindunuffin. He dindunuffin because he couldn’t do nuffin. The Left has all the power, and has been preventing him from truly chimping out the whole time.

Now, in the trivial sense that the Right has not been able to consistently do what it wants all the time, this is obviously true. The Right has not formed the government in all 77 out of Israel’s 77 years and, even when it has, not every part of the state is controlled by the elected part of it. Sure, granted. For the last thirty years, the rightoid line was that Israel, thanks to the PR system and the need for coalition building, has never had a ‘fully’ Right Wing government. We finally got one two years ago, and since then everything has turned out great, more or less.

I’m being unfair, though, because it is certainly true that there are plenty of cases where it is perfectly clear that the Left have done things that have encouraged the Palestinian spiral down into madness, while the Right tried and failed to resist. The most clear-cut example is the invitation of the PLO to administer the West Bank and Gaza during the Oslo Accords, in full knowledge of the fact that the PLO would use it to settle scores with ‘collaborators’, that is to say the best and wisest elements of Palestinian society from whom, if it ever does, a sane Palestinian society can emerge. There is no point in denying that Israeli negotiators have insisted on appealing to the enlightened self interest of Palestinian criminal gangs, with no good reason to think this would ever work, and mounting evidence that it wasn’t. This is all true, but it is not true that the Israeli Right have simply sat at the side the whole time while the Left had its way, never influencing events themselves.

Around a year ago, there was a brief controversy about why it was at one point impossible to import cookies to Gaza. The case was comprehensively cracked here.

The Too Long Didn’t Watch, is that Israel did it neither for any comprehensible security reasons, nor for any comprehensible nefarious reasons, because it wasn’t for any reason. Someone just thought it would be based and epic to not put cookies on the approved import list, and eventually someone else stepped in and put them on the list. What positive goal was achieved? What positive goal was even intended? As with the Palestinians, we have hit the end of the road.

An image to ponder

When Kahane wasn’t condemning normie Zionists for having contempt for the Arabs, he liked to call them dogs. Not the most original metaphor, but vivid enough, so let’s run with it. Imagine a dog, not a Pitbull (that’s racist), but a Belgian Shepherd or similar. We observe one person who tries to reason with the dog, discusses with him the categorical imperative, and performs random unsolicited acts of kindness to appeal to its better nature. Another, swarthier person enters, perplexed at this cringe European, and pushes him to the side. He takes a good long look at the dog, walks over and kicks it square in the nuts, returning to high-five his friends. Rinse and repeat for three decades. Who is surprised that the dog is deranged?

What you do with a dog, obviously, is you train it. You don’t respond to its barks and snarls by getting down on all fours and barking back because ‘this is the yard’ and that’s what is done here. How do you train the dog? Well, go find someone who’s good at it, and ask him.

Ask him.

You have to want to though. Jews like to say how much they hate it that they are in conflict with the world’s most mental people. The truth is that they love it. Their group narcissism feeds more than anything else off the feeling of being at the center of a cosmic struggle between good and evil. If they had an enemy who was unexceptional, if they were just part of a not particularly important conflict with no broader ramifications for the world at large, they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves. They have to be at the front line of something. So, looking at the madness across the fence feels strangely snug.

But it’s not worth it. Not anymore. Palestinianism is an abomination. It’s an abomination we made. Not just us, but first and last of all us, and none of the other actors have a pressing need to fix it. We are not the first, and shall not be the last to be faced with people half devil and half child, and the problem of how to incorporate them into a political order so that they no longer generate chaos. It’s a tricky problem, with lots of moving parts, but that’s all it is. It has no special moral or spiritual or eschatological significance; it’s just a big fat mess. Now, or tomorrow, or many years from now, but sometime we must wake up from the dream state we have been in while we wandered here, kicking up the dust around us until it started to choke.