Hmm. My point in bringing up their education was that they are now even more radicalised than before. I don’t think they can be coerced in to being much better than they are, but it would also be foolish to ignore the quite deliberate (and successful) efforts to make them much worse.

People are failing Anthropology 101.

We always assume everybody thinks like us, but they don’t.

Anthro teaches that there are very, very, very, very, very few true human universals outside of bio.

You want universals, go down the hall to the Biology dept.

People make assumptions they don’t even know they are making, because they figure they are just common sense. They don’t know their basic ideas are rooted in history and culture, and that folks with a different history and culture may think, feel and do, completely differently. Without being crazy. Just them.

This can create problems not all of which are philosophical unfortunately. Alas, alas.

This is, among other things (like sentimental, US-style multiculturalism), an oddly passive strategy that has the considerable advantage of relieving Israel of any responsibility from taking action to promote peace. What’s to be done? They may never change, etc. etc. Wake us up when they do….

What, you want the Palestinians to LIKE you? This has nothing to do with anything. Think the Estonians like the Russians? The Bolivians, the Chileans? The Greeks, the Turks? The Poles, the Germans? The examples are truly endless.

Israel’s setting the bar at coercing affection from the P’s is the surest way to insure that conflict will continue. My guess is that the Palestinians will never like Israel, yet someday learn to live in peace with it.

Muffti’s whole point was that ‘true’ peace is a hopeless dream precisely because the happy ‘multi-culti’ dream is inaccessible and probably impossible. Muffti said nothing about not offending eachother – it’s difficult for sworn enemies to fail to offend one another.

Nothing is being intellectualized away – Muffti’s not nearly smart enough to do that! – Muffti’s poitn was that the notion of ‘true’ peace Laya was referring to seems well night impossible. But maybe functional peace is a more realistic goal.

But Muffti does think that Palis have feelings. Sorry.

Peace is really about shared interest, and self-interest.

…which would give me a nice warm feeling of multi-culti fuzziness, if Matt had not detailed exactly which actions the Palis are taking:

“They’ve lived their entire lives being taught suicide bombing is cool, dead terrorists are heroes and the greatest thing you can do is strap on some C4 and find some Jews.”
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - –

so, Muffti – could you please tell us over here in Israel how to tiptoe around our interlocutors’ “actions” so we don’t, you know, offend each other?

Muffti – your comments exemplify the self-referential fallacy that Laya is describing.

Front and center: you launch into hair-splitting, angel-on-pin inquiries because, well, from your academic, West Coast cocoon you are untouched by this (or any other) threat of unremitting, immediate violence.

So the issue of what to do about the Palis can be intellectualized away – and you can safely entertain the notion that the Palis may have rights-n-feelings too. From a safe distance you can ignore those aspects of the reality that – violently! – depart from prevailing multi-culti tropes.

Nail, meet head.

Not to go on about Oslo, but there are a couple of less-observed, long-term factors resulting from that mess. The average Gazan is 16 years old, ie, was born and educated either by a Fatah/PLO school or a Hamas school. The situation is similar in Y&Sh. They’ve lived their entire lives being taught suicide bombing is cool, dead terrorists are heroes and the greatest thing you can do is strap on some C4 and find some Jews.

The assumption that palestinians wanted peace during Oslo was… flawed. To say it now, or within the next decade or two, would be outright insanity.

Regarding cultural imperialism: who is ‘we’ in that paragraph? Are you speaking as an American? An Israeli? An American Jew? This seems confusing to me.

Yoni

That having been said, living in Israel, I would settle for any kind of peace. Most Israelis, in fact, have stopped hoping for peace, and started simply hoping for “quiet.”

You are right about the difference between the people and the governments that supposedly represent them. In order to really have peace though, especially in an era of non-conventional warfare, it seems both bodies would need to desire it.

A few things could be clarified for Muffti. You say:

If true peace can only come through understanding, what do you do if understanding the others culture means that peace is not a true goal, and that annihilation is? What can we make of this paradox?

First, Muffti isn’t sure what true peace is, but in point of fact, there are many peaceful situations have arisen not from cultural understanding but from other factors: bankruptcy, economic factors, demographic problems. A desire for peace and recognition of the humanity has not always been top priority. Muffti would be plainly happy if the Israeli’s could establish peace that wasn’t true peace: if, for example, the economic relations between Israel adn its neighbours became so strong that annihilation of one woudl mean economic annihilation fo the other, and that kept them playing nice even if hating eachother, Muffti could live happily.

There’s a deeper question embedded in wath you say however. there is hte notion that cultures qua cultures really want thing. TH einteresting thing about cultural desires is that it is not a straightforward product of the desires of its inhabitants. And here lies what Muffti thinks is the real prickly puzzle. Teh average inhabitant has desires and needs but so doest he culture as a whole and the two are often at ends and odds with each other. Millions of jihadis abound but the average muslim and his moderate groups again and again try paint themselves as happy to live in a non-sharia society and worship in private. Ahmadinejad was voted in on a platform of agression towards to US and Israel but faces massive and bold criticism at home (so far as the media paints it) for really just doing his job as he promised to do it.

In other words, there is no algorithm for predicting what the people want from waht the culture as a whole seems to want. When it is army against army, soemtiems this doesn’t matter since what the average man does not control the army, despite often serving in it. However, when small(ish) groups can get together, form militaries that can effectively push around an entire country, this get much more worriesome. In other words, while you paint a scary picture, Muffti suspects that an apparenlty unified culture desires is the funciton of a very motley and unorganized set of the desires of the people who identify and are identified with that culture.

This makes the quesiton of cultural imperialsim much thornier than it might have looked at first.

Sorry to ramble; just woke up on a sunday morning and that is the worst time to blog.