Gaza as Mexico and other Israeli hypotheticals
The debate continues on Steve Walt’s "thought experiment." Today, David Rothkopf joined Chris Brose in taking on Walt’s hypothetical Jewish Gaza. Ross Douthat also weighed in over at the Atlantic. Walt seems to be taking the impressive buzz he’s generated in his blogosphere debut in stride and has just posted a follow-up experiment. But it’s ...
The debate continues on Steve Walt's "thought experiment." Today, David Rothkopf joined Chris Brose in taking on Walt's hypothetical Jewish Gaza. Ross Douthat also weighed in over at the Atlantic. Walt seems to be taking the impressive buzz he's generated in his blogosphere debut in stride and has just posted a follow-up experiment.
The debate continues on Steve Walt’s "thought experiment." Today, David Rothkopf joined Chris Brose in taking on Walt’s hypothetical Jewish Gaza. Ross Douthat also weighed in over at the Atlantic. Walt seems to be taking the impressive buzz he’s generated in his blogosphere debut in stride and has just posted a follow-up experiment.
But it’s not just Israel’s critics who can play the analogy game. Blogging for Haaretz, Bradley Burston proposes this one:
A fanatical religious party wins a string of elections in Mexico’s northern states, then stages a civil war to drive out the federal government and take full control.
The party’s charter demands the return to Mexico of the occupied territories of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas.
Firing homemade rockets and more advanced projectiles smuggled in from Iran and China, the party’s gunners can hit a total of one of every seven Americans, or 43,598,000 people, in a broad swath which includes Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Austin, San Antonio and Houston, and Las Vegas.
In all of these areas, pre-schools, grade schools, and universities are all forced to shut down. Families sleep in bomb shelters, and return to them several times a day during air raids. Businesses are shuttered, and the economy shuts down.
I dunno. I must admit I’m a little confused by which part of Mexico corresponds with which Palestinian faction and the model pretty much ignores five decades of Israeli history.
I find this need to put Israel in context by pretending that it’s something else a little strange. Why, in order to understand this country’s situation, do we need to imagine that Israelis are actually Arabs, or that the Palestinians are Mexicans, or that Israel never existed, or that it existed but was in Alaska?
Analogies and hypotheticals can be useful for putting a complicated situation in context, but can also be dangerous if you’re altering your perception of reality in order to fit your chosen narrative. In a conflict as ideologically divisive as Israel/Palestine, they’re rhetorically useful but pretty rarely enlightening.
Believe it or not, Israel is a real place. So is Gaza. No theoretical construct is going to absolve either side of responsibility for inflicting violence or get them any closer to a resolution.
Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating
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