Israel vs. Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault and Derrida

Halkin thinks there's more to media bias than anti-Semitism, ignorance, anti-colonialism, anti-Americanism:

The 1960's and 70's, after all, saw not only the entrenchment of the Israeli occupation, but also the rise of postmodernism—and postmodernist thought is intrinsically hostile to much of what Israel is about.

...[it is] the belief that the eternal verities that had concerned thinkers in the past were neither eternal, veracious, nor worth thinking about unless they could be pressed into the service of temporal, that is, political causes...beginning with Nietzsche and Marx, 19th- and 20th-century European thought was becoming increasingly instrumental, so that instead of a determinable something known as "truth," there were only, to use a contemporary term not yet fashionable in Benda's day, competing "narratives."

What seemed a deplorable trend to Benda has now become the regnant ideology of our times. And this is bad for Israel, because the Zionist narrative, as gripping as it may seem to those who tell it as their own, is not, when set against the Palestinian narrative that opposes it, terribly convincing in an age that has a short attention span and distrusts the claims of history.

...For most contemporary intellectuals, this is a narrative that quite simply does not have what it takes. At best, it is put by them on a par with its Palestinian rival, so that one ends up with a "meta-narrative," two contradictory versions of history between which it is impossible and unnecessary to choose because they are ultimately equal and symmetrical. Here is a people that has suffered and here is a people that has suffered; here is one with great traumas and here is one with great traumas; here a lost homeland has been repossessed and here a possessed homeland has been lost; here and here is the inability to recognize the "Other," making both sides brutal and murderous with rage and hatred. [emphasis added]

Given that Israel is now faced not only with a whole host of enemies that we already were familiar with but also the prevalent philosophical movement of the 20th and 21st centuries, what is Israel supposed to do? How do you combat an argument that can claim to be fully articulated and understood by a bumper that says "Free Palestine"?

Halkin thinks he has the answer to countering the effects of this philosophy--hasbara:

But to think of hasbara as merely public relations is to take only the ground-level view. Israel's battle to make its case heard and understood is part of a larger battle to assert the importance of history and historical truth in a world in which they no longer matter very much. It is even, one might say, part of the battle against the intellectual betrayals of postmodernism itself.

In that sense, unless hasbara is conceived of as truly explaining, and not just as PR, Israel will continue to lose the war for public opinion. In the long run, the truth is its most reliable weapon, even if it is one that can only be wielded effectively by those willing to risk self-inflicted wounds. For if the truth is, generally speaking, on Israel's side, it may not be so in every case, and the temptation to tailor it when it is not, which hasbara has not been free of, is the temptation to resort to propaganda. And in a war of Jewish propaganda versus Arab propaganda—or, if one prefers, of Jewish versus Arab narratives—the Arabs will always win. They are simply much better at it. The first rule of warfare is to fight on the ground that is most advantageous to oneself.

So it will be a clash between Israel's truth and the Palestinian's propaganda at a time that--according to Halkin--we are dealing with journalists "who are forced to concentrate on the dramatic and superficial at the expense of the in-depth and explanatory" writing in "an age that has a short attention span and distrusts the claims of history".

John Stuart Mill once said:

Indeed the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.

And this was before the UN!

Technorati Tag: Israel and Postmodernism and Media Bias.