Israel Through (Genuinely) Liberal Eyes. Part 1

The Propagandist is proud to welcome Ben Cohen, editor of the AJC's Z-Word Blog, to the growing ranks of our contributing writers.

Cohen’s ambitious four-part series examines the philosophy and motivations behind international delegitimization campaigns against the state of Israel. His starting point is a sympathetic critique of Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony’s essay, Israel Through European Eyes.

We are in this thing for the long haul.

By this thing, I mean the tripartite assault upon Israel emanating from "the media... the campuses and in the corridors of power - a smear campaign of a kind that no other nation on earth is subjected to on a regular basis," as Yoram Hazony puts it.

Hazony makes this claim in "Israel Through European Eyes". In this popular essay, the Israeli scholar launches an enquiry into why this smear campaign is happening and what might be done to confront it.

Hazony's explanation of the intellectual origins of Israel's current, woeful predicament robustly counters the typical platitudes one encounters in discussions of how Israel should respond.

"Change your policy," insists the left. "Engage in better PR," advises the right.

There is some superficial truth in both of these observations, but neither deals with either the cause of delegitimization nor its terrifying persistence.

After all, nothing was fundamentally changed by the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, as courageous as that was. Nothing was fundamentally changed by the IDF's release of video showing what really happened on the Turkish flotilla to Gaza, as timely as that was.

The Tale of The Shifting Paradigm

In addressing the critical question "why Israel?", Hazony leans heavily on Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigm shifts in science.

Kuhn argued that scientists cradle their interpretation of a given phenomenon within a conceptual cluster known as a "paradigm." Those facts which are amenable to the paradigm are elevated. Those which are not are discarded.

"[E]ven a mountain of facts will not change the mind of a scientist who has been trained in a different paradigm, because the fundamental framework from which he views the world is different," writes Hazony, following Kuhn.

"The facts themselves mean something completely different to him."

Because fealty to one's paradigm always trumps neutral consideration of the bald facts, the popular shift from one paradigm to the next is invariably slow and excruciating. For instance, Charles Darwin discovered this when he unveiled his theory of natural selection to his peers, among them advocates of racial supremacism such as Louis Agassiz.

Something very similar occurs in politics.

Read the next part in this series, Israel Through (Genuinely) Liberal Eyes. Part 2