Malgorzata Koraszewska has translated this into Polish.

One of the great unsolved mysteries of the 21st century is why, given what a catastrophe it proved to be, anyone, much less a whole phalanx of politicians, diplomats and “peace-makers,” have tried repeatedly to negotiate a peace settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Given that the initial plan (Oslo Peace Process) was predicated on Arafat and the Palestinians renouncing their drive to destroy Israel, thus permitting a positive-sum, win-win solution to the problem, and that the Palestinians have clearly not renounced that drive, either formally (unchanged PLO charter, no Arabic text recognizing Israel) or in practice (terror attacks, genocidal incitement from the pulpit), the positive-sum possibility is blocked: Palestinians won’t agree to the conditions Israel needs (flexibility on border settlements, renunciation of “right of return”); while Israelis will not make crucial concessions (uprooting all the settlements) in return for what seems like it will bring more war under worse conditions.

And yet, repeatedly since the Oslo Jihad in late 2000, efforts have been made over and over to reach a settlement. Partly this was because Western, positive-sum-minded negotiators, convinced of the superiority and reasonableness of their approach, could not believe that it would not work. “We were so close,” they told themselves, “if only we get Israel to give more, then the Palestinians will agree.” Hence Barak’s efforts to win a peace in the teeth of war at Taba in January 2001; and Olmert’s even greater concessions in 2008.

Obama was the last one to take this seriously and he and his Secretaries of State, after announcing imminent breakthroughs (one year, 9 months), crashed and burned. And everyone knew, but no one would say, that the Palestinians refused to make the concessions Israel needed to take the gamble. On the contrary, “the whole world” (in an act of global bad faith) knew it was Israel’s fault. In so doing, they complied fully with the Palestinian negotiating strategy of “land for war.”

The Palestinian game was simple: demand concessions that Israel could not meet (withdrawal to ’67 borders, uprooting all settlements), refuse concessions that Israel needed (renounce right of return, change the PLO charter, stop genocidal incitement), and blame Israel for the failures to reach agreement. The Foreign Language Palestinian position is:

we have made all the concessions necessary, we have accepted the state of Israel; we agree to a two-state solution; we are willing to settle for 22% of historic Palestine; we fight for freedom and dignity. It is Israel, with its settlements on and occupation of that 22%, that are the impediments to peace. When Israel meets those minimum demands, there can be peace. Therefore, in the name of peace, force Israel to concede what we rightfully demand.

Of course, there’s a rather different read of this discourse. First, it’s not matched by similar statements in Arabic. On the contrary, just like Arafat’s Hudaybiyya speech to South African Muslims promised “temporary truce while we are weak to be broken later,” contrasted with his Nobel Prize speech about the “peace of the brave,” so this English “narrative” (read: cogwar narrative for infidel consumption) has no presence in the Arab language public sphere. On the contrary, in Arabic, the cogwar narrative for the faithful makes it clear: Land for War.

Note the open admission of double-talk and a public secret: everyone knows what the inspiring idea and great goal are, but don’t say it to outsiders. Note also the calculus: the more Israel concedes, the weaker she becomes, the more certain our victory. More land = more war. This is the exact opposite of the peace camp (in Israel, in the West) where the positive-sum game players think they were sooo close in 2000, and if only Israel makes more concessions, then we’ll get a peace agreement: more land = more peace.

Over time, and over many efforts to “go the extra mile” by Israeli Prime Ministers, the logic of Palestinian negotiating became clear and Israelis increasingly reluctant to even pretend to negotiate (Netanyahu). American Presidents slowly weaned themselves of the irresistible desire to bring peace. But the liberal-progressive consensus only grew stronger: the Occupation was the problem and that two states will never happen unless Israel is forced to withdraw.

In this light, the Palestinian “Foreign Language Narrative” becomes a weapon of deceit in the pursuit of an all-out war. Its aim is to use the negotiations to weaken Israel and strengthen Palestine so that the next round of fighting will favor their side; and given the Palestinian proclivity for engaging in suicidal warfare against a much stronger enemy, it’s pretty clear that any concession will bring violence.

The extensive evidence of Palestinian ill-will towards Israelis has made Israelis reluctant to make concessions to Palestinians on the warpath. As a result Palestinians appeal to the outside world to intervene and force the Israelis to make deeply damaging concessions. And since it was hard to recruit in the West by saying “let’s hate the Jews together and destroy Israel,” they used demopathic speech to convince liberals and progressives to join their cause: they invoke Western values (all of which depend on reciprocity) in order to pursue their irredentist goals.

Now I understand that people are free to choose, mix and match these two competing “takes” on whether Palestinians speaking in English to non-Muslims (infidels) are a) sincere, and b) representative of a sentiment among their people that can rally around peace when the demanded concessions are met. What astonishes me is that the overwhelming majority of people prominent in the Western public sphere – journalists, academics, policy analysts, talking heads, increasingly politicians – have adopted the least likely scenario (sincerity representative of Palestinian sentiments), while the most likely scenario (conscious war deception) has the fewest takers.

The result is a combination of Caliphators, Jihadi and Da-i, who knowingly promote the lethal deception and a wide range of “liberals” and “progressives” in the West who promote this narrative, either as knowing demopaths (primarily motivated by their hostility to Israel, not necessarily aware of the threat to the West), or as good-hearted dupes who just can’t believe the Palestinians would lie to them. Right now, “the whole world” – namely the matrix of UN, NGOs, and journalists that believe and assert this – is certain that the Palestinian narrative is accurate, that Israel is to blame, and that once they make the proper concessions, there will be peace – two democratic states side by side. The solution is so obvious, it could be solved with an email.

Perhaps, alas, one of the reasons that this narrative seems attractive despite its bad faith may be that even when aware of the deception, Westerners think it will just be Israel that will suffer, itself something unusually popular, especially in “progressive” circles. Just like in so many other cases, the dupe gives the Caliphator the benefit of the doubt: this is just about Israel, not about all infidels… right? The dangers now becoming apparent in the West of aggressive, Muslim-led protests, the multiplication of death threats against public figures, the open contempt for Jews, suggest Israel is only the most infuriating target of Caliphator struggle.

The Promoters of the Palestinian Foreign-Language Narrative

Becky Anderson:

Becky Anderson Explains it All… Except Everything Relevant.

Becky Anderson interviews Husam Zumlot: Disinformation squared

Christiane Amanpour:

Amanpour and Fawaz discuss the Conflict between the River and the Sea

How to launder Hamas Propaganda: CNN Interviews an “Historian”

Rosemary Church:

Studies in RUI, IV: Rosemary Church explains to IDF Spox Peter Lerner what media organizations do.

Clarissa Ward:

RUI of Hamas Propaganda II: Clarissa Ward questions the Israeli claims

In an article just published by Fathom on the Pattern and the addiction of Western journalists to lethal journalism about Israel, even when it’s also Own-Goal journalism about the West, I had a section on my explanation for Deutsch’s Pattern. I place it here. At some point, in another article on the Pattern, I’ll come back to this analysis. I welcome comment.

Part 6: Shame-Honour Dynamics, the Stigmatised Witness, and the Pattern

I taught a course at ISGAP with Deutsch, and in the final seminar I tried to explain the Pattern as a manifestation of shame-honor dynamics, a cultural matrix in which public criticism poses an existential threat to a “man of honor”: them’s fighting words. The legitimacy of hurting Jews protects non-Jews from the possibility that the Jew might say something that damaged his honor.

To an atheist, at least in principle, the Christian doctrine of the stigmatised “witness,” in which the degraded and miserable Jews, the Christ-killers, testify to the Christian “truth” of the divinity of Christ (which Jews stubbornly and inexplicably refuse to recognize) would not carry any conviction. And yet, so bold an atheist as Voltaire, managed to replicate Augustine’s approach: they deserve the eternal hated of mankind. “Still, we ought not to burn them.” So when at long last in the 18^th century, “grown-up” Europeans who rejected Christian teachings finally had a chance to speak with other, even older critics of Christianity, they mostly preferred to adopt the teaching of the religion they otherwise rejected, thereby preserving the Pattern.

The dhimmi code in Islam serves the same purpose as Christian “Witness Doctrine,” providing a legal institution enforcing the need for triumphalist Muslims to dominate the public sphere. Jews and Christians and other infidels were “protected” from Muslim violence as long as they accepted their debased status. They must not “blaspheme Islam” or insult Muslims, they must not try to throw off the Muslim yoke. If they did, they were worthy of death, all of them. The Armenians, the Slavs under Ottoman rule, all suffered not just genocide, but the sadistic cruelties Hamas once again demonstrated.

Today, most people know all about the acute Jewish ability to criticise from the many examples of self-criticism by Jews so committed to taking responsibility for what goes wrong in the world, that they expend enormous energy and ingenuity accusing their own people of misbehaving. This is currently a great fashion among “progressive” Jews: “We are racists, Israel is apartheid, we are committing genocide!”

But that acute ability to analyse and criticise also testifies to an exceptional Jewish talent for discerning flaws and follies everywhere. Freud was afraid his ferociously introspective “science” might remain entirely Jewish (and Jung proved him right). The Frankfurt School and Derrida developed some of the most penetrating techniques of critique, of deconstructing the idols of the mind. The Jew is the child in the crowd who, seeing that the emperor has no clothes, speaks up.

In this sense one might even argue that progressive Jews affirm the Pattern because, like a defeated male cowering before the triumphant alpha, they can thereby reassure the non-Jews that they would never turn their critical skills against them. Heaven forbid! And certainly, the gentile enactors of the Pattern welcome their highly-prized service: confirming the legitimacy of hurting Jews.

Imagine, for example, what someone gifted in biblical criticism (i.e., tearing the biblical text to historical shreds) might come up with when turning the critique on the New Testament, or (gasp!), the Qur’an. Imagine what someone who had studied the ease with which modern egalitarian revolutions, threatened by outside enemies, devolve into totalitarian terror that devours their own, might say about the 75 years during which the Zionist revolution has maintained democracy under an existential threat not to the revolution but the entire people. Imagine someone with the critical acumen of a Derrida deconstructing anti-western grand narratives or psychoanalysing “oikophobia.” Imagine a Jew having the nerve to claim that antisemitism is a toxic form of envy? Or talk about the small-mindedness of goyische kopf’s zero-sum thinking in public?

It is not by accident that the Arabs who hate the Jews most are those who hide their shame of failed supremacy with their Pattern-enacting victim narrative, even though the last thing a man of honor wants to show is weakness. Nor is it an accident that the Palestinian’s most fervent amen chorus in the West, the “progressives,” think they are the global moral hegemon, and then use social media to cancel critics. No wonder both “identities” revel in heaping abuse on the Jews and respond with indignation when criticized in return. These are the classic patterns of shame-honor cultures in which no one should dare criticize a man of honor.

The perdurance of the Pattern, I therefore argue, is testimony to a limbic fear of public humiliation. As long as Jews are free to speak, everyone is in danger of being rebuked (i.e. in their minds of being shamed). As long as the Pattern rules, however, as long as people comply with its prime directive to legitimate hurting Jews, even when they have nothing against the Jews, even when they like Jews, then Rousseau’s dream of Jewish free speech will not materialise.

The cancel-culture of the 21^st century began in earnest at Durban in 2001, just before 9/11, with an NGO resolution to make Israel a pariah, beyond the pale. The Zionist voice must not be heard; to do so would be to “normalise” evil. Independent Jews were the first target of 21^st century cancel culture. And when that assault on the legitimacy of the Zionist voice gains traction, as it has over the last two decades with the development of social media, it threatens the free speech of all. We witness the formation of another persecuting society, like the Pattern-governed one set in motion exactly a millennium ago, in the early 11^th century. But note: it only begins with the Jews, and it takes generations if not centuries to dig ourselves out of that pit, if we do at all.

Roger Cohen writes a monument to narrative equivalence, producing in any uninformed reader, a radical empirical and moral disorientation. It’s not clear whether he is aware of what he’s doing (in which case he’s a IYI), or deliberately deceptive. He has however, clearly been spending way to much time with the unreconstructed peace camp, and the product, especially after 7/10, is yet another example of Kahneman’s slow thinking consisting primarily of doubling down on (too-)fast thinking.

Between Israelis and Palestinians, a Lethal Psychological Chasm Grows

In a conflict marked by complete incomprehension on both sides, the ability to see each other as human has been lost.

Israeli security forces looking on as Palestinians prayed in Jerusalem in October. Nearby is a site sacred to both Jews and Muslims that has been one focus of tensions over the years.Afif Amireh for The New York Times

Nov. 20, 2023, 5:01 a.m. ET

Eight years after the foundation of the state of Israel, Moshe Dayan, the chief of staff of the Israeli military, stood close to the Gaza border to pronounce a eulogy for a 21-year-old Israeli security officer slain by Palestinian and Egyptian assailants.

“Let us not today cast blame on his murderers,” he said in 1956. “What can we say against their terrible hatred of us? For eight years now, they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their land and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home.”

His short speech, a little longer than Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and a powerful reference for Israelis, is perhaps recalled less for this insight into Palestinian anger than for Mr. Dayan’s resolute conclusion.

“Without the steel helmet and the cannon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home,” he said.

Today, 67 years later, at a time when Jews have again lost their lives to Palestinian gunmen at the same kibbutz, Nahal Oz, that Roi Rotberg guarded, Mr. Dayan’s explicit evocation of the sources of Palestinian “hatred and desire for revenge” remains rare in Israel. Many Israelis have preferred to avert their gaze from the rage at their doorstep.

Moshe Dayan, the chief of staff of the Israeli military, center, with Ariel Sharon, left, in 1956, eight years after the foundation of the state of Israel. Mr. Sharon would become prime minister many years later.Israel Defense Forces, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In the same way, Palestinian insight into the devouring specters of antisemitic persecution awakened in Jews by the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack appears negligible. Mutual empathy is very hard to find.

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the following was cut from an article (already too long).

One of the things that struck me on 7/10, redoubled by the reaction in favor of Hamas, was the savage hatred it revealed among Palestinians and the almost casually cruel support of their “woke” supporters. Mean girls had signed on to the cause.

If we ever needed an example of unadulterated racism, of so dehumanizing another people that anything, no matter how sadistic and deliberately cruel, was permitted indeed celebrated – then this was it. There’s no need here for any rhetorical inflation in the use of the term. If “racism” is one of the worst epithets one can throw at another (as in “Nazi racism about the Jews”), then here is its 21^st century flagship in the arts of savage dehumanization. If “terrorism” means targeting civilians in the name of a cause, then this is the quintessence of terrorism, that emotive and judgmental term, by any of its variegated definitions.

On 7/10 the whole world got a glimpse into the soul of (religious) genociders, who, when they could, delighted in the darkest deeds of mankind. It was a horror and an abomination to anyone who considers life sacred, a ghoulish delight to those drawn to racist death cults. It should be a defining moment.

It should mean, understanding that this did not happen in a vacuum. It meant saying to the Palestinian Grievance Narrative: ‘No. You cannot fill the vacuum between what you claim to have suffered, and the deeds of Hamas.” That vacuum needs to be filled with heretofore un(der)reported world of genocidal hatred incited by the very Palestinian leaders who cry about their people’s suffering. It must be filled with the revival of the eliminationist Jew-hatred that had devastated Europe in the megadeath orgy of World War II only two generations earlier.

This most toxic of the many hatreds of Jews to be found in the millennia-long history of supersessionist monotheism, periodically exploded in the West throughout the last millennium (starting in 1010 in France), culminating last time in the horror of the Holocaust. After the Nazis industrially slaughtered 6 million Jews, the West all said “Nie wieder,” even as that murderous hatred found a warm welcome in the humiliated Arab political culture of the Naqba.

Most Westerners (including those whose job it was to do so) did not pay that much attention to this importation of Nazi ideology, nor the way that an apocalyptic Jihadi ideology has given great prominence to the genocidal hadith of the rocks and the trees. Indeed, the media actively suppressed evidence of it. And yet, we witnessed the resurfacing of that matrix of genocidal hatred in one of its most violently cruel avatars on 7/10. If anything ripped off the mask of, “when Palestinians talk about slaughtering Jews, they actually just mean just Israelis,” or the “we’re not antisemites, we’re ‘just’ antizionists,” then 7/10 did… at least to those who were looking into the face of the horror.

Possibly even more troubling in the long run, many in the world, both Muslims and infidels, exulted at the sight of this abomination. Demonstrations of loud solidarity with Hamas cropped up in cities and campuses around North America and in Europe, gatherings of people who could hear news of a slaughter of humans, of women, children, and old people, and rejoice! Attacks on Jews spiked: 400% in the USA, 1350% in London.

Previously, in past decades, these pro-Palestinian aggressions against Jews in the diaspora (where Muslims are not a majority), were widely considered regrettable but understandable responses to the TV’s rendering of the terrible suffering of the Palestinian people at the hands of the Jewish State. Who could not sympathize with these poor Palestinians enduring the blows of a so much more powerful enemy. This time, however, the response arose not from sympathy or pity but triumph: after witnessing abominable violence they rose to spread it, an open embrace of the aggressors’ savage hatred for the “other.” It was the mirror opposite of the post-modern embrace of the “other.” This attack on human beings in Israel reverberated globally as a battle cry… a Jihadi battle cry. Intifada.

I can understand Muslim anger and hatred; many live in a culture that celebrates the most ruthless “strong horse,” and that bans anything that might shame those “leaders.” They are products of a society without a free press. They have only the narrowest escape in a situation where both the information elites and the peer groups enforce the tribal scapegoating. Even if they know something’s wrong here, they have few tools to grapple with it. Especially when the infidel sources affirm the jihadi’s claims so spectacularly.

But allegedly “progressive” infidel activists who never cease invoking humane values and rights and the embrace of the other, and the value of every human life, who zealously cancel those they believe use “dehumanizing, hate-speech,” especially if used about Palestinians? These denizens of woke haven’t suffered the intolerable fate they believe the Palestinians have. Their hatred is second hand, and now reveals itself obscenely casual and self-indulgent. When they witness the most inconceivably savage, dehumanizing racism, expressed by the leaders of a cause they’ve been told is about freedom and human rights, against a racist and genocidal enemy, they cheer like their team just won a playoff.

A week ago (November 12), I received this note, off-list, from a classmate (’71), a good liberal Jew, shaken by 7/10, but equally shaken by the images of death and destruction from Gaza. I have had difficulty answering effectively; have discussed it with others.

I confess I am increasingly uncomfortable with the situation.  Our rabbi gave a sermon last week based on a saying of Hillel from the Pirke Avot, “In a place where no one behaves like a human being, we must strive to be human.” I don’t get the sense that the government has a strategy beyond obliteration – a long-term plan for how to solve the Palestinian problem in a human way.  And its failure to rein in the settlers on the West Bank, its crackdown on dissidents within Israel (the Washington Post reported on prosecution of Palestinians for instagram posts), and, most important, my increasing sense that the civilian toll in Gaza may be disproportionate to the military benefit, are leaving me disconcerted.  I recognize that the casualties are an inevitable result of Hamas’s inhumane policies, but “in a place where no one behaves like a human being, we must strive to be human.”  My friends in Israel – none of whom, to be sure, was ever a fan of Netanyahu’s – are scathing about his behavior.  I am told he has met with militant settlers but not with hostage families.  What happens next, after 25,000 Palestinian civilians are killed and Israel has control of Gaza?

Here’s my fisk, which I will later try and make a coherent essay.

I confess I am increasingly uncomfortable with the situation. Our rabbi gave a sermon last week based on a saying of Hillel from the Pirke Avot, “In a place where no one behaves like a human being, we must strive to be human.”

The Hebrew is “Ish”, man. And it’s addressed to people who have the courage to take on responsibility when no one else will. One commentator writes: “In a place where there is no one who knows, or is designated to perform the correct actions, strive to be that person.” In this case, it could mean, not following the majority for evil.

You shall neither side with the multitude to do wrong—you shall not give perverse testimony in a dispute so as to pervert it in favor of the crowd. (Deuteronomy 23:2)

Translating Hillel’s ish as “human being,” becomes dangerous when the emphasis shifts from decisiveness and responsibility to wringing one’s hands in compassion.

I don’t get the sense that the government has a strategy beyond obliteration

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