Nachum Kaplan is a journalist and commentator. He has 25 years media experience and held senior international roles at Reuters and IFR. He holds a B.A. in Politics and Indonesian from Monash University. He is also a practising psychotherapist. He blogs at Moral Clarity.
There are few problems in the Middle East so complicated that they cannot, with the right skill set, be blamed on Israel.
This is reassuring. Otherwise, the Middle East would be too difficult to understand. It contains Arabs, Persians, Turks, Jews, Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Druze, Alawites, Yazidis and assorted other peoples who have spent thousands of years acquiring grievances against one another.
There are monarchies, military dictatorships, theocracies, fragile democracies, failed states, tribal loyalties, religious movements, national movements, separatist movements, terrorist organizations and militias that possess more artillery than some European armies.
Then there are ancient ethnic disputes, modern territorial disputes, theological disputes, dynastic rivalries, oil, water, gas, shipping lanes, nationalism, Islamism, imperialism, post-imperialism, Cold War debris and the lasting consequences of Europeans once drawing borders with the insouciance of children attacking a restaurant placemat with crayons.
The beginner should start with a simple rule: Never permit an event to have more than one cause if Israel can be blamed.
This is important because causation is messy. Consider Gaza. A conventional analysis requires examining Hamas ideology, Palestinian Arab nationalism, Israeli security policy, Egyptian policy, Iranian sponsorship, Arab politics, failed peace negotiations, religious fundamentalism, economic conditions, Palestinian Arab factional rivalry, Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and its consequences, security checks, Hamas’ seizure of Gaza, repeated wars and several governments’ strategic calculations.
It is exhausting. Fortunately, there is a shortcut. Blame Israel. All you need to do is follow this simple eight-point formula.
Start with the conclusion
- Work backward through history
- Remove inconvenient agency
- Apply the colonial template
- Insert context where necessary
- Delete it where troublesome
- Adjust the chronology
- Change the grammar
This method’s brilliance is that it requires very little knowledge but creates the illusion that you do. This makes it popular among journalists, academics, celebrities and Western political activists understandably reluctant to squander an entire weekend reading about it. After all, who reads books anymore?
The experienced professional critic gets tired of not being able to answer the same questions. So, he simply says “Israeli occupation." That is his conclusion, or in our case, the starting point.
The technique is especially good for discussing terrorism. Terrorism presents the obvious difficulty that somebody committed it, meaning there may be a perpetrator.
Do not panic. Here is where we transfer responsibility backward through the causal chain until Israel appears.
For example, a radicalized terrorist murdered Jewish civilians. He was radicalized because he was angry. He was angry because he experienced humiliation. The humiliation resulted from "occupation". The "occupation" exists because of Israel. Therefore, Israel caused the terrorist attack.
Note that this procedure must never be reversed.
An Israeli who becomes radicalized after seeing his family murdered maintains full agency and is responsible for voting for politicians that Western observers dislike. Israeli fear or trauma is never morally exculpatory.
Palestinian Arab fear explains; Israeli fear incriminates. Master this distinction and the rest becomes easy.
Next up is correct chronological selection. History is dangerous because it contains events that interfere with arguments. The solution is simply to begin the story after those events.
If discussing an Israeli military operation, begin with the operation. If somebody mentions the attack that preceded it, explain that the attack did not occur in a vacuum. Move backward. If you encounter an inconvenient Palestinian Arab decision, move backward again. Eventually, you will reach 1967. Should 1967 prove insufficient, retreat to 1948.
If somebody asks what happened before 1948, stop immediately.
Nothing before 1948 is helpful. There are ancient Jewish kingdoms. Temples. Roman expulsions. Continuous Jewish communities. Ottoman history. Arab nationalism. Pogroms against Jews before Israel existed. The British Mandate. Jewish refugees. And, worst of all, Arab rejection of partition in favor of war.
So much material can turn a perfectly coherent morality play into history, so it is important to know when to stop digging. This is not archaeology.
The preferred historical model begins with Zionists entering Palestine rather as Darth Vader enters a corridor: already villainous and requiring no discernible antecedent.
This permits the colonial template to be deployed. This template is wonderfully efficient because it comes with pre-installed moral conclusions. There is a colonizer (without a colonzing empire, and who bought the land it used, but never mind the details, r.s.) and a colonized. An oppressor and an oppressed. White and brown. Powerful and powerless.
Once everyone has been assigned to the appropriate box, history becomes unnecessary because sociology then declares Israel guilty.
Israel can be tricky here because Jews, true to form, refuse to remain racially cooperative. Some are pale. Others are brown. Some are even black. They are also sneaky with their genealogy. Some came from Poland. Others came from Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya and other places where their ancestors lived long before anyone invented American racial studies departments.¹
Here is how to handle these difficulties:
“Whiteness," when necessary, can be expanded from a complexion into a metaphysical condition. So an Iraqi Jew can be deemed white for an argument about colonialism and revert to being Middle Eastern when somebody wishes to celebrate Israeli diversity.
Having mastered history, comparative morality is next.
Israel must never be crudely compared with what its enemies do. It should be measured against an imaginary country operating under ideal conditions available only in thought experiments.
Ask whether every Israeli military action satisfies standards no army fighting an urban war against an entrenched terrorist organization has ever achieved.
Civilian deaths are evidence of Israeli immorality regardless of military objective, enemy tactics, precautions taken, comparable conflicts elsewhere or anything else.
This does not mean that these other wars must receive equivalent attention. The news cycle is only 24 hours.
The Middle East contains Syria, where hundreds of thousands died in a civil war; Yemen, where an appalling humanitarian catastrophe is again unfolding; Iran, where dissidents have discovered that revolutionary governments can be remarkably inventive when suppressing their own citizens; Lebanon, where Hezbollah constructed a state within a state; and other places where people have suffered without inspiring encampments at Columbia and other formerly prestigious universities.
These tragedies are unfortunate. Israel, however, is interesting, which brings us to one of our most powerful tools-moral magnification. This is what allows a tiny country containing an infinitesimal fraction of humanity to dominate the world’s ethical attention.
The mechanism is simple. When something terrible occurs elsewhere, ask what happened. When Israel is involved, ask what it reveals about Israel.
A Syrian atrocity is an atrocity. An Israeli atrocity, alleged or real, is evidence about Zionism. A corrupt Arab politician is corrupt. A corrupt Israeli politician exposes the whole Zionist project’s moral bankruptcy. An Israeli soldier commits a crime and suddenly Theodor Herzl is summoned as a character witness.
This asymmetry is extraordinarily useful because it transforms individual wrongdoing into collective ontology.
Caution, however, is needed. This technique must not be applied indiscriminately. A Hamas atrocity does not reveal anything about Palestinian Arab nationalism. That would constitute collective blame.
A Palestinian Arab terrorist does not define Palestinian Arabs. An Israeli extremist, however, can explain Israel. This may appear contradictory but regular exposure to quality Western journalism should soon make it instinctive.
This is the time to introduce the passive voice, which is indispensable when Palestinian Arabs do wrong things, such as commit mass murder. Journalists are drilled to write in the active voice but that is just a hangover from the bad old days when newspapers reported facts and did not have agendas.
The key is subjectless sentences. Rockets “are fired," violence “erupts," clashes “break out," tensions “escalate," and Israelis “die." Palestinian Arab terrorists, by contrast, are “killed by Israeli forces."
This would be even better in the active voice: “Israeli soldiers killed…."
Grammar is an underrated geopolitical instrument. The right sentence can redistribute agency without changing a single fact.
This is valuable when reporting sequences of violence. The initiating act can be grammatically dissolved into the atmosphere, leaving the Israeli response standing alone in crisp active prose.
Consider: “After tensions escalated, Israel bombed Gaza."
The rockets have now achieved transcendence. No one is required to have launched them. Unlike the bombs that the Israelis dropped.
If anyone takes issue, this is when you bring out the grievance exemption. This exemption recognizes that certain political actors operate under such difficult historical circumstances that their ideology should never be taken literally.
If Hamas or Hezbollah threatens Israel, speaks of destroying it and amasses an enormous arsenal, investigate the grievance and look into legitimate Iranian security concerns.
There is just one important caveat. If an Israeli minister says something deranged, quote him repeatedly and without mercy.
This is not inconsistent. It just reflects the sophisticated principle that threatening Jews may require context, whereas Jews threatening others requires a television panel.
The grievance exemption also solves the problem of Palestinian Arab rejectionism. Suppose Palestinian Arab leaders reject yet another peace proposal. Immediately declare the proposal’s terms inadequate.
If the proposal offered Palestinian Arab statehood, the borders were inadequate. If it included East Jerusalem, sovereignty was inadequate. If territorial compensation was offered, the amount or place was inadequate. If nearly every substantive demand was addressed, the power imbalance made the negotiations inherently inadequate.
This is crucial because allowing Palestinian Arab leaders to make bad decisions would force us to admit that Palestinian Arabs are people with flaws like everyone else. Their exalted position as symbols and vessels for Western guilt must not be undermined.
Better to blame Israel.
Eventually, however, the inevitable question of “why Israel?" may arise. Why does one tiny country’s conflict attract this astonishing explanatory burden?
Fortunately, there are several approved answers: American imperialism, Western guilt, settler colonialism, oil, geopolitics and the Jewish lobby.
Be careful with that last one. If you find yourself explaining that a small group of Jews possesses mysterious power over governments, banks, newspapers and foreign policy, you may inadvertently have wandered into some surprisingly old literature. Put Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion down and get with the internet age.
Use “Zionists" instead. The software usually accepts the substitution after a simple patch update.
This may be the entire system’s greatest achievement. Antisemitism once blamed Jews for capitalism and communism, wealth and poverty, war and revolution, cosmopolitanism and tribalism. Jews were simultaneously too powerful and too weak, too assimilated and too separate, rootless foreigners and secret masters of their societies.
This will not cut it in modern political discourse, so there has been an upgrade.
Israel can now be blamed for destabilizing the Middle East by acting and by failing to act. It is condemned for occupying Gaza and, after withdrawing from Gaza, for controlling Gaza from the outside. It is accused of provoking its enemies when it strikes them and emboldening them when it does not.
The accusation adjusts to the available facts, which shows the approach’s elegance and durability. A theory that can be disproved is merely scholarship. Ask Karl Popper. A theory capable of explaining every possible outcome? Now, that is an ideology.
And an ideology that can explain a vast region of a billion people by repeatedly returning to the actions of several million Jews has achieved something truly impressive. It has reinvented an ancient hatred and obsession as geopolitics.
So, should you find yourself confronting some new development in the Middle East, there is no need to despair. Perhaps Iran has armed another militia or Hezbollah has started another war. Do not get stressed and look into it. Investigation produces complexity, complexity creates uncertainty and uncertainty is fatal to moral grandstanding.
Just exhale and remember the formula.