Originally Posted by roachboy

xasy: do you notice any dissonance between your summary and the information bermuDa posted?

in his posts, you get an outline of ways in which the various parties involved with this long brutal degrading (for everyone) conflict determine each other---in yours, you get an image of israel as Perpetual Victim, which provides you with no options if you want to explain why this or any particular conflict might happen----except vague and outmoded narratives of israel the victim struggling to survive in a hostile environment (when the reality is that israel is by a considerable distance the most powerful military force in the region and is under no meaningful threat from any combination of others--no threat in the way you seem to prefer to think about threat, that is--there is no threat to israel's existence in 2006...) buttressed perhaps with the socially acceptable racism directed at arabs that many folk who have no idea what they are talking about use to fill in inconvenient gaps in vague narratives (so in your story there are no civilians only terrorists opposing israel--everyone is a terrorist--you cant tell who is and who is not--"they" use "human shields"--and so by extension are not themselves human--nice work....)


your narrative gives you no space to actually think about the conflicts that lay behind the present war on lebanon.
for you, all questions as to cause and motive are settled in advance. everything you adduce as evidence is simply plugged into this a priori framework.

as a way of thinking about history, your position is not viable, precisely because what looking at history would function to explain you have decided is already settled, given in advance. the same problem obtains for thinking about politics.

there are ways in which this kind of narrative indicates that this thread is not even a debate---it is simply a place for a collage of mutually exclusive stories and no meaningful dialogue between them.

you could even see this kind of talking past each other as a little petri dish in which some of the structuring features that lay behind not only the lsraeli war on lebanon but a whole series of previous conflicts sits: if these narratives reflect what is happening ideologically amongst the participants, they simply talk past each other. they are set up to talk past each other.

at bottom, the version that i have been tracking assumes that violations of the dignity of the palestinian population are problematic--and that violence will follow from systematic violations of dignity, that is of basic human rights---from this, you assume that the palestinian population is made up of a wide range of human beings--not "terrorists"--and then you attempt to see how it is that variables have come to be shaped as they are--and you can get a glimpse of how the right likud story is fundamentally an insult to that dignity. not content with shutting palestinians out of the present, a narrative like yours tries to shut them out of the past as well.

in the end, xazy, yours is not a narrative about this conflict: your is a narrative within the conflict--it is part of the conflict--it is the logic used by one of the parties to shape itself within the context of the conflict--you are not explaining the conflict, then--you are reproducing it in your narrative.