Judea Pearl: VIEWPOINT / The Down with Israel Syndrome

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http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1002304.html

Each year, in preparation for Israel’s birthday, American newspaper editors feel an urge to invite Arab writers to tell us why Israel should not exist. Typical this year were the Los Angeles Times (Opinion, May 12 “Forget the two-state solution”, by Saree Makdisi) and the Christian Science Monitor (Ghada Karmi “A One-state Solution for Palestinians and Israelis”, May 30, 2008), where the elimination of Israel were advanced under the usual euphemism of a “one-state solution.”

I presume this exercise gives editors some satisfaction, of the kind one would get in inviting officials of the Flat Earth Society to tell us why the earth should not be round, and do so precisely on Earth Day, lest the wisdom would escape anyone’s attention.

Undoubtedly, the banalization of absurdity has its kicks. It is sporty, admirably “out-of-the-box-ish” and, if only it did not involve a dangerous experiment with the lives of millions of human beings, could be considered mighty cute.

But this practice is adult matter, and the result is a depressing Kafkaesque choreography, in which Israel is put on trial for its very existence, while less radical commentators, if they are invited, deal with Israel’s future, difficulties and achievements, but leave the accusations unanswered.

There is some wisdom to ignoring insults and unfounded accusations. By answering one tacitly bestows credence, however minimal, upon the arguments that put you on the accused bench — the last bench that a birthday celebration deserves.

So, perhaps it is wise to write chapter and verse about Israel’s achievements (as Bill Kristol did May 12, and Tom Friedman did June 8) and let the “colonial” and “apartheid” accusations hang there, unanswered, as living testimonies of the Orwellian mentality of the accusers?

I am not totally convinced.

I am concerned about the possibility that a non-negligible percentage of American readers, especially the novice and the hasty, would interpret the publication of opinion articles calling for the dismantling of Israel as evidence that the arguments and conclusions presented are deemed worthy of consideration in the eyes of editors whose judgment the public has entrusted to protect us from Flat-Earth type deformities.

This concern becomes especially acute when news reporters too begin touting the “one-state” slogans, with unmistaken sympathy, under the cover of “World News.”

(e.g., Richard Boudreaux and Ashraf Khalil “For some Palestinians, one state with Israel is better than none,” LA Times, World News, May 8 )

I am concerned because evil plans begin with evil images. Once the mind is jolted to envision deviant imagery it automatically consructs a belief structure that supports its feasibility and desirability. The first phase of Hitler’s strategy was to get people to envision, just envision, a world without Jews — the rest is history.

Today we are witnessing a concerted effort by enemies of co-existence to get people to envision, just envision, a world without Israel – the rest, they hope, will become history.

The American press seems to fall for it.

In fairness to the editors of some newspapers, articles calling forthe elimination of Israel are often balanced by articles discussingthe prospects for a peaceful settlement of the dispute. But, ironically, this “balance” is precisely where the imbalance cries out loudest, for it gives equal moral weight to a provocation that every Jew in Israel considers a genocidal death threat, most Jews view as an assault on their identity as people and most Palestinians view as an incentive to undermine or forestall peace negotiations.

Balance has its norms, logic and responsibilities, mirrored and shaped by sound editorial judgment. We do not rush to “balance” each celebration of Martin Luther King Day with articles by white supremacists, and we do not “balance” a hate speech with a lecture on breathing technique; a hate speech is balanced with a lecture on the evils of hate.

A true, albeit grotesque, moral balance would be demonstrated only if for every “down with Israel” writer the newspaper were to invite a “down with Palestinian statehood” writer.

But editors seem to have strange takes on morality; for some, questioning the legitimacy of Israel’s existence is a mark of impartiality, while questioning the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations is a moral taboo. Decency should somehow inform these editors that both “down with” calls are morally reprehensible and insulting to readers’ intelligence, hence, both should be purged from civil discourse and marginalized into the good company of white supremacy and Flat-Earth rhetoric.

But until decency reigns, we can be sure to see them again at Israel’s birthdays, the predators of peace, paraded by the press, demanding their annual prey: once more to envision, just envision, a world without Israel.

Ironically, Arab commentaries published around Yom Haatzmaut can actually be of some service to Israel, for they provide a faithful mirror of the prevailing sentiments in the elite ranks of Palestinian society and thus gauge how ready this society is to accepting a peace agreement, whatever its shape, as permanent.

This year, the LA Times (May 11), The Nation (May 26) the New York Times (May 18) the Washington Post (May 12) the Christian Science Monitor (May 30) and others lured an impressive group of Arab intellectuals into unveiling their worldview to American readers.

Highly educated, mostly secular, champions of modernity and masters of communication, these authors are keenly attuned to grass roots sentiments

and, enticed by the limelight, revealed the naked landscape of the Palestinian mindset.

Sadly, what they revealed in 2008 is not what Mahmoud Abbas and public opinion polsters would like us to believe. They revealed what we feared all along but were afraid to admit: the notion of a two-state solution never began to penetrate the surface of Palestinian consciousness.

In vain would one search these articles for a shred of an idea that morally justifies a two-state solution, or that acknowledges some historical ties of Jews to the land, or that makes an intellectual investment contrary to the Greater Palestine agenda.

One by one, the articles depict Israel as a temporary outpost of Western imperialism, a entity to oppose not to neighbor.

This does not mean that the two-state solution is dead – after all, it is the only proposal worthy of the word “solution” – but it means that the current efforts to reach a peaceful settlement should begin to address one key obstacle: the ideological landscape as revealed to us by our Arab brethren on Yom Haatzmaut.


Judea Pearl is a professor at UCLA and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation (http://www.danielpearl.org/ ), named after his son, which promotes dialogue and understanding. He and his wife Ruth are editors of “I am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl” (Jewish Light, 2004), winner of the National Jewish Book Award for anthology.

Judea Pearl: VIEWPOINT / The Down with Israel Syndrome

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AUTHOR

Judea Pearl

Judea Pearl was born in Tel Aviv and is a graduate of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He came to the United States for postgraduate work in 1960, and the following year he received a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering, now New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 1965, he simultaneously received a master’s degree in physics from Rutgers University and a PhD from the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, now Polytechnic Institute of New York University. Until 1969, he held research positions at RCA David Sarnoff Research Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey and Electronic Memories, Inc. Hawthorne, California.

Pearl joined the faculty of UCLA in 1969, where he is currently a professor of computer science and statistics and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory. He is known internationally for his contributions to artificial intelligence, human reasoning, and philosophy of science. He is the author of more than 350 scientific papers and three landmark books in his fields of interest: Heuristics (1984), Probabilistic Reasoning (1988), and Causality (2000; 2009).

A member of the National Academy of Engineering and a founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Pearl is the recipient of numerous scientific prizes, including three awarded in 2011: the Association for Computing Machinery A.M. Turing Award for his fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning; the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition, and the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Other honors include the 2001 London School of Economics Lakatos Award in Philosophy of Science for the best book in the philosophy of science, the 2003 ACM Allen Newell Award for “seminal contributions that extend to philosophy, psychology, medicine, statistics, econometrics, epidemiology and social science”, and the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute.

Pearl is the father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which he co-founded with his family in February 2002 “to continue Daniel’s life-work of dialogue and understanding and to address the root causes of his tragedy.” The Daniel Pearl Foundation sponsors journalism fellowships aimed at promoting honest reporting and East-West understanding, organizes worldwide concerts that promote inter-cultural respect, and sponsors public dialogues between Jews and Muslims to explore common ground and air grievances. The Foundation received Search for Common Ground’s Award For Promoting Cross-Cultural Understanding in 2002 and the 2003 Roger E. Joseph Prize for its “distinctive contribution to humanity.”

Judea Pearl and his wife Ruth Pearl are co-editors of the book “I am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl,” winner of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award for Anthologies, which provides a panoramic view of how Jews define themselves in the post 9/11 era.

Professors Pearl and Akbar Ahmed (American University), the founders of the Daniel Pearl Dialogue for Muslim-Jewish Understanding, were co-winners in 2006 of the Civic Ventures’ inaugural Purpose Prize, which honors individuals 60 or older who have demonstrated uncommon vision in addressing community and national problems.

Pearl lectures throughout the United States on topics including:

1. I am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl

2. Being Western, American and Jewish in the Post 9/11 Era

3. Creating Dialogue between Muslims and Jews

4. The Ideological War on Terror

5. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The Case for Co-Existence

He has written commentaries about these topics for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The International Herald Tribune, The Daily Star (Beirut), The Saudi Gazette (Jeddah), and the Jerusalem Post. He writes a monthly column for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and is frequently interviewed on major TV and radio stations.


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