Strikes and Balls: The Israeli Dilemma

"We can all too easily look back on scenes of unthinkable horror perpetrated by those who would do anything rather than give the Jews their due." 

—Thomas Cahill, "The Gifts of the Jews"

In "How to Do Things with Words," philosopher J.L. Austin makes a useful distinction between two kinds of speech acts, the referential and the constative. The referential delineates an actual state of affairs; the constative establishes not a quality but a social function. Austin offers an analogy from baseball: the ball may travel knee-high across the center of the plate, a perfect strike, but if the umpire calls “ball,” that’s how it registers on the scoreboard and operates in the game.

For much of the world today, that is, for “umpires” engaged in the production of figments and bent on the reconstruction of reality, an Israeli “strike” will almost always count as a “ball.” The referential has been reconfigured as the constative, despite what a later replay may bring to light. Thus, the Israeli pitcher throws strikes; the Arab batter receives a base on balls. An intimate congruence has been performatively created between the report and the referent minus the slightest hint of the semantic distance that stretches between the two. The former remains parasitic upon the latter. 

Archeologist and historian David Meir-Levy makes this clear in his important book with its Austinesque title, "History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression," in which he digs up the buried facts and returns to the referential. He points out that “the Arabs of the area in question had their own designation for the contested region: Bilad al-Sham” (the country, or province, of Syria/Damascus/Levant.) In point of fact, according to census records, approximately half the Arab residents of the area under contention arrived as settlers from south Syria after the breakup of the Ottoman empire. It appears they might plausibly constitute the real “occupation.”

It was only after the 1967 war that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) reframed the issue, Meir-Levy writes, by “inventing a ‘historic Palestine’ ex nihilo, an ancient ‘Palestinian people’ who had lived in their ‘homeland’ from ‘time immemorial’ [and] who were forced from their homeland by the Zionists…” 

Similarly, in her indispensable volume "Islam and Dhimmitude," celebrated Middle East scholar Bat Ye’or makes mincemeat of the Palestinian brief; they are “an invented people, devoid of national particularisms and history, and artificially constructed…They are not a ‘Palestinian people’ but Arab refugees.” Her research is impeccable, and naysayers cannot fault it without befouling themselves. Indeed. the idea of a (constative) Palestinian nation was hatched principally by Yasser Arafat, who did not disguise his genocidal intentions. In his own words, the aim of the PLO was “not to impose our will on [Israel], but to destroy it in order to take its place.”

In the current imbroglio, as always, the loaded term “occupation” is used as a weapon against Israel when the bald facts are that Gaza is an autarchical quasi-state; the “West Bank” presently controls 94% of the territory it sits on, with Israel retaining a defensive buffer zone; and in the Palestinian lexicon, the term “occupation” alludes to the whole of Israel. Unfortunately, the Israeli state of mind, once the country’s defensive needs are more or less served, is largely concessionary, whereas the Palestinian mentality is largely rejectionist. As anthropologist Philip Salzman points out, the Palestinians do not want a two-state solution; “they want one state from the river to the sea.” 

However, when in 1994 Israel and Jordan signed a peace agreement, Jordanian control of the “West Bank” was officially relinquished to Israel and not to the Palestinian Authority. Again, from the legal, as well as practical, perspective, there is no Israeli “occupation,” as (mis)understood by the political echelon, the press, and a profoundly misinformed public. This is one of the greatest canards to issue from the conflict. Once again, a “strike” has been interpreted as a “ball” and a flagrant foul has morphed into a legitimate play. This is the essential point. How easily a glaring constative is transformed into a counterfeit referential 

All this reminds me of a game of chess I once played in a Casablanca hotel with an Egyptian fellow guest. I soon found that none of the accepted moves applied — rooks moved anywhere they pleased, knights were permitted two hops, bishops slid laterally as well as diagonally, pawns could capture and then return to their original squares. The structure of the game was made up as we went along. When I protested, I was condescendingly informed: “That’s Egyptian chess.”

When it comes to Israel, the constative will almost always euchre the referential and a collective assessment obliterate a singular factor. Whether improvised on the spot or of long duration, apocryphal rules are like counterfeit currency, bad ideas driving out good and leading eventually to anarchy. Egyptian chess or baseless ball are dead ends. In any event, the fix is in and the game is rigged. 

To revert to Austin’s metaphor, if Israel had the best baseball team in the world, it would still lose the publicity game to a bunch of Arab sad sacks by a lopsided score. The principle of playing by the rules has taken on an entirely different meaning. The rules are meant to distort rather than reflect the real or order the welter of experience, a way of lying that approximates the nimbus of truth. That’s the “beauty” of it. After all, it’s official. It’s just not true. 

Austin would have been appalled by the casual and uninformed, if not downright malevolent, conflation of the two formulaic realms, the factitious constative and the factual referential. And so should we all.