Well put. I do think the political character of the country has changed as a result of the massive influx of conservatively oriented immigrants from North Africa and Russia. What was once a strong liberal community in Israel has shrunk to a small minority, leaving theocratic and nationalist elements to run amok. Of course these are trends we’re seeing elsewhere in the Mideast as well as in the West.

Yes I understand that you don't want to appear incapable of human sympathy and require half-brained excuses. — Maw

Where do sympathy and empathy come from? Are they simple ‘capacities’ or do they depend on our ability , rather than desire, to understand worldviews alien to our own? Are ‘oppressors’ and ‘evil-doers’ lacking in the intent to care, or so they misinterpret those they ‘oppress’?

Is it threatening for you to contemplate the possibility that there is nothing that distinguishes from you those you condemn for subjugation, prejudice or even atrocity in moral terms? That they believe passionately, as you do, that they are behaving according to the highest standards of morality? And that the root of our conflicts is precisely what you are doing here, questioning moral intent and will to sympathy of the other rather than focusing on differences in perspective and worldview?

Thanks for that from Zizek.
It’s a powerful analysis

Do you get the sense that some of the more strident critics of Israel on this thread are using the Palestinians more as symbolic props than as real people? Kind of like Hollywood movies where the set-up involves an ‘other’ ( black, native american, fill in the blank) victimized and oppressed by the imperialist Western white man. This oppressed other can do no wrong since they are just empty symbols.
— Joshs

What Joshs is actually saying here is that he is so incapable of basic human sympathy that he cannot fathom how others can be capable of it. — Maw

Numbers2018 sees through that self-serving interpretation.

the ideological operative system here is similar to the Nazi anti-Semitic ideology in Zizek's sense. The grounding desire, an aspiration to immediately achieve the ultimate peace and justice, presupposes the evil ('sublime') object, invested with negativity and monstrosity. As a result, an ideological figure of 'Israel' has been constructed. 'Israel' has been labelled, demonized, and removed from civil discourse and the historical context. As Zizek points out, 'a pathological, paranoid construction' rejects objective facts and arguments. It employs them just for rationalizations and self-affirmations." — Number2018

don't know why the world, or at least the Western world seems to care about this conflict so much more than larger ones. It seems to me that it is becoming just a proxy for the culture wars wracking America, and I can't say that I think that bodes well for the US or European powers being able to act as an arbiter for peace. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Don’t know if you saw my previous post:

Israel has become a flashpoint for the left not just because of its subjugation of palestinians
but because its form of nationalistic democracy exemplifies the Enlightenment era liberal political self-identity that the West is trying to distance itself from via brutal self-critique. There is nothing quite so threatening to a person than witnessing a way of thinking in an other that they have themselves only recently struggled to free themselves from. This is a thread common to the intensity of. BLM, #Metoo and anti-Israel sentiment. Israel is us Westerners, the way we used to be, the way many of us still are ( Trump , Brexit supporters) .

wonder if Israel is turning itself into Satan. That would be so ironic. — frank

It does get hot as hell there in summer

This is why I hate these political discussions. What on earth is an ‘oppressor’ and what could ‘Legitimate’ possibly mean? The answer depends of course on whether you’re a relativist and how far you’re willing to take that. For me, the belief that such notions can be defined in anything but a hopelessly partisan way is at the heart of most conflicts.

I will say this. Israel has become a flashpoint for the left not just because of its subjugation of palestinians
but because its form of nationalistic democracy exemplifies the Enlightenment era liberal political self-identity that the West is trying to distance itself from via brutal self-critique. There is nothing quite so threatening to a person than witnessing a way of thinking in an other that they have themselves only recently struggled to free themselves from. This is a thread common to the intensity of. BLM, #Metoo and anti-Israel sentiment. Israel is us black , Chinese or white Westerners , the way we used to be, the way many of us still are ( Trump , Brexit supporters) .

You’re damn right I’m being evasive. I d rather poke needles into my eyes than be drawn into this ego-fueled bitch slapping contest. You philosophical posts are always thoughtful. I would think you’d appreciate that nothing constructive can come from throwing the political equivalent of bible quotes at each other. Just help me get a little perspective is all i’m asking.

Do you get the sense that some of the more strident critics of Israel on this thread are using the Palestinians more as symbolic props than as real people? Kind of like Hollywood movies where the set-up involves an ‘other’ ( black, native american, fill in the blank) victimized and oppressed by the imperialist Western white man. This oppressed other can do no wrong since they are just empty symbols. The point is to display the heroism and moral purity of the Western rescuer who can pat themselves on the back for defying their own heritage and upbringing , and maybe flip
their own parents the bird for good measure (it’s been said that Chomsky has a Daddy complex).

Any moral ambiguity to this plot set-up cannot be permitted, lest it spoil the illusion of moral superiority on the part of the self-critical Western activist.

Where did you get this from? It sounds vaguely familiar. What specific political writing does it plug into?

I think cognition and perception are normatively , anticipatingly structured . We perceive the world in relation to what we expect to see, which is why even that which surprises us is familiar to us in some way. In that sense the ought organizes the ‘is’.

Matter is what there is. Things.

Information is patterns. Facts.

The relation is that of choosing. Pointing out. — bongo fury

Perhaps things are only there in an interaction between subject and object pole. More specifically , perhaps what is there directly for us isn’t a thing but a sense. We don’t see things directly. A thing is a higher level construction. As far as sense is concerned, because it only appears to us as an intentional act, it isn’t simply there independently of us , so that is a patterned or formal aspect to sense.

Intersubjectivity is quite a going research concern in psychology and philosophy. It has to do with trying to make sense of the differences between ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘we’, first person subjective experience , 2nd pesos I-Thou interactions and 3rd person objectivity as well as socially normative structures. Their arguments range from the claim that the primordial sense of self is mediated by interpersonal influences (Ratcliffe 2017) to the more radical view that the self is entirely constructed by interpersonal dynamics (Maclaren 2008, (McGann, and De Jaegher 2009).
It has been argued in favor of the first view that in normative contexts where there seems to be a shared worldview, subjectivity must still be operative, otherwise the ’we’ wouldn’t make sense, since it presupppses a collectivity.

Begin gets elected after the atrocities were committed. Obviously he was more "moderate" after that, the deed was already done. So your comment was either stupid or a deliberate attempt to obfuscate. It says something about Israeli politics that they are fine to elect a fascist and war criminal and then decades later still have morons defending it. You'd think 70+ years would give some perspective but can't fight tribalism I suppose. — Benkei

When you engage in a discussion with someone you have never met , have no background context on , and especially when the topic is something as complex and personal as politics , you might want to examine what it is that makes you inclined to use worlds like ‘moron’ , ‘stupid’ , ‘deliberate obfuscation’. I understand my sarcasm irritated you, but it was intended
as a gentle prodding for you to explore more than just what initially seems to you to be the obvious and correct interpretation of my comments. Especially since the reality is I could care less about Israeli politics , I just jotted off my comments in an offhand way, and I am not wedded to any of the assertions I made. Apparently my sarcasm had the opposite effect, making you feel threatened and causing you to double down on your initial
construal of my post.

I’ll tell you what I am wedded to, and that’s a way of understanding human behavior and belief systems that rejects the concept of ‘evil’, which I’ve noticed you like to use. To me , ‘evil’ is what we accuse other people of when we fail to make sense of their thinking from their own perspective. The paradox is that it is this well intended accusation of evil or immorality leveled at individuals or groups that is the root of the sorts of violence and conflict that our concepts or morality are supposed to attach themselves to.

For me your response to my comment is a textbook case of a well intentioned attempt to defend a righteous moral view. But what it shows at a deeper level is that righteous moralism , and along with it the use of terms like ‘stupid’ and ‘moron’ , is a failure of insight, an inability to recognize that we all view the world from
within what in many cases are profoundly different perspectives, all of which can righteously justify themselves in equal measure.

The point of politics to improve the world and end suffering, that's why I bother spending time on it rather than plenty of other more pleasurable activities I'd rather do. The way to alleviate suffering in this case is to end oppression of the Palestinians. That is morality, and you are not to the Left of me for lacking it. — Saphsin

The foundation of politics is philosophy, also the name of this site, and I’ve heard nothing about it from you so far.
As far as being beyond good and evil , I don’t mind being in the company of phenomenologists , Nietzsche, Derrida, Gergen , post-steuxturalists, radical
constructivists and many other philosophical
positions that recognize the limitations of a moralistic thinking.

Since the beginning you've been giving nothing but defensive excuses. Oh they're racist and do bad things, but I have all these things to add to it while you naive guys voice your opposition to what they're doing.

Oh yeah? Wouldn't be surprised if you turn out to defend that — Saphsin

This is ostensibly a philosophy site. I’m aware
that political philosophy and straight out political fights are also a part of what goes on here. I tend to avoid the political discussions because they tend to be muddled and over generalizating. This inclines participants toward a mentality of us against them , of who’s right and who’s wrong, without bothering to examine the context of arguments or the worldview through which they’re filtered.

For the record , I don’t give defensive excuses. I’m a post modernist who rejects moralistic approaches to understanding social value systems and political actions. I don’t give excuses because I have never met a side in a political dispute who couldn’t give legitimate s sincere moral justification for their acts and positions. So I don’t defend any side against their opponents. I defend all sides. This doesn’t mean that I dont prefer certain ways of thinking , certain worldviews to others, but I don’t blame others for falling short of that thinking. I attempt to move with them from within their perspective to a more effective thinking that they can endorse.

From a philosophical vantage, you could say I am positioned well to the left of you, if you maintain a moralistic politics.

I’m more than happy to relate my comments on Israel to this larger philosophical approach, because I am eager to define the philosophical position that grounds your stridently felt moral indignation.

For starters, I identify with Ken Gergen’s social constructionist approach:

By and large identity politics has depended on a rhetoric of blame, the illocutionary effects of which are designed to chastise the target (for being unjust, prejudiced, inhumane, selfish, oppressive, and/or violent). In western culture we essentially inherit two conversational responses to such forms of chastisement - incorporation or antagonism. The incorporative mode ("Yes, now I see the error of my ways") requires an extended forestructure of understandings (i.e. a history which legitimates the critic's authority and judgment, and which renders the target of critique answerable). However, because in the case of identity politics, there is no preestablished context to situate the target in just these ways, the invited response to critique is more typically one of hostility, defense and counter-charge.

In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right. In its generative moment, constructionism offers an orientation toward creating new futures, an impetus to societal transformation. Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition.”(Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics)

There was nothing ambiguous about it, you made your attitude very clear throughout this thread ( — Saphsin

You say it’s unambiguous and I say it’s ambiguous. How ever are we to get to the bottom of this? Perhaps by actually having a discussion about it? No, then you’d have to dismount your high horse and put your brain to work. But I know you can do it. I’ve read some
of your posts. There’s real promise there. So my first suggestion is that you attempt to summarize my
‘unambiguous position’ and we’ll see if it bears any resemblance to what I intended.

" You clearly haven't evolved past grade school. — Saphsin

Actually I learned everything I need to know in kindergarten.

Apologist's crap. A moderate fascist is still a fascist. — Benkei

You have to excuse me. I’ll need to know the secret handshake before I can join the authentic political radical’s club, where self-righteousness flows like water and real psychological insight is in perennial drought.

but your attempt to provoke "why should?" really shows which side you are on that question, with the racist shitheads. — Saphsin

It really does? It really really truly does?Indubitably and forever more ? Are you sure? Will you send me a candy bar if you’re wrong?
Can I guess which side you’re on? Ready? Ok, here goes; you’re on the side of ‘reads a few lines of ambiguous text and , rather than asking a question or two to get clarification, simply goes with their first impression’.
How’d I do? Oh wait, you’d have to ask a question or two to know the answer to that.

The writing was on the wall in 1948 that Israel was turning into a racist sithole: — Benkei

Its early leadership didn’t go the direction of terrorist Begin. When he was elected , he moderated somewhat.
The right in Israel now is unquestionably dominated by racist shitheads, but why should Israel
be different from Russia, Hungary, Poland,Sweden, Germany or the U.S.? It’s today’s fashion.

How do you see the new Republicans? — frank

Although I’m a liberal, I agree with Conservative commentators like David Brooks, Ross Douthat and David Frum that the Trumpist republicans are a sinking ship and are completely out of touch with new economic realities.

think the Republicans are the party of hardened pragmatists. — frank

Let me see if I understand you. You’re saying that the new, populist Trump -dominated Republican party, as opposed to the party of Bush and Reagan, is pragmatic?

There is no empathy to be had for people defending genocide, no matter how hard you'd like to pull on heart strings. — StreetlightX

The more I read your cartoonish takes on complex
political conflicts , the more I get the sense that you’re not talking about the large political world at all, but working out your own personal emotional issues.

like Joshs pathos-laden historical warbling. — StreetlightX

No wonder you don’t like psychology. You’re incapable of nuanced empathic insight.

The Israelis put a lot of effort into making life hard for the Palestinians who remained, apparently expecting them to give up and leave. — frank

They wouldn’t have expected them to give up and leave if they knew how to get along with them. The Israelis didn’t expect or want the tremendous diversity of non-Jewish ethnicities already living in Israel to get up and leave. So why the Palestinians?

I think the cultural clash was a recipe for disaster. A poor , traditionalist culture invaded by modern educated Europeans invariably ends up with the former losing power and autonomy, and produces a vicious cycle
of resentment and paranoia , and self-justifying overreaction on the part of those with the power. Would it have made a difference if the Jewish arrivants had been more enlightened? Today’s polarized political climate in the West suggest not. Lesser educated rural
traditionalists distrust and feel opposed by the growing urban multiculturalists. Ironically, these Trumpists side with Israel over the palestinians. Why, because nationalistic Enlightenment liberalism is the traditionalist in political idea they are familiar with.

But they weren't hostile at first. Wasn't it Jewish intolerance that started it? — frank

There were atrocities on both sides , which I think resulted from profound cultural differences and distrusts. Heres an interesting discussion on the reasons from the expulsion of palestinians after the war of independence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_1948_Palestinian_exodus

And would we all one day turn into Chomsky's the world would be an incomparably better place. — StreetlightX

Chomsky’s the kind of guy who, if stuck on a desert island, would alienate the pragmatists, steal the conch
and form a cult of personality.

As American as Jim Crow & apple pie. Zionism = Manifest Destiny redux. ↪StreetlightX :up: — 180 Proof

It’s painful for me to read this. I’m not saying I completely disagree with it, but something is missing from the historical context. My father’s parents and grandparents lived in Palestine up until 1917 when the Ottoman occupation forced Jews to take up arms against the British, at which point they immigrated to the U.S., which prevented their extermination by the Nazis. They were among the waves of zionists coming from
Central Europe. As you may or may not know, there were a number of varieties of Zionism. Some believed in the Biblical injunction to return to Israel and rebuild the temple. The passover haggadah we read as children said and still says, as a prayer, ‘Next year in Jerusalem’.
Then there were the Zionists who were trying to escape the endless cycles of oppression and progrum , believing that only in a Jewish state could a Jew protect
themselves. Finally, there were socialist utopians with no religious affiliation who wanted to build a model community. I think there was a sincere if naive belief among those pioneers that a Jewish State could
also be a democracy that welcomed and was fair to all, Jew and non-Jew alike. I think this naivite led to incomprehension at the array of hostile Arab powers aimed at the destruction of this Jewish state. It also led to the delegitimization of the concerns of palestinians.

I get the impression you’re not happy with any existing state. That’s a dangerous place to be in from an emotional
health point of view. If you’re not careful
you’ll turn into a Chomsky.

Supposedly if they did, apartheid would have been OK, yes? — StreetlightX

You sound so naive. It’s not. a question of being ok, but of how groups respond to the rhetoric of the opposing side. It’s thing to commit an action of terrorism in the name of liberation , it’s another to produce a never ending stream of rhetoric that isn’t simply about freedom from oppression but about the illegitimacy of another whole population, even in the context of a hypothetical shared democratic state.

What are you , some kind of utopian idealist? I don’t know that Israel’s
form of democracy is that much different than what U.S. democracy started off as. Democracy evolves , you know.

So one side threatens and the other side , the one with the power, accomplishes. I lived in Israel for a year. I don’t think it’s possible for a state that identifies itself in nationalistic terms as a Jewish state can be a full fledged democracy. I think the difference between the Israeli form of democracy and the palestinian attempts at self-government is that in a self-defined Jewish state the arab citizens will always have second class status in spite of the rhetoric of equal rights under the law. In a palestinian state , Jews might have no status of citizenship .

And the state who is demonstrably - and so far successfully - committed to the annihilation of a population is Israel. — StreetlightX

As I recall, rhetoric concerned with annihilating a population, or ‘driving them into the sea’, has been heard for years from certain non-Jewish quarters within the Middle East. . I don’t recall such threats ever coming from Black South Africans toward the white population.

Interesting read. I notice
there is brief mention of a handful of philosophers. I mention this because whenever a philosopher offers a hermetically sealed set of concepts with its own idiosyncratic jargon there is the risk that they are reinventing the wheel without realizing it. That’s why bringing in the larger community of philosophers and situating your thinking in relation to theirs is helpful to your readers. It lets us know who you have read and who you haven’t, and how you interpret their ideas with respect to your own. As it stands I’m left to surmise that your thinking has resonances with Wittgenstein , Peirce and perhaps Levinas. You may want to elaborate on your reference to a God’s eye view of absolute
truth.

when we consider that we have a limited span of attention then technically every “new curiosity” is the abolishment of a previous one to a state of indifference or boredom or lack of desire to continue pursuing it. — Benj96

That’s the interesting thing about attention.It’s not just a neutral beam of light with a certain capacity to illuminate. Attention is an active interpreting. Attention only appears limited to the extent that what we are experiencing is fragmented into arbitrary disconnected meanings. But attention can seem almost unlimited when we are involved in progressively unfolding deeper and deeper layers of a phenomenon that we interpret as continuously unified and harmonious. Deep interested sustained engagement on a unified experience is more profound than curiosity, which , like a junkie , needs constant novelty, but isn’t able to make much out of what it captures in the moment.

This is what Heidegger had to say about curiosity( for those who are curious about Heidegger):

When curiosity has become free, it takes care to see not in order to understand what it sees, that is, to come to a being toward it, but only in order to see. It seeks novelty only to leap from it again to another nov­elty. The care of seeing is not concerned with comprehending and know­ingly being in the truth, but with possibilities of abandoning itself to the world. Thus curiosity is characterized by a specific not-staying with what is nearest. Consequently, it also does not seek the leisure of reflec­tive staying, but rather restlessness and excitement from continual nov­elty and changing encounters. In not-staying, curiosity makes sure of the constant possibility of distraction. Curiosity has nothing to do with the contemplation that wonders at being, thaumazein, it has no interest in wondering to the point of not understanding. Rather, it makes sure of
knowing, but just in order to have known. The two factors constitutive for curiosity, not-staying in the surrounding world taken care of and dis­traction by new. possibilities, are the basis of the third essential characteristics of this phenomenon, which we call never dwelling anywhere.
Curiosity is everywhere and nowhere. This mode of being-in-the-world reveals a new kind of being of everyday Da-sein, one in which it con­stantly uproots itself.”(Being and Time)

I also agree that extremes do tend to provoke a consequential reverse reaction - pivoting to the other extreme.

The question then seems to be “how does one stabilise themselves?” The so called “Goldilocks zone” of not too happy not too sad instead of a tumultuous rollercoaster of ups and downs.

Any thoughts? — Benj96

There is a tendency in psychological theorizing to reduce emotion and attitude to some sort of extraneous coloration or content that is added onto experience. Thus, curiosity or boredom are treated as inner substances, either evolutionarily selected for or socially conditioned or both.

I think it’s a mistake to understand feelings and attitudes as separable from our relations to situations. I don’t think the shift from curiosity to boredom is like equilibrating between two concentrations of a chemical. They are instead existential responses to our coping in situations.
Curiosity leads to boredom because no situation can continue to provide a renewal of interest without a certain exhaustion of challenge. This isn’t the fault of the depletion of an ‘inner’ substance but the way that situations change. Creativity has cycles to it , as we move through different phases of interest in aspects of our world. Without these textures and vissicitudes of momentum to our experience we wouldn’t be able to experience anything. The loss of interest in something is a necessary, meaningful part of the creativity cycle, just as important as curiosity. It is not an ‘internal’ weakness but a natural expression of changing experience of situations as we make our way through them.

How to find a ‘Goldilocks zone’? I think recognizing that experience is self-reflexive and any particular
comportment toward the world will eventually shift of its own accord due to the ever changing nature of experience itself is the best way to maintain a fluid approach to the world. Believing that whatever mood or attitude one is in now will be permanent can lead to a vicious cycle of stuckness. Children are prone to believing that whatever state they are in now will never change, and that leads to intense negative moods.

When I think of curiosity people a few images come to mind, namely;
Children - they seem to be boundless in what they can find interesting. I suppose this is because for them most things are novel experiences. They can be fascinated with a puddle, or some mud, or a ladybug climbing a piece of grass — Benj96

Children can also be relentlessly , impossibly bored. I have never been so bored as an adult as I was as a child. I think that’s no coincidence. Different moods and attitudes imply and are based on complementary ones.
Extreme elation is often followed by deep
depression, as seen with bipolar disorder.

Do things have value because they make us happy or do they make us happy because they have value? — TheMadFool

Everything we experience has value. We are sense-making creatures so what we experience matters to us in some way, whether it is boring or interesting, pleasant or unpleasant. I think the hedonic aspect of our valuations are a function of the relative assimilative coherence of what we experience in relation to our ongoing aims and goals. Hedonism isn’t some arbitrary mechanism shaped by evolution to tell us what we should like or not like, as if we would have no motivation without this ‘mechanism’. The ways in which we make sense of our world are inherently affective and hedonic

There is only one subjective experience in my universe - mine. — T Clark

Yes, but is this subjective experience not at the same time an objective experience? What I mean is this: I can think of myself in relation or opposition to other people. That’s a developed notion of self.But Husserl says, what if we bracket off our knowledge of ourselves as a human among other humans. Instead, imagine that other people, ourselves included, are reduced to unidentified phenomena. In that situation, what is left of your subjectivity as ‘yours’? Husserl says that there is still an ‘I’ but as mere center of activity. But one can still speak of a ‘ mine ness’ to experience, because all of my intnetional experiences of objects are correlated and assimilated to my previous experience in terms of
dimensions of similarity and difference. I guess what I’m saying is that you can construct and explain the basis of a whole world of nature, science and culture on the basis of what appears to a unique subjectivity. But this subjectivity , by virtue of being exposed every minute to changes in the objects it intends , is born anew in every new experience. So your very own unique subjectivity is always a slightly different subjectivity over time, The subject is changed by its objects.

Once you realize that the ‘you’ who experiences is always a slightly different ‘you’ , you can recognize other persons as having their own constantly changing subjectivity. If your own subjectivity is not a pure in-itself because of
its constant contamination from its world , then the barrier between your own subjectivity and that of other people no longer seems so impermeable.