My favorite thinker, Isaiah Berlin, warned of the dangers of something called 'monism.' He divided the world between 'foxes' who know many things and do not overly subscribe to one, and 'hedgehogs' who know one big thing and see the world in one overarching rubric. Foxes are 'pluralists' who see the world as being able to accommodate many sorts of values, many of which fall into contradiction with one another and still see some value in them all. Hedgehogs, however, are 'monists', who believe that there can only be one solution, and in Berlin's opinion, which happens to be mine too, 'in politics, these are the most dangerous of men.'
There are many things to recommend about 'hedgehogs.' Their belief animates the passion for action that foxes usually don't have, and if their belief is correct, they implement solutions that work. But their inability to consider alternatives usually guarantees that they're beliefs are incorrect. And it's also true that lack of commitment leads to complacency: sectioning off the oppressed so we can go about our lives untroubled--but better the complacency of oppression than the silence of death.
This leads to the paradoxical contradiction: those of us who believe in value pluralism, right and left, see that those who disagree with them are not inherently our enemies, but at the same time, we have to act as though those who believe differently than us are very much our enemies. Your beliefs are what lead to fanaticism, and fanaticism leads to death: deaths many times more frequent than the world even experiences now.
Even if your beliefs are correct, your inability to accommodate disagreement is what provokes those who oppose you with every fiber of their being to support leaders who enact measures you find the ultimate in murderousness. Your beliefs can only lead to the exact opposite of what you seek.
But to those who oppose Israel's actions with every cell in your bodies: your inability to realize how much Hamas has enacted the Gazan predicament is precisely what leads Gazans to squalor and death, and half culpable for what enables Netanyahu's stranglehold on Israel. All this could have been avoided, and your beliefs in the sole culpability of Israel are what kept Hamas in power. Hamas had 38 billion dollars in foreign aid and used it solely for self-enrichment and tunnels into Israel they do not permit their citizens to enter even as they're being slaughtered. You may be anti-imperialism, but you are pro-totalitarianism. You are as much what enables the left-wing dictators of today as people who excused Stalin in the 1930s and lead to the deaths of literal tens of millions. How many other regimes will you support in your vendetta against the West which gave you everything before you get it into your heads that your beliefs are the opposite of productive to your goals?
To those who support Israel's actions with every cell in your bodies: the extremity of your vitriol against the Palestinian goals has lead you into the hands of a government that may strip the country you love into becoming precisely the sort of authoritarian regime you excoriate in Gaza. By thinking no act of the Israeli government is worthy of accountability, you've made the country you supposedly love into an authoritarian state where a demagogue can game a dysfunctional system for more than fifteen years to stay in power nobody wants him to have. He incurs the worst defeat in Israeli history and still, two years later, nobody can still get rid of him. He's oppressive not only to Palestinians but to Jews. The offensive part of this war should have ended a year and a half ago. Netanyahu knows that prolonging the war is to his electoral advantage: he dooms the hostages and any number of IDF troops who senselessly die even as they unnecessarily kill. Netanyahu and Likud may not have anything like as extreme beliefs as Hamas and their supporters in Gaza, but Israel is hundreds of times more powerful, and every inch of your extremism carries so much more capacity for death and mass murder than the extremism of Gazans. It is probable that the future of the West is exactly the sort of authoritarianism you mean to eradicate elsewhere. You are simultaneously pro-imperialism and pro-authoritarianism. Your extremism will lead to our time's equivalents to Franco, Mussolini, and yes, the other guy. How many more will you insist on killing before the murder is visited on us?
Whatever your beliefs, if you believe so strongly in your own convictions, your inability to consider alternatives can only lead to the death of democracy, peace, and liberal rule of law, because there is no action extreme enough that you cannot convince yourself to support them, and convince yourself much faster than you think you can. The realities of the moment change us all, and even if we think we're immune to propaganda, we never are, and judgement altering anger can rise up so quickly that the heart inevitably dictates the head, and the head inexorably loses the facilities of judgement you're meant to have.
There is no way to be diplomatic about this, and if God holds me accountable for being so self-righteous before Yom Kippur, so let it be written.
Even as I write all this arrogant screed, I know I need to atone for my self-righteousness and on my knees I ask for your forgiveness and God's. But you too have to atone. And if you don't atone now, you will be made to atone in a generation when your beliefs have only wrought violent death and murder on a scale so past this.
G'mar chatima tova. History is watching you.
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