I recently read an op-ed by Israeli professor Fania Oz-Salzberger in which she uses an extended metaphor to defend Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Imagine, she writes, that you have been feuding with a “poor and traumatized” neighbor, someone with whom you have a “sad and complicated history.” Imagine that your neighbor keeps firing bullets into your house from his own living room which is “densely packed with women and children,” and with his own daughter in fact sitting on his lap as he shoots. You’ve tried to ignore him but now some of his bullets are hitting your child’s bedroom door. The police are unavailable. “What do you do?”

Her metaphor is meant to herd the reader relentlessly to one conclusion: Israel had no choice but to unleash the violence it visited upon Gaza this January. Hamas provoked it, and Hamas must bear full responsibility for civilian casualties inflicted by Israeli bombs, because Hamas would not stop firing through Israel’s windows and let Israelis simply live in peace in their own home.

The metaphor is accurate, so far as it goes. Hamas has indeed fired rockets into Israel and done so, surely, in the cynical hope of provoking a brutal response. Hamas undoubtedly sees political advantage in getting Israel to kill innocent civilians of every age and gender in Gaza: Israeli violence in Gaza (and elsewhere) inflames anti-Israel sentiment among Arabs, which probably “energizes Hamas’s base” among Palestinians.

So yes, the metaphor is accurate, as far as it goes, but it only goes halfway. To make it fully accurate, one must add the other half of the equation…“and suppose your house used to be your neighbor’s house. Suppose his family had been living there for a thousand years. Suppose your neighbor is traumatized and poor because after you drove him from his home, he had to move in with his poor and unemployed relatives. Suppose his house is “densely packed with women and children” because its occupants include refugees from the house you now inhabit, and his daughter is sitting on his lap because, in that densely-packed house, she has nowhere else to sit.

And suppose finally that, fearing your neighbor’s resentment, you have encircled his house with guards and guard dogs to cut him off from the outside world, even from shopping, even from having goods delivered, and certainly from visitors, because you know he’ll only use the opportunity to buy more guns and bullets to use against you. You have arranged that food and other necessities be delivered to him, you’re not a barbarian after all, but you insist that all packages be inspected by you before they go in or out. You regret these measures but must enforce them because your neighbor has made no bones about his desire to kill you.

Let’s face it: whatever your plans were, whatever you may have wanted originally, the fact is that you are now a prison warden and your neighbor is your prisoner. Of course he’s lobbing bombs over the fence. Of course he’s trying to hurt you—what did you or anyone expect? And how can the violence end if the configuration between the two of you doesn’t change? And how can that change unless the dynamics of your interaction do?

Others around the neighborhood have pleaded with the two of you to sit down and talk this problem out, but you refuse to do so unless your neighbor first agrees that the house is yours, that you were right to take it, and that no injustice has occurred. This your neighbor refuses to do, and so the impasse continues. Your neighbor’s anger keeps growing; your fear of your neighbor keeps growing; you take ever harsher measures to render your neighbor impotent so that you can be safe; and your neighbor’s anger therefore grows and grows…

Using half a metaphor to represent the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is not useful. It only reifies the notion that one side is totally at fault and that the violence will end once that side is made to confess its guilt. In Israel of course, but in the West generally, and in the United States in particular, sentiment seems pretty one-sidedly to hold that Israel is in the right, the Palestinians are in the wrong. In the Arab world of course, but in the rest of the world generally, and in the poor (or “developing”) countries especially, sentiment seems just as one-sidedly convinced that Israel is in the wrong, the Palestinians its victims.

Clearly, both sides have legitimate concerns and grievances. So long as each side is talking only to itself, it will construct an internally consistent framework within which the arguments of the other side all look like vicious, self-serving rationalizations: this is the inevitable result of trying a case agains tyourself in the court of yourself with yourself as judge and yourself as jury and yourself covering the trial. The conflict can never be adjudicated until Read more

In Homer’s Iliad, the best-known brain belongs to Odysseus. He’s the “man of a thousand wiles.” If you’re breaking into a walled city, he’s the fellow you want by your side. But there’s another character in the Iliad who is just as impressive intellectually: old Nestor, “wisest of the Greeks.” He’ sno help when you’r breaking into a walled city, but you need a Nestor, an Odysseus won’t do.

Wise. It’s not a synonym for “smart.” To be sure, it has something to do with smartness, but don’t look for it on Howard Gardner’s list of “multiple intelligences.” Gardner’s categories—mathematical intelligence, social intelligence, etc—are aptitudes that people are born with. Ditto for whatever IQ tests test.

Wisdom, by contrast, is linked intrinsically to experience. When the young are wise, we call them “wise beyond their years,” acknowledging that “years” and “wise” are related
It’s not enough to be old, either. Some elders are just geezers. Nor is it enough to have lots of experience under your hat. Been-there, done-that only equals jaded. Wisdom is a cross between what you’ve done and what you’ve made of it. As a type of intelligence (are you listening, Howard Gardner?) it might be defined as Read more

Five years ago, America had a rare opportunity in Afghanistan. It stood astride a country exhausted by chaos, tired of bloodshed, and hungry for peace. At that moment, having driven the Taliban out of Kabul, the United States could have relied on the Afghan people as allies. At that moment, Afghans themselves would have manned the barricades against saboteurs and terrorists to protect Americans helping to rebuild their country. Liberated from security concerns, the United States could have exercised to the utmost its undoubted genius for creating prosperity. The military victory could have been a platform for starting on America’s real work: putting a devastated Muslim country back on its feet with no strings attached—just think how that news would have rippled beyond the borders of Afghanistan and throughout the Islamic world.

Instead, the Bush Administration committed an astonishing Read more