Palestine is Not Psychotic: Why Bret Stephens’ Frame Hurts Jews, Not Just Palestinians
“Today in Israel, Palestinians are in the midst of a campaign to knife Jews to death, one at a time. This is psychotic. It is evil. To call it anything less is to serve as an apologist, and an accomplice.”
Mr Stephens’ piece Palestine: The Psychotic Stage published in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) as an Op-Ed on 12 October 2015 is a heavily biased piece which generalizes “Palestinians” in unwarranted ways. While I am certainly concerned with the feelings and sensibilities of my Palestinian friends I am motivated to write this response out of concerns for me and my people — Jews — American, Israeli or otherwise. I would like to address some specific issues and then handle the larger behavioral implications of creating myths like this.
Palestine is not in a psychotic stage. From October 9 until the 16th I was in Ramallah providing pro bono neurosurgical services to Palestinian children. I was fortunate enough to have conversations with many individuals and no one I encountered seemed to be pleased that young Palestinians were attacking Israelis — instead they were concerned with the well-being of their youth. The best way to describe the Palestinian understanding of the incipient “Third Intifada” was that angry young people were protesting and a select few were engaging in counter-productive acts of violence against a people they see as an enemy after a century of dispossession.
An excellent personal example: many injured from confrontations with the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) came through the pre-operative area. A 17 year old boy was shot in the hand by an IDF rubber bullet while protesting and throwing rocks and sustained three metacarpal fractures in his left-hand. Laying in pre-op for orthopedic surgery, our volunteer nurse practitioner — a Palestinian woman whose family fled Jaffa during the Nakhba now living in California — who speaks fluent Arabic asked him why he was being so irresponsible as to go throw stones. His mother was there and overheard and joined the fray, asking our nurse practitioner to really lay into him for being so irresponsible and hurting his mother this way. Rather than treating him as a martyr, the surgeons and the OR staff were also relatively disdainful of this “irresponsible” young man. The attitude of the Palestinian orthopedic surgeon, who is a pretty funny guy, could be summed up this way: “what a dumbass.”
In general, the media is un-helpfully biased and both sides should be asking for a more fair and informative treatment of this situation. It is certainly disingenuous, as Mr Stephens points out, to have a headline like “Palestinian killed as violence continues.” However Mr Stephens, featured on the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs website, engages in the same when he states that “Hamas killed a Jewish couple.” This is true, but he fails to contextualize Eitam and Naama Henkins’ identity as settlers who believe that the West Bank — Judea and Samaria for religious Jews — should be part of a Greater Israel and regularly intimidate Palestinians. Nowhere in the American press has this distinction about the Henkins been made. The world community sees these settlements as illegal and those few who do not are clearly sticking fervently to the letter of the law while still breaking the spirit of the law.
Mr Stephens use of the phrase “The Palestinian blood fetish” is insulting, misleading and a generalization that raises the question of what the WSJ editorial board is aiming for. Why is it OK to generalize the violent and profoundly counter-productive behavior of a few people to an entire people?I do not like what Mr Abbas says, but until I know more about the things he says and to whom, I question what we can conclude about him from this one sample. People say lots of terrible things, but what can be concluded about them? Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s Foreign Minister said in March 2015 “Those who are against us, there’s nothing to be done — we need to pick up an ax and cut off his head,” referring to Israeli Arabs. Ariel Sharon as defense minister bore “personal responsibility” for the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila camps in southern Lebanon according to an Israeli commission of inquiry — does this mean all Israelis are bloodthirsty? It is not clear, until you know more about the larger context. This is not an excuse for bad behavior, just a point about human behavior and what can be concluded based on a small sample.
Mr Stephens statement: “Israeli politicians want to allow Jews to pray atop the Temple Mount — never mind that Benjamin Netanyahu denies it and has barred Israeli politicians from visiting the site” is similarly without context. The Temple Mount has ALWAYS been a touchy point for the Muslims — since 1929 when the building of a ritual wall separating male from female worshipers at the Kotel resulted in an Arab riot. A mixture of lies, ignorance and perceived unfairness sparked those riots to be sure, but this sensitivity should be well-managed, not manipulated as Sharon did in 2000 when he visited the Haram al-Sharif. I absolutely think Jews should be able to go the Haram if they wish. But how this comes to be is a big deal. Informed Israelis know about this Muslim sensitivity, but immigrant Americans with a shorter history, have a harder time with ancient landmarks. Mr Stephens’ responsibility is to help us understand these dynamics, not dismiss what can easily be framed as religious lunacy.
The rhetoric of hate absolutely needs to be removed from Arab society. Mr Abbas’ statement that “[Jews] have no right to defile it [the Temple Mount] with their filthy feet” is a demagogic statement aimed to stoke fear. But, as with so many issues in this interminable conflict, the symmetries are striking — both sides complain about their lack of leadership. In a conversation with my family in Israel after my work in Ramallah, a common theme was that the people would get along if the leaders were not so bad — poor leadership was a theme in multiple conversations with the Palestinian healthcare workers I had just spent a week with. A deeper concern with hate and society is how this filters into the next generation through the education system. Interestingly, a study in 2013 found both sides’ textbooks were guilty of de-legitimating the other and while the Israeli side sought to de-legitimize the report, the Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, asked for help to improve the curriculum. Eliminating hatred from political rhetoric and childhood education is a worthy goal; using an example like this to make the case for a Palestinian psychosis is irresponsible.
“Imagine if a white minister…” is a vacuous analogy — African Americans never settled in a land formerly belonging to the white man. African Americans do not currently control the places the white guy can go, the amount of economic growth the white man’s country is capable of nor has the black man used public moneys to fund an ongoing displacement of the white man from the areas left to him.
Why is this bad for Jews? After all, the more we can convince the wider public that the Palestinians are irrational and violent, the more we can count on their sympathy and support, correct? I would argue no; when either side of this conflict uses rhetoric to generate fear it is bad for both sides based on an understanding of the biological context of behavior. If you believe that evolution is a biologic process whereby living things discover useful information about their environment and encode it for use by later generations, then you are a fan of diversity. Diversity is what allows bacteria to survive antibiotic environments (good news, for them), allows finches to access different seeds with different beaks and allows the sickle cell trait to protect Africans from malaria (at a cost). But diversity is not just a genetic phenomenon. It applies to a domain called “epigenetics” as well: the mechanisms that regulate genetic expression. A recent study of Holocaust survivors found that their genes have been tagged in such a way as to affect the way the genes for a stress hormone are expressed in subsequent generations. Less explored, but likely to be very important in the future is cognitive diversity. Our brains are all different — some people have excellent visuo-spatial analytical skills, others a talent for language and so on. Some of the ways in which our brains are different, despite all being members of Homo sapiens, are daily being discovered in neuroscience labs around the world. A wonderful example is the research regarding self versus other conceptualization in Westerners and in Chinese.
In 2006, Zhu et al published a paper in the journal Neuroimage exploring how brains respond to words describing “self”, “mother” and “other”. Volunteers from China, Australia, US, Canada and England were placed in an MRI and the level of activity in specific regions of their brain were measured as they were shown adjectives associated with themselves, their mother, or an unrelated person. As the study subject viewed these pairings, they were asked to judge whether that adjective was, in their opinion, actually a fair thing to say about themselves, their mother or an unrelated other. They found that in both Westerners and Chinese, adjectives about the self were highly correlated with activation of a region called the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), indicating that this region is a key brain region involved with self-conceptualization. When asked to do the same for “mother”, Chinese study subjects still showed strong activation of the MPFC while Westerners did not. Their conclusion is as follows:
Our findings suggest that Chinese individuals use MPFC to represent both the self and the mother whereas Westerners use MPFC to represent exclusively the self, providing neuroimaging evidence that culture shapes the functional anatomy of self-representation.
So if culture shapes neuroanatomy — literally how your brain is structured to understand its world — can it change in an individual’s lifetime based on their experiences? There is every reason to believe so, though the data are not yet conclusively demonstrative of this. Just think of learning a new language, adjusting to a new culture or the effects of meditation. What is clear is that environmental context helps to determine behavior, even if it is not clear that neuroanatomy is changed. The expectations of those around you clearly alter behavior; the Pygmalion Effect has been well researched through the years — an excellent review can be found here. The Stanford Prison Experiment is another excellent example of context and behavior. Twenty-four college students from the US and Canada were randomly assigned to be either prisoners or guards. Planned as a two week experiment, it had to be stopped after 6 days as the “guards” had become too sadistic and the “prisoners” too depressed. Lest you think that this effect lacks subtlety, another experiment conducted by Robert Rosenthal involved arbitrarily assigning rats a label of dumb or intelligent. In reality the rats were of the same ability level, however rats regarded as intelligent did better on tests of rat ability than those that were labeled dumb. The actual rat results were different, not just the perceptions of the results by the experimenters.
Behavioral and conceptual variability in individuals is clear and the actual behavior of individuals is significantly dependent on the context in which they exist. This is why Mr Stephen’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on October 12, 2015, is so dangerous not only to Palestinians (who I can only assume were appalled) but also to Jews. By creating a perception of Palestinians as a psychotic group bent on stabbing Jews one by one he is creating an environment which enables the behavior of the worst actors on both sides. His prestige as an expert as well as that of the WSJ is being leveraged to lead the readership of the WSJ to believe that “Palestinians” are all psychotic and violent and wish an end to not only Jews but the Jewish state. Both the Jews and the Palestinians wrestle with those members of their demographic who believe that violence is the answer — that one side is “right” and the other wrong. Jewish violence towards Palestinians is also long-standing — the burning of a Palestinian home, the graffiti placed on a Louisville mosque (please also note the outpouring of support of the Louisville community) and the sacking of Deir Yasin (note the way in which the fact of the sacking was manipulated by both sides) is only a small sampling. The clear majority on both sides of this conflict want peace and security but each of us must move as a group with a plurality of perceptions, conclusions and behaviors. Our debate needs to center on creating the conditions for peace, not deluding ourselves into thinking one side is “right” and the other not — this only fosters a more extreme complement of behaviors among those with the conditions and propensity to see their actions as justified and to dehumanize those on the other side.
The responsibility of a journalist of Mr Stephens’ standing is to create the causes and conditions of peace, not to stoke the fear of one side of the conflict with “facts” out of context. The mission of the Carnegie Council for Fairness in International Affairs (CC) reads:
Where does one go for guidance on the great moral issues of war, peace, and social justice? Religious institutions, schools, and moral leaders all play their indispensable roles. Yet there is no hub, no focal point, and no single place of reference to send an inquiry or consult with the world’s experts.
Carnegie Council answers this call. Through our programs, our publications, and our websites, we aim to be the world’s central address for ethics in international affairs.
To maintain this credibility — so crucial to any level-headed discussion in an age where information is abundant but credibility is not — the CC needs to be more attentive to the content generated by its members.