By Jonathan Cook
December 03, 202:
Information Clearing House
-- Of course, I expect a backlash every time I
write. It comes with the territory. There is no
point being a Bari Weiss or a David Frum and
crying out against “cancel culture”. Dissension
is part of the rough and tumble of a modern
world in which everyone – at least, for a little
longer – gets their 15 minutes of sounding off,
however ignorant their opinions. There are
millions of people out there on social media,
and some of them seem to have pretty disturbing
views.
But I don’t write just to be provocative, as some
readers appear to imagine. I write to influence. Not
so much what we think – though that’s a
nice bonus – but how we go about the task
of thinking.
In societies bombarded with propaganda –
propaganda that gets ever more sophisticated as
software and algorithms learn through billions of
tiny mind experiments how to trigger us, arouse us,
incentivise us – it is extraordinarily hard to think
clearly. It requires a huge amount of mental and
spiritual energy to gain distance. That’s very
difficult to do if we spend all day working, or we
are exposed all day to the news cycle. The biggest
problem is not just that our thoughts are likely to
be someone else’s (often Rupert Murdoch’s), it is
that we don’t even know that they belong to somebody
else. That is how propaganda works.
This difficulty means I spend a lot of time
thinking about which topics to write about. I need
to select issues prominent enough in the news that
people will wish to invest a little more time to
read my contribution. But at the same time the topic
I choose needs to illustrate my chief concerns –
that we are being propagandised into ever more
polarised, antagonised tribal identities – starkly
enough that readers will be prepared to reconsider
the strong views they already hold on the matter at
hand.
Challenging ever more polarised and deeply
entrenched tribal identities often feels like a
high-wire act in which the only way to have an
impact is to keep raising the wire a little higher.
The more an audience loses critical distance on an
issue – the more tribal it becomes – the more it has
to be jolted out of its complacency, out of its
sense of what constitutes normality or sanity. But
the jolt itself can prove counter-productive, simply
reinforcing the tribe’s certainty that anyone who
disagrees must belong to the other tribe, the enemy,
and can therefore be safely ignored.
How we think
I have been researching and writing daily on
foreign affairs, mostly related to the Middle East,
for 20 years. That’s a long time, and inevitably
over that period I have grown more confident in my
worldview and I have wanted to deepen and broaden my
perspective.
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Certainly, there are lessons I have learnt from
two decades of reporting on, and analysing, Israel
and Palestine that I think are of wider import. It
is a region whose features I have been able to study
with a degree of dispassion – because the so-called
“conflict” isn’t exactly mine – but also with a
great deal of intimacy – because I ended up marrying
into that conflict. I understand very well how a
modern settler colonial state works and how a strong
tribal identity is key to its success. I understand
too the way it inevitably spawns the infrastructure
of a militarised, hi-tech, surveillance state, and
how an elite needs to constantly manipulate the
public into a sense of existential crisis to keep
itself enriched and powerful.
Any of that sound familiar outside
Israel-Palestine?
The problem is that it is much easier to see how
Israeli Jews are propagandised, how they are
invested in an entirely manufactured tribal identity
that keeps them oppressing Palestinians, than it is
to see how we ourselves are propagandised, or how
our own manufactured tribal identities work in much
the same way.
Which is why every time I write about the United
States, where the most propagandised population on
the planet lives, I receive the biggest backlash
from readers: “Stick to writing about Palestine”;
“You don’t know enough about the US to have a
view”; “What happened to you – you were
great when you just wrote about Israel-Palestine”.
And those are the polite responses.
What appears to be upsetting some readers isn’t
so much the facts I am writing about. After all, in
this intensely globalised world, where we can all
read the same newspapers online and we can all watch
Youtube videos of the actual events themselves, I
know as much as you most likely do about what
happened – whether it’s in Nablus, Bristol or
Kenosha. Unless you were there, and got an angle on
events denied the rest of us, we are debating the
same set of real-world events or the same set of
corporate media depictions of those events.
The issue often isn’t what we know
(though increasingly we choose to close our ears to
information that does not confirm our prejudices),
it’s how we analyse what we know.
Emotional investment
People who began following me because of my
writings on Israel-Palestine, or the acres of
related stuff I wrote countering the Zionist
misinformation campaigns in the UK intended to
vilify Jeremy Corbyn, are already a fairly select
group of people who trust my analytical skills when
it comes to an issue on which they have managed to
see past the propaganda most others are still in
thrall to.
What I know through meeting a small proportion of
those readers is that their ability to break out of
the mainstream mindset was typically based on an
unusual or intensely personal experience they had.
Maybe they visited Israel and Palestine and were
shocked by the yawning gulf between what they had
read in the corporate media and what they saw on the
ground. Or maybe they knew Corbyn to be an authentic
politician and a committed anti-racist and could not
believe how he was depicted in every single
corporate news outlet in the UK.
Direct experience of the way the news is skewed
set them on a path towards questioning the
propaganda they had been subjected to over a
lifetime.
But just because we manage to break out of the
propaganda construct on one issue does not mean we
succeed on every issue. Things that feel intensely
personal to us, in which we are emotionally or
materially invested, are always going to be the
hardest to view from a distance. And for obvious
reasons, nothing is so personal, so deeply invested
in, as our social and political identities. To
question our identity is both to loosen ourselves
from the rock that anchors us to the ground we know
best and to risk alienating the social networks we
depend on. Truly liberating oneself from propaganda
– transcending the identities that have been largely
manufactured for us – is the riskiest of ventures,
which is why so few are willing to do it.
I witnessed that especially keenly in
Israel-Palestine, where Jews who cast aside the
tribal comfort blanket of Zionism were themselves
cast out by their own societies. When we criticise
Israeli Jews for failing to stand in solidarity with
Palestinians, we should also remember how hard it is
intellectually and emotionally to go against the
grain of your society. It takes significant courage.
I have seen it too in the way anti-Zionist Jews
in the Labour party have been hounded out because
they refuse to be used by the parliamentary party’s
dominant Blairite wing to settle political scores
with the more socialist membership. When these
anti-Zionist Jews refuse to abandon their
anti-racist principles and become tribal Zionists –
Zionists who demand special diplomatic treatment for
a self-declared ethnic state that, in turn, demands
special privileges for Jews over Palestinians – they
are demeaned as self-hating or the “wrong kind of
Jews”. Seeing their treatment, one can understand
why so many British Jews might never think to
question what they have been told – or might prefer
to keep their heads down.
And that is the point. It is not that we make a
choice to stay propagandised. It doesn’t require any
effort from us at all. All we need do is not
make a choice. Our socially constructed tribal
identities are the default. All we need to do is go
about our daily lives as normal.
Propagandised populations
For many of us, who lack a strongly Zionist
tribal identity (though of course in the west we
have been raised with a more general, colonial
Zionist identity since at least the 1917 Balfour
Declaration) it is fairly easy to understand how
Zionist Jews have been propagandised and how far
their thinking can stray from reality. In early 2015
– months after Israel’s horrifying attack on Gaza
that killed hundreds of Palestinian children and led
to an outpouring of criticism of Israel in the UK
and elsewhere – a
survey found that 56 per cent of British Jews
believed “anti-Semitism in Britain has some echoes
of the 1930s”.
Remember this survey was before Corbyn had been
elected Labour leader and before the furore about a
supposed antisemitism crisis in the party had moved
into full gear. God knows, what a similar survey of
British Jews would find today.
At that stage, even a prominent liberal
commentator for the Israeli Haaretz newspaper
found the views of most fellow Jews in the UK
preposterous:
If the majority of British Jews and the
authors of the CAA [Campaign Against
Antisemitism] report actually believe that, then
it’s hard to take anything they say about
contemporary anti-Semitism in their home country
seriously. If they honestly think that the
situation in Britain today echoes the 1930s when
Jews were still banned from a wide variety of
clubs and associations, when a popular fascist
party, supported by members of the nobility and
popular newspapers, were marching in support of
Hitler, when large parts of the British
establishment were appeasing Nazi Germany and
the government was resolutely opposed to
allowing Jewish refugees of Nazism in to
Britain, finally relenting in 1938 to allow
10,000 children to arrive — but not their
parents who were to die in the Holocaust (that
shameful aspect of the Kindertransport that is
seldom mentioned) — and when the situation of
Jews in other European countries at the time was
so much worse, then not only are they woefully
ignorant of recent Jewish history but have
little concept of what real anti-Semitism is
beyond the type they see online.
Paradoxically, Haaretz columnist Anshel Pfeffer
would soon subscribe himself to much of the nonsense
he excoriates here – as soon, in fact, as Corbyn was
elected to head the Labour party.
Which is a reminder of how quickly we can adapt
our understanding of what we think of as real,
objective facts, or falsehoods, when it helps to
protect our tribal identities. We see what we want
to see.
Pfeffer, a liberal Zionist, thought the paranoia
of conservative Zionist Jews was ridiculous when Ed
Miliband, a liberal Zionist like Pfeffer and a
gentle critic of Israel, led the Labour party. But
once Corbyn took over, a genuine anti-racist who
opposed the “liberal” racism inherent in a
self-declared Jewish state, Pfeffer started to feel
much more ideologically aligned with conservative
British Jews. Indeed, he soon shared most of their
assumptions about a supposed rise in “leftwing
antisemitism” he had derided more generally months
previously.
In short, the survey did not tell us much useful
about the state of antisemitism in Britain in 2015.
But it did tell us an awful lot about how
propagandised many British Jews already were about
antisemitism in 2015. It was a signpost, a clue as
to where things were about to head.
Losing the plot
Jews, it should go without saying, are not
uniquely susceptible to propaganda or uniquely
invested in a tribal identity. We all are.
It is easy to point the finger at Zionist Jews
for some of their outrageous, self-serving,
supremacist views. Much harder to spot those same
tendencies in ourselves.
Which is why not only complete strangers harangue
me on social media when I turn the spotlight on
leftwing tribalism – I expect that – but
long-standing followers do too.
If you love my Israel-Palestine stuff, or my
Labour party criticisms, but think I’ve lost the
plot on the other stuff, please believe me when I
say my criticisms of western tribalism spring from
exactly the same set of analytical skills I bring to
bear on Israel-Palestine. I am not suddenly or
arbitrarily applying a whole set of other analytical
criteria to the issues you care most passionately
about simply out of a perverse desire to provoke
you.
It may be, just possibly, that you are
provoked because the conclusions I arrive at
on issues close to your heart challenge your
own tribal identity – what you perceive to
be the left, or to be progressive discourse,
or to be anti-racism. Accepting my arguments
might require you to become more flexible or
curious than you want to be, or it might
force you to consider that some of your
views stand in stark contradiction to other
values you profess to believe in. That
inconsistency intrigues me enough to write
about it, but it may well infuriate you.
Which may explain the strange, angry
responses from some followers to the
soundbites from my lengthy articles – the
snippets – I must necessarily post on social
media. Rather than being provoked into
reading the article, where they would need
to grapple with a complex argument, some
followers prefer to comment on the soundbite.
But if you are among those who say you are
fed up with our modern, dumbed-down,
soundbite culture – those, for example, who
supported Corbyn because he wasn’t a
focus-group politician – you should not
really be fetishising that soundbite culture
yourself. Well, not if you want to avoid the
accusation of hypocrisy.
Carlson clones
If you’re also wondering why all the
writers you once loved so much have suddenly
become raving Tucker Carlson clones, it
might – just might – be because you changed
rather than they did. Like Anshel Pfeffer,
maybe you arrived at your Corbyn crisis
moment. Let me take a punt and suggest that
Donald Trump and the rise of the white right
may have made your tribal identity seem much
more precious to you.
That won’t have made you a clearer
thinker. It will have simply made you an
angrier, less compromising, less
compassionate thinker. It will have
encouraged you to think in zero-sum terms.
It will have pushed you away from anyone who
does not espouse exactly your pieties. It
will have made you less willing to consider
the arguments of anyone who no longer echoes
your binary view of the world. It will have
made you a liberal-left version George W
Bush, with his warning: “Either you are with
us, or you are with the terrorists.”
That should not surprise us. A tribal
left is bound to be the mirror image of a
tribal right. They have different pieties,
different slogans, but the same intolerance,
the same self-righteousness, the same anger.
In tribal times like these, those who see
the dangers of tribalism – that it is a tool
for dividing us, for weakening us against
the power-elites and a billionaire-owned
media that relishes and stokes our tribalism
– will struggle to be heard. Anything they
say that isn’t for the tribe is assumed to
be for the enemy. They have moved to the
dark side.
In a time of tribalism, the left’s duty
is to speak out loudly for solidarity. We
need to remember that we are no less exposed
to propaganda than the other tribe. That
doesn’t mean we have to abandon our
principles. But it does mean we have to
remember they are as human as we are, that
they have the same rights as us, that it is
crucially important that we are fair and
consistent, that our blindspots can be as
big as theirs. Because otherwise we not only
entrench our own tribalism, we entrench
theirs too.
Jonathan Cook
is a Nazareth- based journalist and
winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for
Journalism. No one pays him to write these
blog posts. If you appreciated it, please consider
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