Eyeless in Gaza
By I’ve been writing an opinion column for ten years, and something I’ve noticed about what that role does to you (meaning me) is that it more or less impels you to talk about stuff you don’t really know much about as if you do.
People who are really good at it — like say Tom Friedman — can pull this off quite convincingly, usually through the use of some soothing rhetorical advice (in his case, a brow-furrowing, hand-wringing style, festooned with allusions to the scenery of the exotic locales he’s writing from as he investigates the inner souls of Chinese capitalists etc).
The same thing happens in academia all the time — people who are very knowledgeable about A find themselves under structural and social pressure to pretend they’re as knowledgeable about B, which they don’t know nearly as much about, and eventually X, which they really don’t know anything about at all. But if you use enough big words and elaborate footnotes you can get away with this kind of thing surprisingly easily (a phony Oxbridge accent helps a lot too).
Anyway my contribution to the debate about Israel-Palestine is that I don’t know anything about it, really. But at a more general level, the present conflict illustrates some depressing things about the orthodoxy of the American political elites, the assumptions of bad faith on the part of one’s opponents by everyone who argues about this, and the increasingly meaningless status of the word “terrorism.”