Fending Off the Barbarians: Agit-Media and the Middle East

"Us"-versus-"them" rhetoric sustains states of conflict. In this paradigm, "we" are the aggrieved ones, whatever the grievance; "they" are in the wrong. "They" are barbaric, evil, uncivilized, and bent on destroying "us," while "we" have God, justice, patrimony, civilization, and now freedom and democracy on our side. Inflamed by passionate conviction of the justice of our cause, we march on with a sword in one hand and a torch in the other, as Joseph Conrad put it in The Heart of Darkness. Our task, according to this discourse, is to stave off the barbarians at the gate.

This discourse is especially evident in the popular media, which have been disseminating narratives of apocalyptic crises and stirring up anxiety with broad generalizations. The enemy shares, it would seem, religion, culture, and modes of guerilla warfare that make diverse agendas and people come across almost as one. The chronological proximity of the "Al Aqsa" intifada in occupied Palestine and Al Qaeda's spectacular attacks on targets in the United States enhance that impression. So does the fact that, as defined by their respective leaders, the United States and Israel currently have geopolitical interests that make for a common cause and common rhetoric. The result has been a joining of the two countries in the public imagination. At work in producing this connection is a reasoning that emanates, often inconspicuously and sometimes unintentionally, from the reciprocal dynamics that necessarily exist between the respective governments, media, and ordinary citizens. Of course these dynamics come into play wherever discourse meets politics.

At issue now, however, is a particular ramification of the production of ideology and politics in both the United States and Israel that invokes the Cold War of the post-World War II era. The common ground both countries share nowadays is the sense that violent engagement with a demonized Other is inevitable. For both countries, their conflicts pivot on narratives of radical ideological difference and hence a threat to survival that cannot be averted.

While these narratives grow out of different historical circumstances,¹ their current compatibility goes a long way toward accounting for the close ties between Washington and Jerusalem and for the media's role in reinforcing that connection. Indeed, a comparison of the two countries' respective media and the understanding each facilitates at street level reveals a striking affinity in these countries' construction of the enemy and the political and military actions that result from these constructions. This affinity is an artifact of discourse, but it reflects practical agendas. At its core are geopolitical and economic interests. However, as a product of media discourse, these similarities are nourished by the reiterated invocation of intensely threatening signifiers: terrorism, innocent civilians, fundamentalist Islam, suicide bombers, state of emergency, and the like.

Although such signifiers have differing meanings in the Israeli-Palestinian arena, in Iraq, and in other sites of possible U.S. incursion, as conceptual tools these signifiers carry meanings over from one context to the next without signaling their differences. The effect is to short-circuit reflection. Encoding meanings that seem stable and broadly applicable, they elicit instantaneous, reflexive recognition that generalizes easily from one situation to the next. This fact struck me vividly when an Israeli friend chanced on documentary footage from the Vietnam War, projected at the moment when bulldozers were destroying houses and uprooting trees. "Is this ours?" she asked, even though the architecture, vegetation, and distraught people clearly belonged to another part of the world. It was the iteration, not the particulars, that created meaning.

A similar inadvertent link was made recently in the Israeli press. A review of the book An End to Evil, by neoconservatives David Frum and Richard Perle,² and an interview with Israeli historian Benny Morris³ appeared at just about the same time. In the interview, Morris, previously considered a revisionist, leftist "new historian" of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and hence roundly excoriated by the Israeli and the Jewish American Right, sounds very much like Perle, Frum (the rumored originator of the phrase "axis of evil"), and other American neoconservatives...