By Paul D. Miller
Thursday, August 28, 2025
Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman once
said, “Nobody knows anything.” He meant that there were no reliable rules
about how to make a successful movie because audiences were fickle and the film
industry unpredictable—but his insight was truer than he knew. If no one knows
anything about making hit movies, we know even less about the vagaries of human
politics, especially international politics.
I want to make an argument about Israel and the
Palestinians. The main point is that no one knows anything—that you, dear
reader, know less than you think you know—because it is almost impossible to
trust any information about the war in Gaza and because of the power of
narratives in shaping how we think about it. But to get there, I need to take a
detour to talk about the nature of knowledge.
You and I really don’t know much of anything at
all—not about movies, war, or the biological life cycle of fruit flies. I don’t
really know, for example, that Mars exists. I’ve never been there, never seen
it, never touched it. I believe it is there because scientists tell me
so, and I have no reason to disbelieve the story they tell about a nearby
planetary body. It seems consistent with all the other things they say about
physics and astronomy. If I took issue with the existence of Mars, I’d really
be taking on the entire astronomical establishment, claiming that, for whatever
reason, I know better about telescopes, gravity, and shining lights in the sky
than they do. That just seems implausible on its face. I believe in Mars
because I trust the broader story of astronomy and physics.
Similarly, few of us actually know much about Israel or
Gaza or the West Bank. Maybe some of you have visited. (I haven’t, yet.) I’ve
read a good amount about the region—more than the average citizen, less than a
specialist scholar—but even then, I’m trusting in the authority of the authors.
I read newspapers and magazines, but they often conflict with each other. So
which books and newspapers do we believe?
We believe the ones that seem most consistent with the
broader stories we already trust in, the ones that feel consistent with our
preconceived judgments. Just like I believe in Mars because I trust the broader
fields of astronomy and physics, we form our beliefs about Israelis and
Palestinians depending on broader stories of justice, history, and politics
that we already believe in. You might believe in a story about imperialism and
occupation, and thus be predisposed to be pro-Palestinian; or perhaps you believe
a story about God’s favor for his chosen people, in which case you are
predisposed to be pro-Israel.
Don’t worry, I’m not going full postmodern here. I do
believe in objective truth, and I do think we can know real things with
certainty. I’ll get there. My point so far is that, most of the time, our
knowledge rests on which authorities we chose to trust and what stories they
tell. So we should ask: Where do those bigger narratives come from, what are
they, and are they any good?
The narratives come from the knowledge-producing,
meaning-creating parts of society: journalists and universities, churches and
political parties, Madison Avenue and Hollywood. They are all, in different
ways, competing in a marketplace of stories, each with a different claim about
why their story is the most reliable. Tell me which storytellers you listen to,
and I’ll tell you how you vote and what you think about Israel and the
Palestinians.
The left’s changing narratives about Israel.
The left has told a couple of stories consistently since
the 1960s. Arguably, the single most defining story among them is that power
needs critique: Powerful people should not be trusted, they are usually corrupt
or abusive while the powerless are noble victims who need our help. (Of course,
this is never true when the left is in power.)
That philosophy explains a lot of the left’s changing
narratives about Israel. Coming out of World War II and the Holocaust, Jews
were the powerless, the disenfranchised, the victims par excellence.
There was a lot of leftist sympathy for Zionism (it didn’t hurt that a lot of
early Zionists were also socialists). Postwar leftist sympathy for Israel
lingered for two decades, all the way to the Six-Day War of 1967, as Israel was
seen as a precarious experiment in a hostile neighborhood surrounded by more
powerful neighbors.
That view changed overnight after Israel single-handedly
defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and made it look easy—and then occupied the
West Bank and Gaza. Since 1967, the left looks at the region and applies a
simple formula: Israel is powerful, the Palestinians are not. Israel is the
villain, Palestinians are the victim. Israel is the evil overlord, Palestinians
are the heroic resistance.
That was enough to make any leftist more sympathetic to
Palestinians than to Israel. But the left’s story about Israel doesn’t stop
with the crude power/powerless narrative. There are two more layers.
The left also tends to view Israel as another chapter in
the long story of imperialism. Israel is a “settler colonial” state guilty of
displacing indigenous people (the Palestinians), just as white Europeans
displaced Native Americans and just as British people displaced Australia’s
aboriginal people. Israel is imperialist, Palestinians are indigenous—and the
indigenous rebels are always the good guys in that story.
Relatedly, Israel is “white” and the Palestinians are
“nonwhite” or lumped in with the “Global South” or “people of color.” In this
story, the conflict maps easily onto America’s white/black racial dynamics.
Some writers have made
the comparison explicit. It amounts to a claim that
nonwhite people are uniquely virtuous by virtue of not being white, and that
all nonwhites everywhere should stand in solidarity with each other.
So here is the point: If you already believe that Israel
is a powerful, imperial, white ethno-state whose existence is an intrinsic
aggression against a powerless, indigenous, nonwhite people, you already “know”
what the Israel-Hamas war is about, without ever having to read facts about it.
When something happens like the explosion at al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City
on October 17, 2023, you are almost cognitively incapable of even considering
the possibility that it wasn’t the evil Israeli empire responsible for
hundreds of Palestinian deaths. You already “know” who to blame, even though,
as it turns out, you
were wrong.
To be fair, the same is true, to a lesser degree, in some
corners of the right. Some Christians still tell a story about Israel drawn
from the Old Testament. The refounding of Israel in 1947 is a divine miracle
and a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, proof of God’s faithfulness to his
chosen people. God promised to bless those who bless Abraham, and to curse
those who curse Abraham. In this reading, Israel is definitionally the good
guy; anyone who opposes Israel merits God’s curse. Again, you already know everything
you need to know, instantaneously, without learning anything new.
A simplistic and crude framing.
It’s almost too easy to poke holes in the left’s
narratives. The power/powerless framing is simplistic and crude. Not all
powerful people are evil, not all powerless people are innocent. Power is
necessary to keep order and execute justice; the powerless, being human, are
just as capable of wickedness and evil—for example, by committing terrorism and
taking hostages. Power does not make a person evil; it simply magnifies the
effects of one’s choices. Those choices are often evil, because humans are sinful,
but at other times they are necessary and just, because humans are also capable
of reason and goodness.
It is baffling that the left holds Israel’s victory in
1967 against it, as if Israel is somehow blameworthy for winning a war. Maybe
we should ask if the war was justified? I’m happy to share my own view (the
war, yes; the postwar occupation, less so). It is the paradigmatic case for a
justified war of preemption, considering Egypt blockaded an Israeli port and
explicitly disavowed negotiations and peace. But the point is that we should
actually ask the question, rather than make assumptions based on a crude and
simplistic argument based on which side has more power.
In the power/powerless framing, anyone who succeeds in
defending themselves—and therefore gaining power—automatically becomes a bad
guy, while the loser is the new good guy. But if, heaven forbid, the newly
minted tragic heroes someday succeed, are they now the bad guy? You see the
problem. It’s a never-ending cycle of good and bad without any reference to
what anyone was fighting for or against. It’s a morally arbitrary way to pick a
side.
The imperial/indigenous framing is more complex, but
still wrong. Zionism is not the same thing as imperialism, and Israel is not
a settler-colonial state—but even if we grant the premise, that does not
automatically make the Palestinians heroes. In theory, both sides might be
villains in different ways. The left has a weird fetish for rebels and national
“liberation” movements, in the name of which they’ve spent a century turning a
blind eye to or excusing war crimes, terrorism, and ethnic cleansing done by
all kinds of ghastly movements so long as they were done in the name of
liberation, self-determination, or class revolution. Just look up the history
of the Algerian National Liberation Front during its war against France in the
1950s and 1960s. Or the the Mau Mau fighters in Kenya, or Colombia’s FARC, or
the Vietcong. Examples abound.
And Israel isn’t white or European; an equal number of
Israeli citizens are descendants of immigrants from Africa and Asia as from
Europe. It is a multiethnic state (including 20 percent who are Arab). And, to
be clear, it wouldn’t be a crime if the population were primarily European.
Identifying good guys and bad guys by their ancestry or the color of their skin
is, the last time I read the dictionary, racist. If your politics consists of
measuring shades of skin tone to figure out who to root for, you are bad at
politics. Politics is more complicated than a broad white/nonwhite dichotomy.
That’s my beef with these narratives. The stories insist
on simplifying, turning complex political events into morality plays with
heroes and villains with big name tags. That makes it so much easier to know
which tribe to root for, like the old Westerns where the good guys wear white
cowboy hats and the bad guys wear black.
It is part of the “MacGuffinization of politics,” or the
“Marvelization of reality.” We expect reality to conform to the story arcs of
fiction. There’s a protagonist (the Palestinians), there’s a goal (statehood
and liberation), a villain (Israel), a moment of conflict and rising tension
(war!), and the script writes itself. Flip the script to make Israel the hero
and it is still a simplistic, Marvelized reality.
That’s why I say that we don’t really know what we’re
talking about. When we filter the news through these stories—and it is almost
impossible not to—we filter out facts in favor of the narrative. We make
ourselves dumber when we can’t break out of the narrative and look at what
facts really say.
Not even William Goldman, the screenwriter who insisted
on our universal ignorance, could escape the irresistible draw. He wrote the
screenplay for the Oscar-winning Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
In most respects Goldman subverted typical Western tropes by celebrating its
anti-hero protagonists, outlaws on the lam after a train robbery gone wrong.
But he kept one trope: Butch and the Kid dutifully wore their black hats, while
the lawmen wore white. No one knows anything, but we instinctively use stories
to make it simpler, whether they are true or not.
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