For a logician, a paradox is just a disguised contradiction, like the town where the barber shaves everyone who doesn’t shave himself, in which case the barber himself… Which simply means that to say he shaves only everyone who doesn’t shave himself is undefined in his own case, because if he doesn’t/didn’t shave himself, then he subsequently does, which doesn’t really contradict the condition since… But there is something more to paradoxes than playing with words.
The reason is that human life is lived as a series of scenes, some simultaneous with others, embodying different principles of causality, in which the significant ones are those that have a purpose, and we are particularly aroused by situations in which a purpose, such as “shaving everyone…” meets with a restriction (“except…”) that appears to prevent the fulfillment of that purpose. And yet we know that there are occasions where the efficient performance of purposeful acts may be less effective than “performing” them in such a way that they remain always virtual, never producing the final result that would inaugurate a new situation putting a new set of acts on the agenda…
In the broader scheme of things, we are mortal creatures who cannot limit our overall sense of purpose within our life span, for human purposes and their possible fulfillments exist within a context that we increasingly view as that of humanity as a whole. In one way or another we all contribute to “the human condition” and since the dawn of the modern era with the American and French Revolutions, we have become increasingly aware of the entire world as a single human community.
The awareness of this condition of one-worldness only accelerating with the generations, it is thus no accident that we are faced today with a revitalized version of the Islamic dream of world conquest. Just as the Bolsheviks inaugurated a new era with the ideal of a Communist world, the Mullahs of Iran and the various Sunni jihadist groups such as Al-Qaeda have done likewise, and however we may find their ultimate dream absurd, it reflects the shrinking of the world from the standpoint of access to weaponry as well as economic relations. The contrast between the fanatical confidence of the Mullahs and jihadis their backwardness in almost all other respects is not surprising; the degree to which terrorism and insurgency permit their fanaticism to spread around the globe in the era of Tik-Tok and X allows even the wildest dreams to flood the market, and in its very atavistic nature, Islamism, whose potency was so clearly demonstrated by the enthusiasm October 7 has aroused in the “first world” Left, has served as an inspiration to many who would never sacrifice their lives for a cause, while inciting a good number of the mentally fragile to commit mayhem on its behalf.
The ideal of the world-wide Umma may be atavistic, but its superficial compatibility with globalism has given it new life, notably in conjunction with antisemitism, transformed from a “prejudice” into a political movement by the existence of a Jewish State. For Judaism, as the one major religion that makes no effort to convert outsiders, viewing its role of “light unto the nations” as setting an example for others rather than including them within it, appears in the light of resentment as an agent of ontological negation.
Indeed, the Jews’ desire to have their own nation but not convert the world had always been interpreted as a mark of overweening pride, but since 1948 its realization in a powerful nation-state, as Arafat would have predicted, has moved many of the Western nations, aware of their need to pacify their own increasing Muslim populations, while vicariously sharing their resentment, to perpetuate the quasi-mythical existence of an autochthonous Palestinian nation whose parallel existence Israel is conceived as denying, even “genociding”—whence the recognition of a purely conceptual Palestine as an imaginary double of Israel whose chimerical presumed fraternity would alone permit the Middle East to return to normal.
Whence the UNWRA’s unique perpetuation of the Palestinians’ refugee status through the generations—along with its sympathy, as exemplified on 10/7, with Hamas and similar organizations that need not hide their intentions to found their state on the elimination of Israel—and why not the Jews of the diaspora as well? For although the elimination of the Jews should be seen as a necessary precondition to the Islamization of all humanity, for Israel’s Western frenemies, it is the latter alone whose security needs are viewed as pretexts for “imprisonment” and even “genocide.”
The geographical proximity of the Islamic Middle East to Israel is no small factor in the Western eagerness to take the side of the Palestinians in the current conflict. Despite abortive attempts like the Soviet state of Birobidzhian, an independent Jewish nation-state could only be situated where it was originally located. And just as modern Islamic antisemitism borrowed much from the Nazis, contemporary European (and American) antisemitism has been greatly reinforced by the initiatives of Iran and its Arab proxies. “Globalize the Intifada” has revived latent Jew-hatred by “demonstrating” the “imperialist” nature of the Jews in a way that no Western slogan could match.
The irrational resentment of the Jew deep in the historical memory of Christian Europe has now been embodied in a real military power, and the eagerness of the media and the public to devour stories of Jewish/Israeli atrocities has at last found a credible worldly basis, beside which the details of whether the Gazans are really starving or their women and children truly being massacred are mere details. If pogroms could be initiated in Europe on the basis of vague rumors of Jewish bloodletting, how could these present-day (pseudo-)documented atrocities inflicted on a “third-world” people not appear as a millennial justification of Western Jew-hatred? Today’s antisemitism need no longer restrict itself to the allusive snobbery of Eliot’s “Rachel née Rabinovitch / Tears at the grapes with murderous paws.”
Is it then somehow coincidental that the most reasonable “solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I have seen, contained in an eBook recently released by Mosaic magazine entitled To Save Itself from International Isolation, Israel Must Hold On To The West Bank (available to subscribers at
https://lp.tikvah.org/west-bank-diplomacy-ebook-confirmation), makes the case for an explicitly paradoxical status quo on the left bank: a continuation of the current division of these territories between Israeli settlements and the areas ruled by the Palestinian authority without either Israeli annexation or splitting off a “Palestinian state,” that is, maintaining the present “impermanent” status quo indefinitely.
To discuss this 41-page pamphlet in detail is not possible here, even omitting those parts that do not deal with the West Bank. But the principal author, an Israeli writing under the pseudonym of Rafi DeMogge, insists above all on the necessity of maintaining this apparently unstable status quo, noting as well that there is little or no pressure from those nations who have been so eager to recognize “Palestine” to realize this purported nation-state in concrete terms. Thus DeMogge is very clear that seeking to profit from 89-year-old Mohammed Abbas’ eventual death or resignation to abolish the Palestinian Authority would be a grave mistake.
Just as the St. Petersburg paradox** plays on the simple fact that the player’s “infinite” expectation can only be approximated by extending his playing time to infinity, so the success of the Jewish state, in DeMogge’s terms, is dependent on Israel’s indefinitely forbearing to annex these territories that it nevertheless controls. Indeed, a point on which he does not insist but that follows from his proposal, the only conceivable model for Israeli-Palestinian peace is the stable instability during which a one-state or two-state resolution remains indefinitely an open question.
The Palestinians’ rejection of Israel’s earlier, increasingly generous offers of a state reflected the untempered irredentism of its potential inhabitants: for in even the most favorable partition of the territory, a Jewish state would remain on what the Arabs considered an indivisible part of the Islamic Waqf. Yet the relative stability of the divided West Bank, in contrast to the continual violence emanating from Gaza even before 10/7/23, suggests that (shall we say, “paradoxically”?) the principal cause of instability since the days of Oslo was Ariel Sharon’s generous concession of Gaza to the Palestinian Arabs in 2005—Gaza, which soon broke away from the Palestinian Authority to elect terrorist Hamas and become a constant source of rocket fire and finally of invasion—such as the Palestinian settlements on the West Bank have never been to anything like the same degree since its Israeli conquest in 1967.
Indeed, the immense hostility generated in the West by Israel’s war with Hamas even more clearly demonstrates the error of Sharon’s gesture, an error that at least serves to demonstrate that “two-state” solutions are effective only as ultimate indefinitely unimplemented goals. That after twenty years without a single Israeli presence, it has remained common to speak of Gaza as an “open-air prison” or even a “concentration camp” demonstrates the profundity of the bad faith with which the Palestinians bewail their sufferings—to the accompaniment of a chorus of European sympathizers. DeMogge’s “paradoxalization” strategy may well be the only viable solution to a situation where Israel’s victories are equated with genocide, while any defeat would only redouble its enemies’ support.
The ultimate lesson of DeMogge’s piece as well as the accompanying discussions is simply to avoid drastic modifications of the status quo and “let history decide.” Once Gaza is no longer a base for terrorist incursions and rocket launches, Israel, now rid of the local Iranian proxies of Assad’s Syria and Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, can continue to flourish in relative peace. In time no doubt Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia will join the Abraham Accords, the Houthi terrorists will be decimated, and Israel, its population swelled by natural growth—as well as Aliyah from a Europe (and a US?) increasingly beset by Islamism—should need from the US at a minimum only the grudging support of a Biden-like administration to survive and prosper.
Nor would even the dystopian prospect of future Chinese hegemony threaten it. Unlike the Europeans, the Chinese have no part in the “oldest hatred.” Indeed, Israel and China have strangely similar, yet not incompatible views of themselves as foundational world cultures.
**The basis of this paradox is that a game where a coin is flipped until it comes up tails, and the payoff is equal to 2 to the power of the number of flips: thus one head gives 2, 3 heads gives 8, etc. It is easy to see that the “expectation” from this game is “infinite,” since the probability of the given number of heads, 1/2n times the payoff of 2n always equals 1, and since there are an infinite number of terms in the series, the total expectation is infinite; the problem is that you must play an infinite number of games to achieve this result.