[URBANTH-L]this is so unbalanced
Jamie Sherman
jsone at Princeton.EDU
Thu Jan 8 13:23:57 EST 2009
While I can see the point regarding "sanitized language," and am -
like so many others - horrified by the actions taken by the Israeli
government, I found Loshitzky's article offensive and inflammatory
rather than helpful in promoting critical thinking or analysis. The
moderator's comment, that Loshitzky used "strong language" does not
nearly capture the problem. Strong language is less the issue than
the blurring of the line between analysis, activism, and propaganda.
That Israel has deliberately used attractive female voices as part of
their propaganda machine is worth pointing out, but Loshitzky's
rhetoric not only mirrors the sexism of Israel's public relations
tactics (as Virginia Cornue pointed out) it even more
problematically makes absolutely no distinction between Israeli
governmental policies and the Israeli body politic. In failing to
make the distinction, what ought to be justifiable outrage against
the Israeli government and its current and past mistreatments of the
Palestinian people becomes what others have called "anti-Israel"
statements. Moreover, such conflations shut down the possibility of
dialogue between those Israelis (myself among them) who oppose
Israel's policies by casting any response that does not simply agree
with her position as more Israeli apologetics and propaganda. In this
way, I see Loshitzky's writing as not only problematic from an
intellectual and academic perspective but harmful to what slender
hope there is for any kind of resolution to the conflict.
In this way, and for that reason, Loshitsky's article points to the
mechanisms of propaganda, her essay is itself propaganda as much (or
more than) analysis. Which opens the question here: What is, and how
do we navigate the line between an ethically engaged anthropology and
partisan propaganda in emotionally and morally charged contexts? To
what extent and in what ways can anthropological activism be
mobilized toward constructive dialogue across religious, ethnic, and
political affiliations?
Perhaps by way of comparison, while Marranci's commentary was
extremely critical of Israel, I found it illuminating, deeply
disturbing, and challenging in the best way. By addressing the
interplay of power and analyzing the actions of each in terms of
their respective strategies, he brought new insights without
demonization and opened a space for analytical and moral discourse
that - to me - represents the hope of understanding and addressing
rather than simply continuing to flame the resentments that reproduce
the conflict.
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