Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Echo chambers and thoughts on Yitzchak Rabin Z"L Memorial Day

Sixteen years ago I was in New York, having spent Shabbat at a friend's apartment when we heard the news.    My immediate assumption, quickly confirmed, was that it was a Jew who murdered him.  My wife was surprised.

Perhaps the difference lies in the fact that I had spent the previous year in Israel, living in Gush Etzion.  I had felt the boiling level of emotion around the peace process, and the visceral anger of the Israeli right, especially the religious right, towards Rabin.  I had been called traitor more than once for my support of the Oslo process.  I was at the edge of this world, but I could observe the echo chamber of resistance that allowed Yigal Amir to believe what he was doing was justified.

Since then, I have seen echo chambers in many contexts.  When I lived in Texas, I would listen to Rush Limbaugh, and while what he said was difficult to listen to, what was harder to believe was how normative he was considered in Texas.  In other contexts, as a liberal, I have been in conversations where hatred of Israel and belief that Hamas is a pure expression of Palestinian oppression are voiced without caveat.

It was easy in the 1990s to live in a world where your assumptions are not questioned, where your worst fears about the other are reinforced by everyone around you.  All news from the "mainstream media" is assumed to be false and biased, but you assume that everything coming out of your side is the gospel truth.  It is acceptable to "joke" about violence to others, but any criticism of your side is malicious slander, or, if coming from someone you should be in the group, treason.  Anyone even attempting to understand the other side, or God forbid, to work with them, must be ostracized.

Sixteen years later, we had hoped the internet would help us break out of these shells, but social media has tribalized us even more.  Facebook and Google filter our news sources to cater to what we already believe, never opening us up to challenge or other points of view.  We have to make more of an effort to get out of our echo chambers and hear the other than we ever had to before.  There is no more "mainstream media" where we can even expect even-handed treatment of issues.

I hate to pick on the right wing - there are echo chambers on the left - but right now, with the current government in Israel, I am frightened by what I hear around me.   Judge Goldstein was not even allowed to go to his son's Bar Mitzvah, for the "crime" of sitting on a UN commission investigating what happened during Cast Lead in Gaza.  Human rights organizations like Peace Now, B'Tselem and NIF are regularly demonized and are under threat of government investigation because they do not toe the current party line.  Obama is assumed to be completely anti-Israel, without any real basis. Any criticism of Israeli policy in the territories is considered out-of-bounds.  

The echo chambers on the left are equally closed off.  They assume the worst about everything Israeli, mistrust every statement from the Israeli media, and make ridiculous comparisons of Israel to apartheid South Africa.

On both sides, the other is demonized and whole groups are painted with the brush of their most extreme elements.  All Palestinians are terrorists.  All settlers are violent.  There is no nuance,  no attempt to condemn the extreme behaviour while trying to work with the moderates.  Conversely, any external attack on your own extreme elements is considered maliciously attacking the whole group.

These echo chambers are dangerous to democratic debate.  They do not allow reasoned arguments about the merits of positions, because no one can even agree on the facts.  At the extremes, they nurture people who believe so strongly in their cause and in the evil of their opponents that they justify violence against them.  Palestinian suicide bombers grow up in an echo chamber of hatred against Israel, where they can even justify the murder of innocents.  Yigal Amir lived in a world where hypothetical discussions of "din rodef" became justifications in his mind for killing a Prime Minister.  

This is the message we need to internalize from Rabin's death.  Argue, vote, protest, take a stand, but try to periodically stand outside the inevitable echo chamber your activism creates, and try to understand the other side, and look at things from their perspective.  It won't necessarily change your positions, but it may allow you to have a more reasonable debate, and to remember the humanity of your opponents.  Ideally it may help us reach "win-win" solutions, where we synthesize the requirements of both sides to find a solution that works for everyone.  At the very least, it can prevent the debate from descending into an exchange of bullets.

No comments: