Over at Normblog you’ll find the tenth and final post in Sam Fleischacker’s brilliant “Cool Hour” analysis of the competing claims to justice in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It has offered new and stimulating arguments on questions that sometimes seem to have been argued to death. That’s not a small achievement.
In his final post Fleischacker says,
I think it would be helpful now if both sides could see the conflict as in the end a tragedy, in a strict sense of that word. On one influential and insightful theory of tragedy - Hegel’s - it arises when one just claim confronts another (Hegel’s example is Antigone, which represents a clash between civic and familial duties where there is no real ‘villain’). That’s what we have here. And if each side can see it that way - stop seeing the other as morally blind and see it instead as pursuing a real, if perhaps not wholly adequate, vision of justice - I think it will be far easier for them to reach a compromise. If Zionists and Palestinians can mourn the history of violence between them together, and mutually recognize at least the core of right on each other’s side, then they can - without continuing resentment - build a future in which both groups have stable and peaceful public realms in which to express their collective identity. It’s helpful to their reconciliation, that is, if they can see precisely the unclarity of the issues involved, the difficulty in locating the real demands of justice here.
I particularly like the reference to unclarity in the last sentence. Now go and read the rest yourself.
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You’ll find my comments on previous installments in the “Cool Hour” series behind these numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
“In his final post Fleischacker says,
‘I think it would be helpful now if both sides could see the conflict as in the end a tragedy, in a strict sense of that word. On one influential and insightful theory of tragedy - Hegel’s - it arises when one just claim confronts another (Hegel’s example is Antigone, which represents a clash between civic and familial duties where there is no real ‘villain’). ‘”
This is had already been expressed by Amos Oz who had repeatedly said that:
“AMOS OZ: Well, my definition of a tragedy is a clash between right and right. And in this respect, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a tragedy, a clash between one very powerful, very convincing, very painful claim over this land and another no less powerful, no less convincing claim.
Now such a clash between right claims can be revolved in one of two manners. There’s the Shakespeare tradition of resolving a tragedy with the stage hewed with dead bodies and justice of sorts prevails. But there is also the Chekhov tradition. In the conclusion of the tragedy by Chekhov, everyone is disappointed, disillusioned, embittered, heartbroken, but alive. And my colleagues and I have been working, trying…not to find the sentimental happy ending, a brotherly love, a sudden honeymoon to the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy, but a Chekhovian ending, which means clenched teeth compromise.”
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june02/oz_1-23.html
I found this quote in a recent interview (2002) though I believe that I had read it much earlier in the 1980’s sometimes.
so what?
“so what?”
it means to me that it would be useful to consider why such a level headed idea hasn’t been given more prominence in the debates about the Arab-Israeli conflict.