Strikes and Balls: The Israeli Dilemma

PJ Media ^ | 12 Apr 2024 | David Solway

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"We can all too easily look back on scenes of unthinkable horror perpetrated by those who would do anything rather than give the Jews their due."

—Thomas Cahill, "The Gifts of the Jews"

In "How to Do Things with Words," philosopher J.L. Austin makes a useful distinction between two kinds of speech acts, the referential and the constative. The referential delineates an actual state of affairs; the constative establishes not a quality but a social function. Austin offers an analogy from baseball: the ball may travel knee-high across the center of the plate, a perfect strike, but if the umpire calls “ball,” that’s how it registers on the scoreboard and operates in the game.

For much of the world today, that is, for “umpires” engaged in the production of figments and bent on the reconstruction of reality, an Israeli “strike” will almost always count as a “ball.” The referential has been reconfigured as the constative, despite what a later replay may bring to light. Thus, the Israeli pitcher throws strikes; the Arab batter receives a base on balls. An intimate congruence has been performatively created between the report and the referent minus the slightest hint of the semantic distance that stretches between the two. The former remains parasitic upon the latter.

Archeologist and historian David Meir-Levy makes this clear in his important book with its Austinesque title, "History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression," in which he digs up the buried facts and returns to the referential. He points out that “the Arabs of the area in question had their own designation for the contested region: Bilad al-Sham” (the country, or province, of Syria/Damascus/Levant.)

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It was only after the 1967 war that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) reframed the issue, Meir-Levy writes, by “inventing a ‘historic Palestine’ ex nihilo, an ancient ‘Palestinian people’ who had lived in their ‘homeland’ from ‘time immemorial’ [and] who were forced from their homeland by the Zionists…”

Similarly, in her indispensable volume "Islam and Dhimmitude," celebrated Middle East scholar Bat Ye’or makes mincemeat of the Palestinian brief; they are “an invented people, devoid of national particularisms and history, and artificially constructed…They are not a ‘Palestinian people’ but Arab refugees.” Her research is impeccable, and naysayers cannot fault it without befouling themselves. Indeed. the idea of a (constative) Palestinian nation was hatched principally by Yasser Arafat, who did not disguise his genocidal intentions. In his own words, the aim of the PLO was “not to impose our will on [Israel], but to destroy it in order to take its place.”