Arabs, Jews and Time

why we're talking past each other and how to get in synch

(gonna link to a few of the most helpful pieces I’ve found lately in making sense of the current conflict. They’re all short, thought-provoking reads from different parts of the political spectrum that get you informed more reliably than Twitter and TikTok. If you read them you will be better contextualized than 90% of folks out there right now)

The purpose of this essay will be to try and lay an historiographical lens over them all.

HINT: It’s a timing thing.

But before we begin,

Remember: 10% of people online generate 90% of the content. The algorithm rewards outrage more than any other single emotion. That means that the most extreme 5% on either side of the spectrum are dictating “The Conversation” for all of us.

What’s More: those 5% on both the far left and far right more strongly track with Dark Triad and Authoritarianism than anyone in the middle of the curve.

So…our digital and kinetic conflicts are being driven by a tiny minority of sociopaths that we mistake for “the other half” of humanity. It’s killing our faith in each other, right when we need to find and connect to each other and give voice to this Silent Majority.

Don’t hate the players…hate the Zero-Sum Game.

and yet! and yet! and yet!!!

(Infinite) Game also recognizes (Infinite) Game.

“Just as the smokers of hemp recognize each other across a crowded market square, so too do the lovers of God!” –Ramakrishna

***

Let’s begin.

Like many folks, I’ve been trying to keep tabs on the tragic unfolding in the Levant. And then tracking the backlash to the backlash, and the refutations of the accusations.

Which is almost as tragic as the physical violence itself.

(especially as our only hope to get out of this mess is a diplomatic and humanitarian response brokered by benign powers outside the kinetic conflict itself. But we’re as much at odds as the fighters in the streets are)

In particular, read several pieces lately that highlight a mismatch in chronology that’s playing a real part in how we’re talking past each other.

First, a bit in the New Yorker from a hardcore Zionist grandma who oneups the Palestinian chant “from the River to the Sea” stumping for a united Jewish homeland “from the Euphrates to the Nile.”

Which, you know, (checks map) would be slightly problematic to execute, even if she’s confidently claiming Divine Title to the land from three thousand years back.

Then there’s Sam Harris’ recent polemic where he argues that actually you don’t need to know anything about the Arab-Israeli conflict to understand what happened on Oct. 7th because Jihadis gonna jihad regardless of what country they’re in or who they’re blowing to bits (including a disproportionate number of fellow Muslims).

Again, watch Hotel Mumbai or read a book about the Islamic State so that you can see jihadism in another context—where literally not one of the variables that people imagine to be important here is present. There are no settlers or blockades or daily humiliations at checkpoints or differing interpretations of history—and yet we have same grotesque distortion of the spiritual impulse, the same otherworldliness framed by murder, the same absolute evil that doesn’t require the presence of evil people, just confused ones—just true believers. 

And then there are the counterarguments like Eric Levitz in New York Mag Sam Harris’ Fairy Tale Account of the Israel Hamas Conflict which takes Sam to task for his broad brush dismissal of the last hundred years of highly relevant backstory.

Followed by a thoughtful historical take in the Atlantic The Decolonization Narrative is Dangerous and False that resists the clumsy application of White Colonizer/Brown Colonized to a situation with plenty of genetic sameness, cultural mixing and overlapping tales of horrendous oppression. It’s always more complicated than simple binaries ever allow.

But here’s the thing–each of these stories talk past each other because the facts they select and the timeframes they’re considering relevant don’t match. As a result, we end up out of phase, unable to ever get in synch.

We trust each other less, because what I’m looking at and insisting is crucial information doesn’t even show up on your maps at all.

And this is why:

In history, there are three common ways to slice and dice time.

The Diachronic “Over-Time” narratives, like what most of us learned in school

The Synchronic “One-Time” tales that zero in on a particular time and place

The Achronic “No-Time” accounts that focus on timeless or eternal truths about life, the universe and everything.

Let’s take ‘em one at a time and then see how they’re showing up in today’s news.

Diachronic: This begat this, begat that. Big History. Linear causation of a tale told over time. It’s the Rise and Fall of Civilizations kinda stuff. Compelling and satisfying to read. Feels solid and explains a lot.

But, in the 60’s and 70’s there was a backlash to that kinda story-telling because it all seemed a little suss. “The victors write the history” meant that anyone in charge of the Diachronic tale could tell whatever Triumphalist Just So story they wanted to.

(hence our current kerfuffle around Texas and California text books)

Long View/Diachronic History

So in response, we got the Synchronic “one-time” school of history. In contrast to folks like Joseph Campbell going long and wide with his story of the Hero’s Journey being the only story ever told, Synchronic scholars would zero in on a specific time and place and blow Campbell (or any other Big History type) out of the water with all of the specific exceptions to their generalizing rules.

David Graeber just did this in his recent The Dawn of Everything which challenged the Diachronic narrative that Yuval Harari and others have endorsed–that “once upon a time we were free, healthy hunter gatherers who bartered with each other (yay!), and then came farming, money, priests and oppression (boo!).”

Graeber takes a ton of lesser known case studies to show that our march towards Today was anything but linear, that simple stories of hunting to farming to UberEats was riddled with backpedals, detours and false starts. And if that was true then, then we can still choose our own adventures today.

Synchronic micro histories often force Diachronic Big Histories to tighten their game and think more deeply about their grand Theories of Everything. Done well, this back-and-forth dialectic makes for better scholarship all around.

Close Up/Synchronic History

Achronic (“No-time” or timeless” history.) : is the third kind of history-telling that’s been around for ages, periodically falls out of fashion, and then surfaces again.

Marxism, for example, is an Achronic accounting of human history, where for Marxists, it doesn’t really matter when you zoom into the actual facts on the ground, there’s always and forever been a class struggle between workers and owners. From pharaohs and slaves, to industrialists and factory workers, to techbros and coders, it’s always the same, timeless struggle just dressed up in different garb.

Same with almost any other -ism. Sexism (a la Andrea Dworkin), Racism (a la Ibram Kendi), Capitalism (a la Milton Friedman), Marxism (a la Karl), Post-Modernism (a la Foucault).

What they lack in nuance, they make up for in certainty and ambition!

This kind of Achronic history is what the 1619 Project adopted when it presumed that the entire story of America is founded on racism and then picked the facts to fit the tale. (which is also why a bunch of prominent historians signed a letter contesting the lack of nuance in that foregone conclusion).

It even shows up in non-politicized terrain, like nature documentaries. David Attenborough started catching flak as his Achronic depictions of “Animals in the Wild” flew in the face of unfolding habitat destruction, human intrusions and ecological crisis.

If you’re having to crop the shot to exclude logging roads, telephone wires and trashed beaches to show your lions, tigers and penguins in an Edenic State of Nature, you might not be giving viewers the whole story.

Their most recent docs are beginning to balance some of that timeless Garden of Eden storytelling with some acknowledgment of the (Diachronic) Barbarians at the Gate.

When All You’ve Got’s an Achronic Hammer…(Everything Looks Like Oppression)

***

So, that’s the setup of those three time signatures, let’s see how this is showing up today.

We’ll take them in reverse order.

For Sam Harris describing Jihadi Islam as eternally murderous zealotry, and for the West Bank Zionist matriarch insisting her people are the Chosen People and God gave that land to them first, full stop–neither of these positions has much interest in a close reading of current events.

The big historical and even mythic forces that put these dynamics in play are simply not subject to chronological updates, edits or inputs.

Neither of these Achronic positions is subject to scrutinizing the cause and effect, claims of evidence, or dialectical debate of conventional history making (or political compromise).

It is, what it mother-fucking IS.

Always and Forever.

Needless to say, Achronic history can be inspiring and affirming if it’s what you already (or come to) believe. It can also become fascist and terrifying when its tellers hold the power to enforce that narrative over others without their consent.

***

Next, we have the Synchronic approach to the current conflict. For many in the Western world, the Hamas attack on October 7th was so singularly horrific that it signaled a break with the fractured messy history of the past century.

It was, as many Israelis suggested “Our 9/11.” By that, they meant an event of such unprecedented evil that it brooked no context. You’re either “with us or against us” in denouncing (and responding to) such horrors.

In that same essay where Sam made the Achronic case that Islam is fundamentally broken and Oct. 7 was simply one example of a timeless pattern, he also made a Synchronic argument focused on the attack itself.

He transcribed a disturbing voice recording of a Hamas solider calling his family on a dead Israeli’s phone, bragging about having killed “ten of them” and receiving congratulations from his family.

For Sam, and for many Israelis and others witnessing the aftermath, the barbarism and inhumanity of this moment was not subject to contexualization or relativism (it was singular, or Synchronic). If you couldn’t stand up and unequivocally denounce it, you were on the wrong side of history and morality.

And yet, that’s exactly what some student groups at Harvard did, with a poorly timed switch to a Diachronic perspective. In a letter widely circulated on campus, they claimed that the past 50 years of militarized repression made “Israel entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence.”

Black Lives Matter Chicago also posted a meme of a paraglider flying a Palestinian flag and a caption “I stand with Palestine.” (since deleted). Again, citing some combination of either an Achronic perspective of Ant-Colonialism/Racism as their lens (i.e. Settlers always bad, Colonized always justified), or a Diachronic perspective of tallying up the scoreboard of the last century and concluding that the Palestinians were on the losing side and deserved solidarity.

Either way, it clashed jarringly in the immediate aftermath with the Synchronic focus on the immediate horrors and loss of life that Israelis were still reeling from.

While the hottest takes are cooling off, and more considered and deliberate think pieces and diplomatic interventions are beginning to happen, it’s still volatile ground.

Our friend and colleague Gabor Mate has been accused by fellow Jews as betraying their trust in his careful (but clearly not careful enough) parsing and inclusion of Palestinian suffering and compassion for their trauma.

Even his intersectional cred as a Jew who escaped the Nazis in his birthplace of Hungary has not been enough to insulate him from accusations of having gone over to the other side as a Jihadi apologist.

It’s fundamentally a diachronic argument he’s making “consider all the trauma of the past century and let’s be compassionate to all sides” running up against the synchronic argument of “this was a horrendous act of war and perpetrators have abandoned their humanity.–so don’t you dare try and humanize them!”

But now, as Oct. 7 recedes into the past and daily tallies of destruction in the Gaza Strip mount, we’re all getting pulled back into a more Diachronic accounting.

On some level, observers are all asking some version of “the Hamas attack was evil and justified a totalizing response. And…

How to separate the guilty from the innocent?

How to judge when an eye for an eye retribution is fulfilled?

How to assess culpability over the longer arc of this conflict (better timed Diachronic analysis than either Harvard students or BLM offered)

Some version of Diachronic history will likely come to conclude that:

Hamas had not been operating in good faith as they diverted hundreds of millions of dollars from helping their own people to build tunnels and rockets…

But neither was Netanyahu who cynically allowed Hamas to flourish at the expense of more moderate Palestinian voices to scuttle a two-state solution.

But then,

the Balfour Declarations (1917, 1948).

and the Six Days War (1967)

and the Intifadas (1987-2005)

and the Oslo Peace Accords 1993

and on and on…

Where we stop the tape, and highlight the infraction against one side while ignoring the context and provocations that came before it, depends on which flag we’re flying. We will toggle back and forth without ever coming to consensus or conclusions.

But we can at least upgrade our chronometers so we’re talking about the same things at the same times.

Which is better? Achronic, Diachronic, or Synchronic thinking?

All of them and none of them.

Achronic beliefs are often potent and deeply held. To ignore them is to ignore some of the most powerful motivators in the cultural arsenal. But they’re generally foregone conclusions, and not that great to help us understand causation and complexity.

So we need Diachronic analysis to get a better understanding of How We Got to Now. Up to, but not past the point where our Diachronic explanations fly too high, become too vague or self serving, and we need to zoom down to the ground.

That’s when a Synchronic assessment of a particular time and place let’s us know in fine-grained detail what’s happening in the actual lives of people, unvarnished by grand narratives (the Diachronic) or grand ideologies (the Achronic)

Instead, you could make a case that in this rapidly accelerating, topsy turvy world, we could all do with becoming a little more Polychronic. Able to hold all of these perspectives without over-committing to one.

If you curious about what a Polychronic perspective might look like expressed in all of the gut wrenching complexity and humanity of this current moment, check out Tom Friedman’s (three time Pulitzer winner, author of The World is Flat and From Beirut to Jerusalem) recent essay.

After spending the last month on the ground in Israel he has stories of truly inspired humanity, what he continually calls “the kaleidoscopic,” but which we might call polychronic.

Get out your kaleidoscope: Today you have Jaffa Palestinian refugees living under a Hamas government in Gaza who are firing rockets at Jaffa Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, one of whom repaired the rocket shelters of his Jewish friends in Tel Aviv — for free.

and

Bedouins saving Israeli Jews from Hamas being saved by a rescued Israeli Jewish woman from being shot by the Israeli Army after they rescued her … kaleidoscopic.

These stories, derived from close, on-the-ground reporting shatter the certainties of Good vs. Evil, of Us and Them. They force us to confront again and again the humbling facts that we are capable of corruption and courage. Beauty and bestiality.

All in the same moment.

Because here’s the thing: humanity and its history has never submitted to singular tidy narratives. The moment you divide half the world and give it a label and set it against the other half, you’re almost certain to be wrong.

Facing the truth of this means leaving certainty behind. But that doesn’t let us off the hook for making hard calls and taking clear stands.

It’s heartbreakingly tragic.

It’s upliftingly magic.

It’s the same as it ever was.

And it’s time for a change.