Perhaps people cannot live together…
Identification with the “Other” might be impossible, but we may be able to leave each other alone.
Last year, before the fall of Israel’s “change” government and the reelection of Benjamin Netanyahu, I read an article on Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Arab Ra’am party. Abbas had decided to join the “change” coalition, marking the first time an Arab party had ever done so. In effect, he chose to reject the other Arab parties’ detestation of Zionism and, so he said, make a pragmatic attempt to promote integration of the Israeli-Arab community, with all its anticipated benefits.
The article, however, proved to be a disturbing one. It described how Abbas was hated not only by Israel’s far-right, which was to be expected, but also by many in the Arab community. This had reached the point that Abbas could no longer worship at the al-Aqsa mosque for fear of his personal safety.
This description of the pincer in which Abbas was caught was depressing enough to throw me into a funk for the rest of the day.
Well, I thought, perhaps people cannot live together.
More recently, this distressing thought has been compounded by the raging controversy over the far-right elements in the current Netanyahu government and its proposed reforms to the judiciary, which many—with some reason—see as less a reform than a castration.
For me, the most distressing aspect of the controversy has not been the specific issues being debated—or rather, fought over—but the cultural divide it has exposed and the culture war it has detonated.
This culture war is not new, but it has reached new heights of intensity. It is a war between two Israels. One is secular, liberal, outward-looking, largely Ashkenazi, and relatively affluent. The other is nationalist, religious, more insular, and generally poorer and more ethnically diverse.
The conflict between these two Israels has reached a point that was previously inconceivable. At the height of the controversy over the reforms, I asked a left-wing friend of mine what he thought the endgame of the entire mess might be. He said, “Maybe we’ll split.” That is, his Israel would simply secede from the other Israel, resulting in a secular liberal democracy living alongside something like a Jewish Iran ruled by Torah rather than Quranic law.
Well, I thought again, perhaps people cannot live together.
This phenomenon is by no means confined to Israel. I look at the United States, for example, where I was born and lived half my life. As many have noted, in recent years America has become more or less two countries, divided between “blue states” and “red states” with vastly different cultures and values. The former is largely liberal-progressive, secular-atheist, racially diverse, heavily urbanized, and skeptical of traditional values. The latter is generally conservative-reactionary, overwhelmingly white, intensely Christian, largely rural, and dedicated passionately to the values their blue-state brethren view with the most skepticism and sometimes hostility.
Even more intense, perhaps, is America’s racial divide—specifically between the black minority and the white majority. There is no need to rehearse the dire story of black-white relations in the United States. Clearly, black Americans have been through hell and back over the last four centuries, and white Americans have fought and killed each other over the issue for almost as long, most notably in a civil war so bloody it is now seen as more or less a dress rehearsal for World War I.
Some thought that the election of Barack Obama meant that the racial divide had finally been healed and America was now a “post-racial” country. It now seems clear that Obama’s presidency—though successful on its own terms—was prelude to a horrendous backlash, resulting in the rise of a sometimes subtle and sometimes explicitly racialist populism personified by Donald Trump. The massive wave of unrest that swept the country following the death of George Floyd then destroyed all illusions of a post-racial nation, and it seems—at least from afar—that America is now more divided along racial lines than at any time since the 1960s.
The situation does not look much better elsewhere. Europe has also seen the rise of an intense right-wing populism, and is now deeply divided over issues like immigration and national identity. This has reached the point that it threatens the integrity of the European Union—perhaps the greatest achievement of the “European peace” that ended centuries of internecine wars—exemplified by the victory of the Brexit referendum in 2016 (not coincidentally, the same year Trump was elected).
A look at the larger world reveals an equally riven humanity, with such horrors as China’s brutal persecution of the Uyghurs; radical Islamists’ apocalyptic violence against Yazidis, Christians, and essentially everyone who is not a radical Islamist; and national and religious conflicts in every corner of the globe—not least here in Israel.
Well, one is forced to ponder, perhaps people cannot live together.
People, whether they can live together or not, have long sought explanations for why human beings find it so difficult to overcome their differences or at least refrain from resorting to violence as a result of those differences. Perhaps the most popular explanations at the moment are the concepts of “the Other” and “othering.”
I do not refer here to the complex and difficult concepts of the Other that can be found in the philosophical speculations of thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas. I refer instead to the “vulgar” concept of the Other, which merely signifies people who are different from ourselves—whether in terms of race, sexuality, gender, religion, ethnic identity, or other forms of “otherness” that sometimes seem unlimited in quantity.
“Othering” refers to the catastrophic possibilities inherent in the relationship between the Self and the Other. Our failure to identify with and empathize with the Other, it is held, results in an “othering” that leads inevitably to prejudice, discrimination, oppression, and ultimately dehumanization. From this, the most horrendous atrocities result. Among the most prominent examples given are the Nazi othering of the Jews, white Americans’ othering of black Americans, and the heterosexual othering of homosexuals—now extended to “cisgender” people’s othering of “non-binary” or “transgender” individuals.
In effect, othering is seen as the origin of evil. What is required, then, is to see one’s Self in the Other, identify with the Other, embrace the Other, and foster a positive relationship with the Other by respecting and celebrating difference.
At its extreme, this results in specific protections granted to the Other, especially if the Other is a minority in any given society. Thus, affirmative action is enacted, homosexuals are granted the right to marry, and biological men are permitted to participate in women’s sports. Such measures are often opposed by the traditionally minded, but it is important to note that more basic and essential freedoms are also at stake, such as freedom of speech and religion, which are attempts to carve out a space for the Other, however different and sometimes distasteful the Other may seem to be.
The idea of seeing the Self in the Other and then embracing the Other is an appealing one, but it suffers from two major flaws: First, it is impossible. Second, it is impractical.
It is impossible because it elides the most essential aspect of the relationship between the Self and the Other, which is that the Other is the Other. That is, whether we like it or not, the Other is other to ourselves, and thus identifying with the Other is a task that cannot be achieved. In effect, the Other is more or less unknowable.
This should not be surprising, since, as Freud pointed out, we are also Others to ourselves. Our deepest self, our inner workings, are essentially unknown to us and can only be revealed by patient and often frustrating analysis. Even then, Freud implied, analysis is, to a great extent, “interminable.” Some essential part of us will remain—like the Kabbalah’s ein sof—infinite and unknowable.
In other words, both Self and Other are, in the end, abstract and amorphous entities, making it impossible for us to identify with the Other and, at times, even with ourselves.
The impractical nature of the attempt to identify with the Other is the inevitable outcome of its impossibility. Since we cannot know the Other, we cannot know what the Other wants. Indeed, we cannot even know what we want. This, and not cultural misunderstandings or failures of empathy, is a common origin of humanity’s interminable conflicts.
One can see this quite evidently in interactions between black and white Americans, which tend to be typified by mutual suspicion, incomprehension, and often outright contempt. Black Americans are often offended for reasons white people cannot comprehend, and things that seem self-evident to black Americans are often wholly unknown and sometimes outright offensive to white Americans. Attempts to bridge these divides are almost universally unsuccessful, and anger and violence are frequent results.
As a Jewish Israeli, I can only speak to my own experiences of my country’s divides. For example, it is distressingly common for Palestinians to declare that their ultimate goal is to exterminate Israel’s Jews and effect a Reconquista of “Palestine.” I do not know, however, if this is a simple expectoration of rage or if they “really mean it.” Or perhaps they do “really mean it” at certain points and not at others.
At the same time, positive interactions with Arabs are often fraught with similar uncertainties. They are polite and nice to us, and profess their desire for coexistence, but is this simply an attempt to momentarily please us and conceal their true intentions? Is it a genuine effort at bridging a divide or simple bad faith? Or is it both at different times and places?
I do not presume to speak for them with any certainty, but the Arabs and especially Palestinian Arabs likely have the same suspicions of us. Are we satisfied with Israel proper and willing to eventually grant the Palestinians independence? Or are we determined to conquer all of what was once Mandatory Palestine and expel its Arab residents, however long or incremental the process might be? Do we want to do one or the other at different times depending on the political and security situation?
I doubt, for either side, there are any answers to these questions. The Other, for each of us, remains a mystery, and thus all bets are off and the conflict continues. Perhaps people cannot live together.
If identifying with the Other and embracing the Other are both impossible and impractical, is there a way out of this perpetual tragedy? There may be, though it may also, in its way, be almost as tragic as other, less attractive, options.
Here, I must lean on Levinas: The French-Jewish philosopher was much concerned with ethics and the ethical relationship, and he traced their origins directly to the encounter between the Self and the Other. In encountering the Other, he believed, we also realize our duty toward the Other.
Levinas derived numerous implications from this related to ethics and justice. For myself, it implies that the duty of the Self is simply to apprehend the Other and thus acknowledge the Other’s permanent unknowability. From this comes a primal sense of the Other’s autonomy and the Other’s right to that autonomy, which must not be violated by any attempt to subsume the Other, whether by embrace or violence.
What this means to me is that, while we are all destined to remain unknowable to each other, conflict can be avoided. The simple apprehension of the Other and the otherness of the Other implies not a harmonious empathy but a kind of truce, an unspoken agreement on both sides to leave each other alone. We retain the inevitable suspicions and discomforts that are impossible to overcome, but we agree not to act on them and to respect each other’s autonomy and our right to that autonomy.
Naturally, this is a precarious truce, and requires constant attention and maintenance. There is no messianic homeostasis to be had. It is, in many ways, laborious work, and a far greater challenge than fantasies that a simple change in mentality or an act of radical empathy can solve the insoluble. But it has the advantage of working, or at least tending to work better than the other options.
This is a tragic outcome, but it is also essential, because perhaps people cannot live together, but we are condemned to do so anyway, if only for the sake of mere survival. We must make the best of it, and this, perhaps, is the best we can do. If anything is certain, it is that it is better than the alternatives.
Photo by Bracha L. Ettinger