There are two superficially correct solutions to the problem. The first response is to pat ourselves on the back, celebrating the so-called “transparency of democracy,” and engage in a religious fervor over democratic principles. This is naïve, however, because the government could, if it wanted to, conceal events or classify documents as it did during the Cold War. The “executive privilege” doctrine, designed to combat the Axis of Evil commonly known as the Supreme Court and Congress, has become a forte of this Administration. The second potential response is to speak the names of Woodward and Bernstein and laud Rose. It goes without saying his work was top notch, but this does not answer how the plans had been leaked to the Jordanian press with neither the resources nor access to individuals that Vanity Fair would have.

A better explanation requires a return to Rumsfeldian epistemology. Rumsfeldian epistemology, as explained by philosopher Slavoj Zizek, refers to a March 2003 press conference when then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing. He stated, regarding the invasion of Iraq, “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." (2) His failure is to forget the fourth term of the dialectic, that of the “unknown knowns,” those presuppositions and orientations so embedded within political discourse that one acts on them without knowing it. What part of the collective unconscious makes the US role in Israel and Palestine vacillate between puerility and maliciousness…?

1)    The Humanitarian Complex- The entire situation of the Palestinians and the sympathies one portrays in the conflict always boil down to humanitarian concerns. News coverage, when it covers Palestinian deaths, consistently renders it as a humanitarian catastrophe or a result of the apolitical notion of “the violence.” What the tears-of-a-liberal drown out is any kind of criticism of the Occupation or what empirical conditions make the deaths occur in the first place. Collateral damage, human shields, collaborators, or the casualties of self-defense are the words used that come the closest to being political. The Rose article is itself guilty because the properly shocking conspiracy is framed by the personal narrative of a victim of torture. The problem is that, to win the sympathy, one must lose the conflict in all its political importance. The Rose article devolves back into criticisms of Hamas and political stances only slightly different than those predominant in the status quo. The work done by OCHA or Oxfam is used, then, precisely to make sure nothing really happens. Humanitarianism brings out charity plates, but gives the false comfort of thinking we are helping the situation when it ends up preventing interrogations into why the catastrophe happened. Depoliticization has plagued the Palestinian movement from the First Intifada onwards. At that time, coverage revealed shocking images of Israeli repression but they were soon reduced to simplistic, pseudo-metaphysical abstractions, such as Tom Friedman’s “war of the eyes,” leading a reader to believe that an ontological drama was taking place, one that was not the result of decades of history.

It should be stressed that this is not reciprocal coverage. Each time rockets are fired into Israel, there is a plethora of political commentary lambasting Palestinians, repeating tired mottos about “Palestinian failures” and “self-defense.” Yet, even for all its faults, it is at least an attempt at political context. This is both the failure of the Israel Lobby thesis and the proper response the proponents should make to its critics. The function of (supposedly) pro-Israel groups is not to repress coverage but to ensure that, in its reporting, the enunciated content itself is reduced to become impotent. Thus, when CAMERA proudly proclaims there are “X amount of hits on a Lexis-Nexis,” one should be equally proud in exclaiming, “who cares?” It is not a mistake that the Ehud Olmert of Gaza strikes is the same Ehud Olmert who proclaimed failed talks would cause an “apartheid” situation. What passes off for coverage of violence against Palestinians is woefully inadequate. Yet, even what little exists is trivial because the mode of reception makes the delivered content ineffective.

2)    Blame Bush: Blaming one of the most incompetent administrations in years is easy (and a lot of fun). The Palestinian debacle has met the ire even of the neoconservative community and a significant number of conservatives are distancing themselves from Bush regardless. The problem with the approach is not, however, that Bush does not deserve the blame (he certainly does) but rather that denouncing the subjective guilt obfuscates the objective guilt that goes deeper within American policy. The arming of Palestinian factions has not been new and Clinton provided the “security assistance” which became a codeword to allow Fatah to crack down on dissent and opposition. The policy of micromanaging Palestinian affairs in order to pursue the Jabotinsky doctrine  of breaking the Palestinians before negotiating with them has created a hated, junior partner to the Occupation. Neutrality itself is a farce and a means by which the dominant party can retain its control because all political judgments are rendered moot. The latest conspiracy is just the most honest expression of what “neutrality” has meant. It is not enough to throw Bush and the conservatives out of office (it would help though) but to delve deeper into the epistemic questions which condition what can be empirically thought of as a solution to the problem.

3)    The Spirit of ’93- The Arafat of terrorism and the Rabin of ’67 met and signed a “landmark” peace agreement. All over the world this was hailed as a major step in the right direction. The few (correct) members of the Left were critical, but they were easily dismissed as loonies and anti-Semites. Every peace deal since then, implicitly or not, has come to be seen as an end stage to the agreement. Even when the process was scrapped, its memory has remained.

Daniel Levy, in a recent IHT article (3) , correctly points out that the fundamental flaw of the Annapolis process was that it was thought to be a self-executing document. Yet, one should go one step further and say the entire problem since Oslo was there was a belief the actors themselves, regardless of deals, were self-executing and thus even Israeli military actions were actually believed to be a part of the process toward peace. Officials are too starry-eyed at the sight of Rabin and Arafat shaking hands to do the hard work for a solution.

Each failure refers itself to that moment and thus each event that fails to live up to the elevated concept of Idea is traumatically received. The end result is that the Israeli officials, who continue occupation as each Palestinian negotiating partner who does not fit their model is received as a deviation from the Perfect Partner of Oslo and thus they must be eliminated. What is nefarious about the recent plot is not “Aha! Your true colors are revealed!” but rather that the Bush and Israeli Administrations truly believe such actions are conducive to peace. The mediation of the gap between rhetoric and reality of peace deals is that of the various desires held by the parties in the conflict.

4)    I know it but I don’t understand it- The fundamental problem is that, through various new outlets, the complete litany of Palestinian and Israeli dead or wounded and the parade of Bush failures are laid bare but nothing significant gets done. The informational sublime is not a call to action but pacifies viewers. There is full knowledge of what is occurring on the ground but a measure of synthesis is lost in the flurry. Really… is the Rose article something we learned that’s new? A rabidly conservative government playing dirty is exactly what we’d expect. Knowing the facts help but they have not proven to change people’s perceptions.

The problem with hope in the possibility of an immanent peace deal is that it gives cover-fire for the guilty parties who consistently articulate peace overtures while allowing settlement-expansion. It works much like the old Hollywood movies where the nightmarish situation of the film is finally resolved through the person waking up and thus the horror was merely a bad dream. In large part, this was done to please the censors and this “optimism” precisely pleases official dogma because it gives a parachute for readers. They understand “Yes Bush, Olmert, Abbas, and Haniyeh are incompetent but there’s still hope!” It allows conservatives to constantly say Israelis are in favor of peace and reject evidence of its rejectionism. The reference to “hope” in recovering a peace deal is that it is easily exploitable by official powers to argue they should still have faith in them. It allows one to displace the reception to images of violence and hold out the possibility that the situation created is not all that bad.

Thus, what is easily imaginable in theory (the bottom of Levy’s article highlights some of them) is absolutely unimaginable in praxis (negotiations with Hamas on the horizon which do not try and change it into a malleable negotiating partner or a workable two-state solution for example). Is the gap between the two wholly irreconcilable or inevitable? A page from the book of the most effective anti-Bolsheviks might help. The best of the bunch were those who fully predicted the catastrophic decline of the West but, for that very reason, worked frenetically to change that destiny.

The predominant mode of this strategy has been used by reactionary Likudites who conjure up specters of second Holocaust to legitimize military aggression. Yet, one must steal the reactionaries’ thunder and reinvent the move to take actions which seem impossible and whose possibility can be seen only retroactively. The bleakness of the current situation should be accepted in ALL of its unmediated horror. Rather than become fatalistic, however, one should intervene into the past of this future and figure out what could have been done to solve the issue. This is the only way in which the actual urgency of the situation can become relevant. Action cannot be given an idle reprieve with the “time-tables” and “planned final status talks.” The few years here and there created by Madrid, Oslo, Camp David, Taba, and Annapolis can, then, be seen as a few years of disastrous decisions and time that cannot be wasted. If this attitude had been taken in 1993, maybe the promised final-status talks would actually have happened instead of the continuation of occupation equipped with the Oslo blackmail. Hope itself must be seen as a reactive emotion (in the Nietzschean sense) with only malignant effects on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The pessimistic attitude can translate the jadedness of Israelis and Palestinians with their leaders into actual opposition to force the latter into negotiation.

That is why the conspiracy should be condemned. Yet, what if, instead of placing that individual decision into the grander scheme of things, the grander scheme is placed into the individual decision. What is so obscene is that the action is one more lost opportunity and thus responsibility for the inevitable catastrophe can be placed within it. The totality of the crime can be deciphered from rhetorical mind-games played by various governments.

There will not be any more illusions or parachutes. Humanitarianism will do all the laudable actions currently taken (aid relief, rights violation reports, etc.) but it will become a second-class citizen to the overall political approach to the situation. In a nice paradox, only through the utter separation from the situation via political analysis and criticism can solidarity with all the victims be shown and all the perpetrators condemned without choosing (Sderot or Gaza City? Both are worse.).