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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| After walling itself in, Israel learns to hazard the jungle beyond |
| 2021-03-14 |
Long. An interesting exploration of a country’s psychological evolution, with quotes from Professor Jordan Peterson. [IsraelTimes] For years, the country tried to protect the ’villa’ by hunkering behind barriers, physically and mentally; now, it is sallying forth bravely into the region."In the end, in the State of Israel, as I see it, there will be a fence surrounding it," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, during a February 2016 tour of the Israel-Jordan border. "They’ll say to me, ’That’s what you want to do, to defend the villa?’ The answer is yes. ’Will we surround all of Israel with fences and obstacles?’ The answer is yes. In the environment we live in, we must defend ourselves from the predators." The reference to "defending the villa" might sound somewhat odd to most observers, but to Israeli ears, it is familiar shorthand for a widely — almost unconsciously — accepted idea. Israel is a villa in a jungle. The phrase is said to have originated with Ehud Barak, who gave a 1996 speech as foreign minister to Jewish communal leaders in St. Louis, saying, "The dreams and aspirations of many in the Arab world have not changed. We still live in a modern and prosperous villa in the middle of the jungle, a place where different laws prevail. No hope for those who cannot defend themselves and no mercy for the weak." Sixteen years later, he was still using the phrase. Others continue to do so as well. "Villa in the Jungle" was what veteran military correspondent Alon Ben David called his 2020 lecture series on Israel’s security challenges. It is not just a wry Israeli slogan. The "villa in the jungle" reflects a core Israeli understanding of its place in the Middle East... and how it should act in it. At the heart of the idea lies a deep-seated fear about what surrounds us. The metaphor recalls a pioneering homesteader who hacks down a small clearing in a dangerous forest, creating a precarious island of order with the trappings of civilization while threats lurk in the shadows beyond. Of course, the idea has inescapable colonialist undertones, and Barak has been criticized for the impolitic description of Israel’s neighbors. In artistic depictions from the colonial period in Africa, the jungle — a loaded concept, not a scientific designation — represents the limits of European ability to impose order, and thus to make sense of their surroundings. The jungle was, in the words of one author, "a blank screen, stripped of geographical, temporal, and topological specificity, onto which Europeans projected utopian or dystopian ideas about their home culture and its relationship to the colonial Other." But whereas the disordered vastness of the jungle spurred Europeans to seek to claim it and impose order on it, the Israeli — and some might say, Jewish — impulse is the opposite. In Barak and Netanyahu’s formulation, the Middle Eastern jungle (the original, Sanskrit meaning of the word is "an arid desert," so it is even more appropriate for this region than Barak may have realized) is home to primitive, bloodthirsty peoples, who live and die by the sword and the suicide bomb. Faced with what they saw as interminably |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #2 Yes indeed, g(r)omgoru. The editorialist gets into that deeper in the piece. Also Bibi’s current actions — the Abraham Accords and so forth, that are domesticating the jungle beyond the walls. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2021-03-14 15:13 |
| #1 Actually, I believe, we did venture into the jungle several times before. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2021-03-14 05:33 |