Addendum

I suspect I was unnecessarily glib in promoting the Frum-Atallah Bloggingheads: it really is quite good. Frum is very effective in drawing out Atallah’s ideas for a U.S.-led conciliation process, and Atallah makes what is probably the best rejoinder I’ve seen to my contention that the conflict is simply not that central to our national interests.

This issue actually gets into some fairly fundamental questions about international relations. One of the hotter things going right now in IR theory is constructivism: basically postmodernism applied to geopolitics. Where most theorists have traditionally taken for granted that interests are a) primary and b) derived from objective, material realities, constructivists argue for the, uh, constructed nature of the things that form the bedrock of IR: anarchy, interests, conflict, and so forth.

What makes this relevant to Atallah’s argument is that he basically concedes that the conflict isn’t that important on its face. The actors in question possess no major natural resources, ability to harm the larger powers, etc. But because we think it matters (and a glance at any of the world’s major media outlets will verify this), it matters.

I never thought of it this way — perhaps because the conflict has been around longer than I have — but constructivists have in the Israel-Palestine conflict one of the best cases for their argument. Conversely, realists have never really explained what makes it so damn important (The Israel Lobby isn’t quite what I had in mind).

In any case, it’s more elegant than saying “Jews are news.”