Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig: Bibi, Trump and Gaza: The Problem of Perception
Let’s start with a question: of the two previous U.S. presidents – Donald Trump and Joe Biden – who ended their term in office with a net employment increase of 16 million jobs, and who officiated over a net decrease in national employment? If you answered Trump for the first case and Biden for the second, welcome to the “Age of Perceptual Virtuality.” You have it backwards!
Here’s the best example. The recent Gaza cease-fire agreement was basically on the table since May, but Israeli PM Netanyahu refused to countenance it, given the exorbitantly high price Israel would have to pay in hundreds of freed Hamas prisoners, most of them previously involved in serious terror against Israel. Back then, Hamas also didn’t seem too keen on that U.S. ceasefire proposal. What caused both to change their minds? Incoming President Trump’s threat that all hell would break loose if a deal wasn’t signed before his inauguration.
And what exactly would that “all hell breaking loose” entail? No details were forthcoming – for good reason. What exactly could the new U.S. Administration do to Hamas? Drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza City? (I’m being sarcastic; the obvious answer is no.) Hamas is already so devastated – with the whole of Gaza basically turned into a razed parking lot –that there’s very little Trump could have done on that side of the equation. As for Israel, here Trump could theoretically have applied some pressure, but at great political cost given how deeply his own political “base” supports Israel.
Yet, the deal was done. Why? The mere “perception” of a real threat was enough to move both sides to an agreement. In other words, how the two sides “understood” the external threat was more influential than the continued IDF evisceration of Hamas fighters on the one hand, and the continued (albeit reduced) missile attacks on Israel, on the other hand.
None of this is really surprising. Broadly speaking, human beings are driven far more by our (mistaken) subjective understanding of reality than objective actuality itself. Recent examples of this abound. Kamala Harris lost the U.S. Presidential election in large part because American voters considered the U.S. economy to be in the doldrums. In fact (yes, fact), that economy was the strongest and healthiest in the entire world! Low unemployment (hundreds of thousands of new hires every month over the previous several months) and relatively low inflation. Yet the “memory” of the Corona-harmed economy persisted, and Trump emerged victorious – despite his previous track record of negative employment! (Not to mention four failed businesses over his “illustrious” career.)
Perhaps the most egregious example of “perceptual virtuality” in Israel involves PM Netanyahu himself. Throughout his various terms in office, he has taken on the mantle of “Mr. Security”. Perceptually, his deep voice and extremely glib speech (in Hebrew and English – impressive bilingualism!) have further reinforced this impression. And yet… time after time he has knuckled under to pressure, internal (political) and external (diplomatic) – Trump’s recent “threat” being merely the last example of the latter. Last May, Bibi claimed the American ceasefire proposal’s conditions to be unacceptable; now all of a sudden, the same agreement is OK – just because Trump issued some general threat that wasn’t even clearly meant for Israel?
Bibi’s pushover behavior in the face of domestic political pressure is just as egregious. Five times his Minister for Domestic Security – Ben-Gvir – refused to vote with the government’s decisions, something that previous prime ministers refused to countenance, firing the minister in question. Here, PM Netanyahu did nothing – a sure recipe for future ministerial anarchy (indeed, he has “put on hold” Ben-Gvir’s party ministries, waiting for the latter’s return). “Mr. Personal (In)Security” would be a far better nickname for Israel’s ruling prime minister.
Such perceptual virtuality, of course, hasn’t occurred in a vacuum. Rather, it is a piece of the far larger world of “mirror reality” as expressed in social media and even several traditional media channels. Of course, there are somewhat different ways of perceiving the world; there is no “absolutely single” way to understand our social realm (even the hard sciences are becoming somewhat “subjective”: quantum physics gives a central place to the “observer”). Nevertheless, one would expect that whatever the perception, it is based on some realistic semblance of the facts.
The world of politics is especially prone to such distortions. Today it’s called “disinformation”; in the past, “propaganda.” Whatever the nomenclature, it is insidious; but given human nature’s propensity to believe what we want to believe and not what reality demands of us to believe, this highly problematic phenomenon will not go away. However, that doesn’t exempt us from making the attempt to see through the virtual into the real – especially when our leaders excel in the former, undermining the latter. In politics as in economics: caveat emptor – “buyer beware”!
