disaster. In an unguarded moment, I told an interviewer that I wasn’t losing sleep over casualties in Hezbollah-held areas in Lebanon. I meant that Hezbollah had begun the war and had to accept the consequences, but my words were quickly parsed as cold-blooded indifference to civilian suffering. This did not go down well in Montreal, where there is a strong Lebanese presence. Days later, in a television appearance on Quebec’s most watched program,
Tout le monde en parle
(
Everybody’s Talking About It
), trying to repair the damage done by my previousremark, I said that Israeli forces may have committed a “war crime” in their attack on a place called Qana. Once my words were translated and circulated in the English press across the country, all hell broke loose. What I meant was that the Israel Defense Forces, in a legitimate response to Hezbollah attacks, had engaged in indiscriminate use of force against a target that housed civilians. At Harvard I had taught the Geneva Conventions and I knew the distinction between a war crime and a crime against humanity. I didn’t believe the Israel Defense Forces had been slaughtering civilians. I believed they had used excessive and indiscriminate force. What Jewish community supporters heard, however, was that I was accusing Israel of behaving like the Nazis.
It’s not what you mean. It’s what they hear. I would not retract, because Human Rights Watch had confirmed the use of indiscriminate force, but I did reaffirm my lifelong commitment to Israel’s right to defend itself. Nothing I said dug me out of my hole. With a couple of ill-chosen sentences, I had managed the almost impossible feat of alienating Jewish, Muslim and Lebanese groups alike. I was aghast at the media storm that ensued, the anger and disillusionment from Jewish supporters and the way the controversy stopped our campaign in its tracks. The incident revealed the strange fact that the most divisive issues in the domestic politics of multicultural societies turn out to be international ones, in countries far away. Distant conflicts make communities circle their wagons, and a politician’s reactions are closely parsed for magic words of reassurance. Your job as a politician is to position yourself as the master of balanced understanding. I failed on all counts. After the furor over the Lebanese war died down, Ian Davey told me politicians have nine lives. Over Qana, I consumed eight of them.
It’s worth pausing here to reflect on what the incident reveals about the use of language in politics. If you’ve spent your life as a writer,journalist and teacher, nothing prepares you for the use of language once you enter the political arena. It is unlike any word game you have ever played. You may fancy yourself as a communicator, but the first time you step up on a political platform, you can have the weird feeling that you have walked into Woody Allen’s film
Bananas
, in that sequence where the guerilla leader changes the official language of his Latin American country to Swedish. You leave a charitable realm where people cut you some slack, finish your sentences and accept that you didn’t quite mean what you said. You enter a world of lunatic literal-mindedness where only the words that come out of your mouth actually count. You also leave the world where people forgive and forget, where people let bygones be bygones. You enter the eternal present, where every syllable you’ve ever uttered, every tweet, Facebook post, newspaper article or cringe-inducing photograph remains in cyberspace forever for your enemies to use against you. If you find yourself explaining yourself at a press conference, you have already lost half the battle. In the case of the Qana incident, I had the absurd feeling that the missing context for my remarks was actually my whole life. Did nobody know that I had taught and lived in Israel and written the biography of Isaiah Berlin, a committed Zionist? 5 How could anyone have
Tout le monde en parle
(
Everybody’s Talking About It
), trying to repair the damage done by my previousremark, I said that Israeli forces may have committed a “war crime” in their attack on a place called Qana. Once my words were translated and circulated in the English press across the country, all hell broke loose. What I meant was that the Israel Defense Forces, in a legitimate response to Hezbollah attacks, had engaged in indiscriminate use of force against a target that housed civilians. At Harvard I had taught the Geneva Conventions and I knew the distinction between a war crime and a crime against humanity. I didn’t believe the Israel Defense Forces had been slaughtering civilians. I believed they had used excessive and indiscriminate force. What Jewish community supporters heard, however, was that I was accusing Israel of behaving like the Nazis.
It’s not what you mean. It’s what they hear. I would not retract, because Human Rights Watch had confirmed the use of indiscriminate force, but I did reaffirm my lifelong commitment to Israel’s right to defend itself. Nothing I said dug me out of my hole. With a couple of ill-chosen sentences, I had managed the almost impossible feat of alienating Jewish, Muslim and Lebanese groups alike. I was aghast at the media storm that ensued, the anger and disillusionment from Jewish supporters and the way the controversy stopped our campaign in its tracks. The incident revealed the strange fact that the most divisive issues in the domestic politics of multicultural societies turn out to be international ones, in countries far away. Distant conflicts make communities circle their wagons, and a politician’s reactions are closely parsed for magic words of reassurance. Your job as a politician is to position yourself as the master of balanced understanding. I failed on all counts. After the furor over the Lebanese war died down, Ian Davey told me politicians have nine lives. Over Qana, I consumed eight of them.
It’s worth pausing here to reflect on what the incident reveals about the use of language in politics. If you’ve spent your life as a writer,journalist and teacher, nothing prepares you for the use of language once you enter the political arena. It is unlike any word game you have ever played. You may fancy yourself as a communicator, but the first time you step up on a political platform, you can have the weird feeling that you have walked into Woody Allen’s film
Bananas
, in that sequence where the guerilla leader changes the official language of his Latin American country to Swedish. You leave a charitable realm where people cut you some slack, finish your sentences and accept that you didn’t quite mean what you said. You enter a world of lunatic literal-mindedness where only the words that come out of your mouth actually count. You also leave the world where people forgive and forget, where people let bygones be bygones. You enter the eternal present, where every syllable you’ve ever uttered, every tweet, Facebook post, newspaper article or cringe-inducing photograph remains in cyberspace forever for your enemies to use against you. If you find yourself explaining yourself at a press conference, you have already lost half the battle. In the case of the Qana incident, I had the absurd feeling that the missing context for my remarks was actually my whole life. Did nobody know that I had taught and lived in Israel and written the biography of Isaiah Berlin, a committed Zionist? 5 How could anyone have
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