A Three-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.”

This is Charles Dickens in Hard Times, the English Tory socialist’s condition-of-England novel of 1854, a broadside against the crass, materialistic utilitarianism that defined the spirit of the age, dedicated to his reactionary friend, the fellow writer and labor sympathizer, Thomas Carlyle. Substitute “Interpretations” for “Facts” and add a question mark in brackets after the phrase “boys and girls,” and we have the spirit of the third decade of the twenty-first century. If Jeremy Bentham was the eminent grise of early industrial British society, then Friedrich Nietzsche, refracted, to be sure, through woke ideologues such as Judith Butler on the Left and juvenile neo-reactionaries such as Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin on the Right, is the guiding intellectual light of our time. “There are no facts, only interpretations;” facts, sorry, interpretations, are what the powerful say they are.

Broadly correct, this fact—sorry, interpretation—is also deeply facile. However paltry the evidence, however dominant the paradigm, we cannot dispense with facts and the pursuit of objective knowledge. Just because truth can, it seems, only ever be provisional, that is no reason to thrust it aside in favor of simple assertion; yet thrust it aside we have.

Nowhere perhaps is this more disgracefully clear than in the journalistic coverage of the current war Israel is waging on Hamas, after the Gaza-based terrorist organization’s cruel and deadly assault on Israeli citizens and security forces on October 7 of last year, an equally misreported event in international media. As the British journalist Aris Roussinos has argued, the conflict between Israel and Palestine has become a proxy for other tribal loyalties, relating to the misnamed culture wars which have divided many Western nations down the middle.