Ehud Barak’s Copernican Revolution (Haaretz – 2000)

In the supplement dated 27.10, Ari Shavit describes Ehud Barak’s Copernican revolution: Barak conducted an experiment that put to an empirical test the prevailing paradigm in Israel regarding the roots of the conflict and the Palestinians’ willingness for peace.

What troubles me about Shavit’s comparison between Barak and Copernicus is that Copernicus would not have conducted an experiment whose results were known in advance. An experiment of a Copernican kind is meant to discover something new, not to understand what is obvious to anyone willing to look at reality with open eyes.

When Shavit speaks of the prevailing paradigm in Israel, he means the paradigm prevailing on the Israeli Left, that is: among an overwhelming majority of the media, the media-prominent academy, the judicial system, and Israel’s governing institutions. He ignores the fact that the ‘surprising’ results of Barak’s experiment, unlike those of Copernicus’s, had been predicted in advance with ‘surprising’ certainty by a fairly broad public of ordinary people.

This phenomenon points to another fact, also well known to anyone willing to look at reality with open eyes: that the Israeli Left, even more than the Right, lives in a bubble and is unwilling to see that anything exists outside it. The alarming coalition that exists in Israel among all the aforementioned systems (=the elites) is a real danger to the very existence of the state and to its democracy. The danger does not lie in the positions they espouse, but in their unwillingness to listen, and therefore also to examine alternative positions.

A striking example of this phenomenon appears in an interview in that same supplement with Prof. Sand, who for the umpteenth time explains to us that there are no intellectuals on the Right. He, like all his friends, lives in the bubble reflected in the newspaper ‘Haaretz’, and to a large extent in the general Israeli press, where indeed there are only left-wing intellectuals. Since the average man of the Left becomes acquainted with intellectuals in general through the newspaper ‘Haaretz’, he has no chance whatsoever of discovering that ’empty set’ of right-wing intellectuals. Readers of ‘Yated Ne’eman’ are likewise convinced that there are no non-Haredi intellectuals. Continued life in this bubble guarantees that the disillusionment of those elites, of which Shavit speaks, will never come. To see this clearly, all we need do is read the letters column of the aforesaid ‘Haaretz’ supplement.