The Projector Problem

Two years ago I read a very smart piece by journalist Matti Friedman in which he posited that Americans view Israel’s internal tensions as a mirror of their own.

Instead of trying to understand the Sabra-flavored passions and poisons of a prickly region, instead of studying the complex history and fraught present of this ancient land, instead of identifying the many minorities within the Jewish majority, and instead of acknowledging the truly evil power players arming the smaller actors, they simply apply their own grievances to a country across the world. The result: a neat division of Israel’s population into privileged oppressors and passive victims.

To be honest, we all do this.

We all use our familiar paradigms when trying to understand the unfamiliar. You do it if you’re an American failing to fathom why masses of Israelis constantly find new reasons to protest. You do it if you’re an Israeli mocking those London shtiblach holding grand kiddeishim in honor of a ceremonial monarch’s coronation. You do it if you’re a conservative New Yorker who’s grateful that the state and Supreme Court enforced protections of your religious values — and you can’t begin to understand why religious Jews in Israel would want to weaken their own High Court. You do it if you’re an enlightened European shaking your head as America’s Bible Belt votes for president, or if you’re a Westerner dismissing Russia’s adulation of Vladimir Putin.

Instead of approaching a foreign phenomenon with an open and curious mind, we sweep in with preconceptions and judgments. This is the hero, this is the villain, these are the crazy extremists, these are the unreasonable, irascible primitives. We slot the players and conflicts and tensions into neat categories, spice those portions with our own interpretations of risk and reward, and wrap it all up with a clever take. And sometimes when we do that, we miss the real story.