One of the great advantages of the digitalization of communications is that today, everyone who has a computer has access to information about events occurring all over the globe. A person sitting in their home in say, Jerusalem, can read everything from the Washington Post to the Bellingham Herald from Bellingham, Washington. Sitting anywhere in the world that has an Internet hook-up, a person today can be clued into events taking place from Paris to Timbuktu.
There can be no doubt that this accessibility has democratized communications. Private citizens have gained independence from the editorial preferences of the editors of their local newspapers. But the vastly expanded availability of information has caused a new problem. An individual who follows a public debate in a foreign country may think that he understands what is happening there by reading that country's local papers or popular Web sites every day. And yet, because he is thousands of miles away, he may well misunderstand the significance of what he is reading. Almost like a child's game of "Telephone," the information he accesses from his computer may be misleading because it is written for the locals, who in addition to reading their newspapers, also breathe the same air as their local reporters.
An example would be an Israeli who, sitting in his apartment in Tiberias, kept abreast of events in the US by reading The New York Times on-line. From such a reading, that Israeli could conclude that the US was losing the war against the jihadists in Iraq and was on the verge of retreating. He might also be under the impression that President George W. Bush was about to be impeached by Congress for having "lied" about the threat that Saddam Hussein constituted to the US in March 2003. Finally, such a reader might have the impression that the US economy was sliding into a recession because of the sharp rise in gasoline prices.
If that person were not a private individual, but say, the government of Britain, the assessment that the US was about to bail out of Iraq and impeach Bush would necessarily lead to certain conclusions about how Britain ought to be thinking about its foreign policy.
The problem, of course, is that a reading of The New York Times does not provide an individual or government with a clear understanding of what is happening in the US or of the significance of various debates now raging in the media. For a person to understand what he is reading in the Times, he needs to be able to understand the cultural context in which the articles are being published. Without a cultural awareness of the US, he will be incapable of assessing the value of the information he now accesses on the Internet.
The same, of course, is true of Israel. Israel's political debate is consistently hyperbolic. Israelis who listen to statements by their leaders know that they have to discount much of what they hear as exaggerated showmanship. For instance, from 1982 up until Ariel Sharon became prime minister in 2001, the Israeli Left routinely called him a warmonger, a right-wing extremist and a murderer. But no one really thought that any of this was true. Israelis understood this to be par for the course for the Israeli political debate.
Yet, for foreigners watching events in Israel and listening to this internal dialogue, it couldn't have come as more of a shock when, as prime minister, Sharon suddenly began calling for Israeli withdrawals from Judea, Samaria and Gaza and carried out the withdrawal and expulsion plan from Gaza and northern Samaria last summer. After all, for years they had been reading of Israelis calling Sharon a clone of Genghis Khan. So here, as with the foreigner watching America, the familiarity afforded by access to local debates can lead to greater misunderstandings.
Because of this, it is important for all countries, when assessing what others are doing, to think first and foremost about how various moves can impact their interests. The domestic policy debates carried out in foreign countries should not form the basis of their decision-making.
IT IS important to note our propensity to misunderstand other peoples' national debates today because in three weeks, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will arrive in Washington, DC to present his plan to withdraw Israeli civilians and military forces from much of Judea and Samaria with the hopes of securing American support and funding for his plan.
Olmert's planned withdrawal presents a dilemma for Washington. On the one hand, the US traditionally has supported Israeli withdrawals from territories that Israel took over in the Six Day War, and Olmert's plan aligns with this customary preference. On the other hand, the US is now fighting a war against the global jihad and one of its primary goals is to prevent the establishment of new bases for jihadist forces. Israel's withdrawal from Gaza this past summer fomented Hamas's rise to power in the Palestinian Authority and enabled the transformation of Gaza into a base for al-Qaida, Hizbullah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. An Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria will exacerbate the current situation exponentially.
Were the Americans to base their policies on what they hear in the Israeli media, they might conclude that Israel will be destroyed if it doesn't vacate Judea and Samaria tomorrow. What they would miss is that the debate in Israel about retaining control over Judea and Samaria or relinquishing control of the areas to Hamas has nothing to do with Hamas, Hizbullah, al-Qaida, or any other consideration that might be called strategic.
