This style of conflict reveals the sheer hopelessness of this kind of ‘asymmetric warfare’ in which the weaker party fights with crude weapons and has not a hope of total victory of the battlefield. Hamas’s crudely produced rockets cannot beat the Israeli military machine but can and do cause terror, injury and death to the people of Sderot and now Ashkelon. Israel’s mighty army can cause devastation for the people of Gaza on a greater scale than Hamas can manage, but it cannot prevent the rockets (it’s worth remembering that rockets were fired, albeit on a smaller scale, even when Israel was occupying Gaza). The hopelessness lies in the impossibility of victory for either side. Insofar as Hamas has a realistic political strategy, it is that decades of low-intensity warfare will perhaps weaken Israel’s desire to fight. Israel’s more realistic leaders admit that re-occupation of Gaza presents no ultimate solution.

The current conflict presents a nihilistic avoidance of the only two solutions to the problem: either the genocide of one party by another, or the negotiated agreement to live together. The first solution is inconceivable at the moment, Hamas hasn’t the capability to cleanse Israel of Jews (although some of its members would no doubt like to), Israel does not have the will to do so (although one Israeli leader used the Hebrew word for holocaust to describe the fate of Gaza in the event of a military invasion). The second solution seems equally implausible: the dominant view in the leaderships of Gaza and Israel is that negotiations are impossible at the moment. So we have a situation in which a war is being fought that both protagonists know it cannot win.

The question is what should the response be of those of us who live outside Israel-Palestine. The all too frequent tendency by outsiders in this conflict has been to proclaim one’s desire for peace, while supporting the violence of one’s favourite protagonist. So in the 2006 war, British Jews rallied under the slogan ‘yes to peace, no to terror’ while supporting the Israeli military response, while the left and its Muslim allies decried Lebanese civilian deaths while lending tacit or open support for Hezbollah. The sufferings of one’s favourite civilians are denounced while those of the other side are ignored or explained away.

The tendency on the left to have greater sympathy for the Palestinians/Lebanese is partially understandable: their civilians are poorer, more vulnerable and die in greater numbers. In this asymmetric conflict, Israel is unquestionably the stronger party with the greater capacity to inflict suffering. But to support the military actions of either party in an asymmetric conflict is to perpetuate the sufferings of both sides. The only sensible response from those of us who do not live in the conflict zone is to cultivate a disgust at the perpetuation of the conflict. It may be that one’s natural sympathies lie with one side or another (as someone who has friends and relatives in Israel, the sufferings of the citizens of Sderot are much more real to me) and it may be that one has strong feelings about who has ultimate responsibility for the conflict; but these natural biases need to be transcended during the dangerous phase of mutual bloodletting that we are seeing now.

What we need is a peace movement – a real peace movement, not marches and slogans that proclaim a desire for peace while supporting war. What we need is symmetrical willingness to criticise the warriors on both sides; a symmetrical support for the suffering non-combatants. Only when both support and critique are equally apportioned can those of us who do not directly participate in the conflict develop a stance that is both moral and that breaks with the cyclical process of violence.

Krznaric says that

I can’t help concluding that the Progressive Left doesn’t yet really believe in climate change.

He gives the following reasons for this:

One factor concerns hope. For the first time in years there is a sense of hope about Latin America amongst the Progressive Left. Neoliberalism is in retreat and left-leaning governments are being elected throughout the region. Chavez is challenging the US and the multinationals, and having an impact on poverty reduction. Bolivia has its first indigenous President. But none of this, I believe, is an excuse for ignoring climate change.

A second factor is that many activists and policy-makers continue to keep human development issues separate from what they think of as ‘environmental’ issues. If you are interested in tackling poverty in the favelas of Rio, it is quite normal not even to consider that climate change is a related issue. I think there is a real need for development agencies and activists on the one hand, and environmentally-oriented organisations and campaigners on the other, to merge their thinking to create a new Ecological Humanism, so that climate change and social justice are considered interdependent issues.

A third, possibly deeper factor, is psychological denial. As individuals, we have an extraordinary capacity to shut our minds to the realities of issues that we think are frightening or insurmountable. Climate change is one of them. The good news is that people in rich countries are starting to overcome their denial and accept that climate change is not only happening, but will change their own lives, and that they have to adapt to and embrace the changes. The bad news is that most of them remain in denial when it comes to the world’s poorest countries. As a recent Oxfam report points out, the rich world is sorely lagging behind in its response to the need for developing countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change link..

The time has come for us to take our struggle against denial a stage further, and recognise that climate change is a reality not only for ourselves, but for the world’s poorest people in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions.

This article is absolutely right that in many left wing and liberal circles, climate change is nowhere near higher enough up the agenda. It’s also right to skewer the neo-Bolivarians for their short-termist relianceon petrodollars. But I can’t help thinking that the source of the problem isn’t so much denial or the other reasons Krznaric gives, so much as a more intractable problem with politics itself.

Unlike many on the right, outright denial that human-created climate change is happening is rare on the left. I also think that most people on the left accept that – in principle – there is a major problem that needs to be addressed. The problem is that too often climate change is treated as just another important issue. There are many worthy causes in the world and no one can involve themselves in all of them. Politics and activism therefore require choices to be made. Climate change competes with a whole series of leftist causes – Israel-Palestine, Latin America, human rights etc. Some make the decision to put climate change near the top of the list, some relegate it further down.

Yet the problem is that climate change is not just another issue. For one thing, its consequences can effect every other issue. For another, most activists agree that the window of opportunity for effective action is extremely narrow. This is, in short, THE issue.

But I’m not suggesting that we should trest all the other issues in the world as unimportant and unworthy of our time. Indeed, this is precisely what Krznaric is condemning when he criticises those Venezuela activitsts who are too blind too see the problems in oil-reliance. Instead, what is required is something much more challenging. That is, to find a way to see climate change in everything we are fighting for.

Sometimes it is not so difficult to imagine how to do this – critiques of US policy in Iraq dovetails nicely into critiques of oil-reliance more generally; there is also a climate change ‘angle’ in Israel-Palestine when you look at the iniquitous way in which declining water resources are shared in the region. Sometimes though it’s tough – where, for example, is the climate change angle in fighting for the rights of low paid workers? Here what is required is an appreciation of connectedness and the subtle ways in which we are all bound together in a crisis-ridden globalised world. So climate change creates refugees, which creates cheap and illegal labour in western countries, which creates pressure to keep labour costs down.

In short, what we need is a rejection of both reductive single-issue monomania and of treating politics as a smorgasbord of tempting causes from which we can happily choose.

I was very disturbed by a recent article by well-regarded writer on climate change Ross Gelbspan. Gelbspan’s message is harsh in the extreme:

As the pace of global warming kicks into overdrive, the hollow optimism of climate activists, along with the desperate responses of some of the world’s most prominent climate scientists, is preventing us from focusing on the survival requirements of the human enterprise.

The environmental establishment continues to peddle the notion that we can solve the climate problem.

We can’t.

We have failed to meet nature’s deadline. In the next few years, this world will experience progressively more ominous and destabilizing changes. These will happen either incrementally — or in sudden, abrupt jumps.

Under either scenario, it seems inevitable that we will soon be confronted by water shortages, crop failures, increasing damages from extreme weather events, collapsing infrastructures, and, potentially, breakdowns in the democratic process itself.

Now in fairness Gelbspan is not arguing that we should do nothing. Rather, efforts to act on climate change can lay the groundwork for a new world system that would meet the considerable challenges we are facing:

To keep ourselves afloat, we need to change the economic and political structures that determine how we behave. In this case, we need to elevate the ethic of cooperation over the deeply ingrained reflex of competition. We need to elevate our biological similarities over our geographical differences. We need, in the face of this oncoming onslaught, to reorganize our social structures to reflect our most humane collective aspirations.

I don’t know how far to trust the bleaker climate change predications. Some other writers such as George Monbiot are more hopeful that there may be time – just – to avert disaster. What does seem to be clear though is that any response to climate change that requires radical action is doomed to fail. In the world in which we are living, any attempt to ‘reorganize our social structures to reflect our most humane collective aspirations’ has to contend with apathy, denial, awesomely powerful vested interests and the chaotic nature of global decision-making in a divided world of nation states. Perhaps radical change is possible, but I simply do not believe it is possible within the short window of opportunity that we have.

I think we have to concede that this is a battle that has been lost. What the consequences will be are not certain but it should be obvious that action to combat human-created global warming has been too little too late. Some of the brightest and best minds of our time have worked hard to deny that human activity creates climate change and to delay and weaken any response to global warming. They were better resourced, better organised and maybe even better motivated than those who fought for action against global warming.

Whilst we should still be fighting every step of the way to work on the ‘contraction and convergence’ agenda, we need to start to focus on the next environmental challenge – one that may still be winnable. We do not know yet what that challenge may be. We do know that on past behaviour, vested interests will deny and fight it with all their strength. The question is then: how can we work to change the political system so that a timely and appropriate responses to man-made environmental catastrophes are possible?

Take this recent post on her blog, in which she satirises Suffolk County Council’s considering ways to remove stiles and other obstacles with the aim of making rural pathways accessible to people in wheelchairs:

Yess!! Obviously thousands of people in wheelchairs, who would otherwise think nothing of bowling along rutted countryside paths studded with tree roots, rocks and boulders, fallen branches, overhanging brambles, mud swamps and other impedimenta to progress which make them such a challenge for the able-bodied, are being stymied by the kissing-gate.

And why stop there? What about dodgem cars? Ice rinks? Bungee jumping? Formation water-skiing? SAS training? How many wheel-chair users can take part in these activities, then, eh?? We should hang our heads in shame.

End rustic disablism now! We need a new methodology of the stile.

This post took my breath away. I’d read about the Suffolk initiative as well and saw it as interesting and well-intentioned, if maybe impractical. Yet Phillips sees this as worthy of the most vituperative ridicule.

There seems to be three main principles behind the scorn:

1. A conservatism so extreme that any attempt at making life easier for a minority is instantly distrusted.
2. A deep-rooted belief that social policy should be majoritarian – attempts to cater for minorities should be rejected.
3. A conviction that the only response to physical and other forms of disability should be stoicism and a refusal to look to the wider society for improvements to one’s quality of life.

I think it is worth trying to grapple with these principles as I don’t think Melanie Phillips is alone in holding them. They represent an absolutely implacable refusal of the idea that life can be improved. They reject the very idea of social policy as anything other than reactive and repressive. How can these ideas be combatted?

The other question that Melanie Phillips’s work raises is: what did the liberal-left do to her? What caused this radical turning away from any kind of belief in a better society? Above all, why do those who turn away from the left end up attacking it so viciously?

Whereas populist, Richard Littlejohn-style discourse freely expresses itself in vivid ways, the mark of elite discourse is its aspiration to rationality and good sense. Although elite discourse is not always polite – far from it – the dominant trend is to not present oneself as a creature ruled by passion and prejudice, but as someone whose passions are harnessed for the good of society.

How far our society is ‘enlightened’ is open to debate, yet the legacy of the enlightenment remains profound. The consensus is still that engagement in politics requires a careful analysis of social problems and a determined attempt to right-wrongs in a way that is good for society as a whole.

Yet the enlightenment consensus, I would suggest, has become a straight-jacket on modern politics.

The problem is this: policies that cause harm, that perpetuate prejudice, that stir up hate, that are venal, that corrode social bonds – these are no less prevalent than they ever were, but they have become unjustifiable. The language of modern politics cannot express the desire for destruction, abuse and selfishness, it can only express rational desires to better society.

So it is that politicians may continue pursuing policies that may damage our environment and our society, but they cannot openly justify them. Instead we end up with political discourses that seek to deny the effects of policies; global warming denial is one example, denial that repressive actions against the Islamic radicalism create more radicalism is another.

It is only on the fringes of respectable politics that honest political discourse can thrive. Take Jeremy Clarkson for instance, who does not deny man-made global warming as he does not feel the need to pretend to care. Those who do not aspire to join the political or intellectual elite have more freedom to express the truths of their desires and fears.

If Martin Amis has been brave, as some would argue he has, it is that he has refused to go along with the mannered conventions of elite discourse and has gone out on a limb to articulate his deepest feelings in ways that are not polite and are not masked by a hypocritical façade or rationality.

Let me be clear: I consider Martin Amis’s views on Islam to be ignorant and his ill-thought out suggestions as to what to do about Islamist terror to be at best counter-productive and at worst simply racist. But I do not have a problem with his expressing these views. In fact it may be that if more prominent elite figures such as Amis were to follow his lead we might have a chance of developing a stronger progressive politics.

When political discourse cannot reflect the desires motivating politics, then we have the current perverse situation in which political arguments are often not really arguments at all. If the arguments for a policy cannot be properly expressed, then counter-arguments cannot be tailored against them. However bad-tempered the Amis debate might have been, at least it is a real debate – visceral and ugly perhaps, but with a level of honesty that more polite debates rarely achieve.

The problem of course is that an honest politics of this kind would also be a very unpleasant and hurtful politics. Although honesty about hating Muslims would be preferable to hypocritical pieties in the sense of allowing a debate on our fundamental desires and fears, it would be hard for most Muslims to live through. Written and unwritten taboos against ‘hate speech’ may make for a perverse and dishonest politics, but they also shield vulnerable people from harm.

The question that needs to be asked is this: how can we create political structures that allow for honesty about difficult emotions and issues, whilst at the same time setting some kind of limit, some kind of protection against harm? The answer is far from clear, but I think it lies somewhere in the realm of dialogue and in the potential of conversation to create connections between people.

Perhaps if Martin Amis had the opportunity to share his gut reactions on a face-to-face basis with others who might not agree, his anger and hate might have gone somewhere productive? Perhaps the Amis affair simply reveals the weaknesses in a society and political system that is gives those filled with hate nowhere to go?

Any attempt to gather a group of like-minded people and to create change is conspiratorial, even if the word tends to applied most often to nefarious forms of action. So, in principle at least, there’s nothing wrong with being part of a conspiracy. The problem is, how do you balance such sectarian forms of politics with other kinds of politics that require listening, convincing, drawing people in?

This question has haunted me throughout the last year or two. I am a sociologist by profession and, whilst my work has always been politically-oriented in that I have always tried to raise issues of power and authority, I have had little involvement in the more direct and confrontational forms of politics. Much of my recent work has taken place in Anglo-Jewry, where I have had to show considerable acumen as to how to articulate my own leftist views (on Israel and much else) in the context of an often conservative community.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been increasingly frustrated with the discretion I’ve continually tried to show. I’ve wanted to intervene more directly in the political arena; to write for an audience broader than both academia and the Jewish community.

So I’ve started to dip my toe into the choppy waters of public debates. Last year I signed what I thought was a reasonable worded declaration pointing out that Anglo-Jewish communal institutions do not speak for everyone on the question of Israel. The declaration formed the basis for the launch in early 2007 of the group Independent Jewish Voices. The storm of controversy that followed was extraordinary. The declaration was treated as an act of treachery by some and even in more progressive Jewish circles it was condemned as an attack on the community by secular Jews who only identify as Jews to criticize other Jews.

There was something to these criticisms – after all, it’s pretty rich for signatories like Harold Pinter to claim that they are being silenced. Nonetheless, I was unprepared for the personal consequences that followed the publication of my name with the other signatories: A conference on Jewish music that I was organizing fell through as one of my co-organisers refused to work with me; leaders of a major Jewish organization intimated that I would not receive cooperation in the research I was undertaking if my name was associated with the declaration; leftist academics I respected castigated me in personal terms.

But the biggest problem that my signing the declaration caused me was that it endangered the existence of a group I have been involved in setting up called New Jewish Thought. It is intended to be a group dedicated to nurturing dialogue and respectful relations between Jews. By publicly aligning myself with a group that was seen (however unfairly) as attacking the community, I jeopardized the survival of a group intended to create better relations within the community. Reluctantly I decided to withdraw my signature from Independent Jewish Voices.

This whole episode forced me to confront some difficult issues on the whole question of the politics of communities. On the one hand, change is stimulated and perpetuated by sectarian groups and personalities who drive forward their agendas. Elites and entrenched vested interests are an inevitable part of any community and at times they have to be confronted. But at the same time, if you really care for a community you shouldn’t want to split it irrevocably apart. Change can also be produced through subtle, quiet processes of dialogue and community building.

Of course I’m perfectly aware that there’s a long history of leftist debates about whether to be inside or outside the ‘system’, but I don’t think that what I am talking about is exactly the same thing. What I am talking about is how to change a community without killing it in the process; how to be politically principled whilst still seeing those who don’t share your politics as part of the same enterprise; how to balance passionate ideological commitment with dialogic, respectful solidarity between people.

What I’ve come to realize is that dialogic, respectful, solidarity between people is worth working for precisely as it guarantees a genuine political process. The problem in the Jewish community is not that political questions lead to bad-tempered debates that lead to bad communal relations; the problem is that the dominant tendency in the community is to avoid and even to suppress politics.

In research I’ve conducted on ‘moderately engaged’ Jews, it was striking to note just how much many of my respondents hated talking about Israel in anything other than the blandest tones. Jewish communal organizations try to create ‘solidarity’ with Israel and to take up a position that is ‘apolitical’. What results is anger with people who politically engage with Israel, less because of what they argue, but because they argue at all. The fear of communal division results in a fear of politics.

Addressing this fear requires dialogue and community-building. So in my work for New Jewish Thought what I am doing is trying to create the conditions for politics to take place. I’ve published on our website here an exchange with the person who earlier this year would not work with me. We still don’t agree, but at least we have a basis to build a relationship on.

In writing for Liberal Conspiracy, I want to try and explore these issues further and to see how they apply outside the Jewish community. Balancing political conspiracies with community building isn’t just a task for Jews, it’s a task for anyone who thinks that politics should be about more than student debating society-style point scoring.

Keith Kahn-Harris is a research associate at the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths College and the convener of New Jewish Thought.