The Inversion of Cause and Effect

Significance of Cause and Effect

I’m a high school teacher in Toronto, so this week is “classroom set up” time. When it comes to studying history, for me, memorization isn’t the point. That’s just teaching you what to think instead of how to think. To really study history, you need to understand the relationship between cause and effect, and why those events are historically significant today. As I’m hanging up my big “cause and effect” one (large enough that students should know, in no uncertain terms, how important this is) I had this bizarre thought: is that what the problem is with how the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict is weaponized? Are the clear manipulations of history rooted in this inversion, and consequent subversion? The more I think about it, the more I think that this is a fundamental part of the issue. Because when cause and effect is inverted, then Israeli reactions to violence (most of which are understandable when contextualized) come to “justify” violence against them. 

The Security Wall is perhaps the biggest example of this. When people look at said security wall and the impact of the checkpoints, it is often framed as being responsible for terrorism and violence. That old “if Israel weren’t so Apartheid/ genocidal/ racist then Hamas wouldn’t need to exist” chestnut. The problem is, of course, that the wall went up in reaction to terrorism. It was Hamas’ influence that brought suicide bombings into the State of Israel during the Second Intifada, forcing a wall to be built to prevent people from being able to get into Israel’s main cities. It worked. PIJ described it as an “obstacle to resistance,” and complained that “it limits the ability of the resistance to arrive deep within Israel to carry out suicide bombing attacks.” In 2017, researchers found that not only had it eliminated suicide bombings, it reduced violence on the Palestinian side significantly as well. Terrorism was reduced by 92%. But the idea that it’s the effect of violence is often twisted to frame the fence as the cause of it. Think about how different this narrative is: you’re a country who is having its citizens blown up regularly, so you put up a wall to prevent them from dying. Is it a bandaid on a bullet wound? Yes, probably — but that context is necessary to understand the difference between its creation as a safety measure as opposed to as an “Apartheid” wall built to segregate people racially. 

It is also popular to claim that Hamas is justified in its actions towards Israel due to the Israeli (and Egyptian, but people conveniently forget that they are involved as well) blockade. Again, this is another inversion: the blockade didn’t start until 2007, and it was after Hamas’ election, civil war, and introduction of terrorism that threatened to destabilize the region. The blockade is there as a result of terrorism, not the root cause of it. It changes the story greatly to know that there was a year or two between the election of Hamas and the implementation of a blockade — a fact that undercuts the notion that Hamas’ terrorist actions are a legitimate reaction to living in an “open air prison.”

Even when considering things like the relationship between terrorism like October 7th and the lack of Palestinian autonomy, there’s a certain weaponization of that past: that terrorism is the primary reason why Israel cannot leave the West Bank is less understood. Do I wish that they had never been there in the first place? Yes, of course I do. I wish there was an exit strategy that would not result in the West Bank becoming a larger Gaza, but at present there isn’t. That and the fact that the state doesn’t exist, despite good faith attempts to create one, is also because of a refusal by Palestinian leadership to live in peace side-by-side is often ignored. The causal relationship between Palestinian actions and their lack of a state is absent from much of this “history.”

The very nature of Israel’s military superiority is also product of this inversion; there is a narrative online and on campuses (or on Jon Oliver) that argues that Hamas’ actions against Israel are not worthy of much note or anger due to the State of Israel’s military superiority. That that military strength was necessitated by 75 years of existential threats, multiple wars, and numerous attempts to wipe the country off the face of the map is ignored.

What is less easy to tell is whether this inversion of cause and effect is ignorance or purposeful manipulation. Do people genuinely not understand the context of decisions (even controversial ones), or is this a product of the demonization and delegitimization that is inherent in antizionism? It seems to be part and parcel of anti-Zionist academic narratives, because inverting the causal relationship negates Israel’s legitimate security concerns and rationales for their actions. And that is picked up and carried forward by people on university campuses and social media, who have many opinions and very little knowledge. They may be acting out of ignorance, but while that is perhaps blissful, is rarely a virtue. And in a conflict where history is weaponized daily to justify political dogma, this inversion of one of the most fundamental elements of the study of history is deeply connected to the success of that. 

Someone should tell these students on elite college campuses that they should go back to high school history class. They might learn a thing or two.