This is a very timely lesson to come from a fifty-year old execution. Consider the conflict in the Middle East, where no sides can claim innocence and where no side deserves all of the blame, and where "the facts of the case" seem equally impossible to come by. To take but one recent example, Gideon Levy wrote in Ha'aretz this October about a pregnant Palestinian woman whose baby died by the side of the road, after a soldier refused to let her taxi through the machsom (checkpoint) in order to get to hospital. The solider was reported to have said 'get back in line with the other animals.' Four-fifths of what is a long feature article are devoted to her account of this horrifying ordeal. At the end of the article, without comment, comes the IDF's account, which completely denies everything the woman said, claiming her passage through the checkpoint was not held up at all. Or take 'Operation Defensive Shield,' Spring 2002, in Jenin. Accusations of a 'massacre' were certainly libelous, but terrible things happened, and there are no objective sources to really work out if any human rights abuses occurred. How am I to know the truth?

There are circumstances in which the truth may become known - say with an independent enquiry. But until they do, are we to be paralyzed by what we don't know - or can we recommit to what we do? Suppose the woman was held up; suppose she wasn't. Does it change the unsustainability, the inhumanity, of occupation? Does whether there were or were not booby traps in Jenin change the fact that Palestinians are training for suicide attacks against Israeli civilians? The factual questions are essential for forming judgments, but political action depends more on our vision of what we want the world to be than on what we think may have happened. In practice this means asking not whether our stance is true but whether it is helpful. We need a 'narrative that heals.'

Meeropol's and RFC's "constructive revenge" is an example of this. No doubt, our forward-looking ideology will always be affected by narratives of the past, as well it should be. Yet political activism eventually requires a leap beyond the point to which 'facts' can bring us. It's not that agnosticism is the only rational position - sometimes it is, and sometimes it's not. But ultimately, we have to move beyond our agnosticism, and our certainty, to bring about a better world.

[1]       [2]       3

Joel Stanley is a writer and literary critic based in London. He wishes to thank Alex Stein for assistance in preparing this review.

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