The Other

Few of us can claim to be immune to what seems to be a resurgence of intolerance, bigotry, racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism. Throughout Europe, in the old Soviet Union, in Asia and the Middle East, in the United States of America, the hatches are being bolted down as neighbors repel each other, as good citizens fight to keep what they feel to be alien at bay. In Europe, the Right makes all the noise, and the language of swamping and controls is legitimized by supposedly social democratic politicians. In Israel/Palestine, two nations so closely alike as to be psychologically almost indistinguishable battle with each other in a tiny strip of land, leaving their diasporic relatives torn asunder by grief and anger. In the U.S.A., there is an upswelling of patriotism and a rejection of the rest of the world, drowning, it is thought, in prejudice, fundamentalism, and terror. In the U.K., there has been a spate of apparently racist attacks and murders; the response to September 11^th pillories Muslims, while the response to the Israel-Palestine conflict spurs on antisemitism. Under such circumstances and in the midst of such clouds of darkness, one wonders if any lessons ever get learned. Each one of us has legitimate cause for violence, it seems, and everyone needs to fear what the other might demand.

The multiple sources of all this barely need rehearsing: colonialism, economic exploitation and privation, disenfranchisement and political oppression, the injustices of history, the legacies of domination. Writing the full story of intolerance would take something truly multidimensional—more than simply “multidisciplinary” in the academic sense. It would have to imagine not just the economic, political, and social roots of the passions of nations, ethnic and religious groups, social classes, and individuals; but also the specific histories of each conflict, the exact fantasies that each group provokes in the others with which it has contact and dispute, and the