In an interview with Brian Williams, concerning the war between Israel and Gaza, Netanyahu referred to the expression, “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” This is a line we associate with Westerns, especially those starring John Wayne, even though there is no Western where that line is actually delivered. It is like the expression “they went that-a-way,” which never was said in a Western (unless it be in a recent parody), or the trope of the cowboy riding off into the sunset at the end of the movie, which never occurred in a Western either. But that does not matter. We associate such expressions and images with Westerns, and that presumably was Netanyahu’s intent, to justify the actions of the Israelis by appealing to the positive associations we have with Westerns in general, and with John Wayne movies in particular. Quite apart from the moral issues of the war itself, the allusion to Western movies was unsettling, and it may have been a mistake on Netanyahu’s part to utter this phrase from a public relations standpoint.
First of all, there is something a little disturbing when anyone compares what he is doing to stuff that happens in the movies or in a television show. We would not want to hear a police detective justify shooting a suspect by referring to a Dirty Harry movie, or the head of the CIA justify enhanced interrogation techniques by alluding to Jack Bauer. And you certainly would feel a little uneasy if your primary care physician compared himself to Dr. House. Such identifications make us think of Don Quixote, with the difference being that the man of La Mancha was harmless. By comparing himself to John Wayne, Netanyahu makes us apprehensive regarding his mental state.
Given the tautologous form of “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” we might suspect it was something Yogi Berra once said. But as with most of his sayings that seem like either tautologies or contradictions, we can usually figure out the meaningful assertion that was intended. In this case, the idea is to justify a particular action by reference to a general principle: A particular man must do what men in general must do. But even in that form, something of the tautology remains. It expresses a determination to do something that cannot be reasoned with. In the case of John Wayne, we always understood that real men are not good at giving reasons for what they do—they are just good at doing it. That was sufficient for the morally straightforward situations John Wayne usually found himself in. In a morally complex situation, however, we prefer an open mind and a temperate attitude.
More problematic from a public relations point of view is that the Westerns we associate this expression with have long since disappeared from the cinema. And one of the things we find in a lot of John Wayne Westerns is Indians. Now, Indians are not Native Americans. Native Americans are the peace-loving indigenous people who are close to Nature, at one with the environment, full of shape-shifting spirituality, whom we stole this land from and treated atrociously. Indians, on the other hand, are vicious savages that scalp men, rape women, and subject their captives to horrible tortures. Unable to hold their liquor, they were always going off the reservation, impeding our Manifest Destiny. The last time I saw Indians in a Western was in The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973), where they tried to rape a white woman. Since then, the only natives in Westerns are Native Americans. If anyone in a recent Western gets raped or scalped, it always turns out that it was white men who did it.
By invoking the Westerns that have Indians in them, Netanyahu is inadvertently inviting us to compare the Palestinians with the Indians, suggesting that they are inferior savages who must be treated brutally because they just do not understand that God wanted the Jews to live in the Promised Land, their version of Manifest Destiny. What we in America want is for the Palestinians to be thought of as Native Americans: basically good people who are living on the reservations of Gaza or the West Bank, whose land was regrettably taken away from them at a time when white men thought they had the right to do such things, but it is too late to give it back now.
So, instead of saying things like, “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” Netanyahu might consider following the American example. As soon as some kind of ceasefire is in place, he should rename the Palestinians. Every twenty years or so, we rename all the groups in this country that have suffered discrimination, and then watch carefully to see who is enough of a cretin not to adopt the new nomenclature. In this way, we induce people to have proper thoughts about such groups. Perhaps he might begin by calling the Palestinians “Arab-Israelis.” Next, the Israelis need to start producing movies portraying the Arab-Israelis as peace-loving people. These same movies could show that when Hamas and Hezbollah kill some Jews or launch rockets into Israel, they are really a bunch of Europeans with German accents dressed up to look like Arab-Israelis. And with some imaginative hermeneutics, the Palestinians could be persuaded that Allah really does not disapprove of gambling after all, and they could improve their economic situation by opening a few casinos.
All that will take time, of course, but for the present, it will behoove Netanyahu to quit suggesting he is John Wayne in a classical American Western. It could have been worse, though. He might have quoted Slim Pickens.