Always listen to the dissenters
Half a century ago, Israel’s victory over aggressive Arab nations in the Six Day War established it as surprisingly powerful. But at the higher level of the Israel Defense Forces, that victory also created a superiority complex that led, six years later, to bitter disillusion.
In October 1973, on Yom Kippur, a sacred day in Judaism, Egypt and Syria together launched a surprise attack. Caught unawares, with their reserves not yet in place, the Israelis were unable to defend their positions. Almost 3,000 Israelis lost their lives before the invasion was halted, and many others were permanently injured.
It was a national scandal, soon marked by demonstrations against the government. “How could this happen?” the citizens wanted to know. In the streets, people spat at Moshe Dayan, the minister of defence. The truth, as a judicial inquiry revealed, was that senior generals and intelligence officers had all discussed the possibility of an Egyptian attack and had collectively decided it couldn’t possibly happen. Israel was too strong and Egypt too weak. Besides, Egyptian soldiers were incompetent and unenthusiastic, according to IDF officers.
That was the consensus, and anyone who challenged it was derided or ignored. And even as Egypt clearly prepared f or war ( while claiming they were merely conducting exercises), and even as spies in Egypt reported on plans for an offensive, the general staff stuck to its iron- bound opinion. Prime Minister Golda Meir feared a war was coming but she was talked out of it by her generals. Among the results of the Yom Kippur War was the end of her career.
In the view of William Kaplan, the lesson of that war lies in the way the Israeli generals failed to open their minds to reality. They needed, and spectacularly lacked, a dissenter among them who could question their view that Egypt would never do anything as reckless as picking a fight with Israel.
Kaplan is a Toronto lawyer, labour arbiter and author. He’s written, among other books, two volumes on the scandals surrounding Brian Mulroney, a study of the Seamen’s Union of Canada, and an account of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and their struggle for civil rights. He’s now set out to tell readers why we should respect and even cherish the act of dissent. His often persuasive arguments are contained in a book with an ungainly title: Why Dissent Matters ( Because Some People See Things the Rest of Us Miss), published by McGill- Queen’s University Press.
Though he’s approaching dissent as a general concept, he mainly avoids abstract theory and conducts his arguments as a series of narratives, usually concerning events most of us find easy to understand. He begins with the Yom Kippur War.
He realizes that dissent can often be messy and inconvenient. It may stall our favourite project. It may disturb conclusions that other people, especially senior people, have spent years accepting. It often involves upending principles that many cling to for religious reasons. And of course, the dissenter can be wrong.
Yet dissenters have often changed society simply by frequently stating their convictions and finding persuasive arguments for the changes they recommend. Since the 1950s Canada has radically altered laws and practices on abortion, homosexuality, medically assisted death, women’s rights and same- sex marriage. In each case, this required dissenters to raise fundamental issues in ways that many people c onsidered i mmoral or even outlandish. That kind of often brave dissent has transformed our moral and social landscape.
Kaplan takes us carefully through a series of changes wrought by dissenters. He cites the case of Frances Kelsey, a Canadian doctor and scientist working for the Food and Drug Administration ( FDA) in the U. S. She faced down a pharmaceutical company that wanted to market a drug, thalidomide, already in use in many countries. She was expected to rubber-stamp it but just kept turning it down, always asking for evidence showing it was harmless. By doggedly stalling, she saved many Americans from being born with grave defects.
Rachel Carson, a magazine writer, decided that widely used pesticides were harming birds and wild animals. She was treated as a kook by pesticide manufacturers and farmers, but her arguments created a fresh consciousness of emerging environmental disasters. It turned into a vast movement and gave her a place in history. Kaplan goes so far in his admiration for dissent that he even admires the feelings behind Occupy Wall Street. As he says, we don’t need to do what dissenters want but we should listen to what they say.
In an interview, Kaplan was asked whether Donald Trump, who started off challenging the political establishments, could be called a dissenter. He answered that Trump’s promise to disrupt the status quo is more sizzle than steak. Kaplan believes that dissent is often conservative and essentially responsible, a way not to destroy institutions but to fix them. “That’s not Donald Trump,” he adds. “He’s not about making our society better or fixing it. He’s more about tearing it down.”