How Dare You Compare?! Classificatory Battles in Wartime

• In Event: Peace, War, and Social Conflict Panel Session: Culture and Conflict

Abstract

This research project adopts a cultural-cognitivist framework to explore the social phenomenon of culturally “transgressive” analogies—namely, analogies that trigger collective embarrassment, antagonism, objection, and even moral aversion. Employing a formal-sociological analytical approach, I treat socially disruptive moments involving culturally “improper” comparisons as productive sites for tracing the taken-for-granted—but often unattended—classification orders deemed “proper.” I analyze the intense and multifaceted public discourse surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—particularly in light of the recent (2023-2025) war, evolving crises, and ongoing catastrophe—as a tragically rich and revealing case of cultural struggle over comparison-making. Using textual, visual, and discursive evidence, my comparative analysis encompasses a wide range of cultural manifestations of social tensions and controversies provoked by socially tabooed analogies, such as culturally “immoral” symmetries between Palestinian and Israeli groups, publicly “forbidden” associations between present and past events (e.g., the Holocaust or the Nakba), and socially “outrageous” comparisons between contemporary processes and generalized structures of power (e.g., the forms of “the pogrom” and “the ghetto”, or the concepts of “genocide,” “apartheid”). Analyzing the socio-mental struggle, burden, and anxiety that culturally taboo analogies impose on actors, I propose that such analogies critically challenge the ostensibly logical and semi-neutral coding of similarity and difference, confronting us with a view of the very resemblance between presumably dissimilar objects. I identify and examine two prominent socio-mental patterns that social actors use against such “classificatory threats”: (1) “siding”—through which conceived differences (e.g., between social groups, activities, historical narratives) are dichotomized, and (2) “exceptionalism”—under which objects (e.g., the Holocaust) become incomparable and incommensurable. I critically discuss the ways in which these socio-mental mechanisms effectively reaffirm and essentialize categorical difference and conceptual distance, while rendering the view of a “common ground” irrelevant and invalid—or even offensive.

Author

• Hamutal (Tali) Jaffe-Dax, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem