RUTHFULLY YOURS

Some two dozen well-known novelists are writing a book about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank that will lack context, ignore reality, give Palestinians a pass for their terror and Jew-hating, and do nothing to end the very occupation they deplore.

The occupation is “the most grievous injustice I have ever seen in my life … the worst thing I have ever seen, just purely in terms of injustice,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Jewish author Michael Chabon said after touring the West Bank city of Hebron in late April with his wife, the novelist Amy Ayelet Waldman – who are jointly leading the project to produce the book next year. Perhaps Chabon’s led a sheltered life, for the occupation in Hebron and elsewhere in the West Bank hardly compares to humanitarian horror in North Korea; political suppression in China, Russia and Cuba; and the lack of fundamental human rights across the Arab world.

Or perhaps it hasn’t occurred to Chabon, Waldman and the other esteemed novelists who include Mario Vargas Llosa, Geraldine Brooks and Dave Eggers – all of whom have visited the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or Gaza or will do so in the coming weeks – that they wouldn’t be allowed to investigate human rights in any of the aforementioned countries due to their autocratic rule.

But let’s set aside the writers’ naivete and take them at their word. “We decided,” Chabon and Waldman wrote in announcing the project in February, “to mark the 50th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank by editing a volume of essays by notable international writers on topics involving life in the Palestinian territories, free of cant… [to] allow readers to understand the situation in Palestine-Israel in a new way, through human narrative, rather than the litany of grim destruction we see on the news.”

The writers are working with Breaking the Silence, a controversial group of Israeli soldiers and veterans who discuss their service in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Their joint goal is simple: end the occupation. They hope that the writers will, as Breaking the Silence’s Yuli Novak put it, “touch the hearts of many people, both in Israel and internationally, in convincing them of the necessity to end it.”

Recently, the attorneys general of a number of states have launched an effort to use the RICO anti–​organized-crime statute to prosecute opponents of climate-change alarmism. This is nothing less than an all-out attack on science.

There are several vital issues involved here, involving not only substance, but, even more important, process. Let’s start with the latter.

Science is not a collection of facts; it is a process of discovery. Science, alongside its sister, conscience, is based on the signature Western individualist belief that there is a fundamental property of the human mind that, when presented with sufficient information, is able to distinguish right from wrong, justice from injustice, truth from untruth. Matters of science must therefore be determined by reason, not by force. To attempt to prevail in a scientific dispute through the use of force is equivalent to the use of a gun to prevail in a courtroom, or, for that matter, of rape to prevail in courtship. It is nothing less than a criminal rejection of a basic principle of our civilization.

It is also prima facie evidence that the case requiring such enforcement is severely defective. No valid scientific theory has ever required the use of police powers to prevail. No Ptolemaist was ever burned at the stake by Copernicans, nor did the relativity theorists ever find the need to round up the hard-core Newtonians or Etherite dead-enders. Even such counterintuitive theories as quantum mechanics and the Big Bang have done just fine without the assistance of Gestapo raids directed against their detractors. In the courtroom of science, if you have the facts on your side, you don’t need a gun — and juries would be well advised to distrust the case of those parties who choose to use weapons to silence adversarial witnesses.

The United States was born out of a revolution against, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, an “arbitrary government” that put men on trial “for pretended offences” and “abolish[ed] the Free System of English laws.” Brave men and women stood up to that oppressive government, and this, the greatest democracy of them all, one that is governed by the rule of law and not by men, is the product.

Some of our states have forgotten this founding principle and are acting less like Jefferson and Adams and more like George III. A group of Democratic attorneys general has announced it intends to criminally investigate oil and gas companies that have disputed the science behind man-made global warming. Backed by green-energy interests and environmentalist lobbying groups, the coalition has promised to use intrusive investigations, costly litigation, and criminal prosecutions to silence critics of its climate-change agenda. Pretended offenses, indeed.

We won’t be joining this coalition, and we hope that those attorneys general who have joined will disavow it. Healthy debate is the lifeblood of American democracy, and global warming has inspired one of the major policy debates of our time. That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.

Sadly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this tactic of advancing the climate-change agenda by any means necessary. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is a particularly noteworthy example. This EPA regulation, one of the most ambitious ever proposed, will shutter coal-fired power plants, significantly increase the price of electricity for American consumers, and enact by executive fiat the very same cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions that Congress has rejected.