DAVID SOLWAY: Strikes and Balls: The Israeli Dilemma.

In “How to Do Things with Words,” philosopher J.L. Austin makes a useful distinction between two kinds of speech acts, the referential and the constative. The referential delineates an actual state of affairs; the constative establishes not a quality but a social function. Austin offers an analogy from baseball: the ball may travel knee-high across the center of the plate, a perfect strike, but if the umpire calls “ball,” that’s how it registers on the scoreboard and operates in the game.

For much of the world today, that is, for “umpires” engaged in the production of figments and bent on the reconstruction of reality, an Israeli “strike” will almost always count as a “ball.” The referential has been reconfigured as the constative, despite what a later replay may bring to light. Thus, the Israeli pitcher throws strikes; the Arab batter receives a base on balls. An intimate congruence has been performatively created between the report and the referent minus the slightest hint of the semantic distance that stretches between the two. The former remains parasitic upon the latter.

Read the whole thing.