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July 6, 2002
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace
Process
Todd May
Independence and
Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The
Uncommon Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The
Death of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking Down on
Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An
Alternative to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and
a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public Schools Under
Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil, the Workers'
Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The
Wedding Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing the
Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of
Resolution 242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death, Juries and
Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething with
Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The
Pledge v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers as
Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
June 27, 2002
Ralph Nader
Reclaiming Our
Commons
Neve Gordon
Jerusalem Under
Attack
Robert Jensen
Alternative
Futures
David Vest
Darryl
Kile's Great Day
Gary Leupp
The Loya
Jirga Joke
Rahul Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership; Calls for Fair Elections
June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
Bush Speechwriter
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The
RIAA, Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F-Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The
Only Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
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July
6, 2002
What's So Bad About
Israel?
by Michael Neumann
It's
hard to say what's so bad about Israel, and its defenders--having nothing
better to use--have seized on this. Some do so soberly, like Harpers
publisher John R. MacArthur, who thinks Israel comes off no worse than the
Russians in Chechnya, and much better than the Americans in Vietnam
(Toronto Globe and Mail, May 13th, 2002). Others do so defiantly. True,
Israel has taken the land of harmless people, killed innocent civilians,
tortured prisoners, bulldozed houses, destroyed crops, yada yada yada. Who
cares? What else is new?
I completely sympathize with this point of view. The
appetite for world-class atrocity may be adolescent, but it belongs to an
adolescence that many of us never outgrow. The facts are disappointing.
Even compared with post-Nazi monsters like Pol Pot or Saddam Hussein, the
Israelis have killed very few people; their tortures and oppression are
boring. How could these mediocre crimes compete for our attention with
whatever else is on TV?
They couldn't; in fact they are designed not to do
so. Yet Israel is a growing evil whose end is not in sight. Its outlines
have become clearer as times have changed.
Until sometime after the Six-Day War in 1967,
Israel's sins were unspectacular, at least from a cynic's perspective.
Israel was born from an understandable desire of a persecuted people for
security. Jews immigrated to Palestine; acquired land by fair means or
foul, provoked violent reactions. There ensued a cycle of violence in
which the Jews distinguished themselves in at least one impeccably
documented and truly disgusting massacre at Deir Yassin, and probably many
more that Jewish forces succeeded in concealing. The new state accorded
full rights only to its Jewish inhabitants, and defeated its Arab
opponents both in battle and in a propaganda campaign that effectively
concealed Israeli racism and aggression. It was said then, as now: what's
so bad about that? The answer is, nothing. Of course the perpetrators of
these crimes deserve no state, but only punishment: what else is new?
Isn't this the normal way that states are born?
Israel's pre-1967 crimes, then, are not a part of
its special evil, though they did much to create it. The past was
glorified, not exorcised. Both Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir,
indisputably responsible for the worst pre-1967 brutalities, went on to
become prime minister: the poison of the early years is still working its
way through Middle East politics. But the big change, post-1967, was
Israel's choice of war over peace.
Sometime after 1967, Israel's existence became
secure. It didn't seem so during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, but soon it
became clear that Israel would never again be caught with its guard down.
Its vigilance has guaranteed, for the foreseeable future, that Arab
nations pose no serious threat. As the years pass, Israel's military
advantage only increases, to the point that no country in the world would
care to confront it. At the same time, and to an increasing extent,
Palestinians have abandoned any real hope of retaking pre-1967 Israeli
territory, and are willing to settle for the return of the occupied
territories.
In this context, the Israeli settlement policy,
quite apart from its terrible effect on Palestinians, is outrageous for
what it represents: a careful, deliberate rejection of peace, and a
declaration of the fixed intention to dispossess the Palestinians until
they have nothing left. And something else has changed. Israel could
claim, as a matter of self-interest if not of right, that it needed the
pre-1967 territory as a homeland for the Jews. It cannot say this about
the settlements, which exist not from any real need for anything, but for
three reasons: to give some Israelis a cheap deal on housing, to conform
to the messianic expectations of Jewish fundamentalists, and, not least,
as a vengeful, relentless, sadistically gradual expression of hatred for
the defeated Arab enemy. In short, by the mid-1970s, Israel's crimes were
no longer the normal atrocities of nation-building nor an excessive sort
of self-defense. They represented a cold-blooded, calculated, indeed an
eagerly embraced choice of war over peace, and an elaborate plan to seek
out those who had fled the misery of previous confrontations, to make
certain that their suffering would continue.
So Israel stands out among other unpleasant nations
in the depth of its commitment to gratuitous violence and nastiness: this
you expect to find among skinheads rather than nations. But wait! there's
more! It is not just that times have changed. It also has to do with the
position Israel occupies in these new times.
Though we might wish otherwise, the political or
historical 'location' of a crime can be a big contributor to its moral
status. It is terrible that there are vestiges of slavery in Abidjan and
Mauritania. We often reproach ourselves for not getting more upset about
such goings-on, as if the lives of these far-off non-white people were
unimportant. And maybe we should indeed be ashamed of ourselves, but this
is not the whole story. There is a difference between the survival of evil
in the world's backwaters and its emergence in the world's spotlight. If
some smug new corporation, armed with political influence and snazzy
lawyers, set up a slave market in Times Square, that would represent an
even greater evil than the slave market in Abidjan. This is not because
humans in New York are more important than humans in Abidjan, but because
what happens in New York is more influential and more representative of
the way the world is heading. American actions do much to set standards
worldwide; the actions of slave-traders in Abidjan do not. (The same sort
of contrast applies to the Nazi extermination camps: part of their
specialness lies, not in the numbers killed or the bureaucracy that
managed the killing, but in the fact that nothing like such killing has
ever occurred in a nation so on the 'cutting edge' of human development.)
Cultural domination has its responsibilities.
What Israel does is at the very center of the world
stage, not only as a focus of media attention, but also as representative
of Western morality and culture. This could not be plainer from the
constant patter about how Israel is a shining example of democracy,
resourcefulness, discipline, courage, toughness, determination, and so on.
And nothing could be more inappropriate than the complaints that Israel is
being 'held to a higher standard'. It is not being held to one; it
aggressively and insolently appropriates it. It plants its flag on some
cultural and moral summit. Israel is the ultimate victim-state of the
ultimate people--the noblest, the most long-suffering, the most
persecuted, the most intelligent, the Chosen Ones. The reason Israel is
judged by a higher standard is its blithe certainty, accepted by
generations of fawning Westerners, that it exists at a higher
standard.
Other countries, of course, have put on similar
airs, but at least their crimes could be represented as a surprising
deviation from noble principles. When people try to understand how Germans
could become Nazis, or the French, torturers in Algeria, or the Americans,
murderers at My Lai, it is always possible to ask--what went wrong? How
could these societies so betray their civilized roots and high ideals? And
sometimes plausible attempts were made to associate this betrayal with
some fringe elements of the society--disgruntled veterans, dispossessed
younger sons, provincial reactionaries, trailer trash. If these societies
had gone wrong, it was a matter of perverted values, suppressed forces,
aberrant tendencies, deformed dreams. With Israel, there is no question of
such explanations. Its atrocities belong to its mainstream, its
traditions, its founding ideology. They are performed by its heroes, not
its kooks and losers. Israel has not betrayed anything. On the contrary,
its actions express a widely espoused, perhaps dominant version of its
ideals. Israel is honored, often as not, for the very same tribal pride
and nation-building ambitions that fire up its armies and its settlers.
Its crimes are front and center, not only on the world stage, but also on
its own stage.
What matters here is not Israel's arrogance, but its
stature. Israel stands right in the spotlight and crushes an entire
people. It defies international protests and resolutions as no one else
can. Only Israel, not, say, Indonesia or even the US, dares proclaim: "Who
are you to preach morality to us? We are morality incarnate!" Indonesia,
or Mauritania, or Iraq do not welcome delegations of happy North American
schoolchildren, host prestigious academic conferences, go down in
textbooks as a textbook miracle. Characters on TV sitcoms do not go off to
find themselves in the Abidjan slave markets as they do on Israel's
kibbutzim.
Israel banks on this. Its tactics seem nicely tuned
to inflict the most harm with the least damage to its image. They include
deliberately messy surgical strikes, halting ambulances, uprooting
orchards and olive groves, destroying urban sanitation, curfews, road
closures, holding up food until it spoils, allocating five times the water
to settlers as to the people whose land was confiscated, and attacks on
educational or cultural facilities. Its most effective strategies are
minimalist, as when Palestinians have to sit and wait at checkpoints for
hours in sweltering cars, risking a bullet if they get out to stretch
their legs, waiting to work, to get medical care, to do anything in life
that requires movement from one place to another, as likely to be turned
back as let through, and certain to suffer humiliation or worse. Israel
has pioneered the science of making life unlivable with as little violence
as possible. The Palestinians are not merely provoked into reacting; they
have no rational choice but to react. If they didn't, things would just
get worse faster, with no hope of relief. Israel is an innovator in the
search for a squeaky-clean sadism.
The worse things get for the Palestinians, the more
violently they must defend themselves, and the more violently Israel can
respond. Whenever possible, Israel sees to it that the Palestinians take
each new step in the escalation. The hope is that, at some point, Israel
will be able to kill many tens of thousands, all in the name of
self-defense.
And subtly but surely, things are changing still
further. Israel is starting to let the mask drop, not from its already
public intentions, but from its naked strength. It no longer deigns to
conceal its sophisticated nuclear arsenal. It begins to supply the world
with almost as much military technology as it consumes. And it no longer
sees any need to be discreet about its defiance of the United States'
request for moderation: Israel is happy to humiliate the 'stupid
Americans' outright. As it plunders, starves and kills, Israel does not
lurk in the world's back-alleys. It says, "Look at us. We're taking these
people's land, not because we need it, but because we feel like it. We're
putting religious nuts all over it because they help cleanse the area of
these Arab lice who dare to defy us. We know you don't like it and we
don't care, because we don't conform to other people's standards. We set
the standards for others."
And the standards it sets continue to decline.
Israel Shahak and others have documented the rise of fundamentalist Jewish
sects that speak of the greater value of Jewish blood, the specialness of
Jewish DNA, the duty to kill even innocent civilians who pose a potential
danger to Jews, and the need to 'redeem' lands lying far beyond the
present frontiers of Israeli control. Much of this happens beneath the
public surface of Israeli society, but these racial ideologies exert a
strong influence on the mainstream. So far, they have easily prevailed
over the small, courageous Jewish opposition to Israeli crimes. The
Israeli government can afford to let the fanatical race warriors go
unchecked, because it knows the world would not dare connect their
outrages to any part of Judaism (or Zionism) itself. As for the
dissenters, don't they just show what a wonderfully democratic society
Israel has produced?
As Israel sinks lower, it corrupts the world that
persists in admiring it. Thus Amnesty International's military adviser,
David Holley, with a sort of honest military bonhomie, tells the world
that the Israelis have "a very valid point" when they refuse to allow a UN
investigative team into Jenin: "You do need a soldier's perspective to
say, well, this was a close quarter battle in an urban environment,
unfortunately soldiers will make mistakes and will throw a hand grenade
through the wrong window, will shoot at a twitching curtain, because that
is the way war is."(*) We quite understand: Israel is a respectable
country with respectable defense objectives, and mistakes will be made.
Soldier to soldier, we see that destroying swarthy 'gunmen' who crouch in
wretched buildings is a legitimate enterprise, because it serves the
higher purpose of clearing away the vermin who resist the implantation of
superior Jewish DNA throughout the occupied territories. It is this
ability to command respect despite the most public outrages against
humanity that makes Israel so exceptionally bad. Not that it needs to be
any worse than 'the others': that would be more than bad enough. But
Israel does not only commit its crimes; it also legitimates
them.
That is not a matter of abstract moral argument, but
of political acceptance and respectability. As the world slowly tries to
emerge from barbarism--for instance, through the human rights movements
for which Israel has such contempt-- Israel mockingly drags it back by
sanctifying the very doctrines of racial vengeance that more civilized
forces condemn. Israel brings no new evils into the world. It merely
rehabilitates old ones, as an example for others to emulate and
admire.
Michael Neumann is
a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. He can
be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca
(*)BBC, "Expert
weighs up Jenin 'massacre'", Monday, 29 April, 2002, 14:31 GMT 15:31
UK,
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