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The Bigger Picture
7.7.02
Israel seeks to legitimize ethnic cleansing/genocide/Fwd
** What's wrong with Israel? EVERYTHING!
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http://www.rense.com/general26/whatsso.htm
What's So Bad About Israel?
By Michael Neumann
Professor, Trent University, Ontario, Canada
CounterPunch.org
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, indeedan
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 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann0706.html
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