- 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
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- http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann0706.html
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