my apologies, in advance, for posting on this thread after the discussion has closed. i came across this note and the appended comments more-or-less randomly, and i know only a few of you. but what i've read has perturbed me enough to respond (briefly, i hope, and to only a few points). [i don't want to broach the zany contention that "war is socialism", and the associated claims--if you play games with definitions, you can of course "prove" anything]
--------------
the question of terror and counter-terror.
emily argues that hamas has purposefully killed innocent civilians--these "thousands of innocent civilians killed in malls, restaurants, and night clubs"1--whereas israel, presumably, is engaged only in precise, targeted, defensive and defensible killings. similarly, will repeats, as fact, the thesis that "hamas was targeting civilians and israel is not."
this is a tired argument--especially hackneyed in these days of occupations launched for liberation, and resistance branded, unequivocally, as terror. in the case of israel/palestine, this line of argument is particularly disingenuous. while it's of course true that hamas has carried out suicide bombings inside israel (a reprehensible tactic it stopped in 2004,2 but has allegedly re-committed to in the aftermath of these barbarous bombings), the kind of distinction it seeks to establish between israeli and palestinian violence is simply inadmissable.
in the vain hope of keeping this brief, i want to make only two points: factual, and ethical
first, facts of violence:
CIVILIAN DEATHS
since the second intifada began, the statistics are as follows (from b'tselem)3:
- palestinians killed by israeli security forces: 4781 in OPT, 69 in israel
- (palestinian minors killed by israeli secruity forces: 952 in OPT, 3 in israel)
- israeli civilians killed by palestinians: 237 in OPT, 490 in israel
this is a pattern that has become awfully familiar to observers of today's war on terror. the civilized pursues the barbarian, screaming his devotion to “democracy, freedom, markets.” yet, when the dust settles, we wake to learn that, somehow, the civilized have conspired to demolish far more lives, economies, homes, cities than the barbarians—for an example closer to home, review the history of the US sieges of fallujah.4
as my man frantz fanon once put it (roughly), in reference to the crimes of european imperialism, the historical record relates an “avalanche of murders carried out by those who never stopped talking of man.” (matt mentioned the israeli invasion of lebanon in 2006, as well he should have: the numbers from that war were no less jarring—“more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and a small but unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead, as well as 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians.”)5
ROCKET ATTACKS
all this hoopla about rocket attacks is astonishingly orwellian. they are continuously invoked as the pretext for this and similarly depraved methods of punishing gaza. yet, from 2001-2008, primitive homemade qassams have killed 15 israelis. (yes, 15!).6 and from when the cease fire began in june 2008 until the day that these bombings started, not one israeli had died because of rockets launched from gaza.
THE OCCUPATION AND THE EMBARGO
much more significantly, the daily lot of the average gazan exposes the limits of the all-too-common reflex to fetishize, in an ethical sense, forms of overt “violence.” we need to remember that the 1.5 million-strong population of gaza has been subjected to a crippling, inhuman embargo for the past 18 months. is this not “violence” of a staggeringly immoral, “targeted” sort? (it goes without saying that it's a war crime: quite aside from the illegality of israel's retaining control over a territory it acquired in war, it clearly constitutes collective punishment)
some numbers, excerpted from this devastating account by sara roy:7
“According to Oxfam only 137 trucks of food were allowed into Gaza in November. This means that an average of 4.6 trucks per day entered the strip compared to an average of 123 in October this year and 564 in December 2005. (...) Between 5 November and 30 November, only 23 trucks arrived, around 6 per cent of the total needed; during the week of 30 November it received 12 trucks, or 11 per cent of what was required. There were three days in November when UNRWA ran out of food, with the result that on each of these days 20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are entirely dependent on it. “
palestinians, as abunimah wrote recently, have died “silent” deaths as a result of the embargo: “for want of basic medications: insulin, cancer treatment, products for dialysis prohibited from reaching them by Israel.“8
hamas was responding to the israelis' unwillingness to lift this blockade (which they quite rightly called a violation of the terms of the june agreement),9 when they elected not to renew this ceasefire.10 speaking in november, john ging, the head of the UN agency for palestinian refugees, had himself stated plainly that the “people of Gaza [had] not benefit[ed]” from the first five months of the truce.11
second, ethics and analytics of violence:
at times, the people who have commented on this note have held fast to the aforementioned distinctions between the violence of the israeli state and the violence of the assorted palestinian groups (“israel doesn't target civilians deliberately, whereas the palestinian resistance does”). i want to suggest that this is a confused contention, both ethically and analytically.
ethically: it is misleading, at best, to make an ethical distinction between the kind of destruction that the israeli state is visiting upon the population of gaza, and a suicide bombing/rocket attack. the dropping of bombs in populated areas, in the knowledge that civilians will inevitably be killed, is no less reprehensible, morally, than blowing oneself up in a public, civilian place. the usual suggestion that there is no “intent” to kill in the former case masks a far more sinister willingness to sanction the deaths of innocents—as nir rosen writes, “when you drop bombs on populated areas knowing there will be some "collateral" civilian damage, but accepting it as worth it, then it is deliberate.”12 (see ex-bombardier howard zinn's letter to the NYT, which makes the same argument)13
indeed, this is embedded in the genealogy of air bombing, as a tactic—which, in mamdani's words, “originated as a method of war considered fit for use only against uncivilized adversaries,”14 precisely because it was obvious that the victims would, overwhelmingly, be the populace being bombarded. something similar is at work when emily cites golda meir's golden racist moment (arabs don't care about their babies!). ”it's okay for bombs to drop on these hordes, they don't really “feel,” anyway.” (incidentally, matt cites a UN estimate that 1/5 of those killed have been civilians; the palestine center for human rights, which has an extensive chronicle of where and what has been bombed and when on its website, reports instead that the “vast majority” are civilians).15
analytically: if there is a moral equivalence between palestinian suicide bombing and israeli aerial bombing, there remains a monumental analytical distinction between palestinian and israeli violence, in general. this is where i disagree with the nonviolent spirit of bobo, seth, and matt's agreement to criticize, unequivocally and equally, all manifestations of violence in this conflict. not only does this fall prey to the early fetishization of “overt” violence (after all, matt was moved to write this note only after these latest massacres—not four days ago at the height of the no less “violent” israeli embargo of gaza), but it also tempts us into committing an analytical fallacy: namely, the suggestion that this is a conflict between equals. i hope no one needs reminding that this remains a confrontation between a hyper-modern military juggernaut (wielded by a settler state) and, more or less, the indigenous population it occupies. any analysis of the violence must take these historical, sociological facts as its premise.
in fact, not much was said about this, perhaps because it's taboo in the US (even if uncontroversial most elsewhere) to suggest that the zionist project is colonial, in form and inspiration. (remember theodore herzl, in his 1896 “the jewish state”, speaking about settling in palestine: ”we should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”16) seth said something about remaining a believer in the “israeli state”. but if that means a commitment to the project of israel as a “jewish” national home, at the price of forever dispossessing the original inhabitants of that land, i have to ask why. how does someone committed to the ideal of non-violence endorse a project founded on such an awfully “violent” history (on the question of the origins as ethnic cleansing, no serious historians can disagree—ilan pappe makes this case, for example, as i'm sure you know).17
moreover, as ali abunimah's most recent book argues, wouldn't it be preferable, certainly ethically and perhaps even practically, to agitate for a single, multicultural state as an alternative to confessional politics?
--------------
a few, very quick points, which i couldn't work into the narrative above:
(1) matt--you speak of your own unwillingness to comment on what's happening in this "war", given that you're sitting in american suburbia. this, as i interpret it, is part of a commitment to the democratic process. in other words, you see something impositional in your dictating your interpretations of the conflict to those in israel and occupied palestine.
i think, though, that this reluctance to meddle in “their” affairs can beget a much more concrete appraisal of current events. the israeli operation in gaza, after all, is only the latest, most deadly phase of an almost three year-old plot to topple the democratically-elected hamas government.
the plans for this particular assault were hatched before the six-month-old ceasefire even began (read, for example, this piece by chris floyd, who labels the official narrative a “deliberate and damnable lie”)18 it was clearly always in the works—and had little to do with hamas' alleged violations of the terms of the agreement. indeed, as i hope is clear, they were compelled into not renewing it by the intensification of the israeli stranglehold on gaza. (and how this, and/or the pithy rocket attacks, justifies the vaporization of a university,19 police cadets, homes, workshops, and mosques20 is, i hope, beyond all of us).
we all remember the "civil war" of last summer: as per the "Dayton Plan," "jointly coordinated by US Lieutenant-General Keith Dayton and long-time Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan,"21 the hopelessly-compromised abbas and company were supposed to be returned to power. but hamas (itself partly an israeli creation, of course--can you say blowback?)22 seized control of the gaza strip, defying these designs.
how scandalous, no, that your own gov't would organize a covert operation in order to oust a democratically-elected government?
(2) matt wrote somewhere that “Palestine supported Hitler”. what is this even supposed to mean? i looked long and hard for evidence of this, but there's really very little (apart from hackneyed accounts of the mufti's affinity for hitler's “final solution”—never much more than the enemy of my enemy is my friend, i assure you.23 and besides, how do the politics of an aristocratic colonial lackey implicate Palestine, in toto?)
(3) matt and seth keep speaking of their hope that this impasse will be resolved by the arrival of a palestinian gandhi. this argument is misguided. first, it seems to shift blame for the status quo on the failure of the Palestinians to produce a gandhi (i really do not understand this talk of the “ball being in their court”). second, it neglects the existing role of non-violent resistance in palestine24, as well as the israeli state's thoroughgoing repression of it.25 third, it is historically problematic as an analysis of the indian resistance to british rule—gandhi was of course prominent in the independence movement, reviving it in the aftermath of the first world war, but that hardly proves that he and his non-violence “won” independence for india (we still celebrate bhagat singh, don't forget). there are certainly lessons to learn from gandhi, his movement, and his philosophy, but this overly romantic rendering of the freedom struggle is popular largely because it's far more palatable to the powerful (same goes for the US and civil rights: MLK needed his malcom X. not to mention that african-americans in the US have hardly been emancipated!).26
--------------
ok, i think i'll leave it at that. there are a few more things i planned on pointing out, but this is clearly too long already.
in peace,
adaner
--------------
CITATIONS
1the numbers emily suggests are inflated [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hamas_suicide_attacks]
2 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081230.GAZAHAMAS30/TPStory/International
3http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp
4http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=520770
5http://www.jkcook.net/Articles2/0305.htm
6http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Qassam_rocket_attacks
7http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/roy_01_.html
8http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10055.shtml
9http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7462554.stm
10http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1046923.html
11http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9992.shtml
12http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/29/gaza-hamas-israel
13http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/books/review/Letters-t-1.html?_r=2&oref=slogin
14Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004), page 7.
15http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/PressR/English/2008/121-2008.html
16http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Jewish_State/The_Jewish_Question
17http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/ref-nakba.html
18http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1666-shock-awe-and-lies-the-truth-behind-the-israeli-attack-on-gaza.html.
19http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/Israel-continues-bombing-of-.4826836.jp
20http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=263604&version=1&template_id=37&parent_id=17
21http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9434.shtml
22http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10456.htm
23http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1998/1948/362_mssr.htm
24http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article7005.shtml
25http://inpursuitofjustice.wordpress.com/2008/07/31/another-child-shot-dead-at-wall-protest/
26http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=811&Itemid=34
4 comments:
Thank you for writing. For what its worth, I just want to acknowledge that I read the entire thing.
-almost completely random reader
I would question a few things:
-How many allegedly civilian deaths in Palestine have truly been civilian? Hamas tends to have far more plain-clothes fighters than Israel (which has none). Not that it excuses everything, but a Hamas policeman is often far more than a traffic cop. You don't generally have training in rocketry and assault weapons before checking traffic.
-An embargo is a form of violence and coercion, and, though I again do not mean to excuse, an embargo kills indirectly. There is, furthermore, no one man you can blame for an embargo, shy of perhaps a few politicians. Killing an 18 year-old soldier out of high school does not exactly strike a direct blow against someone culpable.
-Air bombing was not originated as a racist tactic; the first mass uses were against Britain by the Germans, followed by us against the Germans. It is a messy affair, to be certain, but it can reduce casualties compared to an all-out land assault. Imagine trying to hit Tokyo with Marines as opposed to air raids. Do you suppose more Japanese and Americans would have survived?
-If you wish to accuse me of a "fetish" regarding "overt violence", so be it; I'd say my way prevents the kind of hyper-rationalization and reinterpretation that justifies virtually any violence the word-spinners want it to. For example, do European tariffs against agricultural imports from Africa constitute a type of "subtle violence" that could justify an African farmer's bombing of a hotel in London? I should hope not.
-I can understand why someone would believe Israel ought to exist, but if anything, I should be less sympathetic than you, who readily cites Malcolm X. Identity can, at times, trump recent history as the justification for nationhood. Displacing the original population in 1949 and failing entirely to seek their consent or input was a gross leftover of the ending imperial age, but to an extent, what's done is done. At this point, the Jews need land, as do the Palestinians. Going back to the 1967 borders seems the most expedient and ethical means of resolving the most immediate concerns until more divisive questions like right of return and reparations can be discussed.
-The presence of contingency plans for the possibility of conflict signals readiness, not necessarily committal. What would you have, military plans for war drawn up the Monday before a conflict? Israel was smart enough to acknowledge that Hamas might someday invite conflict and planned accordingly. That's what governments do. And as for the civil war last summer, is it not entirely reasonable to think that Fatah would seek outside help as needed? I do not see conspiracy as much as pragmatism.
-You are excusing Mufti Mohammad Amin al-Husayni far too much. Speaking on Radio Berlin in 1944 after meeting with Hitler and offering to fight the British in exchange for support for a pan-Arab state organized on Fascist principles, he instructed his fellow Arabs: "Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you." Granted, I should not have conflated his view with that of all Palestine, but he made no mistake of his strong support for the Nazi regime as the religious leader of Muslims in Palestine.
-I acknowledge the limits of waiting for a Gandhi and did in debate on the original thread. At times, you need a Gerry Adams, a Malcolm X, a Bhagat Singh, or a Nelson Mandela to pave the way for negotiations. That said, the moral edge is often needed as well. Violent men alone do not tend to forge nations. Even when successful, as in Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, or Kim Il-Sung, they tend to do far more damage than they relieve.
Thank you for providing counterpoints and for your arguments. A worthy dialogue is certainly a good thing.
i apologize it took me so long to reply. i was away from the internet for a few days.
i don't know if it will accomplish very much to keep this discussion going much longer, but of course i feel obligated to respond to your comments. i would also suggest that you re-read my original post (and particularly, that you look again at the links i provided, as i don't think you responded, directly, to the majority of the points i made)
(1) not sure if you're referring to the statistics i provided, via B'tselem, regarding casualties since the second intifadah began, or whether you're writing about the latest air strikes (and now ground invasion)
the former: i supplied also the numbers of palestinian minors that have been killed by israeli security forces since 2000, precisely for this reason--the fact that roughly one out of every five palestinians that has died has been under the age of 18 ought to shed some light on the nature of israel's "counter-terrror" campaigns. (for example: i don't know when you started following the occupation actively, matt, but you may remember "operation defensive shield," from 2002. see here for complete coverage of that demonstration of transparent disregard for international law regarding the targeting of civilian infrastructure, collective punishment, etc., etc.)
the latter: i have already provided you with the link to the report by the palestine center for human rights, which has documented extensively the nature of the targets bombed by israel. you have mentioned the example of policemen—setting aside your justification for targeting policemen (though i confess my ignorance wrt the content of the police training programs in occupied gaza, i would urge you to cite these claims when you make them; this aside from the fact that being a policeman in occupied gaza is, as you note, certainly not like being a policeman anywhere else in the world, precisely for the reasons made evident by days of israeli bombing), the logic of bombing police stations certainly violates israel's legal obligation not to collectively punish the palestinian population. like police stations anywhere in the world, these in occupied gaza are located in the middle of heavily-frequented civilian areas. so, for example, to take only the first example from the PCHR report: when israel “fired several missiles at the Palestinian security compound” in the center of Rafah, “concentrating” on the police station, though the “targeted buildings were destroyed”, “12 Palestinians were killed, including a child, a preacher, an Imam of a mosque, a physician, a nurse and a lawyer.”
this quite aside from the fact that israel has also targeted homes, workshops, and mosques; justifying these sorts of strikes requires a whole new round of ethical gymnastics. (and, of course, this becomes even more true with the beginning of the ground invasion, as the PCHR (their latest report is here) reports the extensive shelling of invariably civilian areas from the land and the sea). that's not to say that there are no willing gymnasts.
recent testimony from gaza, i hope, makes it clear that none of this is ever as clean-cut as the drum-beaters' vow to drop “good bombs” on “bad people.” i find your willingness to rationalize the insanity of these massacres in the name of hamas' supposed intransigence deeply incoherent. it is admirable, of course, that you, however tentatively, take a political position unfamiliar to others of your stripes in the US (i.e., opposing israel's actions), but—as i said before—basing this squarely in a knee-jerk opposition to “all” violence obscures the political, historical, and sociological facts behind this invasion and resistance to it. without a proper appraisal of that general context, the utility of this appeal to “non-violence” is dubious, at best.
more on this later, though.
(2) i do not understand your point. we agree that an embargo, for all its indirectness, affects, in a violent and coercive way, the palestinians who are its targets. i see no reason why this makes it less reprehensible than the firing of homemade rockets (indeed, if you think this is worthy of further discussion, i'd be glad to argue that it is far more reprehensible).
moreoever, your point about assigning “blame” doesn't seem very germane to the issue-at-hand (i think here i might be misunderstanding your point)--i'm sure if either one of us had the resources/time to do the research, we could quite easily construct a genealogy of the embargo as a tactic, as well as a chronology and “who's who” of its implementation. (if you mean this in a different sense—as in you can't identify “one person” who can be held responsible for the embargo, then i would suggest that this is true of most acts of overt “violence” in this conflict (bombings, artillery fire, etc.--who do you implicate? the aforementioned brain-washed 18-yr old or the military man pulling the strings?)) perhaps you want to discuss this further; i myself think that this endless stream of thought-experiments distracts from the substance and history of the operation and occupation.
(NB, i never suggested that “killing an 18-yr old out of high school strikes a direct blow against someone culpable.” however, one could easily make the argument that insofar as the enforcers of the embargo are the israeli state, and this 18-yr old is enlisted in the army that defends that state and its aims, killing him/her is legitimate. if you find this rationale indefensible, than i would return you to your explanation of israeli's decision to target ordinary policemen, where i could quite easily supply a similar narrative (“a young, unemployed man in an impoverished land joins the police in search of regular pay and israel bombs his graduation ceremony...”))
(3) the point was not so much that air-bombing is a “racist” tactic, but rather that efforts to justify it mobilize dehumanizing narratives about the population-being-bombarded. collateral damage must be explained and rationalized—in the case of this conflict, talk of “human shields,” lingering continuum(s) of civilianity all serve this purpose. similarly, to respond to your invocation of WWII, i guarantee that you'll find no shortage of sincere efforts to justify the bombing of civilian centers (on both the axis and allied side) that, similarly, seek to explain away the massacres of civilians by suggesting their guilt or their unworthiness. (incidentally, the same book i referenced suggests, contrary to your claims, that the “first systematic aerial bombing was carried out by the British Royal Air Force against the Somalis in 1920.“)
i'm not sure if you think that the discussion of ground invasions vs. aerial bombardment is still material to this argument (given that israel, in gaza, is engaged in both), but a few points on this question. first, one must remember that WWII, which (as you imply) marks the ascendancy of air bombing as a central tactic in modern (and especially American) warfare, was also a war in which the “a substantial majority of the dead [50 to 70 million people!] were noncombatants.” (see here for a very comprehensive, excellent article on the history of aerial bombardment, US use of it, and implications for civilians, etc.) while your hypothetical is likely true (that ground invasions of cities are likely to be messy, costly, and impractical), it is hardly the only (or dominant) reason that armies pursue warfare from the air. instead, as this article makes clear, this option is attractive for other, far-less-”noble” reasons (principally that it comes at minimal cost to your own troops, and inflicts maximum damage, psychological and physical, on the enemy). selden, i think, does an excellent job of tracking the centrality of this rationale through US post-war military interventions (through to the war of terror in afghanistan and iraq)
indeed, i find it immensely troubling that you cite the firebombing of tokyo as an example of relative “restraint'. whatever the hypothetical, the US obliteration of that city was never, in any way, designed to minimize civilian causalities. in fact, the opposite was the case. to quote again from mark selden's exposition:
---quote begins here---
The full fury of firebombing and napalm was unleashed on the night of March 9-10, 1945 when LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyo from the Marianas. Their mission was to reduce the city to rubble, kill its citizens, and instill terror in the survivors, with jellied gasoline and napalm that would create a sea of flames. Stripped of their guns to make more room for bombs, and flying at altitudes averaging 7,000 feet to evade detection, the bombers, which had been designed for high-altitude precision attacks, carried two kinds of incendiaries: M47s, 100-pound oil gel bombs, 182 per aircraft, each capable of starting a major fire, followed by M69s, 6-pound gelled-gasoline bombs, 1,520 per aircraft in addition to a few high explosives to deter firefighters. [25] The attack on an area that the US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated to be 84.7 percent residential succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of air force planners. Whipped by fierce winds, flames detonated by the bombs leaped across a fifteen square mile area of Tokyo generating immense firestorms that engulfed and killed scores of thousands of residents.
---quote ends here---
(4) your argument confuses the analytical with the ethical. i was making, principally, an analytical point: when you subject the impoverished population of gaza to a comprehensive embargo of the sort in effect today, i think it is easy to understand the use of indiscriminate violence as a strategy of resistance.
you, however, via the example of the hypothetical african farmer, accuse me of “justifying” overt violence, which is far from the case. (to reference again your point about paternalism, i think that the discussion of the ethics of the resistance are more-or-less closed to us, as voyeurs of the misery heaped upon the palestinians).
if an african farmer were driven to blowing himself up at a london hotel (or a G8 summit) in an effort to protest the rank hypocrisy of the industrial countries, then of course i would maintain that one can understand it. (i think this is a premise of all successful social science—actions are undertaken in the social, historical, political, economic contexts that forge actors). your hypothetical does not acknowledge the countless examples of people driven by economic deprivation (i.e., not-so-”overt” violence) to precisely such violence: the naxalites in india, MEND in the niger delta, maoists in nepal, to mention only a few
(5) (a) i cited malcom x as an example of someone who, very thoughtfully, refused to denounce “all” violence in struggle (see here for the transcript of the famous debate he participated in at the oxford student union, loosely on this issue), not for his views on separatism. moreover, though during his time with the nation of islam, malcom X voiced the belief that the black population of america ought to secede, this changed after he left them. so i don't quite understand your point—he can hardly be cited as an apostle of the idea that identity ought to be the basis of “nationhood”. he would also remind you, i think, that it makes little sense to extrapolate from his ideological development as an oppressed minority in america in the 50s and 60s to discussions about the legitimacy of a settler state.
(b) i don't know if you looked at ali abunimah's book, as i suggested, but he offers a ready defense of the one-state position. aside from the more cosmic point about multicultural nationality being preferable to confessional politics, the principal contention, i think, is that the two-state solution seems dead in the water, given israel's continued expansion into the west bank. while gaza has been maintained as a ghetto following the “disengagement” in 2005, israel continues to pursue its policy of aggressively colonizing the west bank (need we repeat that this is utterly illegal under international law?) [see, for example, this HRW report on settlement development in the west bank, as well as these maps from the BBC].
if the “two-state solution” is to mean bantustans for the palestinians, as it did at camp david, it is not going to be supported (nor effective at bringing about long-term peace). however, if it really did mean meaningful sovereignty over the pre-1967 areas, i'm sure it would go a long way to resolving the conflict, as you say. but the facts-on-the-ground seem to indicate that israel is hardly prepared for this.
(6) (a) again, i don't know if you looked at the articles i linked to, but they all make clear that israel did not plan this, in advance, as a contingency operation. so i will only repeat, via princeton professor emeritus richard falk (who was recently denied entry to the OPT despite traveling in an official capacity on behalf of the UN), the basic points about who violated the ceasefire and the purpose of the israeli operation (and he doesn't even mention the intensification of the embargo noted, in detail, by sara roy in the article i cited in my last response):
---quote begins here---
Hamas is blamed for the breakdown of the truce by its supposed unwillingness to renew it, and by the alleged increased incidence of rocket attacks. But the reality is more clouded. There was no substantial rocket fire from Gaza during the ceasefire until Israel launched an attack last November 4th directed at what it claimed were Palestinian militants in Gaza, killing several Palestinians. It was at this point that rocket fire from Gaza intensified. Also, it was Hamas that on numerous public occasions called for extending the truce, with its calls never acknowledged, much less acted upon, by Israeli officialdom. Beyond this, attributing all the rockets to Hamas is not convincing either. A variety of independent militia groups operate in Gaza, some such as the Fatah-backed al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade are anti-Hamas, and may even be sending rockets to provoke or justify Israeli retaliation. It is well confirmed that when US-supported Fatah controlled Gaza's governing structure it was unable to stop rocket attacks despite a concerted effort to do so.
What this background suggests strongly is that Israel launched its devastating attacks, starting on December 27, not simply to stop the rockets or in retaliation, but also for a series of unacknowledged reasons. It was evident for several weeks prior to the Israeli attacks that the Israeli military and political leaders were preparing the public for large-scale military operations against the Hamas. The timing of the attacks seemed prompted by a series of considerations: most of all, the interest of political contenders, the Defense Minister Ehud Barak and the Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, in demonstrating their toughness prior to national elections scheduled for February, but now possibly postponed until military operations cease. Such Israeli shows of force have been a feature of past Israeli election campaigns, and on this occasion especially, the current government was being successfully challenged by Israel's notoriously militarist politician, Benjamin Netanyahu, for its supposed failures to uphold security. Reinforcing these electoral motivations was the little concealed pressure from the Israeli military commanders to seize the opportunity in Gaza to erase the memories of their failure to destroy Hezbollah in the devastating Lebanon War of 2006 that both tarnished Israel's reputation as a military power and led to widespread international condemnation of Israel for the heavy bombardment of undefended Lebanese villages, disproportionate force, and extensive use of cluster bombs against heavily populated areas.
---quote ends here---
(b) your point about this being evidence of fatah's “pragmatism” is really quite indefensible--hamas was a democratically elected government! again, it is pure doublespeak to speak of a coup as "pragmatism-by-other-means", as you have done. moreover, even if you renounce all judgement wrt fatah's politicking, you have yet to explain your own government's meddling in the affairs of the palestinians, in a (largely successful) effort to topple their democratic representatives.
(7) i, again, did not want to excuse the mufti, but only sought to refute the implications you drew from his reflections (see again the article i linked to). you have acknowledged that there is no evidence of palestinian support for the holocaust, only a fragmentary quotation from a colonial satrap. if you want to play the game of deducing the politics of people from the words of their leaders, then let us also account for these:
winston churchill, on the palestinians' right to palestine: “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.“
vladimir jabotinksy, on the necessity of an “iron wall” to subdue palestinian struggle (which he very openly saw as the struggle of a native people against a settler state—only that he defended settlement): “Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.“
(the latter, in particular, relates very honestly the mindest of many an israeli policy maker since—and, of course, somewhat eerily, the logic behind the construction of the apartheid wall)
(8) in general (i.e., the absurdities of lumping castro in with pol pot and kim il-sung aside), i agree.
in peace,
adaner
Without having the time or the expertise to address many of your specific points, I believe the great difference between the two of us (at least as far as I have seen in this debate) is that you believe that historical circumstance and economic factors have justified a significant amount of violence by Palestinians in retaliation against Israel and that the immediate threats to Israeli security do not justify a violent reaction, given the context of all these events. You seem to give a moral monopoly to the Palestinian cause.
I am sympathetic to the Palestinian cause; indeed, your very post here was occasioned by something I wrote that garnered significant criticism from people who felt I was unfairly critical towards Israel. However, I am not willing to divorce the very real and immediate truth of human suffering and inexcusable violence, overt violence aimed directly at civilians in the name of nationhood, that has come from some Palestinians. I can understand that violence, in much the same way that I can understand some vengeance killings that happen in the streets here in America. But I cannot condone either.
The moment that I can support or turn a blind eye towards violence because of any particular theoretical notions of justice or sociology is the moment that I have embraced a moral relativism and a double standard that simply cannot serve as the basis for consistent ethics.
It is wrong when the Israeli army bombs a soccer field or bulldozes a house. It is wrong when the Palestine resistance blows up a bus or shoots a rocket into a hospital.
And I will not and cannot reduce my criticism and hatred of such actions simply because they happen to more understandable or appealing in a historical socioeconomic political context.
Post a Comment