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]

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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?

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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

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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

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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

Israel blames Hamas for primitive homemade rocket attacks on the nearby Israeli city of Sederot. In 2001-2008, these rockets killed about 15 Israelis and injured 433, and they have damaged property. In the same period, Gazan mortar attacks on Israel have killed 8 Israelis. Since the Second Intifada broke out in 2000, Israelis have killed nearly 5000 Palestinians, nearly a thousand of them minors. Since fall of 2007, Israel has kept the 1.5 million Gazans under a blockade, interdicting food, fuel and medical supplies to one degree or another. Wreaking collective punishment on civilian populations such as hospital patients denied needed electricity is a crime of war.

The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.
(...) 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. On 18 December UNRWA suspended all food distribution for both emergency and regular programmes because of the blockade.
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This is a battle pitting the rural poor and their liberal allies against wealthy urban conservatives who now want to diminish the elected status of Thailand's parliament. It is fought on the streets between the left-wing red-shirts, whose power base is in the north-east, and the yellow-shirted royalists of Bangkok and the south. It is also a struggle for the soul of Thailand after Thaksin, the telecoms billionaire turned politician whose legacy has divided a country. The outcome will be studied with trepidation by a region with much to lose from the implosion of a former tiger economy.

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U.S. forces in Iraq have detained 10,000 prisoners without evidence of their wrongdoing, a U.S. detention centers in Iraq commander said on Monday.