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What's So Bad About Israel? |
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by Michael Neumann
(No verified email address) |
18 Jul 2002
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Is Israel different?
Counterpunch Weekend Edition
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.
(*) BBC, "Expert weighs up Jenin 'massacre'", Monday, 29 April, 2002,
14:31 GMT 15:31 UK,
Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in
Ontario, Canada. He can be reached at:
mneumann (at) trentu.ca
http://www.counterpunch.org./neumann0706.html
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