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20, 2003
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June
21, 2003
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Life in a Bifurcated
World
By WILLIAM A. COOK
"But modern industrial warfare may
well be leading us, with each technological advance, a step closer
to our own annihilation."
Chris Hedges,
War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Each day the newspapers carry stories from Israel
and Iraq describing another IDF or US soldier shot; each day
another story about the failed roadmap for peace and the failed
promise for Iraqi freedom. Each day we witness America becoming
mired in the tar baby that has been the day-to-day experience
of Israel for fifty years. Each day the strong arm of vengeance
sticks in the tar baby's gut accomplishing nothing but proximity
to more pain and suffering. Brother Remus told that tar baby
story to the plantation owner's son, a story with a long history
in Africa, a story of wiliness and endurance, twin traits that
enable the oppressed to survive the bitterness of occupation;
would that the "Man" had heeded the truth embedded
in that tale. But the oppressor is addicted to his myths of superiority,
to his beliefs in only his righteousness, and to his obligation
to bring his freedom and his advanced civilization to the inferior
people he oppresses. Such is the blindness that afflicts those
who see through the lens of force.
Hedges' observation embodies the developed
nation's talisman, the power of its technology to conquer, to
impose its will, to subdue a people, to exploit its resources,
all to advance its own agenda, the hording of more wealth to
its ruling class. But that ruling class is blind, not just to
the tar baby, but also to the people it governs who suffer its
stupidity. Nothing is more frightening than to read Woodward's
Bush at War and realize that no one in charge not
Cheney, not Rumsfeld, not Powell, not Rice, not Wolfowitz, not
Tenant, not Black, not Ashcroft, no and not the President
asked the most fundamental question that glared through all the
dust and  twisted
steel that had been the Twin Towers and the Pentagon: "Why
would nineteen men incinerate themselves in the most glaringly
symbolic structures of wealth and power erected by western civilization?"
What is the primary cause of the "evil" we have seen
visited upon us? Perhaps the answer is so simple it could not
be asked: "We are the cause, we the vested interests bought
by wealth to the positions we hold cannot afford to recognize
or accept the devastation we have wrought on the hopeless and
deprived of the world."
Israel blossomed fifty-five years ago,
not into a reborn land flowing with milk and honey, but into
a modern technological Goliath that mimics its ancient foes as
it attempts to subdue the indigenous peoples of Palestine, not
with the puny shields and swords of the Philistines, but with
the tanks, helicopter warships, fighter jets, missiles, cluster
bombs, and the ultimate and illusive weapons of mass destruction
that give righteousness its almighty power. For half a century,
Israel used every arsenal of contemporary warfare to advance
its goal to acquire the fabled lands of Judea and Samaria promised
them by their mythical god 2500 years ago. The original fighters
used terror tactics, massacres, and ethnic cleansing to advance
their cause. The current government of Ariel Sharon, one of the
original terrorists, uses laser guided missiles to annihilate
individuals he has determined are terrorists and any innocents
who happen to be present when the technologically advanced instrument
of death finds its way to its extrajudicial target. He and his
coalition forces now control through illegal occupation 78% of
Palestine and continue to defy the United Nations resolutions
to return the land to its rightful owners. And they do this with
the full approbation of their Godfather, the United States of
America.
For the infliction of this oppression,
Israel suffers the consequences of righteousness' two sided sword:
the wily evil that festers in the soul of the oppressed and the
internal suffering that bleeds in the Jewish souls who find this
use of force intolerable. Yet the minority rule in Israel: the
minority parties who coerce Sharon to stay the course or lose
his seat of power; the minority cults of Zionist zeal who inhabit
the illegal settlements; and the minority ruling class who control
the corporations and industries and hence the legislation that
gives them the power to impose their will. It is that last that
controls ultimately. The military-industrial complex that infects
Israel infected the United States over fifty years ago and continues
to infect its principles with the toxic lies of compassionate
conservatism and compassionate globalization..
The incestuous relationship that exists
between the US and Israel breeds ever larger technological children,
bigger tanks, bigger missiles, better conceptualized bombs that
eradicate more people and, most importantly, better protection
for their military as they press the buttons of war sending death
and destruction to unseen foes who might be, "God forbid,"
children or mothers or the sick, maimed or elderly, the accidental
detritus of modern warfare. That incestuous relationship provides
protection for industries producing these advanced technological
wonders ensuring their continued existence despite the havoc
they wreck on Israelis to say nothing of Palestinians. That same
incest also breeds, for both Israel and the United States, an
ever growing family of terrorists who find purpose in their collective
fight against the oppressor and release from their torment in
the fanatical illusion that their God calls them to His cause,
the destruction of the infidels. Ironically enough, the oppression
imposed by Israel on the Palestinians is justified in the name
of that same God's covenant with His people and their perceived
illusion that they must defend that God against infidels as well.
Illusion becomes the propellant of our technological advancement!
Indeed, the myths propel the addiction
to slaughter and justify it! How else explain IDF soldiers "beating
medical personnel and using them as human shields, taunting young
children to throw rocks at their tanks so they could respond
with live ammunition, forcing women with infants to stand for
hours in the cold a few metres from their homes, destroying food
and water systems, and firing heavy machine guns into residential
streets and buildings." ("Our Humanity in the Balance,"
May 4, 2003, Moiseiwitisch, Murray, and Penland, Winnipeg Free
Press).
How else explain IDF soldiers "urinating
on school computers and defecating on the rugs of homes they
have garrisoned for use; accidentally demolishing the homes of
innocent people that happen to be near the homes deliberately
destroyedpreventing the residents of entire cities from leaving
their houses for weeks on end (no exceptions-not for chemo, dialysis,
childbirth, buying food, attending school, or visiting your sick
mother); damaging 27 Palestinian ambulances beyond repair and
wounding 187 medical personnel; and assassinating people without
the niceties of trial and due process, not to mention reckless
shootings in which 126 innocent children aged 13 or younger (including
19 toddlers and infants aged 5 or younger!) have lost lives."
(Tikkun on line, 3/4/03).
How else explain the behavior of Jewish
settlers in Hebron who "regularly attack Palestinian shops,
cut electricity lines and water pipes, wreck cars, and attack
schoolchildren." Or this, "Plans are underway for the
construction of a 'safe passage,' a settlers' 'promenade' that
would link the settlement of Kiryat Arba on Hebron's eastern
flank to the Old City like a wedge thrust into the heart of the
city, confiscating 64 parcels of private Palestinian property
and razing at least 15 houses in its wake." Or this, "Associated
Press (20,12,02) and the Israeli daily Yedioth Achronot have
recently quoted Palestinians in Hebron describing how 'Israeli
border police have forced detainees to choose whether to have
a nose, arm or leg broken.'" ("Hebron: City of Terror,"
2/23/03, Ran HaCohen)
These are examples of the silent Sharon
policies that allow for the systematic harassment and killing
of Palestinians and the unseen erosion of their lands as Israel
confiscates more and more of what was the Palestinian state before
1948. "You are leaving behind you a scorched land, a scorched
country, and you are mainly leaving behind you a scorched people"
the opposition leader Yossi Sarid yelled as Sharon left to meet
with Bush last October 14. There are those who understand the
consequences!
What, one asks in wonder, does adherence
to these myths and scorched earth policies accomplish? Certainly
and obviously not security for the Jewish people! Rather it creates
the scourge of desperation and hopelessness wrapped around the
waist of the suicide bomber that plagues Israel, as decidedly
as the locusts ravaged Egypt when the Jews were the enslaved!
Why, one asks in wonder, does the oppressed take on the mantle
of the oppressor with such vehemence that they become blind to
the plight of the afflicted? Where, one asks in wonder, will
it all end or do we move ineluctably step by step closer, as
Hedges states, to our own annihilation?
And what now of the United States, the
incestuous relation that gives sustenance to Israel's Sharon
and feeds his insatiable appetite for vengeance and retaliation?
We see its fruition in Iraq as we take on the mantle of the oppressor,
discarding the pseudo-garment of the liberator now that the oil
and military positioning is in place. We read each day accounts
of thousands demanding that the oppressor leave the country;
we see the troops, our 20 year old kids, disgorge from their
armored vehicles to wade through angry crowds searching in vain
for "terrorists" who, also in vain, attempt to inflict
some damage on the oppressor whom they see as the "terrorist";
we read of our soldiers ambushed, wounded or killed; we hear
stories, even after three months in occupation, of Americans
kidnapping and raping Iraqi women, the beginning perhaps of the
occupier's attitude about the inferior status of the oppressed;
we hear our beloved leaders decry the wily behavior of the oppressed
who should be welcoming our presence, who proclaim our beneficence
to those whom we have just bombed into submission; we watch in
disbelief the Iraqi people, whose children are crippled because
they picked up our cluster bombs thinking them toys, whose hospitals,
museums, and libraries have been destroyed, whose natural resources
have become the new found wealth of the western oil companies,
yea, we watch them condemn us as invaders and despoilers, the
newest nation to attempt to colonize their country. We have become
the new Israel in the mid-east and we will suffer the same fate
not only in Iraq, but also in all the haunts that we inhabit
around the world, and here at home. We have sunk our invader's
arms into the tar baby of the Middle East without concern for
the primary causes that have festered there for more than fifty
years and given birth to so much animosity that Americans must
hide from the rest of the world for their own protection. We,
like Israel, will build walls around ourselves to ward out those
whom we oppress and wonder why it must be so.
Until and unless our leaders confront
the primary causes of the world's anger against the west, no
solution to our insecurity will arise. We will continue to pummel
the tar baby helplessly despite our "modern industrial warfare"
and, perhaps, because of it. We live in a bifurcated world of
the supremely rich and the absolutely deprived, of the aggressor
and the oppressed, of those willing and able to exploit both
humans and natural resources without compunction and those who
suffer such pillage, and, until and unless we confront head on
these realities, America's obsession with Pan Americana can only
secure America's insecurity. The desperate wiliness of the oppressed
and their indomitable will to endure has been the story of human
history; there is no reason to believe that it will change.
William Cook
is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern
California. His new book, Psalms
for the 21st Century, was just published by
Mellen Press. He can be reached at: cookb@ULV.EDU
Today's Features
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