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The
Lies Israel Tells Itself (And We Tell On Its Behalf)
By JONATHAN COOK
Nazareth.
When journalists use the word "apparently",
or another favorite "reportedly", they are usually
distancing themselves from an event or an interpretation in the
supposed interests of "balance". But I think we should
read the "apparently" contained in a statement from
the head of the United Nations, Kofi Annan -- relating to the
killing this week of four unarmed UN monitors by the Israeli
army -- in its other sense.
When Annan says that those four deaths were "apparently
deliberate", I take him to mean that the evidence shows
that the killings were deliberate. And who can disagree with
him? At least 10 phone calls were made to Israeli commanders
over a period of six hours warning that artillery and aerial
bombardments were either dangerously close to or hitting the
monitors' building.
The UN post, in Khiam just inside south Lebanon, was clearly
marked and well-known to the army, but nonetheless it was hit
directly four times in the last hour before an Israeli helicopter
fired a precision-guided missile that tore through the roof of
an underground shelter, killing the monitors inside. A UN convoy
that arrived too late to rescue the peacekeepers was also fired
on. From the evidence, it does not get much more deliberate than
that.
The problem, however, is that western leaders, diplomats and
the media take the "apparently" in its first sense
-- as a way to avoid holding Israel to account for its actions.
For "apparently deliberate", read "almost certainly
accidental". That was why the best the UN Security Council
could manage after a day and a half of deliberation was a weasely
statement of "shock and distress" at the killings,
as though they were an act of God.
Our media are no less responsible for this evasiveness. They
make sure "we" -- the publics of the West -- never
countenance the thought that a society like our own, one we are
always being reminded is a democracy, could sink to the depths
of inhumanity required to murder unarmed peacekeepers. Who can
be taken seriously challenging the Israeli foreign minister Tzipi
Livni's assertion that "There will never be an [Israeli]
army commander that will intentionally aim at civilians or UN
soldiers [sic]"?
Even the minority in the West who have started to fear that Israel
is "apparently" slaughtering civilians across
Lebanon or that it is "apparently" intending
to make refugees of a million Lebanese must presumably shrink
from the idea that Israel is also capable of killing unarmed
UN monitors.
After all, our media insinuate, the two cases are not comparable.
There may be good reasons why Lebanese civilians need to suffer.
Let's not forget that they belong to a people (or is it a race
or, maybe, a religion?) that gave birth to Hizbullah. "We"
can cast aside our concerns for the moment
and take it on trust that Israel has cause to kill the Lebanese
or make them homeless. Doubtless the justifications will emerge
later, when we have lost interest in the "Lebanon crisis".
We may never hear what those reasons were, but who can doubt
that they exist?
The "apparent" murder of four UN monitors, however,
is a deeper challenge to our faith in our moral superiority,
which is why that "apparently" is held on to as desperately
as a talisman. No civilized country could kill peacekeepers,
especially ones drawn from our own societies, from Canada, Finland
and Austria? That is the moral separation line that divides us
from the terrorists. Were that line to be erased, we would be
no different from those whom we must fight.
An iconic image of this war that our media have managed to expunge
from the official record but which keeps popping up in email
inboxes like a guilty secret is of young Israeli girls, lipsticked
and nailpolished as if on their way to a party, drawing messages
of death and hatred on the sides of the missiles about to be
loaded on to army trucks and tanks. In one, an out-of-focus soldier
stands on a tank paternally watching over the girls as they address
another death threat to Hizbullah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
Is this the truer face of Israeli society, even if it is the
one we are never shown and refuse to believe in. And are "we"
in the West hurtling down the same path?
Driving through the Jewish city of Upper Nazareth this week,
I realised how inured I am becoming to this triumphal militarism
-- and the racism that feeds it. Nothing surprising about the
posters of "We will win" on every hoarding. But it
takes me more than a few seconds to notice that the Magen David
ambulance in front of me is flying a little national flag, the
blue Star of David, from its window. I have heard that American
fire engines flew US flags after 9/11, but this somehow seems
worse. How is it possible for an ambulance, the embodiment of
our neutral, civilized, universal, "Western", humanitarian
values, to fly a national flag, I think to myself? And does it
make a difference that only a few months ago Magen David joined
the International Committee of the Red Cross?
Only slowly do my thoughts grow more disturbed: how many hospital
administrators, doctors and nurses have seen that ambulance arrive
at their emergency departments and thought nothing of it? And
is that the only Israeli ambulance flying the flag, or are many
others doing the same? Later the BBC TV news answers my question.
I see two ambulances with the same flags going to the front line
to collect casualties. Will others soon cross over the border
into southern Lebanon, after it is "secured", and will
no one mention those little flags fluttering from the window?
A psychologist tells me how upset she is about a meeting she
attended a few days ago of the northern coordinating committee
of her profession. They were discussing how best to treat the
shock and trauma suffered by Israeli children under the bombardment
from Hizbullah. The meeting concluded with an agreement that
the psychologists would reassure the children with the statement:
"The army is there to protect us."
And so, the seeds of fascism are unthinkingly sown for another
generation of children, children like our own.
No one agreed with my friend when she dissented, arguing that
this was not the message to be telling impressionable minds,
and that violence against the Other is not a panacea for our
problems. Parents, not soldiers, are responsible for protecting
their children, she pointed out. Tanks, planes and guns bring
only fear and more hatred, hatred that will one day return to
haunt us.
The slow, gentle indoctrination continues day in, day out, reinforcing
the idea among Israel's Jewish population that the army can do
no wrong and that it needs no oversight, not even from politicians
(most of whom are former generals anyway, or like the prime minister
Ehud Olmert too frightened to stand up to the chiefs of staff
if they wanted to). "We will win". How do we know we
will win? Because "the army is there to protect us."
Add into the mix that faceless "Arab" enemy, those
sub-beings, and you have a recipe for fascism -- even if it is
of the democratically elected variety.
The Israeli media, of course, are the key to providing the second
half of that equation -- or rather not providing it. You can
sit watching the main Israeli channels all day, flicking between
channels 1, 2 and 10, and not see a Lebanese face, apart from
that of Hassan Nasrallah, the new Hitler. I don't mean the charred
faces of corpses, or the bandaged babies, or the amputees lying
in hospital beds. I mean any Lebanese faces. Just as you almost
never see a Palestinian face on Israeli TV unless they are the
mob, disfigured with hatred as they hold aloft another martyr
on his way to burial.
Lebanon only swings in to view on Israeli television through
the black and white footage of an aerial gun sight, or through
the long shot of a distant urban landscape seconds before it
is "pulverized" by a dropped bomb. The buildings crumble,
flames shoot up, clouds of dust billow into the air. Another
shot of arcade-game adrenalin.
The humanitarian stories exist but they do not concern Lebanon.
Animal welfare societies plead on behalf of the dogs and cats
left alone to face the rocket fire on deserted Kiryat Shemona,
just as they did before for foxes and deer when Israel began
building its mammoth walls of concrete and steel across their
migration routes in the West Bank, walls that are also imprisoning,
unseen, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
The rest of the coverage is dedicated to Israeli army spokespeople,
including the national heartthrob Miri Regev, and media "commentators"
and "analysts". Who are these people? They are from
the same pool of former military intelligence and security service
officers who once did this job in the closed rooms of army HQ
but now wallow in the limelight. One favored pundit is even subtitled
"Expert on psychological warfare against Hassan Nasrallah".
And who are the presenters and anchors who interview them? The
other day an ageing expert on Apache helicopters interrupted
his interviewer irritatedly to tell him his question was stupid.
"We were in the army together and both know the answer.
Don't play dumb?" It was a rare reminder that these anchors
too are just soldiers in suits. One of the most popular, Ehud
Yaari of Channel 2, barely conceals his military credentials
as he condones yet more violence against the Lebanese or, if
he can be deflected for a moment, the people of Gaza.
That is what comes of having a "citizen army", where
teenagers learn to use a gun before they can drive and men do
reserve duty until their late 40s. It means every male teacher,
professor, psychologist and journalist thinks as a soldier because
that is what he has been for most of his life.
Israel is not unique, far from it, though it is in a darker place,
and has been for some time, than "we" in the West can
fully appreciate. It is a mirror of what our own societies are
capable of, despite our democratic values. It shows how a cult
of victimhood makes one heartless and cruel, and how racism can
be repackaged as civilised values.
Maybe those UN monitors, with their lookout post above the battlefield
where Israel wants to use any means it can to destroy Hizbullah
and Lebanese civilians who get in the way, had to be removed
simply because they are a nuisance, a restraint when Israel needs
to get on with the job of asserting "our" values. Maybe
Israel does not want the scrutiny of peacekeepers as it fights
our war on terror for us. Maybe it feared that the monitors'
reports might help to give back to the Lebanese, even to Hizbullah,
their faces, their history, their suffering.
And, if we are honest, Israel is not alone. How many of us want
the Arabs to remain faceless so we can keep believing we are
the victims of a new ideology that wants only our evisceration,
just as the "Red Indians" once supposedly wanted our
scalps? How many of us believe that our values demand that we
fall in behind a new world order in which Arab deaths are not
real deaths because "they" are not fully human?
And how many of us believe that deliberate barbarity, at least
when we do it, is only "apparently" a crime against
humanity?
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