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July 6, 2002
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace Process
Todd May
Independence
and Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
June 27, 2002
Ralph Nader
Reclaiming
Our Commons
Neve Gordon
Jerusalem
Under Attack
Robert Jensen
Alternative
Futures
David Vest
Darryl Kile's
Great Day
Gary Leupp
The Loya
Jirga Joke
Rahul Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership; Calls for Fair Elections
June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
Bush Speechwriter
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F-Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
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Weekend
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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.
Michael Neumann
is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario,
Canada. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca
(*)BBC, "Expert
weighs up Jenin 'massacre'", Monday, 29 April, 2002,
14:31 GMT 15:31 UK,
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