|
August
13 / 19, 2002
Punishment
by Detail
by Edward Said
Aside from the obvious physical discomforts, being
ill for a long period of time fills the spirit with a terrible
feeling of helplessness, but also with periods of analytic lucidity,
which, of course, must be treasured. For the past three months
now I have been in and out of the hospital, with days marked
by lengthy and painful treatments, blood transfusions, endless
tests, hours and hours of unproductive time spent staring at
the ceiling, draining fatigue and infection, inability to do
normal work, and thinking, thinking, thinking.
But there are also the intermittent passages
of lucidity and reflection that sometimes give the mind a perspective
on daily life that allows it to see things (without being able
to do much about them) from a different perspective. Reading
the news from Palestine and seeing the frightful images of death
and destruction on television, it has been my experience to be
utterly amazed and aghast at what I have deduced from those details
about Israeli government policy, more particularly about what
has been going on in the mind of Ariel Sharon. And when, after
the recent Gaza bombing by one of his F-16s in which nine children
were massacred, he was quoted as congratulating the pilot and
boasting of a great Israeli success, I was able to form a much
clearer idea than before of what a pathologically deranged mind
is capable of, not only in terms of what it plans and orders
but, worse, how it manages to persuade other minds to think in
the same delusional and criminal way. Getting inside the official
Israeli mind is a worthwhile, if lurid, experience.
In the West, however, there's been such
repetitious and unedifying attention paid to Palestinian suicide
bombing that a gross distortion in reality has completely obscured
what is much worse: the official Israeli, and perhaps the uniquely
Sharonian evil that has been visited so deliberately and so methodically
on the Palestinian people. Suicide bombing is reprehensible but
it is a direct and, in my opinion, a consciously programmed result
of years of abuse, powerlessness and despair. It has as little
to do with the Arab or Muslim supposed  propensity for violence as
the man in the moon. Sharon wants terrorism, not peace, and he
does everything in his power to create the conditions for it.
But for all its horror, Palestinian violence, the response of
a desperate and horribly oppressed people, has been stripped
of its context and the terrible suffering from which it arises:
a failure to see that is a failure in humanity, which doesn't
make it any less terrible but at least situates it in a real
history and real geography.
Yet the location of Palestinian terror
-- of course it is terror -- is never allowed a moment's chance
to appear, so remorseless has been the focus on it as a phenomenon
apart, a pure, gratuitous evil which Israel, supposedly acting
on behalf of pure good, has been virtuously battling in its variously
appalling acts of disproportionate violence against a population
of three million Palestinian civilians. I am not speaking only
about Israel's manipulation of opinion, but its exploitation
of the American equivalent of the campaign against terrorism
without which Israel could not have done what it has done. (In
fact, I cannot think of any other country on earth that, in full
view of nightly TV audiences, has performed such miracles of
detailed sadism against an entire society and gotten away with
it.) That this evil has been made consciously part of George
W Bush's campaign against terrorism, irrationally magnifying
American fantasies and fixations with extraordinary ease, is
no small part of its blind destructiveness. Like the brigades
of eager (and in my opinion completely corrupt) American intellectuals
who spin enormous structures of falsehoods about the benign purpose
and necessity of US imperialism, Israeli society has pressed
into service numerous academics, policy intellectuals at think
tanks, and ex-military men now in defence- related and public
relations business, all to rationalise and make convincing inhuman
punitive policies that are supposedly based on the need for Israeli
security.
Israeli security is now a fabled beast.
Like a unicorn it is endlessly hunted and never found, remaining,
everlastingly, the goal of future action. That over time Israel
has become less secure and more unacceptable to its neighbours
scarcely merits a moment's notice. But then who challenges the
view that Israeli security ought to define the moral world we
live in? Certainly not the Arab and Palestinian leaderships who
for 30 years have conceded everything to Israeli security. Shouldn't
that ever be questioned, given that Israel has wreaked more damage
on the Palestinians and other Arabs relative to its size than
any country in the world, Israel with its nuclear arsenal, its
air force, navy, and army limitlessly supplied by the US taxpayer?
As a result the daily, minute occurrences of what Palestinians
have to live through are hidden and, more important, covered
over by a logic of self-defence and the pursuit of terrorism
(terrorist infrastructure, terrorist nests, terrorist bomb factories,
terrorist suspects -- the list is infinite) which perfectly suits
Sharon and the lamentable George Bush. Ideas about terrorism
have thus taken on a life of their own, legitimised and re- legitimised
without proof, logic or rational argument.
Consider for instance the devastation
of Afghanistan, on the one hand, and the "targeted"
assassinations of almost 100 Palestinians (to say nothing of
many thousands of "suspects" rounded- up and still
imprisoned by Israeli soldiers) on the other: nobody asks whether
all these people killed were in fact terrorists, or proved to
be terrorists, or were about to become terrorists. They are all
assumed to be dangers by acts of simple, unchallenged affirmation.
All you need is an arrogant spokesman or two, like the loutish
Ranaan Gissin, Avi Pazner, or Dore Gold, and in Washington a
non-stop apologist for ignorance and incoherence like Ari Fleisher,
and the targets in question are just as good as dead. Without
doubts, questions, or demurral. No need for proof or any such
tiresome delicacy. Terrorism and its obsessive pursuit have become
an entirely circular, self-fulfilling murder and slow death of
enemies who have no choice or say in the matter.
With the exception of reports by a few
intrepid journalists and writers such as Amira Hass, Gideon Levy,
Amos Elon, Tanya Leibowitz, Jeff Halper, Israel Shamir and a
few others, public discourse in the Israeli media has declined
terribly in quality and honesty. Patriotism and blind support
for the government has replaced skeptical reflection and moral
seriousness. Gone are the days of Israel Shahak, Jakob Talmon,
and Yehoshua Leibowitch. I can think of few Israeli academics
and intellectuals -- men like Zeev Sternhell, Uri Avneri, and
Ilan Pappe, for instance -- who are courageous enough to depart
from the imbecilic and debased debate about "security"
and "terrorism" that seems to have overtaken the Israeli
peace establishment, or even its rapidly dwindling Left opposition.
Crimes are being committed every day in the name of Israel and
the Jewish people, and yet the intellectuals chatter on about
strategic withdrawal, or perhaps whether to incorporate settlements
or not, or whether to keep building that monstrous fence (has
a crazier idea ever been realised in the modern world, that you
can put several million people in a cage and say they don't exist?)
in a manner befitting a general or a politician, rather than
in ways more suited to intellectuals and artists with independent
judgment and some sort of moral standard. Where are the Israeli
equivalents of Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink, Athol Fugard, those
white writers who spoke out unequivocally and with unambiguous
clarity against the evils of South African apartheid? They simply
don't exist in Israel, where public discourse by writers and
academics has sunk to equivocation and the repetition of official
propaganda, and where most really first-class writing and thought
has disappeared from even the academic establishment.
But to return to Israeli practices and
the mind-set that has gripped the country with such obduracy
during the past few years, think of Sharon's plan. It entails
nothing less than the obliteration of an entire people by slow,
systematic methods of suffocation, outright murder, and the stifling
of everyday life. There is a remarkable story by Kafka, In the
Penal Colony, about a crazed official who shows off a fantastically
detailed torture machine whose purpose is to write all over the
body of the victim, using a complex apparatus of needles to inscribe
the captive's body with minute letters that ultimately causes
the prisoner to bleed to death. This is what Sharon and his brigades
of willing executioners are doing to the Palestinians, with only
the most limited and most symbolic of opposition. Every Palestinian
has become a prisoner. Gaza is surrounded by an electrified wire
fence on three sides; imprisoned like animals, Gazans are unable
to move, unable to work, unable to sell their vegetables or fruit,
unable to go to school. They are exposed from the air to Israeli
planes and helicopters and are gunned down like turkeys on the
ground by tanks and machine guns. Impoverished and starved, Gaza
is a human nightmare, each of whose little pieces of episodes
-- like what takes place at Erez, or near the settlements --
involves thousands of soldiers in the humiliation, punishment,
intolerable enfeeblement of each Palestinian, without regard
for age, gender, or illness. Medical supplies are held up at
the border, ambulances are fired upon or detained. Hundreds of
houses demolished, and hundreds of thousands of trees and agricultural
land destroyed in acts of systematic collective punishment against
civilians, most of whom are already refugees from Israel's destruction
of their society in 1948. Hope has been eliminated from the Palestinian
vocabulary so that only raw defiance remains, and still Sharon
and his sadistic minions prattle on about eliminating terrorism
by an ever-encroaching occupation that has continued now for
35 years. That the campaign itself is, like all colonial brutality,
futile, or that it has the effect of making Palestinians more,
rather than less, defiant simply does not enter Sharon's closed
mind.
The West Bank is occupied by 1,000 Israeli
tanks whose sole purpose is to fire upon and terrorise civilians.
Curfews are imposed for periods of up to two weeks, without respite.
Schools and universities are either closed or impossible to get
to. No one can travel, not just between the nine main cities,
but within the cities. Every town today is a wasteland of destroyed
buildings, looted offices, purposely ruined water and electrical
systems. Commerce is finished. Malnutrition prevails in half
the number of children. Two thirds of the population lives below
the poverty level of $2 a day. Tanks in Jenin (where the demolition
of the refugee camp by Israeli armour, a major war crime, was
never investigated because cowardly international bureaucrats
such as Kofi Annan back down when Israel threatens) fire upon
and kill children, but that is only one drop in an unending stream
of Palestinian civilian deaths caused by Israeli soldiers who
furnish the illegal Israeli military occupation with loyal, unquestioning
service. Palestinians are all "terrorist suspects".
The soul of this occupation is that young Israeli conscripts
are allowed full rein to subject Palestinians at check-points
to every known form of private torture and abjection. There is
the waiting in the sun for hours; then there is the detention
of medical supplies and produce until they rot; there are the
insulting words and beatings administered at will; the sudden
rampage of jeeps and soldiers against civilians waiting their
turn by the thousands at the innumerable check points that have
made of Palestinian life a choking hell; making dozens of youths
kneel in the sun for hours; forcing men to take off their clothes;
insulting and humiliating parents in front of their children;
forbidding the sick to pass through for no other reason than
personal whim; stopping ambulances and firing on them. And the
steady number of Palestinian deaths (quadruple that of Israelis)
increases on a daily, mostly untabulated basis. More "terrorist
suspects" plus their wives and children, but "we"
regret those deaths very much. Thank you.
Israel is frequently referred to as a
democracy. If so, then it is a democracy without a conscience,
a country whose soul has been captured by a mania for punishing
the weak, a democracy that faithfully mirrors the psychopathic
mentality of its ruler, General Sharon, whose sole idea -- if
that is the right word for it -- is to kill, reduce, maim, drive
away Palestinians until "they break". He provides nothing
more concrete as a goal for his campaigns, now or in the past,
beyond that, and like the garrulous official in Kafka's story
he is most proud of his machine for abusing defenceless Palestinian
civilians, all the while monstrously abetted in his grotesque
lies by his court advisers and philosophers and generals, as
well as by his chorus of faithful American servants. There is
no Palestinian army of occupation, no Palestinian tanks, no soldiers,
no helicopter gun-ships, no artillery, no government to speak
of. But there are the "terrorists" and the "violence"
that Israel has invented so that its own neuroses can be inscribed
on the bodies of Palestinians, without effective protest from
the overwhelming majority of Israel's laggard philosophers, intellectuals,
artists, peace activists. Palestinian schools, libraries and
universities have ceased normal functioning for months now: and
we still wait for the Western freedom-to-write-groups and the
vociferous defenders of academic freedom in America to raise
their voices in protest. I have yet to see one academic organisation
either in Israel or in the West make a declaration about this
profound abrogation of the Palestinian right to knowledge, to
learning, to attend school.
In sum, Palestinians must die a slow
death so that Israel can have its security, which is just around
the corner but cannot be realised because of the special Israeli
"insecurity". The whole world must sympathise, while
the cries of Palestinian orphans, sick old women, bereaved communities,
and tortured prisoners simply go unheard and unrecorded. Doubtless,
we will be told, these horrors serve a larger purpose than mere
sadistic cruelty. After all, "the two sides" are engaged
in a "cycle of violence" which has to be stopped, sometime,
somewhere. Once in a while, we ought to pause and declare indignantly
that there is only side with an army and a country: the other
is a stateless dispossessed population of people without rights
or any present way of securing them. The language of suffering
and concrete daily life has either been hijacked, or it has been
so perverted as, in my opinion, to be useless except as pure
fiction deployed as a screen for the purpose of more killing
and painstaking torture -- slowly, fastidiously, inexorably.
That is the truth of what Palestinians suffer. But in any case,
Israeli policy will ultimately fail.
Edward Said
writes a weekly column for the Cairo-based al-Ahram.
New Print
Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- War Talk As White Noise:
Anything to Get Harken and Halliburton
Out of the Headlines;
- First Hilliard, Then
McKinney: Jewish
Groups Target Blacks Brave Enough to Talk About Justice in the
Middle East; Intimidation
is the Name of the Game; Smearing
"Insane" McKinney As Muslims' Pawn;
- The Missing Terrorist?
Calling Scotland
Yard: "Where's Atif?"
- They Never Booed Dylan!:
Tape Transcript Shows
Famed Newport Folkfest Dissing of Electric Dylan Not True. The Catcalls were for Peter
Yarrow!
- New Shame from the Liffey
Shrike
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now! Or Call Toll Free 1-800-840-3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
August 14
/ 19, 2002
Susan Davis
Played
Out: a Journey to Central City, Colorado
CounterPunch
Staff
Our Favorite
Films
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Usonian
Utopia's:
Frank Lloyd Wright, Working Class Housing and the FBI
Uri Avnery
A Phone
Call from Hell
Wendy Brinker
Racism
is Alive and Well in the South Carolina Death House
Hamit Dardagan
The
Unbearable Lightness of Bombing
Ahmad Faruqui
The Legacy
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Philip Farruggio
Leading
by Example
Anthony Gancarski
Union
Jackass: Richard Perle's UK Charm Offensive
Jeff Halper
Fortress
Israel: the Message of the Bulldozer
Gary Leupp
An Open
Letter to Bruce Springsteen about Bush's War on Terrorism
Dave Marsh
Sing a
Simple Song
Rashmi Mayur
To Johannesburg
in Search of Hope
Steve Perry
Another Fine Mess:
Martha Stewart and Paul Wellstone
Anis Shivani
What's
Next...Concentration Camps?
Edward Said
Punishment
by Detail
Jeff Taylor
Paul Wellstone's
Legacy
August 13,
2002
Robert Fisk
At the al-Qaeda
Cemetery
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Corporate
Crime Time
Andrew Cockburn
Bono
Betrays Ireland
August 10/11,
2002
Walt Brasch
The Bush
2 Legacy...So Far
August 9,
2002
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Corporate
Crime:
More Shareholder Power
Not the Solution
Ansar Ahmed
The Waning
of the
Pax Americana
Alexander
Cockburn
War,
the Military and the Hunt for the "Violence Gene"
August 8,
2002
Ron Jacobs
Iraq:
The Final Storm?
Dave Marsh
Now Ain't
the Time
for Your Tears
Mark Weisbrot
Bush
Administration Tries to Hide Role in Venezuela Coup
Anthony Gancarski
AIPAC,
Congress and Iraq
Robert Fisk
Families
of the
Disappeared Demand Answers
Gary Leupp
Karzai's
Bodyguard
August 7,
2002
Anis Shivani
The First
21st Century
Police State
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Fallon's
Fallen
Is the US Navy Killing
Children in Nevada?
Robert Fisk
For the
Forgotten Afghans,
the UN Offers a Fresh Hell
Dr. Susan
Block
Rigas in
Cuffs
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies of the US Part 5: the Call of Democracy?
August 6,
2002
Philip Farruggio
Signs
of the Elites
Bruce Gagnon
We Must
Come Alive
David Krieger
From
Hiroshima to Hope
Jerre Skog
Global
Reach of Corporate Crime or What the Hell are
They Teaching at Harvard?
Robert Fisk
Return to
Afghanistan:
Collateral Damage
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Fox in the Pension Fund
August 5, 2002
Rahul Mahajan
Iraq
and the New Great Game
Jordy Cummings
The
Last Frontier of
Israel and Palestine
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Saddam's Diary
Mike Leon
US Mute
to Israeli Brutality
Norman Madarasz
Brazil:
the Most Important Election of 2002?
August 4, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
August 3, 2002
David Krieger
Nuclear
Apartheid
Gilad Atzmon
The End
of Innocence
Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
a Critic
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|