Andrew Lichterman

“…[B]oth individuals and entire peoples must order their lives on the basis of the saying recorded in the Tosefot to Baba Kama 23: ‘A man should concern himself more that he not injure others than that he not be injured.’ For when a man tries to keep watch that his fist not injure others, by that very act he enthrones in the world the God of truth and righteousness and adds power to the kingdom of justice; and it is precisely this power which will defend him against injury by others.

This does not happen, however, if a man is preoccupied with watching out only for himself and keeps his fist always poised to prevent others attacking him; for by such a pose he in fact weakens the power of justice and stirs up evil. When a man constantly portrays to himself scenes of terror, when he asserts that everyone wants to obliterate him and that he can rely only on the power of his own fist, by this he denies the kingdom of truth and justice and enthrones the power of the fist. And since the fist is by nature poor at making distinctions, in the end defense and attack become reversed: instead of defending himself by means of the fist, such a man becomes himself the assailant and destroyer of others. Hence, like begetting like, others repay him in kind, and so the earth is filled with violence and oppression.” Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamaret, excerpt from a sermon, titled “Liberty,” 1906, and published in Musar Hatorah v’Hayahadut (Vilna 1912). Translated by Rabbi Everett E. Gendler. Published on the web by the Shalom Center

There is little surprising about the latest spasm of carnage in the Middle East. As many other observers have said, the people of Israel, and of the Palestinian lands it occupies are largely at the mercy of extreme elements on both sides who thrive on violence. By far the greater violence continues to be inflicted by Israel, having at its command the full panoply of destructive weaponry from tanks, warships, and high-performance warplanes up to nuclear weapons, subsidized by many billions of dollars of military aid from the United States. Who “started it” on this particular occasion is an arbitrary matter, determined a priori by the political predispositions of the viewer. Yes, Palestinian resistance forces in Gaza kidnapped and killed Israeli soldiers. But roll the starting point back a few weeks and Israeli gunmen–who happen to wear uniforms and fire far more destructive weapons from a great distance–decimated a family of Palestinians taking a day at the beach. Yes, Hizballah forces kidnapped and killed Israeli soldiers, a provocative act. But the line they crossed transects a war zone where there has been no peace for decades. In recent years Hizballah–which emerged as a dominant local political and military factor resisting the Israeli invasion and occupation of Southern Lebanon –and Israel’s IDF have fought a running low-level war on the border, largely limited to attacks on each others forces. Israel fires at Hizballah with tanks, artillery, and bombs, its air force routinely flaunting both its military superiority and its contempt for international law with frequent overflights deep into Lebanon designed to terrorize the population with sonic booms. Hizballah plants roadside bombs, launches rockets southward at Israeli forces and fires anti-aircraft weapons at Israel’s planes, sometimes causing casualties in Israel. Or reverse the order if you like, it’s up to you.

There is little doubt, however, that Israel’s response, both in Gaza and Lebanon, has been disproportionate, wildly excessive, and contrary to the laws of war. In Gaza, a territory never fully released from military occupation, and now invaded once more, Israel is following a clear policy of collective punishment, destroying a vital electric power station and reducing the water, food and medical supplies accessible to a population already impoverished and immiserated by decades of Israeli military rule. Israel also has engaged in new rounds of targeted assassinations–a polite term for lawless murders–and “arrests” that amount to retaliatory hostage-taking, seizing a sizable portion of the Palestinian parliament. All of this violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits murder, reprisals against civilians and their property, and collective punishment, which limits destruction of public or private property to strict military necessity, and which makes the occupying power ultimately responsible for the physical well-being of the subject population.

In Lebanon, the entire country is being punished, with attacks on villages, cities, and infrastructure ranging from power stations to grain silos, pharmaceutical companies, and dairy farms that have killed and continue to kill many civilians. This devastating onslaught bears little relationship to the purported goals of the campaign, to recover Israel’s soldiers and to prevent further Hizballah rocket attacks. Israel’s military justifications are so pro forma as to appear transparently cynical–the main civilian airport was used to supply terrorists, terrorists could move the captured soldiers across the many bridges and highways Israel is systematically destroying, a convoy of civilians incinerated by helicopter gunships as they flee have no one to blame but Hizballah, who allegedly fired rockets from their locale. Hizballah too seems willing to engage in escalating open warfare, firing its rockets with no more discrimination than is being shown by Israel (although with far less devastating effect). Both are engaged in a game in which civilians are conceived as pawns and pry bars; each hoping to inflict enough carnage and suffering to leverage the discontent of adversary populations into pressure on adversary governments. Both pursue a fantasy as old as the ability to deliver explosives by plane or missile, a strategy whose only reliable outcome in war after war has been uncontrollable spirals of violence and mass death.

It has become apparent, however, that Israel has taken the seizure of its soldiers in both Gaza and Lebanon as an opportunity to pursue far larger agendas in both places, including the destruction of the elected Palestinian government and perhaps of the elected government of Lebanon as well. Reacting to relatively minor border incidents with massive assaults aimed at something very much like “regime change” is clearly disproportionate. But such actions been enabled by an international climate created by the actions and preventive war doctrine of the United States, a climate in which even the Japanese government, which enshrines peace in its constitution, has threatened strikes against North Korea in response to missile tests that while provocative are not unlawful. (Long-range missile tests are a routine practice of a number of countries, including the United States).

The United States, Israel’s chief military and financial patron, represents Israel’s massive assaults on Gaza and Lebanon as being within Israel’s right to “defend itself.” The U.S. vetoed an even-handed Security Council resolution on Gaza calling for release of both the Israeli soldier seized by Palestinians and the Palestinian parliamentarians seized by Israel, and that condemned both the excessive violence of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the launching of rockets against Israel. But why would we expect the United States to do otherwise, when it behaves the same way. In its own occupied territories in Iraq, the lives of its troops are seen as worth far more than those of the people of the country it has conquered; any perceived “threat” will draw overwhelming firepower. The rationale, and the slippery slope to which it leads, is the same: there are terrorists trying to kill us, they might be terrorists, they harbor terrorists, they are all terrorists. And the ugly taboo truth beneath it all is a deep and abiding racism, part and parcel of the continuing legacy of European imperialism.

“In the early days of the insurgency, some U.S. commanders appeared oblivious to the possibility that excessive force might produce a backlash. They counted on the iron fist to create an atmosphere conducive to good behavior. The idea was not to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Iraqis, but to induce compliance through intimidation.

‘You have to understand the Arab mind,’ one company commander told the New York Times, displaying all the self-assurance of Douglas MacArthur discoursing on Orientals in 1945. ‘The only thing they understand is force — force, pride and saving face.’ Far from representing the views of a few underlings, such notions penetrated into the upper echelons of the American command. In their book ‘Cobra II,’ Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor offer this ugly comment from a senior officer: ‘The only thing these sand niggers understand is force and I’m about to introduce them to it.’

Such crass language, redolent with racist, ethnocentric connotations, speaks volumes. These characterizations, like the use of ‘gooks’ during the Vietnam War, dehumanize the Iraqis and in doing so tacitly permit the otherwise impermissible.” Andrew Bacevich, “What’s an Iraqi Life Worth?” The Washington Post, July 9, 2006

In Israel, similar attitudes “tacitly permit the otherwise impermissible,” spiraling down over decades of war and military occupation into a kind of casual brutality. Christopher Hedges, in his book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, describes Israeli soldiers at a Gaza refugee camp boundary insulting Palestinian children on the other side of the fence, and then shooting them when they throw rocks (at an armor-plated jeep):

“I had seen children shot in other conflicts I had covered–death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo–but I had never watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.” Christopher Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, (New York: 2002, Public Affairs Press), p.94.

The Western countries, of course, have for almost a century found it easier and more acceptable to deal death wholesale to those considered outside the pale of “civilization” from the safe and distanced platform of an airplane. And as the British air force headquarters for India told a new colonial official, the rules of war don’t apply “against savage tribes who do not conform to the codes of civilized warfare.” Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, (New York: The New Press, 2000), p.45.

The result of such attitudes is a belief that the “right of self defense,” for troops occupying the soil of people deemed inferior, includes the killing of many, many more human beings than were killed in any attack on the Western power. Hundreds or thousands may be killed, more hundreds or thousands seized, tortured, and imprisoned, great hardship imposed on thousands or hundreds of thousands or more for months or years, in retaliation for the loss of a handful of Western lives we deem infinitely valuable. This terror we–and Israel– call “deterrence.”

Israel deploys such violence in the service of a national vision that doubly evokes the dark side of a European state form that one way or another has dominated the last several centuries of human experience. Israel’s Zionists, inheritors of a nationalism long without a state that developed amidst burgeoning nationalisms whose own language and ethnic-based visions branded long-resident Jews as foreign “others,” today brandish their status as victims of European nationalism’s crimes as a shield against criticism of crimes impelled by ethnic nationalism. As Yuri Slezkine observes in his book The Jewish Century, Israel is

“…the sole Western survivor (along with Turkey, perhaps) of the integral nationalism of interwar Europe in the postwar—and post-Cold War—world. The Israeli equivalent of such politically illegitimate concepts as ‘Germany for the Germans’ and ‘Greater Serbia’—’the Jewish state’—is taken for granted both inside and outside Israel. (Historically, the great majority of European states are monoethnic entities with tribal mythologies and language-based high-culture religions too, but the post- 1970s convention has been to dilute that fact with a variety of ‘multicultural’ claims and provisions that make European states appear more like the United States.) The rhetoric of ethnic homogeneity and ethnic deportations, tabooed elsewhere in the West, is a routine element of Israeli political life. And probably no other European state can hope to avoid boycotts and sanctions while pursuing a policy of territorial expansion, wall building, settlement construction in occupied areas, use of lethal force against demonstrators, and extrajudicial killings and demolitions. It is true that no other European state is in a condition of permanent war; it is also true that no other European state can have as strong a claim on the West’s moral imagination.” Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 364-365.

Crucial to the narrative used to justify any level of violence in defense of the vision that is Israel is that there can only be one Holocaust, an event that transcends all history, and that “never again” can refer only to the slaughter of Jews, and not of anyone else. If one begins to contemplate the many annihilations that sustained the development of the European nations and their Euro-colonial offspring, from millions in the Congo to millions more in the Atlantic slave trade to entire civilizations erased in the Americas, things get more complicated (on this point, see generally Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (New York: 1996, The New Press).

Acknowledging these other holocausts requires both acknowledging the value of all those “non-Western” lives lost, and engaging with the effects of Western imperialism then and now. And the path the dominant elements in the state of Israel have chosen recapitulates the methods and attitudes of the European colonial past, while being thoroughly integrated into the economic, political, and military structures of the global corporate capitalist present. In Israel as in much of the rest of the world, this has created increasing disparities of wealth in recent decades, exacerbated by the apartheid regime imposed on the occupied territories (See Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, The Global Political Economy of Israel, (London: Pluto Press, 2002), pp.353-357). These inequities, together with Israel’s rejection of any more cosmopolitan form of statehood, create a climate conducive to competing violent communal nationalisms both within and without.

If humanity is to survive much longer on a crowded planet, bristling with weapons and stretched to its ecological limits by the ungoverned appetites of its most powerful inhabitants, we must begin to address the great injustices that inevitably breed despair and violence. A place to start is with a genuine commitment to making all human lives equally precious. This may seem either simple or simply cliche, but to attempt this in any meaningful way requires us to confront the countless lives that have been used up or destroyed in the pursuit of power and profit, a process that continues unabated. The first step for inhabitants of the wealthiest societies with the greatest capacity for violence is to oppose the violence our own societies inflict, respecting the humanity of those against whom that violence is directed enough to believe that they will do the same. This may be a risky path, but we already can see the destination of the path we are on: war without end.