kirb wrote:
> Henry wrote:
> > kirb wrote:
> > > Hanky
> > > hate
> > > Henry
> > > kook
> > > hate
> > > stupid racist
> > > wow
> > Breathe, kirb......... Breathe........
> > Then make an attempt to read and think....
> I read your post
But you forgot to think. That was step number two,
remember? Slow down. Breathe......
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
Link: http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann0706.html
--
http://911research.wtc7.net/
http://www.911proof.com/
"The new America, born in sin and arrogance, delusional
in Manifest Destiny, bred in overabundant gluttony,
consumerist and materialist, fathered by George W. Bush,
Dick Cheney and the Cabal of Criminality, a country flocked
by sheeple, ignorant and conditioned, indifferent to a world
growing up around it, living delusions of empire and of
omnipotence, building hatred against it and its policies
throughout the planet, slowly dumbing down its citizens,
losing its edge in the sciences and arts, producing a nation
of acquiescent automatons brainwashed to never question
authority and always faithfully follow the crimes of governance."
- Manuel Valenzuela
"You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie!" - bu$h, a few days
before his FEMA chief, Micheal Brown was forced to resign
because of his gross incomptence.
"The tools that enable Cuba to save lives and preserve
human dignity during hurricanes are socialist values
and organization." - Dr. W.T. Whitney Jr
Ever wonder who benefits from the 200 MILLION
U.S. taxpayer dollars spent EACH DAY in Iraq?
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0223-08.htm
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type !
"They are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And
there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to
take... men with blind hatred and armed with lethal weapons
who are capable of any atrocity... they respect no laws of
warfare or morality."
-bu$h describing his own war crimes in Iraq.
http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0512-10.htm
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> > kirb wrote:
> > > Hanky
> > > hate
> > > Henry
> > > kook
> > > hate
> > > stupid racist
> > > wow
> > Breathe, kirb......... Breathe........
> > Then make an attempt to read and think....
> I read your post