Sirocco – Progress Pond

The Road to Disaster

I have translated a current op-ed by Kåre Willoch, Prime Minister of Norway for the Conservative Party 1981-1986, on the Palestinian question.

Mr. Willoch, b. 1928, is one of the most respected former statesmen in Scandinavia and polls as the most admired living man in Norway. His views on this subject matter are somewhat removed from those of the US establishment.
The Road to Disaster

By Kåre Willoch, former Prime Minister of Norway

In Aftenposten
Translated by Sirocco

Those who defend the Israeli policy towards the Palestinians support a policy generating a hatred that could spell disaster for Israel.

A hundred years of double standards. The misfortunes of the Palestinian people in our time are tied to nearly 100 years of double standards in the Western world. Words about freedom, democracy, and peace have been combined with an unparalleled tolerance for the occupation and oppression of Palestinians. The censure of injustice has been rendered ineffectual by consistently being directed towards the oppressed and the oppressors at once. Whenever the abuses generate extremism among the oppressed, this is used to prove the legitimacy of the oppression. Whenever the oppressed rise up, the oppressors’ right to self-defense is underlined.

Liberty promised. It all began during World War I. Then the Arabs — including those in Palestine — were given expectations of liberty in reward for joining in the war against Turkey, a German ally. However, France and Great Britain simultaneously forged an agreement to divide the Middle East between themselves. In order to secure Jewish support for the Allies, the Jews were promised a “national home” in an area where 90 percent of the population were Arabs. The Palestinians’ attempts between the wars to retain the country in which they had roots preceding the Saga Age in Norway were brutally crushed by the Brits.

Crimes against the Jewish people. After the Europeans’ unfathomable crimes against the Jewish people during the last world war, the Western world considered that the Jews must get a state of their own in an area still having far more Arabs than Jews. Arab states then proposed to ask the International Court of Justice in the Hague whether the UN had any basis in international law to establish a state for a people in an area where another people lived. The West then refused to invoke the law pertaining to the rights of peoples in a matter concerning the rights of a people. But at least the UN resolved that no one living in the area should lose any rights or suffer any maltreatment due to the country’s partition.

Nevertheless, when Jewish terrorists in 1948 perpetrated massacres against civilians in order to make Arabs flee the land that was to be Israel, none of those who had passed the motion prohibiting such events did anything of significance to prevent them. These massacres have been described by the Israeli historian Benny Morris.

The UN’s terms violated. Even though the UN’s foremost term for the creation of the state of Israel had been violated, Palestinian refugees believed they would be allowed to return to their homes. But Israel refused them entry and confiscated their properties without compensation. In their case, no Western powers would enforce the human rights they had participated in guaranteeing. Thus arose the refugee problem. It was these abuses against Arabs in Palestine that provoked so strong reactions in Arab countries that many Jews felt they had to emigrate thence to Israel.

The war in 1967 proved another milestone. Israel’s former foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, wrote in his book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: “After the defeat (in 1967), the Arabs might have made peace in return for the 1948 borders they had hitherto rejected. But now an intoxicated Israel wanted more, and the failure to make peace led both to a revival under Israeli occupation of a fierce Palestinian nationalism and the birth, under the spell of the six-day victory, of a Messianic national-religious Jewish expansionism.” (Economist, February 11 2006).

Since then, Israel has settled ever more of its own citizens on Palestinian land, in breach of international law, to which Western countries ostensibly give great weight. No one has done anything of significance to protect the Palestinians from this.

The Oslo Accords. The Oslo Accords of 1993 gave the Palestinians hope for a state of their own. But the emerging message to the Palestinians was: If you want your own state, you have to cease all violent resistance to the occupation. Meanwhile, the expanding Israeli settlements on Palestinian land showed that they would not gain their own state without violent resistance. When the Oslo Process began, 116,000 Israelis lived on the West Bank and in Gaza. The number is currently approaching 300,000. (Numbers from Foreign Policy). When the confiscation of Palestinian land provoked Palestinian resistance, Israel subjected them to brutality in breach of international law.

After the elections among Palestinians in 2006, Western powers demanded that the losers, namely Fatah, should be in power. They refused to talk to Hamas, which won. Such was the West’s attitude to democracy. Thus, one was able to divide the Palestinians against each other. The justification given was that Hamas wished to eradicate Israel. Signals to the effect that Hamas was willing to abandon such extremism were disregarded. (Economist, January 3). A condition of such willingness, however, was that Israel withdrew from the occupied territories. This Israel did not wish to do. Instead, the reply was what white oppressors always have said before being compelled to give up the oppression: We don’t talk to terrorists. By the oppressors’ definition, those who kill the most civilians are no terrorists. Their premise is that killing only amounts to terrorism when the oppressor’s people are affected.

Enemies must talk to each other. Nelson Mandela has said that peace requires enemies to talk to each other. Israel chose another path. Financial Times wrote on January 4 about the blockade of Gaza in response to the Palestinians voting for Hamas. The Economist believes that Israel and the USA hoped that the emergency caused by the siege would turn the people against Hamas. The opposite happened. Moreover, as The Economist wrote on January 3: The last straw arrived in November, when Israel, in spite of the truce, killed six Hamas people. Hamas responded with rockets.

The remainder of the tragedy has been seen every day on television. But how can the USA, which talks about spreading freedom and democracy, support the oppression of a people, breaches of international law, and the sidelining of an election result, as the USA does with respect to Palestine? Of the difference between American and European reactions, The Economist wrote in 2006 that “the most obvious answer lies in the power of… the Israeli lobby (AIPAC) and the religious right.” In explaining the role of religion, it mentioned that “Two in five Americans believe that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, and one in three say that the creation of the state of Israel was a step towards the Second Coming.” No American politician has much of a chance to be elected to Congress without supporting Israel. However, former leaders — like Jimmy Carter — are able to protest the abuse of military superiority.

Disaster for Israel. Those who defend the Israeli policy towards the Palestinians support a policy generating a hatred that could spell disaster for Israel. They make it even more difficult for those Israelis who want another policy to make their country avert the course from disaster. Friends of Israel ought to work for Israeli acceptance of the Arab peace proposal. This calls, among other things, for borders as before the war of 1967, only with such adjustments as the parties reach agreement on, and guarantees for Israel’s security.

Among Israel’s Arab Citizens, Fury Grows

From my blog.

However much Israel’s war of choice is sold to its Jewish majority as a war of necessity, this doesn’t work with Arabs. Least of all with Israel’s own 1.3 million Arab citizens, many of whom are also victims of the increasingly savage missile attacks, and nearly all of whom watch Arabic TV stations.

The television remotes are working overtime these days. The televisions are on in every Arab home in the Galilee. On Al Jazeera or the Lebanese stations, things look different. “The longer it continues the greater the anger. You can’t ignore the images, the sounds. What do you mean, where is the anger directed? At Israel, of course,” a Dir Assad resident said yesterday.

He says anyone watching the Arab channels gets a very different picture from that seen on the Israeli channels. While the Israeli channels depict a difficult but just war, the Arab satellite stations show constant attacks against civilians. The number of bodies seen on the screens every hour could change someone’s opinion of the justness of this war, and Israel is viewed as the instigator.

These Israeli Arabs, or Palestinians, were disenchanted with the “Jewish state” of Israel at the outset. This is due not only to solidarity with their kin in the occupied areas. Nor is it only due to the apartheid-like law reserving 94 percent of land for Jewish purchase only; nor to the one excluding Muslims from serving in the military (thus limiting their eligibility for social benefits) as well as in the police, the security services, and the prisons (though not as inmates); nor to a host of discriminatory statutes ranging from a 2003 “emergency regulation” restricting the right of Arabs to naturalize their families, to lower children’s allowances for non-Jews. It is due to the sum of all these, and more generally, to systematically occupying the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder:

The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics has classified all communities in Israel into 10 clusters according to their socio-economic status. All 10 communities in the lowest cluster are Palestinian. Out of 26 communities in the second lowest cluster, 23 are Palestinian. None of the Palestinian communities ranked higher than the five lowest classifications. Moreover, almost 50 percent of the children living below the poverty line in Israel are Palestinian, despite the fact that Palestinians do not comprise more than 20 percent of Israel’s entire population. Palestinians in Israel also receive less education than their Jewish counterparts. Sixty percent of the Palestinian labor force have a maximum of nine years of education. Only five percent of Palestinians have college degrees or higher, compared to 17 percent of Jews in Israel.

In addition, Palestinians encounter problems of overcrowding. They own less than three percent of Israel’s land, and less than 50 percent of that land is under their local authority’s jurisdiction. The severe lack of appropriate, updated urban plans for their neighborhoods has created a serious housing problem. This shortage has resulted in a high population density, as well as more than 10,000 illegal houses threatened to be demolished under court order.

These data are from 2000, but things are hardly better now. For further reading, see this book entitled The Other Side of Israel, written by an Israeli Jew who, as it happens, grew up in apartheid South Africa.

On top of this one now has the simmering resentment over the brutal, meaningless destruction of Lebanon, with its consequent missile rain over Arab and Jew alike.

It’s common in Israel to talk about an ‘Arab population bomb’; indeed, several of the aforementioned discriminatory practices are justified in terms of such. But unless a constructive ‘Operation Change of Direction’ be launched, and soon, some Arab Israelis may well find themselves at their wit’s end. That could involve far uglier bombs than childbirth.

Where Freedom Reigns

Nearly three out of four Americans think Iraqis are better off now than before the invasion, a survey shows.

Iraqi blogger Riverbend might beg to differ. She describes how Baghdad’s middle class is being expelled by Mahdist goons:

Summer of goodbyes…

Residents of Baghdad are systematically being pushed out of the city. Some families are waking up to find a Klashnikov bullet and a letter in an envelope with the words “Leave your area or else.” The culprits behind these attacks and threats are Sadr’s followers- Mahdi Army. It’s general knowledge, although no one dares say it out loud. In the last month we’ve had two different families staying with us in our house, after having to leave their neighborhoods due to death threats and attacks. It’s not just Sunnis- it’s Shia, Arabs, Kurds- most of the middle-class areas are being targeted by militias.

Other areas are being overrun by armed Islamists. The Americans have absolutely no control in these areas. Or maybe they simply don’t want to control the areas because when there’s a clash between Sadr’s militia and another militia in a residential neighborhood, they surround the area and watch things happen.

This takes the surprise out of the fact that, in a survey carried out this April by the International Republican Institute, only 1% of Iraqis said they trusted American and coalition forces for their personal protection (and that poll was taken before a certain ‘incident’ was known).

Mahdist militiamen in Baghdad

Nor is it rocket science to see why, as even the Wall Street Journal admits, “the middle class — upon whom so much depends — is fleeing Iraq in numbers.” A point worth noting for the 55 percent of Americans who, according the the aforementioned poll, think “history will give the U.S. credit for bringing freedom and democracy” to Iraq. For without an urban, educated middle class, Iraqi freedom and democracy remain a chimera.

It’s the last remains of this middle class that are going now. Here’s a BBC report from 2002:

In the days before the Gulf War, people in the Arab world mocked big spenders by telling them to stop being such Baghdadis.

But since 1991, life in Iraq has changed dramatically – the country’s GDP has dropped from US$3,000 to $715 and doctors have had to learn anew how to treat diseases that had disappeared from Iraq in the 1980s such as cholera and diphtheria.

For the past 12 years, the country has been struggling under UN-imposed sanctions, which have greatly affected the life of the Iraqis but done little to undermine the power of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Riverbend continues:

Since the beginning of July, the men in our area have been patrolling the streets. Some of them patrol the rooftops and others sit quietly by the homemade road blocks we have on the major roads leading into the area. You cannot in any way rely on Americans or the government. You can only hope your family and friends will remain alive- not safe, not secure- just alive. That’s good enough.

For me, June marked the first month I don’t dare leave the house without a hijab, or headscarf.

As documented in this HRW background paper, Iraq ranked among the most progressive Arab societies with respect to women’s rights from the 1968 Baathist coup until the Gulf War. Gender equality was enshrined in the constitution; there were compulsory schooling and free higher education for both genders; and the law ensured equal employment opportunities in the public sector. However, the tide turned after 1991, as a weakened dictator traded off his modernizing vision for religious support, especially among reactionary Shias. Additionally, UN sanctions hit women disproportionately, just as they decimated the middle class.

After the second US-led war on Iraq, the wheel has now turned full cycle.

Not depressing enough, you say? Try this fresh report in the Observer:

Gays flee Iraq as Shia death squads find a new target

Hardline Islamic insurgent groups in Iraq are targeting a new type of victim with the full protection of Iraqi law, The Observer can reveal. The country is seeing a sudden escalation of brutal attacks on what are being called the ‘immorals’ – homosexual men and children as young as 11 who have been forced into same-sex prostitution.

There is growing evidence that Shia militias have been killing men suspected of being gay and children who have been sold to criminal gangs to be sexually abused.

What’s not to like? Reading on:

Eleven-year-old Ameer Hasoon al-Hasani was kidnapped by policemen from the front of his house last month. He was known in his district to have been forced into prostitution. His father Hassan told me he searched for his son for three days after his abduction, then found him, shot in the head. A copy of the death certificate confirms the cause of death.

Homosexuality is seen as so immoral that it qualifies as an ‘honour killing’ to murder someone who is gay – and the perpetrator can escape punishment. Section 111 of Iraq’s penal code lays out protections for murder when people are acting against Islam.

‘The government will do nothing to tackle this issue. It’s really desperate when people get to the stage they’re trading their children for money. They have no alternatives because there are no jobs,’ Hili says.

I think this goes to show that three out of four Americans can be wrong.

From my blog.

Famous Author Excoriates Israel

Crossposted from my blog.

Jostein Gaarder, the author of the global literary phenomenon Sophie’s World (printed in 26m copies in 53 languages), launches a scorching attack on Israel in Aftenposten, Norway’s paper of record. Gaarder, a historian of ideas, describes himself as a friend of the Jewish people but doubts whether Israel truly is the same. Suffice it to say that this will not appear in the New York Times anytime soon.
The form of Gaarder’s condemnation is inspired by Amos, the first Judaic prophet whose message is preserved in scroll (ca. 750 B.C.). Quoting Wikipedia: “The central idea of the book of Amos according to most scholars is that Yahweh puts his people on the same level as the nations that surround it — Yahweh expects the same morality of them all.”

God’s chosen people

Jostein Gaarder, Aftenposten 05.08.06

From the Norwegian by Sirocco

There is no turning back. It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel. We could not recognize the South African apartheid regime, nor did we recognize the Afghan Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing. We must now get used to the idea: The state of Israel in its current form is history.

We do not believe in the notion of God’s chosen people. We laugh at this people’s fancies and weep over its misdeeds. To act as God’s chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.

Limits to tolerance

There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance. We do not believe in divine promises as justification for occupation and apartheid. We have left the Middle Ages behind. We laugh uneasily at those who still believe that the God of flora, fauna, and galaxies has selected one people in particular as his favorite and given it funny stone tablets, burning bushes, and a license to kill.

We call child murderers ‘child murderers’ and will never accept that such have a divine or historic mandate excusing their outrages. We say but this: Shame on all apartheid, shame on ethnic cleansing, shame on every terrorist strike against civilians, be it carried out by Hamas, Hizballah, or the state of Israel!

Unscrupulous art of war

We acknowledge and pay heed to Europe’s deep responsibility for the plight of the Jews, for the disgraceful harassment, the pogroms, and the Holocaust. It was historically and morally necessary for Jews to get their own home. However, the state of Israel, with its unscrupulous art of war and its disgusting weapons, has massacred its own legitimacy. It has systematically flouted International Law, international conventions, and countless UN resolutions, and it can no longer expect protection from same. It has carpet bombed the recognition of the world. But fear not! The time of trouble shall soon be over. The state of Israel has seen its Soweto.

We are now at the watershed. There is no turning back. The state of Israel has raped the recognition of the world and shall have no peace until it lays down its arms.

Without defense, without skin

May spirit and word sweep away the apartheid walls of Israel. The state of Israel does not exist. It is now without defense, without skin. May the world therefore have mercy on the civilian population. For it is not civilian individuals at whom our doomsaying is directed.

We wish the people of Israel well, nothing but well, but we reserve the right not to eat Jaffa oranges as long as they taste foul and are poisonous. It was endurable to live some years without the blue grapes of apartheid.

They celebrate their triumphs

We do not believe that Israel mourns forty killed Lebanese children more than it for over three thousand years has lamented forty years in the desert. We note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs like they once cheered the scourges of the Lord as “fitting punishment” for the people of Egypt. (In that tale, the Lord, God of Israel, appears as an insatiable sadist.) We query whether most Israelis think that one Israeli life is worth more than forty Palestinian or Lebanese lives.

For we have seen pictures of little Israeli girls writing hateful greetings on the bombs to be dropped on the civilian population of Lebanon and Palestine. Little Israeli girls are not cute when they strut with glee at death and torment across the fronts.

The retribution of blood vengeance

We do not recognize the rhetoric of the state of Israel. We do not recognize the spiral of retribution of the blood vengeance with “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” We do not recognize the principle of one or a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye. We do not recognize collective punishment or population-wide diets as political weapons. Two thousand years have passed since a Jewish rabbi criticized the ancient doctrine of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

He said: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” We do not recognize a state founded on antihumanistic principles and on the ruins of an archaic national and war religion. Or as Albert Schweitzer expressed it: “Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.”

Compassion and forgiveness

We do not recognize the old Kingdom of David as a model for the 21st century map of the Middle East. The Jewish rabbi claimed two thousand years ago that the Kingdom of God is not a martial restoration of the Kingdom of David, but that the Kingdom of God is within us and among us. The Kingdom of God is compassion and forgiveness.

Two thousand years have passed since the Jewish rabbi disarmed and humanized the old rhetoric of war. Even in his time, the first Zionist terrorists were operating.

Israel does not listen

For two thousand years, we have rehearsed the syllabus of humanism, but Israel does not listen. It was not the Pharisee that helped the man who lay by the wayside, having fallen prey to robbers. It was a Samaritan; today we would say, a Palestinian. For we are human first of all — then Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. Or as the Jewish rabbi said: “And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others?” We do not accept the abduction of soldiers. But nor do we accept the deportation of whole populations or the abduction of legally elected parliamentarians and government ministers.

We recognize the state of Israel of 1948, but not the one of 1967. It is the state of Israel that fails to recognize, respect, or defer to the internationally lawful Israeli state of 1948. Israel wants more; more water and more villages. To obtain this, there are those who want, with God’s assistance, a final solution to the Palestinian problem. The Palestinians have so many other countries, certain Israeli politicians have argued; we have only one.

The USA or the world?

Or as the highest protector of the state of Israel puts it: “May God continue to bless America.” A little child took note of that. She turned to her mother, saying: “Why does the President always end his speeches with ‘God bless America’? Why not, ‘God bless the world’?”

Then there was a Norwegian poet who let out this childlike sigh of the heart: “Why doth Humanity so slowly progress?” It was he that wrote so beautifully of the Jew and the Jewess. But he rejected the notion of God’s chosen people. He personally liked to call himself a Muhammedan.

Calm and mercy

We do not recognize the state of Israel. Not today, not as of this writing, not in the hour of grief and wrath. If the entire Israeli nation should fall to its own devices and parts of the population have to flee the occupied areas into another diaspora, then we say: May the surroundings stay calm and show them mercy. It is forever a crime without mitigation to lay hand on refugees and stateless people.

Peace and free passage for the evacuating civilian population no longer protected by a state. Fire not at the fugitives! Take not aim at them! They are vulnerable now like snails without shells, vulnerable like slow caravans of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees, defenseless like women and children and the old in Qana, Gaza, Sabra, and Chatilla. Give the Israeli refugees shelter, give them milk and honey!

Let not one Israeli child be deprived of life. Far too many children and civilians have already been murdered.

From my blog.

Also available there:

A partial analysis of the controversial essay, refuting some bad interpretations.

A comment on the letter to the Norwegian people from Shimon Samuels at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

My translation of Gaarder’s new op-ed, wherein he explains his position with respect to Israel and Jews.

Why the Coming Occupation Will Fail

When the dust has settled, the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon will commence. It will soon become the IDF’s waking nightmare, to be inherited by any international stabilization force dumb enough to venture in.

Why? The short answer is that occupation of a hostile territory always is hell. The somewhat longer answer can be couched in terms of order and chaos.

From my blog.
It’s inherently far easier to create chaos than order. Because there are infinitely more ways for things to be disorganized than to be organized, tearing down is far quicker and less taxing than building up. South Beirut took twenty-two years to even partly rebuild and an equal number of days to turn back into refuse.

Total makeover: South Beirut before and after.

Now, in a conventional war of attrition, the aim is to disrupt the enemy’s organization and infrastructure, and the strongest force is the one that can do so most decisively. However, if the victor wants to occupy the conquered territory, his task is reversed: he must nourish order instead of destroying it, and he must do so amidst the rubble he himself created.

This gives the insurgency the advantage, not just because it’s easier to destroy than to build, but also because an army is designed to do the former.

Furthermore, in war it is generally not enough to contain the enemy: you have to harm him too. But when the occupying army strikes back to protect the order it seeks to impose, it usually fans the flames of disorder by antagonizing the civilian population.

This problem is exacerbated insofar as the insurgent force:

has a decentralized command structure, making it hard to deal a decisive blow;
is integrated with the civilian population, blending in with same;
is expected by the civilians to be around longer than the occupying force;
perceives itself, and is perceived by the civilians, as directly defending the homeland, while the occupiers at most perceive themselves as indirectly defending theirs;
consists of fighters who fear failure more than death;
is well-prepared and can be resupplied from outside.

On all of these variables, Hizbollah scores extremely highly.

The IDF is so hated that it is going to take serious losses before an international force arrives, if it ever does. As to the latter, it will be less hated (anything else would be tough to achieve) but also less motivated; and above all, the contributing nations will inevitably be far less prepared to take losses.

This occupation has the potential to make Afghanistan resemble a chamber music concert at a daycare center for the elderly. It is bizarre to see European countries like France and Denmark even thinking of signing up. The only two bodies of people I would like to see deployed into this meat-grinder are the Knesset and the US Congress; the latter with ‘410-8’ tattooed on their foreheads.

Walking through Walls

From my blog.

What is the crossbreed of the IDF and post-structuralism? Oppression you can’t comprehend.

A chilling article by Eyal Weizman reveals an unlikely migration of ideas from the Left Bank of the Seine to the West Bank of the Jordan:

The attack conducted by units of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as `inverse geometry’, which he explained as `the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions’…. This form of movement, described by the military as `infestation’, seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF’s strategy of `walking through walls’ involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.

[Kohavi] said: `this space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. […] The question is how do you interpret the alley? […] We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps.

“This is why,” explains the erudite warrior, “that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls.”

To begin with, soldiers assemble behind the wall and then, using explosives, drills or hammers, they break a hole large enough to pass through. Stun grenades are then sometimes thrown, or a few random shots fired into what is usually a private living-room occupied by unsuspecting civilians. When the soldiers have passed through the wall, the occupants are locked inside one of the rooms, where they are made to remain – sometimes for several days – until the operation is concluded, often without water, toilet, food or medicine. Civilians in Palestine, as in Iraq, have experienced the unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home as the most profound form of trauma and humiliation.

In Arab culture, the boundary between private and public — the home and the street — is generally conceived more robustly than in the West. But after all, post-structuralism is all about collapsing rigid boundaries.

What Israel did and still does to Palestinian homes, it is now doing to the entire Lebanese nation, through whose walls it crashed nearly a month ago. A million have been hoarded “inside one of the rooms” on pain of death.

Yet it isn’t cost-free to retrain a combat army for brutalizing civilians with a sugar-coating of outdated po-mo jargon. This helps account for why the IDF — which Israelis trust more than any other institution — is choking on a rag-tag militia of at most some 5,000 men.

Somehow I doubt that Deleuze and Lyotard will be of use to them there.

Meanwhile, in Gaza

While Lebanon’s death by thousand cuts fills the news, the Israeli ravaging of Gaza continues unabated:

The United Nations has called on world leaders not to forget the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, saying it is at least as serious as that in southern Lebanon.

[snip]

Thirty aid agencies backed the appeal, and one charity spoke of a sense among aid agencies that Gaza’s population was being terrorised.

BBC News

Since the power station has been destroyed, much of the population has no electricity or clean water, causing fear of epidemics. Worse, people are kept on the brink of starvation as Israel lets in far too few aid trucks.

According to the UN, the tiny area is bombarded with some 150 artillery shells a day. An equal number of people have been killed over the past month, including one child on average per day. In the latest round of violence a young woman and a 14-year old boy were shelled to death; four others were injured.

The Independent (subscription) describes this situation as threatening “total breakdown of the fabric of society”:

A 12-year-old boy dead on a stretcher. A mother in shock and disbelief after her son was shot dead for standing on their roof. A phone rings and a voice in broken Arabic orders residents to abandon their home on pain of death.

Those are snapshots of a day in Gaza where Israel is waging a hidden war, as the world looks the other way, focusing on Lebanon.

It is a war of containment and control that has turned the besieged Strip into a prison with no way in or out, and no protection from an fearsome battery of drones, precision missiles, tank shells and artillery rounds.

As of last night, 29 people had been killed in the most concentrated 48 hours of violence since an Israeli soldier was abducted by Palestinian militants just more than a month ago.

The operation is codenamed “Samson’s Pillars”, a collective punishment of the 1.4 million Gazans, subjecting them to a Lebanese-style offensive that has targeted the civilian infrastructure by destroying water mains, the main power station and bridges.

How grotesquely appropriate to name it “Samson’s Pillars.” Here’s what Samson, according to myth, accomplished in Gaza:

16:28 And Samson called unto the LORD, and said, O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.

16:29 And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left.

16:30 And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.

Judges

Sounds like terrorism, no? How would we characterize such a person today?

Samson ‘was mentally ill’

Dr Eric Altschuler, from the University of California, in San Diego, claims that instead of being a hero, Samson was actually mentally ill.

In a report in the New Scientist, Dr Altschuler said that in today’s society Samson would be seen as “a bit of a thug”.

[snip]

Dr Altschuler said Samson routinely got into fights, killed 1,000 Philistines single-handedly and then gloated over it and showed no remorse.

[snip]

Kevin Gibson, a consultant clinical psychologist and head of adult psychology at Sunderland Hospitals Trust, said society would view Samson in a different light today.

“Today we would see his ruthlessness and exploitiveness as having a personality disorder,” he said.

When it comes to the current government of Israel, some of us do.

Adapted from my blog.

Serbia With Nukes

From my blog.

Israel, I have argued, is aptly viewed as a modern hybrid of ancient Athens and Sparta, and debate typically turns on which aspect to stress. However, something is missing in this characterization. Consider how a major Israeli daily wants the PM to address the world:

The mass circulation Maariv devoted its front page to a suggested speech for Mr Olmert to deliver to world leaders.

“What is it about us, the Jews, the few and persecuted, that arouses all these instincts of cosmic justice in you?” it read. “We are not hesitating, apologising or relenting.

“Gentlemen, it is time for you to understand: The Jewish state will no longer be trampled underfoot… I serve as a mouth today for six million bombed Israeli citizens, who serve as a mouth for six million annihilated Jews, who were burnt to dust by savages in Europe… And you, just as you did not take the matter seriously at the time, you are ignoring it now.”

If this tirade is indicative of Israeli public opinion, it is a disturbing mentality on the part of a nation engaged in two-front war against two neighboring populations involving large-scale razing of roads, bridges, water mains, power stations, hospitals, and housing quarters by means of tank shells, artillery rounds, cluster bombs, and guided missiles, killing nearly 1,000 civilians and driving many hundred thousands to flee. The eminent historian Tony Judt, in an outstanding essay from May called ‘The country that wouldn’t grow up’, pegs it as ‘macho victimhood’.

But today the country’s national narrative of macho victimhood appears to the rest of the world as simply bizarre: evidence of a sort of collective cognitive dysfunction that has gripped Israel’s political culture.

And the long cultivated persecution mania – “everyone’s out to get us” – no longer elicits sympathy. Instead it attracts some very unappetizing comparisons: At a recent international meeting I heard one speaker, by analogy with Helmut Schmidt’s famous dismissal of the Soviet Union as “Upper Volta with Missiles,” describe Israel as “Serbia with nukes.”

Serbia with nukes. What harsher indictment in Western ears? Even to its less hostile critics, Serbian nationalism remains predicated on a literally epic victim cult. The difference is that Jews can claim, to a greater extent, an actual history of massive collective persecution. However, Judt notes, to new generations of non-Israelis, this history is becoming just that:

Israel has stayed the same, but the world… has changed. Whatever purchase Israel’s self-description still has upon the imagination of Israelis themselves, it no longer operates beyond the country’s frontiers.

Even the Holocaust can no longer be instrumentalized to excuse Israel’s behavior…. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. “Remember Auschwitz” is not an acceptable response.

In short: Israel, in the world’s eyes, is a normal state, but one behaving in abnormal ways. It is in control of its fate, but the victims are someone else. It is strong, very strong, but its behavior is making everyone else vulnerable. And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This – the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic – is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel’s trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the only card left.

Judt knows only too well what he is talking about. Himself a declared ‘proud Jew’, he was nonetheless subjected to a scathing campaign of defamation upon his famous 2003 essay in The New York Review of Books. Here he concluded thus:

The depressing truth is that Israel’s current behavior is not just bad for America, though it surely is. It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews.

His recent essay in Haaretz reiterates this crucial point:

In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel’s reckless behavior and insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia. But the traditional corollary – if anti-Jewish feeling is linked to dislike of Israel then right-thinking people should rush to Israel’s defense – no longer applies. Instead, the ironies of the Zionist dream have come full circle: For tens of millions of people in the world today, Israel is indeed the state of all the Jews. And thus, reasonably enough, many observers believe that one way to take the sting out of rising anti-Semitism in the suburbs of Paris or the streets of Jakarta would be for Israel to give the Palestinians back their land.

Nor does this apply only to Muslims. On the one occasion I have ever personally heard an ethnic Scandinavian express anti-Semitic views, the objects of his disapproval turned out to be Israeli occupation policies and the US pro-Israel lobby. A man of little formal education, he confused these with Jews as such, as he realized when pointed out. Ironically, however, garden-variety apologists for Israel would eagerly concur with his original self-identification as an anti-Semite.

In other words, this victim cult is doubly self-reinforcing. Not only does Israel’s contempt for human rights and international law antagonize a growing fraction of humanity, which rejects the tired image of a civilized oasis besieged by barbarians. In addition, helped by the efforts of Israel’s propagandists to stifle criticism, this enmity toward a state is increasingly redirected at ethnic Jews everywhere, boosting the irrational sentiment that made necessary the creation of a Jewish nation-state in the first place, long after such nationalist projects had been discredited in Europe.

This has got to end before it is too late. After all, a Serbia with nukes may eventually feel the need to use them.

Cartoon War II

From my blog.

What sort of country revels in murder and oppression but cries to high heavens about cartoons?

Saudi Arabia? Check. Syria? Check. Libya? Check. Iran? Check.

Israel? Check:

Norway ‘Nazi cartoon’ irks Israel

Israel’s ambassador to Norway has complained to press regulators about a cartoon showing Israeli PM Ehud Olmert as a Nazi concentration camp commander.

Miryam Shomrat told the BBC the caricature in Oslo’s Dagbladet newspaper went beyond free speech.

Ms Shomrat said it would be open to prosecution in some European countries.

Dagbladet’s editor said the caricature was “within the bounds of freedom of expression,” according to Norway’s NRK state broadcaster.

Ms Shomrat made the official complaint to the Norwegian Press Trade Committee following the publication of the cartoon on 10 July.

In an interview with the BBC’s Europe Today, she said however that her protest could not be compared to the outcry in the Muslim world over the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

Lars Helle, Dagbladet’s acting editor-in-chief, said the newspaper was taking the complaint seriously.

“But I do not fear that Dagbladet will be found guilty,” Mr Helle told the NRK.

The cartoon shows Mr Olmert standing on a balcony in a prison camp.

He is holding a sniper’s rifle and a dead man is seen lying on the ground.

The drawing clearly alluded to the Hollywood film Schindler’s List, in which a sadistic Nazi commander shoots Jewish prisoners for fun, according to Dagbladet.

Here is the doodle in question, which Brit Hume at FAUXNews cites as proof of “a real strain of anti-Semitism in European opinion”:

The allusion to Schindler’s List is clear. Now here’s another list:

1. Anwar Isma’el Atallah, 12 years old
2. Saleh Sleman Al Jemasi, 16 years old
3. Ruwan Fareed Hajjaj, 5 years old
4. Khalid Nidal Abed Al Karim Wahbeh, 1 year old
5. Mahfouth Farid Nasseer, 15 years old
6. Ahmad Ghaleb Abu Amshah, 16 years old
7. Ahmed Fathi Odah Shabat, 16 years old
8. Waleed Mahmoud Al Zinati, 12 years old
9. Salah Adeen Hammad Abu Maktuma, 17 years old
10. Ibrahim Ali Khatoush, 15 years old
11. Mahmoud Muhammad Al Asar, 15 years old
12. Ibrahim Ali Al Nabaheen, 15 years old
13. Ahmad Abdil Mina’m Abu Hajaj, 16 years old
14. Nasrallah Nabil Abu Selmieh, 5 years old
15. Aya Nabil Abu Selmieh, 7 years old
16. Iman Nabil Abu Selmieh, 11 years old
17. Yahya Nabil Abu Selmieh, 9 years old
18. Huda Nabil Abu Selmieh, 13 years old
19. Basma Nabil Abu Selmieh, 15 years old
20. Sumaia Nabil Abu Selmieh, 16 years old
21. Raji Omar Deif Alla, 16 years old
22. Muhanna Sa’ed Mesleh, 16 years old
23. Ahmad Rawhee Abdo, 13 years old
24. Ali Kamil Al Najar, 13 years old
25. Fadwa Faisel al ‘Urouqi, 13 years old
26. Mohammad Awad Muhra, 17 years old
27. Khitam Muhammad Tayeh, 11 years old
28. Nadee Habib Al Ataar, 11 years old
29. Saleh Ibrahim Nasser, 13 years old
30. Bashir Abdullah Awad Abu Thaher, 12 years old
31. Sabrine Naser Habib, 3 years old

The above are children killed by the IDF in Gaza alone since June 26, according to Defence for Children International.

Two questions come to mind: 1. How far off is the cartoon in light of this list? 2. To the extent that it misses the mark, which is more unacceptable? The cartoon, or the list?

Though the Secretariat of the Norwegian Press Trade Committee has already recommended that the complaint be rejected, Ms. Shomrat continues her campaign to stir up outrage over the cartoon. Here is the ambassador making her case in the New York Sun:

Ms. Shomrat said that while Dagbladet, a “reputable” paper, has allowed pro-Israel opinion pieces, it has been quite critical of Israel…. She also said that if the cartoon were printed 50 years ago, it would have been fit for Der Stürmer, the weekly Nazi newspaper.

Is it a crime for a European paper to be critical of Israel? Did Der Stürmer come out in 1956? And lastly, who is now making tasteless comparisons?

Despite the obvious similarities, Ms. Shomrat said that because Israel is now fighting a war, her objections were nothing like the complaints many Muslims made after inflammatory cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist were printed in a Danish paper and later syndicated in numerous other papers, including Dagbladet.

Israel’s objection to freedom of expression in another country is nothing like the Muhammed protest because Israel is fighting a war? Since the New York Sun can hardly be suspected of anti-Israel bias, presumably the ambassador is accurately quoted. And it boggles the mind.

Israel used to be adept at propaganda as well as war. What went wrong?

Rogue State: Israel and UN Resolutions

Israel defends its destruction of Lebanon with reference to UN Security Council Resolution 1391, calling on Lebanon to seize control of its entire territory. In this context it is interesting to consider Israel’s own record when it comes to UN resolutions.

From my blog.
The Israeli Ambassador to Norway, Miryam Shomrat, has kindly answered questions from readers of the daily Aftenposten. One question read: “Is Israel free to pick and choose which UN Resolutions are to be complied with?” Her Excellency replied as follows:

One must distinguish between resolutions decided upon by the UN General Assembly, which are not binding, and resolutions made by the UN Security Council which are binding according to International Law. Israel is adhering to Security Council resolutions.

That’s quite a study in disingenuity. Three follow-ups come to mind:

1. If it’s fine and dandy to ignore UN General Assembly resolutions at will because they aren’t legally binding, why are we constantly reminded that Israel was established under a UN General Assembly resolution? Indeed, Israel’s own establishment proclamation cites this resolution immediately before declaring the state:

On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

The ambassador herself complains in another reply: “The historical fact is that when the State of Israel was established the Arab countries attacked it a [sic] war of aggression and at the end of the war refused to sign peace agreements and establish recognised borders – which Israel wanted.” But if a barrage of UN General Assembly resolutions critical of Israel count for nil, why was it so wrong for Arab states to reject the particular resolution authorizing Israel’s creation in the former British Mandate? (For the record, I don’t personally oppose it, necessarily.)

2. Is it really true that “Israel is adhering to Security Council resolutions”? If by this one means, ‘adhering to some Security Council resolutions’, then it is doubtless so, though not mind-bendingly impressive. But what about the following, Ms. Ambassador?

252 (1968) Urgently calls upon Israel to rescind measures that change the legal status of Jerusalem, including the expropriation of land and properties thereon.

262 (1968) Calls upon Israel to pay compensation to Lebanon for destruction of airliners at Beirut International Airport.

267 (1969) Urgently calls upon Israel to rescind measures seeking to change the legal status of occupied East Jerusalem.

271 (1969) Reiterates calls to rescind measures seeking to change the legal status of occupied East Jerusalem and calls on Israel to scrupulously abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention regarding the responsibilities of occupying powers.

298 (1971) Reiterates demand that Israel rescind measures seeking to change the legal status of occupied East Jerusalem.

446 (1979) Calls upon Israel to scrupulously abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention regarding the responsibilities of occupying powers, to rescind previous measures that violate these relevant provisions, and “in particular, not to transport parts of its civilian population into the occupied Arab territories.”

452 (1979) Calls on the government of Israel to cease, on an urgent basis, the establishment, construction, and planning of settlements in the Arab territories, occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem.

465 (1980) Reiterates previous resolutions on Israel’s settlements policy.

471 (1980) Demands prosecution of those involved in assassination attempts of West Bank leaders and compensation for damages; reiterates demands to abide by Fourth Geneva Convention.

484 (1980) Reiterates request that Israel abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention.

487 (1981) Calls upon Israel to place its nuclear facilities under the safeguard of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency.

497 (1981) Demands that Israel rescind its decision to impose its domestic laws in the occupied Syrian Golan region.

573 (1985) Calls on Israel to pay compensation for human and material losses from its attack against Tunisia and to refrain from all such attacks or threats of attacks against other nations.

592 (1986) Insists Israel abide by the Fourth Geneva Conventions in East Jerusalem and other occupied territories.

605 (1987) Calls once more upon Israel, the occupying Power, to abide immediately and scrupulously by the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War, and to desist forthwith from its policies and practices that are in violations of the provisions of the Convention.

607 (1986) Reiterates calls on Israel to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention and to cease its practice of deportations from occupied Arab territories.

608 (1988) Reiterates call for Israel to cease its deportations.

636 (1989) Reiterates call for Israel to cease its deportations.

641 (1989) Reiterates previous resolutions calling on Israel to desist in its deportations.

672 (1990) Reiterates calls for Israel to abide by provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention in the occupied Arab territories.

673 (1990) Insists that Israel come into compliance with resolution 672.

681 (1990) Reiterates call on Israel to abide by Fourth Geneva Convention in the occupied Arab territories.

904 (1994) Calls upon Israel, as the occupying power, “to take and implement measures, inter alia, confiscation of arms, with the aim of preventing illegal acts of violence by settlers.”

1073 (1996) Calls on the safety and security of Palestinian civilians to be ensured.

1322 (2000) Calls upon Israel to scrupulously abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention regarding the responsibilities of occupying power.

1402 (2002) Calls for Israel to withdraw from Palestinian cities.

1403 (2002) Demands that Israel go through with “the implementation of its resolution 1402, without delay.”

1405 (2002) Israel Calls for UN inspectors to investigate civilian deaths during an Israeli assault on the Jenin refugee camp.

1435 (2002) Calls on Israel to withdraw to positions of September 2000 and end its military activities in and around Ramallah, including the destruction of security and civilian infrastructure deaths during an Israeli assault on the Jenin refugee camp.

1515 (2003) Calls on Israel to fulfil its obligations under the Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution.

1544 (2004) Calls on Israel to respect its obligations under international humanitarian law, and insists, in particular, on its obligation not to undertake demolition of homes contrary to that law.

The above list relies on this compilation by Professor Stephen Zunes, updated from the primary sources. Note that it only includes resolutions which Israel currently is flaunting; otherwise it would have been longer. For instance, UNSC Resolution 425 (1978), calling on Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, was ignored by the former for 22 years.

3. To the extremely limited extent that passed UNSC resolutions are palatable to Israel, could that possibly be because the US, after adopting Israel as a client state in the early 1970s, has used its veto power more than all other permanent members during that period combined? After all, since Ambassador George Bush cast the first pro-Israel veto in 1972, forty UNSC Resolutions critical of Israel have been shot down by the USA, the most recent one calling for a halt to the Lebanon slaughter.

Often, the threat of US veto compels the other members of the UNSC to seriously water down their proposals in order to get anything passed:

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Security Council unanimously approved a weak statement Thursday expressing shock and distress at Israel’s bombing of a U.N. post on the Lebanon border that killed four unarmed military observers but no condemnation.

[snip]

The United States, Israel’s closest ally, insisted on dropping any condemnation or allusion to the possibility that Israel deliberately targeted the post in the town of Khiam near the eastern end of the border with Israel.

[snip]

The initial draft proposed by China would have had the council express shock and distress at Israel’s “apparently deliberate targeting” of the U.N. base and condemn “this coordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long-established and clearly marked U.N. post.”

[snip]

Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Dan Gillerman called the statement “very fair and balanced” and said it was right for the council to adopt it in memory of the four peacekeepers.”

FOX News

The UNSC great power veto is itself a concession to practicalities, made in order to get the major victors of WWII on board the UN ship. The way in which the USA is overusing it on behalf of a client state amounts to abusing an already questionable institution, and reflects rather poorly on client and patron alike.