Israel, Suicide Nation
by M. Junaid Alam
From: www.dissidentvoice.org
March 29, 2004
Politics, being the art
of deception, must certainly recognize Israel as its Da Vinci.
Its smug self-portrait as a ‘civilized democracy’,
rendered with brushes dipped deeply in the oil paint of antipathy
for Arabs, has won much admiration among impressionable Americans.
Galvanizing and amplifying latent Western hatred of Muslim Arabs
in order to rally the West under the banner of ‘Judeo-Christian
civilization’, and intimidating doubters by abusing the memory
of the Holocaust to claim special ‘unique victim’ status,
Israel intones, ‘Stand with us because we are white and bomb
towel-heads in F-16s just as you do, and don’t dare stand
against us because you once persecuted our forefathers and should
atone for your sins – by abetting ours.’
The result of this most cynical ploy is that the Palestinians,
dark-skinned victims of Israel’s perpetual campaign of ethnic
cleansing, torture, theft, and humiliation, are always grotesquely
caricatured as mindless savages with a fetish for suicide attacks.
There is, however, one major credibility problem with this racist
rhetoric: Israel itself is in the process of committing suicide.
The trouble hardly stems from any defect in Israel’s elaborate
propaganda campaign. To the contrary, its message has been widely
accepted with fawning awe and reverence by all dominant presses,
pundits, and politicians, whose necks and knees strain from displaying
the proper respect accorded to the lies of the powerful. The Israeli
narrative, preserved, polished, and peddled by the generously-funded
pro-Israel lobby and various sycophants, has easily withstood the
fleabites of facts and evidence presented by critical Jewish- Israeli
scholars, historians, journalists and commentators, which go unnoticed
in mainstream discourse.
No, Israel’s crisis has not emerged because its packaged
lies have been unwrapped for the public by sentimental sectors
of corporate capital moved by the plight of the oppressed, but
rather because the oppressed themselves, viciously maligned and
virtually alone in their struggle for survival, have refused to
bow to the logic behind those packaged lies; that is to say, they
refuse to be exterminated, disappeared, destroyed, or spirited
away, as Zionism has been demanding of them for one hundred years.
As one Palestinian recently wrote in response to Ben-Gurion’s
famous quip on expelling Arabs, (“The old will die and the
young will forget,”): “The old are dying, and the young
are dying too, but no one is forgetting.”
What is therefore falling to pieces is not Israel’s ‘smug
self-portrait’, but rather the cheap, crumbling edifice of
arrogance on which it and all the other aspirations of Israeli
colonialism are mounted. Propping up this arrogance in the past
was the basic assumption among Israeli elites that after enough
murder, rape, torture, bulldozing, looting, and expropriating,
the Palestinians will break. This prognosis has failed miserably.
Compounding the original crime of mass expulsion with more violence
has not allowed Israel to escape its consequences. Zionism’s “original
sin”, as one Israeli historian calls his nation’s original
1948 expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians and massacre of hundreds
more, is the basis of both Israel’s existence and the continued
non-existence of the more than four million caged, dispossessed
Palestinian victims who demand justice.
This demand for justice expresses itself in continued endurance
and resistance, separate forms of defiance with interdependent
consequences – consequences that Israeli society cannot cope
with and sees as its greatest threat.
Endurance means, first and foremost, staying in place. Its greed
for land and settlements partially hindered by Palestinian presence,
Israel has responded by robbing the natives of any legal, political
or human rights, and has constructed what Israeli anti-occupation
activist Jeff Halper calls a “matrix of control” to
stifle their lives, including settlements, military checkpoints,
roadblocks, curfews, embargoes, and detention centers. But merely
living in this hellish scenario constitutes a victory against the
root logic of Israeli colonialism, which is to ‘purify’ the
land by removing its indigenous population.
Resistance, on the other hand, refers to active measures against
the occupation. In the first Intifada and in the beginning of the
second Intifada this almost always took the form of unarmed protest
or stone-throwing, but Israel responded by mowing down hundreds
of Palestinians with machine guns and breaking their bones, bringing
in bulldozers to demolish homes and tanks to enforce even harsher
living conditions. Their restraint further rewarded with an atrocious
death ratio of 25:1, Palestinians tired of digging rows of graves
for their children and patriots just to be patted on the head by
a few polite Western liberals, and turned to armed struggle, the
most extreme form of which now manifests itself in suicide bombing.
The remarkable reality of sustained Palestinian endurance and
resistance in the face of overwhelming power has precipitated two
crises for Israel so entwined that they are best referred to as
a dual crisis: that of its political legitimacy and self-proclaimed
moral purpose.
Because Palestinian-Arab population growth in historical Palestine
(Israel, Gaza, West Bank) greatly exceeds that of the Jewish population,
Jewish majority status in the area - assiduously obtained through
a century of mass murder and mass expulsion - will be imperiled
and surpassed within a mere two decades. That these growing Arab
millions stand stripped of elementary rights and suffer the deprivations
of a racist military machine undermines Israel’s claim to
the mantle of democracy. Panicked Israeli protest to the effect
that Palestinian growth is some sneaky maneuver to “destroy” Israel
only reinforces its status as an apartheid state, since a democracy
which fears the democratic enfranchisement of half its population
is no democracy at all.
Furthermore, Israel’s viciously disproportionate use of
force against all forms of Palestinian resistance to the occupation
has created a maximum escalation of violence in which any citizen
of Israel is now a potential target of weaponized desperation – suicide
bombing. Rocking Israeli cafes, discos, and streets at will, this
tactic has narrowed the 25:1 death ratio to almost 3:1, and exploded
Israel’s basic founding ideal – that it is a safe haven
for Jews. Indeed, Jews are now safer in almost any place in the
world other than Israel.
In responding to this dual crisis, some in Israeli circles of
power have expressed quite reasonable ideas. Last September, Israeli
politician Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset, declared
his country was resting “on foundations of oppression and
injustice” and advocated full withdrawal from the territories
to create a Palestinian state. The same month 27 air force pilots,
considered the military’s elite, refused to implement assassinations,
describing them in a letter as “illegal and immoral attacks.” In
November, four ex-chiefs of Israel’s vaunted internal security
service, Shin Bet, jointly declared themselves against Sharon,
the apartheid wall, and their country’s “disgraceful” and “patently
immoral” behavior against Palestinians, prompted by concerns
that “Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for
the Jewish people.” In December, 13 reservists (including
three officers) of Israel’s top commando unit joined hundreds
of other Refuseniks in refusing to serve in the occupied territories,
saying that they “have long ago crossed the line between
fighters fighting a just cause and oppressing another people.”
But flirtation with reasonableness by these small few stands in
stark contrast with Israel’s long-time marriage to racism,
colonialism, and growing “fascist tendencies,” to borrow
Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling’s words. Representing
these tendencies are rightists at the helm of Israeli society -
the settler movement, military, and right-wing parties, spearheaded
by prime minister Ariel Sharon, a war criminal responsible for
several bloody massacres that have left hundreds of civilians dead.
Sharon’s ‘solution’ to the country’s dual
crisis is in the tradition of Revisionist Zionism, founded in the
1920’s by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, an admirer of Italian fascism
who wrote honestly but with the aspirations of a conquistador-cowboy
that Palestinians “look upon Palestine with the same instinctive
love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any
Sioux looked upon his prairie.” One disciple of this doctrine
was Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan, who admitted, “There is
not one single place built in this country that did not have a
former Arab population,” and advocated the following method
to expand this theft: “[Israel] must see the sword as the
main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale
high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no
- it must - invent dangers.”
The assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin epitomizes and
exemplifies this strategy for addressing Israel’s dual crisis.
While the murder of a blind, crippled, wheelchair-bound quadriplegic
outside a place of worship appears cowardly, and the inevitable
blowback against Israel gives the impression Sharon has lost his
mind, the strike is part and parcel of a consciously calculated
game plan that is perfectly rational within the framework of Zionist
logic. For the assassination of Hamas’ main symbolic leader
is designed to provoke it into an extreme ‘mega-terror’ act
or a series of terror attacks, severe enough to marshal chauvinist-Israeli
support for a final solution to the Palestinian problem – complete
ethnic cleansing and removal of all Arabs from historical Palestine.
This is not some imaginary scenario, but a definite escalation
of existing Israeli tactics. An attack of September 11th or similar
proportions would allow Israelis to heighten their coveted ‘special
victim’ status, bolster their image as fighting for the ‘Judeo-Christian’ cause
of the ‘war on terror’, and purge the re-demonized
Arabs without international interference. In one fell swoop, Israel
would be able to complete what it started in the 1948 war and its
dual crisis would be solved.
No serious person denies that Hamas will retaliate; the organization
has vowed to attack any Israeli from Sharon on down and political
analysts even within Israel recognize that it is only a matter
of time before it strikes. Nor is Israeli provocation which aims
at or leads to getting Israelis killed unprecedented. In fact,
it is commonplace. On July 22, 2003, the Israeli daily Yedioth
Achronot reported that the heads of Tanzim, Hamas, and Islamic
Jihad, approved a unilateral cease-fire, and that former Palestinian
Security minister Dahlan had met Sheikh Yassin, who agreed to the
cease-fire principles. 90 minutes later, the same paper reports,
Israel assassinated militant Salah Sheadeh, “in the course
of which dozens of civilians were killed and wounded as well.” Israeli
writer and professor Ran Hacohen noted that in November 2001, “the
assassination of the Hamas activist Mahmoud Abu Hanoud was carried
out just when the Hamas was respecting for two months its agreement
with Arafat not to attack inside Israel,” and that “in
January 2002, the assassination of Raed Karmi ended a few weeks
of relative quiet in the territories.” All of this obviously
had disastrous consequences for Israeli civilians.
Then there are those infamous media-created ‘periods of
calm’ during which no Israelis die but dozens of Palestinians
are murdered and thrown into the trash heap of forgotten history,
such as August 1st, to September 1st, 2002 when 39 Palestinians
were killed; 18 days later a suicide bomber exploded in Israel – a ‘shattering’ of
the ‘lull’. (Haaretz, September 2, 2002). Even more
telling is a study conducted by the Israeli weekly, Ha’Ir,
of ten Israeli assassinations against targeted Palestinian activists
that followed periods of relative calm (a revelation in itself),
from July 31, 2001 to September 9, 2003. The results? In retaliations
immediately following the deaths of the ten targeted militants,
a total of 180 Israeli civilians were killed. (Ha’Ir, September
25, 2003)
This makes the results of recent Israeli polls all the more remarkable,
for they show not only that 80% of Israelis believe the Yassin
assassination will increase Palestinian terrorist attacks, but
that 62% of Israelis support it. (AFP, March 23, 2003). Even a
generous interpreter would have to admit that a significant portion
of those who predicted dire consequences from the attack nonetheless
approved of it. That Israel’s political strategy involves
the jeopardizing and killing of its own citizens, apparently with
loud approval from some of its own population, speaks volumes about
its moral bankruptcy.
Along with this bankruptcy comes a high degree of irony, since
Israeli propagandists never tire of demonizing Palestinians based
on suicide bombings. Their smugness precluding any possibility
of sincerity, Israeli pundits ask, ‘Why do Palestinians blow
themselves up just to kill us?’, and always answer themselves
(who else is there?) in a somber tone as if they are suddenly concerned
with Palestinian well-being, ‘They place no value on their
own lives.’ If given a chance, the Palestinian native would
respond, ‘If you would be so kind as to donate us those tanks
and helicopters you safely slaughter us with from afar, we would
be happy to spare you the agony you undoubtedly feel about our
deaths.’
But it turns out that Israel is now neither safe nor far from
the reach of its victims, and that its main strategy for addressing
its problem involves exposing all its citizens to injury and death
just to whip up enough self-righteousness and hate to repeat the
cycle all over again until the conditions are ripe for mass expulsion.
In this sense Israel is akin to a guilt-ridden wife beater; acutely
aware of its own immorality, it provokes its victim into some futile
kind of resistance to inspire itself with enough hatred to justify
continuing the beating, awaiting all-out world war to finish the
job without eliciting much protest.
Many IDF officers probably do not even see the demented logic
of their own strategy and have convinced themselves that it is
beyond reproach. Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon and his crew
proudly announced that they plan to ‘liquidate’ the
entire Hamas leadership, removing those who train suicide bombers,
and thus rid Israel of Palestinian terrorism once and for all.
What these fine gentlemen fail to understand is that they will
accomplish absolutely nothing of the sort. In the Israeli daily
Haaretz, September 14, 2003, it was pointed out that in the past
two years, the IDF had claimed to have killed or captured the Hebron “head” of
the military wing of Hamas no less than five times – and
each time it was a different person. Moreover, the notion that
bombers need to be ‘trained’ is absurd: how much practice
does it require to put on a bomb belt, walk into Israelis, and
explode? All the ‘training’ required is amply provided
by the daily supply of Israeli atrocities that make one final death
appear preferable to a humiliating life in which one’s dignity
and hope are killed a thousand times over.
Ya’alon himself must know this; a few months ago he declared
that Israeli tactics were only creating hatred. It is worth quoting
one of the former Shin Bet heads, Major General Ami Ayalon, on
the subject: “Terror is not thwarted with bombs or helicopters.
Why does this increase terror? Because it is overt, because it
carries an element of vindictiveness.” Israeli elites who
hope to snuff out the Palestinian demand for land, freedom and
justice by crushing the Palestinians themselves should take heed:
their history of vengeance is no match for the vengeance of history.
For it is precisely the vengeance of history that haunts Israel
today; conceived and inserted into the heart of the Islamic world
at a time when Europe looked highly upon colonialism, the memory
of the Holocaust fell heavily upon its conscience, and Muslims
were politically weak and motionless, Israel’s confidence
appeared justified. But now, Europe has largely abandoned its colonialist
attitudes, Israel’s abuse of its vast military power has
earned it the label of the world’s greatest threat to peace
within Europe and inverted its image from underdog to occupier
across most of the globe, and the first signs of Islamic awakening
and resistance, though often primitive and backward-looking at
the moment, are emerging.
Israel’s reliance on the waning forces which precipitated
its creation in its war against the very people who were dispossessed
during that creation has locked it into a self-destructive dynamic.
Its set of solutions consist only of increasing: (a) colonial brutality
by killing more natives, (b) sympathy for and anger over Jewish
suffering by getting more Israelis killed, and (c) prospects for
an intensified ‘war on terror’ in which anything goes
and actions (a) and (b) would be justified in the long run.
Plan (c) is certainly the clincher in Sharon’s vision of
purging the Palestinians, as he always justifies his atrocities
as complementary to the American-led ‘war on terror’ and
constantly advocates bringing this war to Iran, Syria, and elsewhere.
Thus from the Zionist viewpoint, America replaces Europe and its
crusade against terrorism substitutes for colonialism, allowing
Israel to thrive again. But Israelis who cling to this new savior
fail to see that this is only an escalation of and not an escape
from the self-destructive dynamic. Sharon’s decision to follow
Dayan’s directive to “invent dangers” by inciting
and exacerbating the Islamic threat along with America means that
the whole nation’s very existence will be imperiled, not
simply that of a few dozen Israelis every few weeks, as is presently
the case.
For assuming our ‘war on terror’ is still raging two
decades from now as desired by Sharon and company, what will Israel
do when it is surrounded by over 300 million neighboring Arabs
and 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide? Does a sane nation of a mere
few million place its hopes for survival on the permanent subjugation
of a quarter of humanity that surrounds it? Israel on its current
path is like a man who swims off the coast into the ocean and happens
on an island, only to complain of being surrounded by water. Its
citizens should start asking themselves and their leaders, ‘What
will we do when the typhoon comes?’
M. Junaid Alam, 20, Boston, co-editor and web-designer of new
leftist journal for American youth, Left Hook (http://www.lefthook.org).
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