[News] You are terrorists, we are virtuous

[Anti-Imperialist News]

<http://www.lrb.co.uk/index.php>
London Review of Books
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L<http://www.lrb.co.uk/index.php>RB | 
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n16/contents.html>Vol. 
28 No. 16 dated 17 August 2006 | 
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/contribhome.php?get=laor01>Yitzhak Laor




You are terrorists, we are virtuous




Yitzhak Laor on the IDF

As soon as the facts of the Bint Jbeil ambush, 
which ended with relatively high Israeli 
casualties (eight soldiers died there), became 
public, the press and television in Israel began 
marginalising any opinion that was critical of 
the war. The media also fell back on the kitsch 
to which Israelis grow accustomed from childhood: 
the most menacing army in the region is described 
here as if it is David against an Arab Goliath. 
Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent Lebanon back 20 
years, and Israelis themselves even further: we 
now appear to be a lynch-mob culture, glued to 
our televisions, incited by a premier whose 
'leadership' is being launched and legitimised 
with rivers of fire and destruction on both sides 
of the border. Mass psychology works best when 
you can pinpoint an institution or a phenomenon 
with which large numbers of people identify. 
Israelis identify with the IDF, and even after 
the deaths of many Lebanese children in Qana, 
they think that stopping the war without scoring 
a definitive victory would amount to defeat. This 
logic reveals our national psychosis, and it 
derives from our over-identification with Israeli military thinking.

In the melodramatic barrage fired off by the 
press, the army is assigned the dual role of hero 
and victim. And the enemy? In Hebrew broadcasts 
the formulations are always the same: on the one 
hand 'we', 'ours', 'us'; on the other, Nasrallah 
and Hizbullah. There aren't, it seems, any 
Lebanese in this war. So who is dying under 
Israeli fire? Hizbullah. And if we ask about the 
Lebanese? The answer is always that Israel has no 
quarrel with Lebanon. It's yet another 
illustration of our unilateralism, the thundering 
Israeli battle-cry for years: no matter what 
happens around us, we have the power and 
therefore we can enforce the logic. If only 
Israelis could see the damage that's been done by 
all these years of unilateral thinking. But we 
cannot, because the army – which has always been 
the core of the state – determines the shape of 
our lives and the nature of our memories, and 
wars like this one erase everything we thought we 
knew, creating a new version of history with 
which we can only concur. If the army wins, its 
success becomes part of 'our heritage'. Israelis 
have assimilated the logic and the language of 
the IDF – and in the process, they have lost 
their memories. Is there a better way to 
understand why we have never learned from 
history? We have never been a match for the army, 
whose memory – the official Israeli memory – is 
hammered into place at the centre of our culture 
by an intelligentsia in the service of the IDF and the state.

The IDF is the most powerful institution in 
Israeli society, and one which we are discouraged 
from criticising. Few have studied the dominant 
role it plays in the Israeli economy. Even while 
they are still serving, our generals become 
friendly with the US companies that sell arms to 
Israel; they then retire, loaded with money, and 
become corporate executives. The IDF is the 
biggest customer for everything and anything in 
Israel. In addition, our high-tech industries are 
staffed by a mixture of military and ex-military 
who work closely with the Western military 
complex. The current war is the first to become a 
branding opportunity for one of our largest 
mobile phone companies, which is using it to run 
a huge promotional campaign. Israel's second 
biggest bank, Bank Leumi, used inserts in the 
three largest newspapers to distribute bumper 
stickers saying: 'Israel is powerful.' The 
military and the universities are intimately 
linked too, with joint research projects and an array of army scholarships.

There is no institution in Israel that can 
approach the army's ability to disseminate images 
and news or to shape a national political class 
and an academic elite or to produce memory, 
history, value, wealth, desire. This is the way 
identification becomes entrenched: not through 
dictatorship or draconian legislation, but by 
virtue of the fact that the country's most 
powerful institution gets its hands on every 
citizen at the age of 18. The majority of 
Israelis identify with the army and the army 
reciprocates by consolidating our identity, 
especially when it is – or we are – waging war.

The IDF didn't play any role in either of the 
Gulf wars and may not play a part in Bush's 
pending war in Iran, but it is on permanent alert 
for the real war that is always just round the 
corner. Meanwhile, it harasses Palestinians in 
the West Bank and Gaza, to very destructive 
effect. (In July it killed 176 Palestinians, most 
of them from the same area in Gaza, in a 
'policing' operation that included the 
destruction of houses and infrastructure.) They 
shoot. They abduct. They use F-16s against 
refugee camps, tanks against shacks and huts. For 
years they have operated in this way against 
gangs and groups of armed youths and children, 
and they call it a war, a 'just war', vital for 
our existence. The power of the army to produce 
meanings, values, desire is perfectly illustrated 
by its handling of the Palestinians, but it would 
not be possible without the support of the left in Israel.

The mainstream left has never seriously tried to 
oppose the military. The notion that we had no 
alternative but to attack Lebanon and that we 
cannot stop until we have finished the job: these 
are army-sponsored truths, decided by the 
military and articulated by state intellectuals 
and commentators. So are most other descriptions 
of the war, such as the Tel Aviv academic Yossef 
Gorni's statement in Haaretz, that 'this is our 
second war of independence.' The same sort of 
nonsense was written by the same kind of people 
when the 2000 intifada began. That was also a war 
about our right to exist, our 'second 1948'. 
These descriptions would not have stood a chance 
if Zionist left intellectuals – solemn purveyors 
of the 'morality of war' – hadn't endorsed them.

Military thinking has become our only thinking. 
The wish for superiority has become the need to 
have the upper hand in every aspect of relations 
with our neighbours. The Arabs must be crippled, 
socially and economically, and smashed 
militarily, and of course they must then appear 
to us in the degraded state to which we've 
reduced them. Our usual way of looking at them is 
borrowed from our intelligence corps, who 
'translate' them and interpret them, but cannot 
recognise them as human beings. Israelis long ago 
ceased to be distressed by images of sobbing 
women in white scarves, searching for the remains 
of their homes in the rubble left by our 
soldiers. We think of them much as we think of 
chickens or cats . We turn away without much 
trouble and consider the real issue: the enemy. 
The Katyusha missiles that have been hitting the 
north of the country are launched without 
'discrimination', and in this sense Hizbullah is 
guilty of a war crime, but the recent volleys of 
Katyushas were a response to the frenzied assault 
on Lebanon. To the large majority of Israelis, 
however, all the Katyushas prove is what a good 
and necessary thing we have done by destroying 
our neighbours again: the enemy is indeed 
dangerous, it's just as well we went to war. The 
thinking becomes circular and the prophecies 
self-fulfilling. Israelis are fond of saying: 
'The Middle East is a jungle, where only might 
speaks.' See Qana, and Gaza, or Beirut.

Defenders of Israel and its leaders can always 
argue that the US and Britain behave similarly in 
Iraq. (It is true that Olmert and his colleagues 
would not have acted so shamelessly if the US had 
not been behind them. Had Bush told them to hold 
their fire, they wouldn't have dared to move a 
single tank.) But there is a major difference. 
The US and Britain went to war in Iraq without 
public opinion behind them. Israel went to war in 
Lebanon, after a border incident which it 
exploited in order to destroy a country, with the 
overwhelming support of Israelis, including the 
members of what the European press calls the 'peace camp'.

Amos Oz, on 20 July, when the destruction of 
Lebanon was already well underway, wrote in the 
Evening Standard: 'This time, Israel is not 
invading Lebanon. It is defending itself from a 
daily harassment and bombardment of dozens of our 
towns and villages by attempting to smash 
Hizbullah wherever it lurks.' Nothing here is 
distinguishable from Israeli state 
pronouncements. David Grossman wrote in the 
Guardian, again on 20 July, as if he were unaware 
of any bombardment in Lebanon: 'There is no 
justification for the large-scale violence that 
Hizbullah unleashed this week, from Lebanese 
territory, on dozens of peaceful Israeli 
villages, towns and cities. No country in the 
world could remain silent and abandon its 
citizens when its neighbour strikes without any 
provocation.' We can bomb, but if they respond 
they are responsible for both their suffering and 
ours. And it's important to remember that 'our 
suffering' is that of poor people in the north 
who cannot leave their homes easily or quickly. 
'Our suffering' is not that of the 
decision-makers or their friends in the media. Oz 
also wrote that 'there can be no moral equation 
between Hizbullah and Israel. Hizbullah is 
targeting Israeli civilians wherever they are, 
while Israel is targeting mostly Hizbullah.' At 
that time more than 300 Lebanese had been killed 
and 600 had been injured. Oz went on: 'The 
Israeli peace movement should support Israel's 
attempt at self-defence, pure and simple, as long 
as this operation targets mostly Hizbullah and 
spares, as much as possible, the lives of 
Lebanese civilians (this is not always an easy 
task, as Hizbullah missile-launchers often use 
Lebanese civilians as human sandbags).'

The truth behind this is that Israel must always 
be allowed to do as it likes even if this 
involves scorching its supremacy into Arab 
bodies. This supremacy is beyond discussion and 
it is simple to the point of madness. We have the 
right to abduct. You don't. We have the right to 
arrest. You don't. You are terrorists. We are 
virtuous. We have sovereignty. You don't. We can 
ruin you. You cannot ruin us, even when you 
retaliate, because we are tied to the most 
powerful nation on earth. We are angels of death.

The Lebanese will not remember everything about 
this war. How many atrocities can a person keep 
in mind, how much helplessness can he or she 
admit, how many massacres can people tell their 
children about, how many terrorised escapes from 
burning houses, without becoming a slave to 
memory? Should a child keep a leaflet written by 
the IDF in Arabic, in which he is told to leave 
his home before it's bombed? I cannot urge my 
Lebanese friends to remember the crimes my state 
and its army have committed in Lebanon.

Israelis, however, have no right to forget. Too 
many people here supported the war. It wasn't 
just the nationalist religious settlers. It's 
always easy to blame the usual suspects for our 
misdemeanours: the scapegoating of religious 
fanatics has allowed us to ignore the role of the 
army and its advocates within the Zionist left. 
This time we have seen just how strongly the 
'moderates' are wedded to immoderation, even 
though they knew, before it even started, that 
this would be a war against suburbs and crowded 
areas of cities, small towns and defenceless 
villages. The model was our army's recent actions 
in Gaza: Israeli moderates found these perfectly acceptable.

It was a mistake for those of us who are unhappy 
with our country's policies to breathe a sigh of 
relief after the army withdrew from Lebanon in 
2000. We thought that the names of Sabra and 
Shatila would do all the memorial work that 
needed to be done and that they would stand, 
metonymically, for the crimes committed in 
Lebanon by Israel. But, with the withdrawal from 
Gaza, many Israelis who should be opposing this 
war started to think of Ariel Sharon, the genius 
of Sabra and Shatila, as a champion of peace. The 
logic of unilateralism – of which Sharon was the 
embodiment – had at last prevailed: Israelis are 
the only people who count in the Middle East; we 
are the only ones who deserve to live here.

This time we must try harder to remember. We must 
remember the crimes of Olmert, and of our 
minister of justice, Haim Ramon, who championed 
the destruction of Lebanese villages after the 
ambush at Bint Jbeil, and of the army chief of 
staff, Dan Halutz. Their names should be 
submitted to The Hague so they can be held accountable.

Elections are a wholly inadequate form of 
accountability in Israel: the people we kill and 
maim and ruin cannot vote here. If we let our 
memories slacken now, the machine-memory will 
reassert control and write history for us. It 
will glide into the vacuum created by our 
negligence, with the civilised voice of Amos Oz 
easing its path, and insert its own version. And 
suddenly we will not be able to explain what we 
know, even to our own children.

In Israel there is still no proper history of our 
acts in Lebanon. Israelis in the peace camp used 
to carry posters with the figure '680' on them – 
the number of Israelis who died during the 1982 
invasion. Six hundred and eighty Israeli 
soldiers. How many members of that once sizeable 
peace camp protested about the tens of thousands 
of Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian casualties? 
Isn't the failure of the peace camp a result of 
its inability to speak about the cheapness of 
Arab blood? General Udi Adam, one of the 
architects of the current war, has told Israelis 
that we shouldn't count the dead. He meant this 
very seriously and Israelis should take him 
seriously. We should make it our business to 
count the dead in Lebanon and in Israel and, to 
the best of our abilities, to find out their names, all of them.

3 August

<http://www.lrb.co.uk/contribhome.php?get=laor01>Yitzhak 
Laor lives in Tel Aviv.



The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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