[News] "By choice they made themselves immune"

[Anti-Imperialist News]

"By choice they made themselves immune"
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10128.shtml

Saree Makdisi, The Electronic Intifada, 6 January 2009

Israel has killed and injured almost 4,000 men, women and children so 
far in its assault on Gaza; it has entombed whole families together 
in the ruins of their homes. As I write, news is breaking that 
Israeli bombs have killed at least 40 civilians huddling in a UN 
school which they mistakenly thought would be safer than the homes 
from which Israel's relentless barrage -- and its deliberately 
terrorizing "warning" leaflets and prerecorded phone calls -- had 
already driven them. (I still have one of the leaflets the Israelis 
dropped on besieged Beirut in 1982 and the language is exactly the 
same -- "flee, flee for your lives!"). Mosques, schools, houses, 
apartment buildings, have all been brought down on the heads of those inside.

All this death and destruction comes supposedly in retaliation for 
rocket attacks that had not inflicted a single fatality inside Israel 
in over a year. What happened to "an eye for an eye?"

As horrific as the toll of dead and injured already is, the scale of 
Israel's bombing, and its targeting of ambulances and medical and 
rescue crews -- several doctors and paramedics have been killed or 
wounded so far -- means that the true totals are actually unknown. 
Countless numbers of victims have bled to death in the streets or in 
the ruins of their smashed homes. Calls for help aren't getting 
through Gaza's phone networks, battered to pieces along with the rest 
of the civilian infrastructure -- its water, sewage, electricity 
systems, all already crumbling as a result of the years of siege. The 
victims that are evacuated -- as often, these days, in civilian cars 
as in the remaining ambulances -- make it to hospitals that are 
overwhelmed; many will die that might have otherwise been saved.

Any hospital would be overwhelmed under the circumstances: how then 
for a hospital that has already been cut off by the 19-month-old 
Israeli blockade of Gaza from urgently needed supplies, medicines, 
drugs, anesthetics, spare parts, fuel for generators? In fact, the 
true story of what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza is to be 
seen in the besieged territory's hospitals: the smashed, burned, 
dusty bodies of children being carried in on makeshift blankets 
(there aren't enough stretchers to go around); the morgue drawers 
full of bodies; the emergency rooms with badly hurt, crying people 
scattered on stretchers, on beds, on the blood-washed floors, as the 
doctors run from one to another trying to figure out who can be saved 
and who must be attended to first -- the boy with his feet blown off? 
The old woman with the huge gash in her head? The young man with his 
guts hanging out of his stomach? The anguished little girl thrashing 
about in pain, in fear, in agony and begging for her mother who 
vanished in some monstrous explosion? And outside, on the crowded 
sidewalks, the other side of the human suffering that Israel has 
chosen to inflict on an entire population: the wailing mothers, 
fathers and children; the weeping young men; the panicked people 
rushing around trying to find loved ones after each new Israeli bombing.

All this to make Israelis feel secure? What security is this kind of 
barbarism ever likely to gain them?

These are the scenes that every Palestinian and every Arab around the 
world sees every single day on the uncensored, unedited, unfiltered 
and relentlessly, brutally honest coverage broadcast on the Arabic 
Al-Jazeera channel. Unlike the US and UK networks, Al-Jazeera has 
correspondents and camera crews all over Gaza; they are Arabs, some 
of them are Palestinians, and they all live among the people whose 
suffering they record for the whole world to see; they can 
communicate with them in their own language and in the language of 
the audience as well. The coverage is continuous 24 hours a day.

Ordinary people around the rest of the world are seeing the version 
of events that gets filtered through the editing suites, the cutting 
rooms, the editorializing of foreign media, and that, in the case of 
the US, finally makes it to their living room largely (if not 
entirely) sanitized, and packaged to them in two-minute sound bites 
by correspondents posted safely outside of Gaza and inside Israel. 
The coverage broadcast from Israel is heavily monitored, controlled 
and censored. The Israeli army found in 2006 that its panicked 
soldiers in Lebanon were using cell phones to call home for help; 
this time it made sure to inspect all of its soldiers to make sure 
that none takes a phone with him into Gaza. The army imposes a 
smothering control over the flow of information; nothing that is 
reported from or datelined Israel can be read at face value or taken 
for granted.

If you get your news from an American television network, no matter 
how horrible you think what's happening in Gaza is, the reality that 
you are not seeing is much, much, much worse. (Perhaps that's why the 
English-language Al-Jazeera channel, widely followed in the rest of 
the world, is unofficially banned in the US -- not a single cable or 
satellite provider carries it).

And yet even with this imperfect coverage it must be said that people 
all over the world, including in the US, are protesting what they are 
seeing. Huge, million-person demonstrations have been held, from 
Melbourne to Jakarta, from Calcutta to Istanbul, and from Vienna to 
London, not to mention the huge popular protests in Beirut, Cairo, 
Damascus, Amman, across the length and breadth of the West Bank, and 
in some of the largest protests ever held in Palestinian communities 
inside Israel. Across the US, too, people have been protesting, 
holding vigils, writing letters to the editors of the newspapers 
demanding more balance to the warped coverage of the events that we 
see here, especially in papers like The New York Times. And the 
internet has been a major source of information for all those 
millions who have figured out that they will never learn what they 
need to learn from The New York Times or the Washington Post or ABC 
or CNN. Sites like Counterpunch, Electronic Intifada, Alternet, 
Truthdig, Huffington Post, Salon and many others besides have carried 
extraordinarily intelligent and detailed pieces by a range of 
commentators whose sense of what is happening far exceeds what is 
made available by professional journalists in the mainstream press -- 
including many superb pieces by Jewish Americans who give the lie, 
once and for all, to the absurd notion that their community is 
solidly behind Israel's violence.

Indeed, it seems clear that the writing now being posted on 
alternative media outlets is also starting to outweigh the clumsy 
efforts still being churned out by America's army of paid and unpaid 
cheerleaders for Israel, who have forsaken what little remained of 
their own humanity and blinded themselves to suffering that ought to 
move any rational, caring, sentient human being to tears -- the 
Dershowitzes and Foxmans, the Orens and Boots, the Krauthammers and 
Peretzes, the Bards and Goldfarbs, the cynical apparatchiks of CAMERA 
and AIPAC and the mindless busybodies and shuffling zombies of Stand 
With Us, the Israel Project and the Israel on Campus Coalition -- who 
persist with their stubborn, craven defense of the indefensible. 
About these misanthropes there is much to be said, most of it too 
unpleasant to print, so I'll shift the burden here to those memorable 
closing lines of Wilfred Owen's war poem "Insensibility:"
But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,
That they should be as stones.
Wretched are they, and mean
With paucity that never was simplicity.
By choice they made themselves immune
To pity and whatever mourns in man
Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;
Whatever shares
The eternal reciprocity of tears.

As for Israel itself: once again it has revealed its true nature to 
the world. It was only after the first reports came in of their own 
serious fatalities -- soldiers caught in an ambush, though the 
censored news reports from Israel claim that it was all friendly fire 
-- that the Israeli media suddenly started carrying reports wondering 
whether things have gone too far. "The Price of Stubbornness over 
Gaza Exit is Dead Soldiers," write Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff in 
Haaretz. "For the first time, Israeli TV broadcasts raised the 
question of whether it was worthwhile for the operation to continue."

Until this point, the Israeli media -- and most of the country's 
liberal intelligentsia, never mind the militant right wing -- had 
been moralistically defending the bombing, and sometimes actually 
cheering it on. Starting the attacks on a Saturday was a "stroke of 
brilliance," the Guardian's Seamus Milne quotes the country's biggest 
selling paper Yediot Aharonot as saying; "the element of surprise 
increased the number of people who were killed." The daily Maariv 
agreed: "We left them in shock and awe." The rational and genuinely 
ethical voices of Amira Hass and Gideon Levy have never seemed more isolated.

The brute fact of the matter is that, as long as their air force is 
killing an entirely defenseless people, the Israeli public and media 
do cheer them on. As soon as they start paying any kind of price -- 
no matter how grotesquely out of proportion to the level of damage 
their soldiers are inflicting on unarmed and innocent people -- their 
bloodlust quickly cools. In Gaza, the Israeli infantry won't take a 
single step forward unless the ground in front of them -- and 
everything and everyone in it, armed, unarmed, whoever and whatever 
they are -- has been safely cleared away for them by the air or by artillery.

These are "Georgia rules," which are not so far from the methods 
Russia used in its conflict last summer," write Harel and Issacharoff 
in Haaretz. "The result is the killing of dozens of non-combatant 
Palestinians. The Gaza medical teams might not have reached all of 
them yet. When an Israeli force gets into an entanglement, as in 
Sajaiyeh last night [where three Israeli soldiers were killed], 
massive fire into built-up areas is initiated to cover the 
extraction. In other cases, a chain of explosions is initiated from a 
distance to set off Hamas booby-traps. It is a method that leaves a 
swath of destruction taking in entire streets, and does not 
distinguish military targets from the homes of civilians."

I'm not sure where the "Georgia" reference comes from: the Israelis 
used the very same tactics in Jenin and Nablus in 2002, and in 
southern Lebanon in 2006 and 1982. And it would be an act of futility 
to point out -- for the millionth time -- that the Israeli method of 
warfare takes place in sweeping disregard for the principles of 
international humanitarian law, not to mention total contempt for 
innocent human life. This is not to mention that most of the 
casualties pouring into Gaza's morgues and hospitals are the victims 
of the sheer indiscriminate unleashing on densely populated civilian 
areas of high explosive ordnance from land, sea and air that has been 
characteristic of Israel's military style since at least the 1970s.

Israel's disregard for innocent human life is not motivated only by a 
desire to forestall the political consequences -- especially during 
an electoral campaign -- of Israeli military casualties. It is also a 
clear indicator of the contempt that Israel has for Palestinian life 
in general. The cold, hungry, tired, desperate, and terrified men, 
women and children that Israel is now sweeping away by the dozen in 
balls of fire and showers of shrapnel are the very same people that 
it had already reduced to what one UN official months ago warned was 
"a subhuman existence," the deliberate product of the siege that 
Israel has imposed on Gaza for over three years, beginning in 2005, 
before the election of Hamas. They are the same people whose 
political and human rights Israel has been stifling since the 
occupation of 1967 -- 20 years before the creation of Hamas. They are 
the same people who were ethnically cleansed from their land in 1948 
because, as non-Jews, they were inconveniently cluttering up the land 
that European Zionists wanted to turn into a Jewish state, no matter 
what the land's actual population had to say about it.

Israel's disregard for Palestinian life in Gaza today is, in short, a 
direct extension of its disregard for Palestinian life since 1948, 
and what is happening in Gaza today is the continuation of what 
happened six decades ago. Eighty percent of the people crammed into 
Gaza's hovels and shanties are refugees or the descendants of 
refugees that armed Zionist gangs, which eventually coalesced into 
the infant Israeli army, terrorized from their homes elsewhere in 
southwestern Palestine in 1948. They have been herded, penned, and 
slaughtered by a remorseless power that clearly regards them as subhuman.

If you think I'm stretching the point, I'm not. Listen to the words 
of Professor Arnon Sofer, the government consultant who did so much 
to help plan the isolation and imprisonment of Gaza, in a interview 
with the Jerusalem Post in 2004: "When 2.5 million people live in a 
closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe," Sofer 
predicted. "Those people will become even bigger animals than they 
are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The 
pressure on the border is going to be awful. It's going to be a 
terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill 
and kill and kill. All day, every day." Sofer admitted only one worry 
with all the killing, which will, he says, be the necessary outcome 
of a policy that he himself helped to invent. "The only thing that 
concerns me," he says, "is how to ensure that the boys and men who 
are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to 
their families and be normal human beings."

Meticulously and clinically thought through even before the first 
rocket from Gaza claimed a life inside Israel, the slaughter in Gaza 
today has nothing to do with rockets or with Hamas. As Sofer himself 
explains, it is the purest and most distilled expression of Zionist 
ideology. "Unilateral separation doesn't guarantee 'peace,'" Sofer 
says in that same interview; "it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state 
with an overwhelming majority of Jews."

And that -- taken right from the horse's mouth -- is what the 
slaughter of innocents in Gaza is fundamentally about: the people 
being killed today are the ones for whom there is no room in the 
Zionist vision of the state. They are regarded as an excess 
population. Not even Malthus thought that a redundant population 
should just be lined up and shot, or bombed into the ground. But, 
clearly, times have changed since 1798.

This inhuman madness will end only with the end of the violent 
ideology that spawned it -- when those who are committed to the 
project of creating and maintaining a religiously and ethnically 
exclusivist state in what has always been a culturally and 
religiously heterogeneous land finally relent and accept the 
inevitable: that they have failed.

Saree Makdisi is professor of English literature at the University of 
California, Los Angeles and author of 
"<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9889.shtml>Palestine Inside 
Out: An Everyday Occupation."



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