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Today's
Stories
March 31, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
The Illegal Coup in Haiti: How the
Kidnapping of Aristide Violated US and International Law
March 30, 2004
William S. Lind
An Occurrence
in Pakistan: the Battle That Wasn't
Ron Jacobs
Assassinations, Hate Mail &
Justice
Mickey Z.
Tommy Boy Friedman Does "Imagine"
Neve Gordon
Strategic Motives of the Yassin Assassination
Mark Scaramella
The Founding Scam: Insider Trading is the American Way
John Chuckman
The Countessa of Empire: Condi
Rice's Idea of Democracy
Greg Moses
Live from Pasadena: Silhouettes of New Order
Rai O'Brien
What Kind of Democracy to Expect if the Opposition Takes Power
in Venezuela
Bill Christison
The
9/11 Commission: Dangerous Harbinger for the Future
Website of the Day
Ghost Town: Riding Through Chernobyl
March 29, 2004
John Maxwell
Crisis
in the Caribbean: a Miasma Foretold
J. Michael Springmann
Email
Spying & Attorney Client Privilege
Robert Fisk / Severin
Carrell
Coalition
of the Mercenaries
The Black Commentator
Haiti's Troika of Terror
Doug Giebel
Candide in the Wilderness:
How Bush Policy Was Made
David Krieger
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Bargain
Mike Whitney
Rejecting the Language of Terrorism
Richard Oxman
The Pitts: a 9/11 Burrow of an American
Family
Kim Scipes
The AFL-CIO in Venezuela: Deja Vu All Over Again
Michael Donnelly
End Game for Northwest Forests
Norman Solomon
The Media Politics of 9/11
Kathy Kelly
Last Lines Before Vanishing
Website of the Day
Swans: Can Money Buy Everything?
March 27 / 28, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Empire of the Locusts
Gary Leupp
The Yassin Assassination: Prelude to an Attack on Syria
William A. Cook
The Yassin Assassination: a Monstrous Insanity Blessed by the
US
Faheem Hussain
Some Thoughts on Waziristan: Once and Always a Colonial Army
Elaine Cassel
Is Playing Paintball Terrorism?
Larry Birns / Jessica
Leight
Disturbing Signals: Kerry and Latin America
John Ross
Bush Tells the World: "Drop Dead"
John Eskow
A Memo to Karl Rove from the Hollywood Caucus
Alan Maass
Who Are the Real Terrorists?
Dave Lindorff
Spineless of US Journalists
Joe Bageant
Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy
Dave Zirin
Reasonable Doubt: Why Barry Bonds is Not on Steroids
Craig Waggoner
Who Would Mel's Jesus Nuke?
The Kerry Quandry
Joel Wendland
Marxists
for Kerry
Josh Frank
Scary,
Scary John Kerry
Matt Vidal
Spoilers, Electability and the Poverty of American Democracy
Poets' Basement
LaMorticella, Hamod, Guthrie, Davies and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Say a Little Prayer
March 26, 2004
Christopher Brauchli
There's
a Chill Over the Country
Robert Fisk
The Man Who Knew Too Much: the Ordeal
of Mordechai Vanunu
Joe DeRaymond
Democracy in El Salvador? Think Again
Mike Whitney
Lessons on Apartheid from Ariel Sharon
Mickey Z.
Somalia and Iraq: Looking Back and Ahead
Chris Floyd
The Pentagon Archipelago
CounterPunch Photo Wire
Cheney's Close Shave?
John Breneman
Bush's Comic Bomb
Website of the Day
Dick
is a Killer
March 25, 2004
Lee Sustar
Who
is to Blame for Lost Jobs?
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Offshore Banking Centers
Roger Burbach
Lula vs. the IMF: Brazil Begins
to Throw Off the Austerity Planners
Jimmer Endres
Elections Without Politics: The Military Budget Is Not an "Issue"
Larry Tuttle
Acting in Your Name: Identity Theft and Public Interest Groups
Toni Solo
Misreporting Venezuela
Dan Bacher
A Memorial Wall for Iraq War's Dead and Wounded
Saul Landau
Is
Venezuela Next?
Website of the Day
The Spiral Railway
March 24, 2004
Gary Leupp
General
Musharraf's IOU
Richard Oxman
Shakespeare
for Kerry
William Lind
The Beginning
of Phase Three: 4G Warfare Hits Iraq
Rep. Ron Paul
Iraq One Year Later
Michael Dempsey
Killing Rachel Corrie Again
Alan Farago
The Bad Math of Mercury: Bush's War on the Unborn
Benjamin Dangl
and April Howard
Media
in Cuba
John L. Hess
No Lie Left Behind: Judy Miller Does Dick Clarke
Greg Weiher
Two Cheers for Dems: "We're Not as Bad as George"
Eva Golinger
An Open Letter to John Kerry on Venezuela
Grayson Childs
Where's Cynthia McKinney?
Steve Niva
Israel's Assassinations will Only
Fuel More Suicide Bombings
Website of the Day
The Bushiad and the Idiossey
March 23, 2004
Phillip Cryan
The
Drug War's Next Casualty: Colombia's National Parks
Ron Jacobs
They Shoot Men in Wheelchairs, Too?
Dave Lindorff
A Spanish Parallel: Scare Tactics and Elections
Mike Whitney
Richard Clarke and Teflon George
Brian McKinlay
Bush's Lil' Buddy in Trouble: John Howard Starts to Wobble
JG
Driving Mr. Koon: "Jim Crow Lives Next Door"
Phyllis Pollack
Gettin' Jigga with Metallica: the Battle Over the Double Black
CD
Ahmed Bouzid
Sharon's One-Way Track
Sean Carter
The G-Word Goes to Court: One Nation Under [Your Logo Here]
M. Shahid Alam
World's Greatest Country: Do the Facts Lie
March 22, 2004
Mazin Qumsiyeh
On Extrajudicial
Executions
Uri Avnery
The
Assassination of Sheikh Yassin is Worse Than a Crime
Gilad Atzmon
Sharon's Rampage
Mike Whitney
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: the Story of Captain James Yee
Jason Leopold
Firm With Ties to Cheney Faces Criminal Indictment in Cal Energy
Scam
Greg Moses
Stop
Walling and Stalling: a Report from Houston's Peace March
Phil Gasper
San Francisco: 25,000 March for an End to the Occupation
Lenni Brenner
Report
from NYC: Old and Young Parade for Peace
Julian Borger
The Clarke Revelations
Steve Perry
Karl Rove's Moment
Website of the Day
Enviros Against War
March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
March 19, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Zapatero
to Kerry: Back Off, Senator, Our Troops are Coming Home
Ann Harrison
So
Protesters, How Well Do You Know Your Rights?
William MacDougall
Fortress Britain's War on "Economic Migrants"
Greg Moses
Sold American: Cowboy Nation Gets Ready to Vote
Cynthia McKinney
Haiti and the Impotence of Black America: Roll Back This Coup,
Mr. Bush
Norman Solomon
Spinning the Past; Threatening the Future
John L. Hess
"Missing" Evidence and the NYTs
Vicente Navarro
The
End of Aznar, Bush's Best Friend
Website of the War
Naming the Dead
March 18, 2004
Gila Svirsky
Rachel
Corrie, One Year Later: She Never Lost Faith in Decency
Christopher Brauchli
Drilling a Hole in the Sanctions: How Halliburton Made $73 Million
from Saddam
William Kulin
Report from Iraq: Just Another Baghdad Car Bombing
Mike Whitney
Resistance: a Moral Imperative
Rep. Ron Paul
Broadcast Indecency Act: an Indecent Attack on the First Amendment
Josh Frank
The Nader Question
Jack Random
They Lied & They Lost: Madrid and the Lessons of Democracy
Greg Bates
What Makes a Nader Voter Tick? A Survey
Sam Hamod / Alfredo Reyes
Contempt of the World: Hastert, Bush and Cheney on Spain
Gary Leupp
The
Madrid Bombings: the Chickens Come Home to Roost
Website of the Day
Privatizing Armageddon: Buy Your Own Doomsday Key
March 17, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
Spain, the EU and the US: War on
Terror or Civil Liberties?
David MacMichael
Untruth
and Consequences
Michael Donnelly
Wear the Green, But Skip the Green Beer
Tom Stephens
"Steady Leadership": Let the Buyer Beware
Wayne Madsen
Sen. Kerry, Let Me Help You Out
Karyn Strickler
Who Owns the Sierra Club? Anonymous Donors and Rigged Elections
Peter Linebaugh
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
March
31, 2004
The Demented Logic of the Occupation
Israel:
Suicide Nation?
By M. JUNAID ALAM
A nation which enslaves another forges
its own chains.
-Karl Marx
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.
Feedback: alam@lefthook.org
Weekend
Edition Features for March 20 / 21, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Empire of the Locusts
Gary Leupp
The Yassin Assassination: Prelude to an Attack on Syria
William A. Cook
The Yassin Assassination: a Monstrous Insanity Blessed by the
US
Faheem Hussain
Some Thoughts on Waziristan: Once and Always a Colonial Army
Elaine Cassel
Is Playing Paintball Terrorism?
Larry Birns / Jessica
Leight
Disturbing Signals: Kerry and Latin America
John Ross
Bush Tells the World: "Drop Dead"
John Eskow
A Memo to Karl Rove from the Hollywood Caucus
Alan Maass
Who Are the Real Terrorists?
Joe Bageant
Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy
Dave Zirin
Reasonable Doubt: Why Barry Bonds is Not on Steroids
Craig Waggoner
Who Would Mel's Jesus Nuke?
The Kerry Quandry
Joel Wendland
Marxists
for Kerry
Josh Frank
Scary,
Scary John Kerry
Matt Vidal
Spoilers, Electability and the Poverty of American Democracy
Poets' Basement
LaMorticella, Hamod, Guthrie, Davies and Albert
Website of the Weekend
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