The Sadism of the Israeli Occupation
The Guardian reports on a building scandal in Israel over the extreme brutality of its occupation of the Palestinians in the West Bank. Excerpt:
' According to Yishai Karin: 'At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence. They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power in the violence and the sense of danger.' In the words of one soldier: 'The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That's when I enjoy it. It's like a drug. If I don't go into Rafah, and if there isn't some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts.' . . . One described beating women. 'With women I have no problem. With women, one threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can't have children. Next time she won't throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me, I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn't have what to spit with any more.' '
The idea that these sorts of actions derive from 'lack of training' is absurd. They derive from hatred and from being able to act with impunity. They are a burden of the strong who have the opportunity to abuse the weak.
The US political elite and media that conceals the brutality of the Israeli occupation for sectional political gains are accomplices to this sadism, and their silence endangers the security of the United States. When we cannot understand why Arab audiences, who are perfectly aware of what the Israeli army has been doing to Palestinians for decades, are outraged, it leads us into policy mistakes in dealing with the Middle East. No one in the US media ever talks about Zionofascism, and the campus groups who yoke the word 'fascism' to other religions and peoples are most often trying to divert attention from their own authoritarianism and approval of brutality.
posted by Juan Cole @ 10/21/2007 11:21:00 AM
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12 Comments:
With every act of unnecessary brutality toward the Palestinians, Israel further jeopardizes it's own security. That's why Arab leaders and Iran don't accept peace, and why Bush's so-called "peace conference" is going to fail.
Americans across the political spectrum contrive not to see this sadism the same way the Germans knew nothing of the camp a mile down the road and why the French in Algeria knew nothing of what their army was doing in their torture centers in Algiers. They approve, while not wanting to admit it even to themselves.
It's been that way since they had their overseers flogging and mutilating their slaves while they sat in the Big House drinking mint juleps and speaking fair words to one another about liberty and the rights of man.
American behavior in Iraq, with its tortures, its bulging concentration camps, its wanton slaughter and beatings, its devastation and bombing of civilian neighborhoods from the air, and its depleted uranium dust everywhere, is the latest expression of the fundamental contempt for the untermenschen that has been fundamental to our national character since we got off the boat 400 years ago. In view of their own history, steadfastly denied and white-washed, it is perfectly reasonable for Americans to approve in Israel what they did themselves to the Indians, African slaves, Filipinos, Vietnamese and countless others before and now do to Iraq and Afghanistan today.
Like a dog returning to its vomit, we will keep returning to these familar behaviors until, like the Germans after World War 2, we are compelled as a nation to confront radically our national original sin. That will never happen short of a pretty shattering defeat such as the Germans experienced. My hope is that the lesson can be learned short of complete destruction, and soon; it's a grave danger to the whole world for a nation such as this to be stomping around the world with 10,000 nuclear bombs, the stated willingness to use them first, and an evident determination to continue in robbery and wanton luxury even if it means the polar ice caps must fall into the sea.
Let us suppose that Israeli soldiers (that is, state terrorists) are poorly trained, bored and ill-supervised. We know one group that is still more so — Palestinian terrorists. I wonder if any Israeli (or American) psychologist would suggest that Palestinian brutality was a result of poor training, etc?
I am always astonished at the lengths to which Israelis and Americans will go to excuse their various atrocities and how easily they will condemn at great length any act by any Palestinian. (Remember the reaction to Edward Said's stone toss?)
This was not published in the Guardian, actually, but its sister-paper, the Observer.
A "building scandal" I'm not quite sure you would call this. The author of the study is retailing horrible deeds here, but it's a little like talking about Vietnam atrocities in the USA today. Everyone in Israel knows the first intifada was a cruel affair. The "Iron Fist Policy" that was introduced at one point by Rabin (later to become the symbol of peace precisely because he saw it didn't work) isn't news. There's already been many well-known books on it. One of the best books on torture, John Conroy's Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People uses it as one of its case studies.
So here you have single study, with 21 interviews, conducted years after the fact, by a woman saying she's working through her own trauma. Again, imagine a similar study of the Vietnam war coming up today. It caused a stir, but it wasn't a big one and it didin't last because 1) it doesn't really prove any parallels to the present (although such things certainly could exist); it doesn't reveal anything new about the past; and as a sociological design, it lacks way too much to feel safe using it as a basis for generalization.
The occupation is awful. It would be nice to have some reporting on it. If this is the best we can do, we're coming up short.
Studies of Israeli school books show that they are taught negative stereotypes of Palestinians from an early age. They are lazy, dirty, slovenly, untruthful.... and many books perpetuate the myth that no Palestinians were present at the creation of Israel and that the Arabs showed up just irritate and steal from the Jewish population of Israel.
A couple months of military training is not going to undo the indoctrination of a lifetime. They need to face the real problems of their education system. As well as the radical right that is becoming stronger, and largely supports these activities.
Atrocity is war's dirty little secret. It's not about dominance. The Palestinians are no less inclined to excess. One can't prevent atrocity by training. Atrocity is war and terror made more efficient. Atrocity is an inevitable part of war.
I attended a high school in Tehran for a few months in 1975. There, most of my friends were Jewish Iranian and Israeli. (It must be remembered that it was an open secret that Israel and Iran were allies at the time.) I'll never forget one of my Israeli friends telling us a war story of his older brother during the 1967 War. He told us that his brother fought in the West Bank, he found an Arab woman, raped her, then upon leaving, threw a hand grenade into the house to kill her. My teenage friend actually bragged about this.
I've never forgotten that story. Thirty years later, a young Jewish American man worked for me and asked what war is like. I told him the story. He never asked anymore questions after that.
The annihilation of the Palestinian people - which is what is going on - is one of the great human rights crimes of our era. Israeli sadism testifies to a deeply fascist society in which the norm is hatred of Arabs and the knowledge that they can be tormented, tortured, jailed, besieged and crushed with impunity. Indeed the chickens will come home to roost: we will all have to pay for Israel's crimes, for the US's fulsome backing of Israel, and for the US's monstrous global brutalities in the quest for "full-spectrum dominance."
I don't have words to describe how deeply ashmed and saddened I am as an American that our government is so cowardly in dealing with the Israeli Lobby (see Mersheimer/Walt book). I cannot believe that we are living under a pro-Zionist media/publishing/government body, and we think we have a free press! We are enabling brutal treatment and oppression of the Palestinians, AND we are losing our most treasured right as Americans - FREE SPEECH. People are being cancelled from college campuses for having opinions that don't fall in line with Israel. This is insane! Speak out people -it is out of control. We are losing this country, causing wars for not reason, and are hated more than ever. Now, I know why!
The web has plenty of info: google "Israel Lobby" and look at "The Guardian"(Enlish newspaper) and Anti-War.com. Educate yourself in a real fair and balanced manner.
"With every act of unnecessary brutality toward the Palestinians..."
Please describe what would be an act of NECESSARY brutality toward the Palestinians.
These cases of abuse are the inevitable result of a military occupation: regardless if in Iraq, in Palestine, or in Afghanistan. Wherever you will put soldiers in such positions they will abuse their power. For various reasons, and I think 'Zionist ideology' is somewhere towards the bottom of the list, if at all.
We fight the occupaion, we fight the Apartheid system in Israel/Palestine, and we fight its many abuses. But don't think there is something particularly Israeli about these phenomeona, just as there was nothing particularly American about Abu Ghraib.
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