“I’d Prefer Not To.”

Top item my brother and I have learned never to mention in front of my parents: Israel.  Top plea I’ve nagged them to heed: abandon any and all network news.  Indeed, related.

My parents, a mother from Lebanese Christian descent and an Ashkenazi father, appear to think the question of accountability for Israeli violence is outrageous, as if it implicitly condones Hamas’ agenda.  My mother especially seems to get foamed at the mouth with the mention of Hamas, and both are baffled by any sort of argument which might cast doubt on the righteousness of Israeli ‘retaliation,’ as if I’m insulting every branch of my family tree.  They ask, “You understand they want to wipe Jews off the face of the earth, right?”

It’s a funny question, because the grating simplicity allows for only one correct answer—that is, to destroy ‘them’ before they destroy ‘you.’  I know where this one-sided compassion comes from.  My parents are hardly stupid and anything but cruel.  They are, however, largely informed by CNN.  Ironically, dissident anti-Zionist voices from Israelis themselves are far more prolific in the media than in the US.  That should tell you something.

Lonnie Ray Atkinson has a post over at DV asking, “Does It Matter?”  Though likely preaching to the converted, the point is that we must assess the situation in context, not in soundbytes regulated and orchestrated by a PR game run by both the Israeli and US governments.  The question is not an affront to Israel’s duty to protect its people or right to statehood at all, because I believe strongly in the former and the second is just fact.  At what point might we begin to doubt the intentions of Israeli military action?  Where is the line at which we would say “OK, enough, your actions indicate that you are not only concerned with the future of only your own people, but actively hoping to end the possibility of a peaceful future for your opposition”?  Will it end only with the deaths of every Palestinian?  In this we might see the longterm goal entirely: to use Palestinian genocidal martyrdom as an excuse to demolish Israel.

In the 2006 invasion of Lebanon seeking Hezbollah, over one thousand Lebanese civilians were killed in a conflict that lasted only a month, 300 of them children under the age of thirteen; Hezbollah, while connected in complex ways I don’t know enough about, was not a part of the democratically elected Lebanese government (which likely mostly wished to minimize conflict with Hezbollah themselves in order to avoid total civil war).  Without any control over Lebanese media, images of the destruction flooded out into the world.  Lebanon was so geographically, economically, and psychologically devastated, in fact, it was ideal weather for Hezbollah to up their attempts at making the Lebanese government even further irrelevant.  At the time nobody understood—it did not seem to warrant the approach nor intensity of force.  Israel essentially claimed they did the best they could.  Did they?  Since 2000, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces inside occupied territories was, prior to this war, 4781.  The number of Palestinians killed by other Palestinians stood at 594.  The number of Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians was 237.  Are they?

The burden of morality lies first on those with the luxury to be moral.  Israel’s government has every conceivable resource available to them.  Those living within the sealed borders of the Gaza Strip have essentially nothing other than strategy, psychological warfare alone.  A few weeks ago, I quoted Zizek discussing Ghandi’s advice to the Jews during the Holocaust, which was to commit a mass suicide so as to gain the collective sympathy of the world.  Zizek noted that one can easily imagine how the Nazis would have responded to this action: “OK, we will help you, where do you want the poison to be delivered to you?”  Over the last decade, Hamas and Hezbollah have gained ground not only internationally but internally, increasingly allowed more political agency by the exhausted complicity of their own communities in the face of Israeli violence.  It is a perversion of Ghandi’s recommendation, substituting sacrifice for suicide; in collapsing public and militaristic spaces, they are ensuring Israeli aggression will be at the cost of innocent life above all.  It is repulsive and indefensible in the extreme, but Israel has the choice to take the bait.  And the problem is they do.  With gusto.

This, too, bears no defense.  Ultimately, it is Israel’s own brutality which will prove to have been used against them, maybe all of us, by treating life as callously as their guerrilla opposition.  To doubt, to always challenge what is “true” is the only answer here to move forward into something better.  It’s worth quoting again: “If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.”  Think of all the ways you can fold that.

There’s a really interesting reading of Zizek’s schizophrenic vision of violence in the new issue of Naked Punch.  At least this I believe to be true: we’ve waited long enough.