RAWI Condemns Israel's Aggression in Gaza
RAWI, the Radius of Arab American Writers, condemns in the strongest possible terms the ongoing Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip. Various news agencies around the world have reported the terrible impact of Israel's military aggression in Gaza, which has resulted in nearly 400 Palestinian deaths, the majority of them children and civilians.
A particularly gruesome illustration of Israel's brutality can be found in its effect on specific households, such as the Hamdan family, who lost two daughters, the Balusha family, who lost five daughters, the Absi family, who lost three daughters, and the Kishku family, who lost two daughters. In all, Israel has killed over fifty Palestinian children.
Commentators on the political right have applauded Israel's destruction of Gaza and the massacre of civilians, in the same way that they applauded the deadly economic strangulation preceding the current military violence. Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum went so far as to accuse the Palestinians of photographing children pretending to be injured.
It is the response of traditional liberal media that has been most disturbing, however. Nearly all corporate media in the United States and a majority of its progressive forums have conceptualized Israel's attack as retaliatory, a position that has no basis in fact and that would be unjustifiable even if it were true. In fact, the majority of American media appear to believe that the death of Palestinian civilians is an unfortunate byproduct of their own innate barbarity. Famed Israeli writers and noted doves David Grossman, writing in the New York Times, and Amos Oz, quoted in Ha'aretz, appear to be much more preoccupied with the purity of the Israeli soul and with finding a quieter way to suppress Palestinian resistance than they are with the belligerence of their government.
We deplore that media continually emphasize Israel's retaliation as if to simultaneously justify and absolve its cruelty. We would point out that most of the Gazans are refugees who are indigenous to the villages and cities Israel claims to now be protecting. Gaza's population does not consist of irrational Muslim extremists who inexplicably dislike Jews and take a perverse joy in undermining Israel's timeless and innocent democracy, as American news outlets relentlessly suggest; it consists of people who have been systematically dispossessed, starved, tortured, and economically exploited. Nor does this population exist outside of history; it is engaged in a colonial war against a powerful state that has long undertaken a program of ethnic cleansing.
RAWI calls on artists and writers of all cultural backgrounds, nationalities, faiths, and political affiliations to vocally condemn Israel's extensive human rights violations, along with the odious discourses of justification that allow those violations to continue.
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No comment really necessary. Given that Israeli ground troops have just entered the Strip, condemnation is the minimum necessary response.
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9 comments:
I agree that this is horrible, pointless, counterproductive, and should be condemned. But I'm not sure what the writers of the RAWI declaration mean when they say:
"Nearly all corporate media in the United States and a majority of its progressive forums have conceptualized Israel's attack as retaliatory, a position that has no basis in fact and that would be unjustifiable even if it were true."
Hamas has been sending rockets into Israeli territory for a very long time, and has killed innocent people - granted, not nearly on the scale of the Israeli attacks, but still, this is a response to violence. The magnitude of this response is insane, but the notion that retaliatory action against murder is "unjustifiable even if it were true" is pretty suspect.
The challenge for Israel is to show restraint even when under fire - to support the rebuilding of Palestinian infrastructure even as their border towns are being attacked. The challenge for Hamas is to just stop firing in the first place.
Again, I'm not claiming that the violence is equivocal. It's totally out of proportion. But if people continue to disregard the moral difficulty of *accepting* Hamas rocket attacks without any kind of response, then Israel will never get beyond its own dangerous paranoia.
Maybe?
xo
I interpret that particular comment as referring to the argument that the assault on Gaza is not driven by the rocket attacks - contemptible as they are - but by the imminence of Israel's elections and the need for Barak, Livni et al to show they can be tougher than Bibi.
See Ian Lustick's argument about the US invasion of Iraq as being driven by domestic politics - a 'supply-side war' for which there was no demand in terms of genuine national security threats (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030324/lustick). Here, too, the very disproportionate nature of the response, the timing of it, the almost certain strategic ineffectiveness: this points to something other than security demands.
So the point is not to deny that Hamas has attacked. It is to point out that this assault on Gaza is not, or not to any significant extent, a direct response to those attacks.
Oh, that makes total sense. Ugh.
Well... up to a point Lord Copper. They're linked. They're not alternatives, are they? You can have a
conflict which is both a politically astute (if cynical) move, and also one which has a (purported) national security motivation. Afghanistan is (arguably) one. And I'll stop using (brackets) now.
BTW, to start off, the Israeli response is disproportionate, and therefore (probably) illegal and (definitely) immoral. (Sorry). But having cleared my ethical throat and purchased the right to say this, that doesn't mean that it wasn't prompted by the rockets coming from Gaza.
If there had been no rockets, there wouldn't have been political capital to be made from an attack, and therefore no need to out-tough Bibi. Even if you think of this as a cynical political incursion, the rockets are part of the picture.
And doesn't it go further? Did Hamas know this? Do they have anything to gain from having Israel be nice to them? A cuddly Israel benefits Fatah, doesn't it? You poke the dumb giant, and he'll go thumping anything and everything, particularly when there's an election coming. And if he thumps things, then it might just be in your interest.
So I'm with Dan. Ignoring the rockets plays into the hands of those people who would like to dismiss the otherwise eloquent and fair RAWI declaration as biased.
No question that the ideologues & hawks on both sides need and benefit from each other in their domestic political struggles (see also Bush & Bin Laden, a perfect couple). To quote the wise and eloquent Dr. Lustick again, “the closer the process comes to success, the more certain it is that lunatics on both sides will unleash their fury in every way possible to derail the process” (http://tinyurl.com/9ru3ay).
The key thing is to recognize the 'security concerns' as the pretext they are. Or, to be more circumspect (although why we should wish to be that, I am not wholly certain), we could say that Hamas's rockets are the proximate cause of the invasion, while the Israeli electoral map, timetable, and mood are the more fundamental cause.
Of course, the ultimate causes lie in colonialism, whose legacy all of this mess is...
As for those inclined to dismiss the concerns of people like RAWI, or indeed like Dan - I don't suppose a detail like this will make much difference.
Here's Azmi Bishara, who has clearly given up any hope/idea of re-entering the Knesset, being far more dismissive of the rockets. He considers them essentially rhetorical. I don't think I would want to go that far, nor do I think RAWI do so in their statement:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/01/200916191833159347.html
So we're in causation. We all know there are levels to that. From an event which is necessary for something (a condition precedent, and - apologies, I'm going to dust off some Latin - a sine qua non), but which does not bear any moral exculpatory influence on the subsequent action; to a smack in the face that makes you punch back without thinking about it. Where on the spectrum are the rockets? I'm wary of relegating them to the far end of things, if for no other reason than the local Israelis wouldn't do so. Perhaps they wouldn't because they have no concept of proportionality. Perhaps they wouldn't do because they have no concept of history. Perhaps they wouldn't do so for a dozen other reasons. But they do (judging from reports) so consider them, and in a democracy such beliefs (even if wrong) are important. Hence I doubt the rockets are merely rhetorical. I don't see them as a morally neutral sine qua non.
And I doubt the political wisdom at the least, and the good faith at the best, of a condemnation which deliberately ignores their contribution to what's going on. At the simplest, it's foolish: take your opponent's best points and demolish them. Don't ignore them, or you give him ammunition.
Whether they ought to be considered merely rhetorical is a different question. To answer that we can wheel up history and proportionality.
As for the ultimate cause? Colonialism is in the bag - but whose, the British or the Turks? Or that of the Romans? Or the Seleucids? Or Alexander? Or Moses?
Or is it all Sarah's fault for dissing her slave (who, I might add, she told her husband to knock up) and getting Abram to do the dirty on his son Ishmael? Or is it God's fault: he promised Abram and Sarah that Abram would have lots of kids. But took too long to deliver, and so Sarah took things into her own hands. He's omniscient right, so he would have seen that coming. Actually, to see that coming you don't have to be omniscient, just have a modicum of understanding of psychology. So the buck stops there.
Looking into history is helpful, but I doubt it helps provide answers which unequivocally inform what our moral position should be. It's always someone else's fault.
Pip pip.
RD
Now that we have a philosopher in the mix, I shall have to stop using linguistic shortcuts. By summarizing Azmi's argument in terms of the rockets being merely rhetorical, I meant that he dismisses their military/strategic significance altogether, and sees them simply as a cry of the oppressed, an act of political communication. As I said, I wouldn't go that far. Not least because they have real, harmful effects on real people's lives, including ending a few of them and reducing the quality of many more. In quantitative terms they are clearly not equivalent to the destruction visited upon Gaza by the blockade and the current slaughter. But in qualitative terms, as poliical violence, they are at least comparable, if in no way equivalent.
On the ethics of the conflict, here's a piece by one of Ben Gurion University's crop of anti-Zionist Israeli scholars - an always interesting group: http://tinyurl.com/a4a8rl
Philosopher, shilosopher. I read some books once.
Now I'm half weasel-hack, and half blood-sucking parasite. Only Realtors are lower on the foodchain than me.
RD
PS Hey, did'ya catch my bilingualism? "Realtor"
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