| 
Recent Stories
March 26, 2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets of Blood
Patrick Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs, Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The Smell of Death Surrounds Me
March 25, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What Democracy Looks Like: the Streets
of Cairo
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings on
the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood Indicator: Casualties and the Stock
Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless Country
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood for Oil:
the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint Them
Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic Protest
for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz----------------Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Stephen Banko
I Was a Soldier
Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did We Become
an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
Myths and
Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch from
Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The Erosion
of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
Click Here for More
Stories.
Burn Your Sweatshop Clothes!
Buy Union Made Apparel!
|
March
29, 2003
Israelis
Victims
No Longer?
By ANN PETTIFER
Iris
Murdoch, the Oxford moral philosopher and novelist, thought suffering
was not necessarily redemptive; it did not always improve us either
morally or spiritually.
Taking her cue from
Plato, she argued that while suffering might well be a constituent of
the moral life, it must never be an end in itself. Moreover, evil, which
she often characterized as the good degenerating into egotism, could
corrupt its innocent victims.
From the late 1930s,
Murdoch was involved in a number of friendships with Jewish refugees
from Fascism; she was pupil, lover or muse to several, including the
Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti. The moral abyss that was the Holocaust
came to haunt her.
Yet, in 1970, she
took the considerable risk of writing a novel, A Fairly Honourable Defeat,
in which the amoral, destructive protagonist in the story, Julius King
an urbane Jewish émigré, is discovered to have the numbers
of a concentration camp tattooed on his arm.
In an earlier novel,
The Nice and the Good, Murdoch had portrayed another, very different
Holocaust survivor, Willie Kost. Although Willie is trapped by his past,
he nevertheless spends his time on "small, non--grandiose exercises
in love." Julius King, on the other hand, claims to have had a
"cosy war." His period in Belsen is never acknowledged; the
price he has paid in surviving the horror and the powerlessness is the
loss of his humanity. A cold repressed anger turns him into a monster
of egoism, a puppet--master whose raison d'etre is the exercise of power.
Contempt for his fellow creatures is absolute.
Primo Levi, the
Italian Jew who survived Auschwitz and wrote so unsparingly and unsentimentally
about life in the camp, never doubted that the evil revealed in the
Holocaust had universal meaning: it was not only a tragedy for Jews,
but for all humankind. Thus he refused the temptation to enlist this
catastrophe to shield the new Jewish state from criticism.
When, after the
wars of 1967 and 1973, Israel held onto conquered land (in defiance
of U.N. resolutions) and continued to dispossess Palestinians, Levi
urged the Israelis not to use a "sacred history of suffering"
as the rationale for their "tribal aggression"----a very different
position to that taken by another Auschwitz survivor, Eli Wiesel. Through
his writings and his witness to that terrible moment, Wiesel has earned
iconic status as the quintessential moral man. However, his embrace
of the temptation that Primo Levi spurned is seldom recognized.
No matter how brutal
Israeli actions become, Wiesel is silent or defensive, always reserving
his sympathy for Jews. His public utterances reveal a chilling indifference
to the plight of Palestinians. Last fall, even as the UN was trying
to pave the way for peaceful disarmament, Wiesel was calling with pious
insistence for war against Iraq.
Historical amnesia
allows him to forget that before the establishment of Israel, Arabs,
unlike Europeans, were, on the whole, hospitable to their Jewish minorities.
It is a stance that comes perilously close to the one satirized by the
Israeli novelist Amos Oz in The Slopes of Lebanon: "Our sufferings
have granted us immunity papers, as it were, a moral carte blanche_We
were victims and have suffered so much. Once a victim, always a victim,
and victim--hood entitles its owners to a moral exemption."
A story in the New
York Times Magazine (Feb. 16) on radical young settlers engaged in a
wholesale land--grab in the Occupied Territories, provides a graphic
illustration of stunted moral development in a new generation of Israelis
who appropriate the history and memory of the Holocaust to justify a
savage nationalism. These predatory eretz Zionists intimidate Palestinians
into abandoning their homes and land; they then plunder, pillage and
expropriate.
Yehoshefat Tor,
the founder of one of the settlements, declares "the Torah says
we should kill all the Arabs." These people seem stripped of culture
and possessed by nihilistic rage. Curiously, in a bit of bourgeois bowdlerizing,
the Times chose to advertise the story on the magazine's cover under
the title "Israel's Rebellious Teen Settlers."
This is no youthful
rebellion. Rather it is an expression of the ruthless expansionism that
Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, has advocated for years. In 1998,
in an address to the extreme right--wing Tsomet Party, Sharon instructed
the outpost settler movement to "grab as many hilltops as (you)
can to enlarge the settlements, because everything we take now will
stay ours."
Chris McGreal, reporting
for the Guardian (London) on the composition of the new Sharon governrment,
noted that it is made up of right-wing parties, one of which advocates
the complete expulsion of the Palestinians from the Occupied Territories.
Saeeb Erekat, a Palestinian minister, says "it's a government for
the settlers, from the settlers and by the settlers. Sharon has made
it clear that he wants the Palestinians to surrender to him."
Towards the end
of her New York Times essay, author Samantha Shapiro writes that the
young settlers "seem to the Palestinians to be embodying their
nightmare fear: that the state of Israel is a lawless, boundless anarchic
occupation, and not the effort of a group of refugees to establish a
homeland in borders delineated by the United Nations." However,
the settlers themselves "portray outposts as a retort to the horror
of living in ghettos, powerless and ashamed. The settlements are seen
as a repudiation of the long Jewish history of victimization."
So we have come full circle. The descendants of the victims of the Holocaust
have become victimizers. The chain of evil is unbroken.
In the late 1970s,
Jonathan (Jay) Pollard, the American who spied for Israel, took a summer
course on the politics of South Africa which my husband was teaching.
Jay was an outstanding student and, when asked, the spouse supported
his application to graduate school.
The future spy was
not reticent about his Zionist commitments, but he also didn't brandish
them. After his arrest, we learned from a British journalist investigating
the case, that Pollard had subsequently become fluent in Afrikaans,
an accomplishment that could well have made him an ideal conduit in
the mid--1980s when Israel and South Africa were in collusion. Israel,
which had consistently defied the 1977 UN mandatory arms embargo against
South Africa, became the major supplier of military technology to the
apartheid state.
Arms were manufactured
under license from Israel and the two countries cooperated in the production
of nuclear weapons. There was cooperation between their military academies
and a regular exchange of instructors. The Holocaust and the history
of discrimination and pogroms against Jews had not nurtured in Pollard's
Israeli handlers, or Jay himself, a sense of solidarity with the world's
oppressed non--Jews. Apartheid's Africans were betrayed without compunction
and also, in a tragic irony, were those universalist South African Jews
who had joined the liberation movement -- people like Ruth First and
her partner Joe Slovo. In 1982 Ruth was killed by a letter bomb, sent
courtesy of South African state security, the same folk with whom Israel
was doing business.
Manipulation of
the Holocaust has had, for many years, a distorting effect on US political
discourse. A majority of American Jews and their cultural and political
organizations continue to regard criticism of Israel as prima facie
evidence of anti--Semitism. In May last year, writing in the New York
Review of Books, Professor Tony Judt confronted the myth of "the
small victim community," arguing that "since 1967 Israel has
changed in ways that render its traditional self--description absurd.
It is now a colonial power, by some accounts the world's forth largest
military...by comparison, Palestinians are weak." Calling him Israel's
"dark id," Judt warned that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has
encouraged a contempt and cynicism towards Palestinians that will be
"hard to shake."
Israeli novelist
and poet Yitzhak Laor paints an even bleaker picture. The "fat,
old, pork--eating hedonistic General" is how he describes Ariel
Sharon -- seeing him as emblematic of both the corruption and the decline
of democracy. Palestinians have been erased from Israeli consciousness
and with the Left and the peace movement on the ropes Laor holds out
little hope of the country transforming itself from within. "Does
anybody think that Israel is capable of getting itself out of this mess
without help?" he asks.
While the United
States is the only country with the authority to rein in Sharon, it
is unlikely to oblige now that powerful Zionists are shaping George
Bush's policy in the Middle East -- and critics are too easily silenced
when opposition to the Israeli government is equated with anti--Semitism.
In his new book,
Israel and Palestine: Out of the Ashes; The Search for Jewish Identity
in the 21st Century, Marc Ellis wrestles with the meaning for Jews of
a Jewish state that has become an idol, pursing policies that were "in
another age and in different circumstances carried out against us. Ghettoization
of an entire people, collective punishment for the resistance of the
few."
Ellis
expresses disappointment with American Jewish leaders who call only
"for unity against an 'uncivilized' foe and for loving rather than
criticizing the state of Israel." Ellis wants Jews everywhere to
stop taking refuge in narratives of themselves as the suffering innocent;
it is hypocritical, he says, "when victims now empowered claim
victim--hood." He exhorts them to return to the prophetic tradition
that was Judaism's unique gift to history. At the core of this tradition
is the requirement to act justly. Only this, he believes, could break
the political impasse in Israel/Palestine: "Without the prophetic,
the world collapses in upon itself."
A greater Israel
-- purged of Palestinians -- would be a barren achievement, a far cry
from what the prophet lsaiah hoped would be "a Light unto the Nations."
Postscript. As I
was writing this, an Israeli friend (a member of Ta'ayush, an Israeli/
Palestinian peace group) phoned to say that he was detained for several
hours after trying to deliver food and supplies to the Occupied Territories.
(Jews are not allowed into Bethlehem, hence his arrest.) The sympathetic
Israeli policeman who was taking down his details said that he had watched
the light go out in Palestinian eyes; a different kind of despair was
overtaking them. My friend asked whether this would mean more suicide
bombing. Not necessarily, was the policeman's response: this time the
despair was more like that experienced by Jews as they went passively
to their slaughter in the concentration camps.
Ann Pettifer
is a freelance writer and the publisher of Common Sense, the alternative
newspaper at the Notre Dame University. She can be reached at awalshe@nd.edu
Yesterday's Features
Daniel Wolff
A Road Trip in Wartime
Chris
Clarke
We Never Spit on Any Baby Killers
David Lindorff
Saddam, a Hero Made in Washington
Pierre
Tristam
Icarus on Crack: American Hubris and
Iraq
Jason Leopold
Richard Perle: the Enterprising Hawk
Saul
Landau
Technological Massacre
Carol Norris
The Mother of All Bombs
Riad
Abdelkarim, MD
Iraq War Lingo 101
Adam Engel
Schlock and Awe
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links / |