rigorousintuition.ca

[ninakat]

Weekend Edition
January 2 - 4, 2009

An Experiment in Provocation
Stealing Gaza
By BRIAN ENO

It's a tragedy that the Israelis - a people who must understand better than almost anybody the horrors of oppression - are now acting as oppressors. As the great Jewish writer Primo Levi once remarked "Everybody has their Jews, and for the Israelis it's the Palestinians". By creating a middle Eastern version of the Warsaw ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they've forgotten it. And by trying to paint an equivalence between the Palestinians - with their homemade rockets and stone-throwing teenagers - and themselves - with one of the most sophisticated military machines in the world - they sacrifice all credibility.

The Israelis are a gifted and resourceful people who fully deserve the right to live in peace, but who seem intent on squandering every chance to allow that to happen. It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that this conflict serves the political and economic purposes of Israel so well that they have every interest in maintaining it. While there is fighting they can continue to build illegal settlements. While there is fighting they continue to receive huge quantities of military aid from the United States. And while there is fighting they can avoid looking candidly at themselves and the ruthlessness into which they are descending.

Gaza is now an experiment in provocation. Stuff one and a half million people into a tiny space, stifle their access to water, electricity, food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, and humiliate them regularly...and, surprise, surprise - they turn hostile. Now why would you want to make that experiment?

Because the hostility you provoke is the whole point. Now 'under attack' you can cast yourself as the victim, and call out the helicopter gunships and the F16 attack fighters and the heavy tanks and the guided missiles, and destroy yet more of the pathetic remains of infrastructure that the Palestinian state still has left. And then you can point to it as a hopeless case, unfit to govern itself, a terrorist state, a state with which you couldn't possibly reach an accommodation.

And then you can carry on with business as usual, quietly stealing their homeland.

Brian Eno is a musician and music producer.

[IanEye]

Sky Saw
_________________
Allá en el rancho grande - allá donde vivía
había una rancherita - que alegre me decía, que alegre me decía

[ninakat]

[yathrib]

I was listening to the daily call in show on the local "progressive" station this week; the topic was, naturally, Gaza. The antisemites were coming out of the woodwork. "The Jews" were doing it because they're greedy, atheist, ugly, whatever. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. As long as people use these situations as an excuse to let out their inner Hitler, many people of good will are not going to want to touch the Palestinian cause with a ten foot pole, even in a case like this where the Israelis are clearly as wrong as can be. And forget about ever getting Jewish Americans--otherwise the most enlightened and humane people on the planet--to take an objective look at it, when the people on the "other side" are like this.

[slimmouse]

[ninakat]

Annie Lennox and Brian Eno Stand Tall for Gaza in the UK -- In the U.S., the Congress rolls over for AIPAC

"Our voices will not be silenced until there is a complete and absolute end to the genocide."
- Annie Lennox, January 10, 2008

*VIDEOS*

[AlicetheKurious]

[StarmanSkye]

Isn't there a chance that part of the calculation for Israel's now-18-day sustained paroxism of unrestrained, over-the-top violence has a very deliberate psychological component, ie. greater social cohesion and a popular sense of unified, collective purpose with shared responsibility, in response to the reactionary outrage and condemnation by those people around he world certain to protest who aren't committed to endorsing Israel's actions, and where newsmedia censorship-control isn't as thorough as it is in the US. While there is a significant minority of Israeli citizens who don't support Israel's past and present militant policies, their demoraliing effect can be minimized by usual threats, intimidation and secret-police-state crack-downs. With the circular rationale of legitimate 'shooting-and-crying' in 'defense' against the hated evil of terrorist Hamas and their 6000+rockets, the Israeli leadership appeals to their citizens as being in a desperate life-and-death struggle which will require 100 percent of their support -- a common-cause cohesion US leaders failed to fully inspire the US citizenry with following 911 because of that society's cultural plurality and high degree of cynicism over government duplicity and corruption. Israel, having exploited fear-and-terror much more successfully through the fact of Israel's relatively intimate society ostensibly unified by virtue of religious identity and culture, can better manipulate public opinion. There's a long tradition of victimhood in the Jewish tradition that lends itself to being used that has been extensively analyzed and commented on.

And too, I have to wonder at whether the Israeli society is being psychologcally primed for the likely further attacks by the IDF on Lebanon and Syria, or perhaps occupying that portion of Egypt which runs along the Gaza borer, to 'insure' against Palestinian weapons smuggling, to better secure threats against Israeli's 'security', etc.