Pre-emptive policing
April 8th, 2009
Views: 322
From this:
Intelligence reports suggest that “known activists” are also returning to the streets, and police claim they will foment unrest. “Those people would be good at motivating people, but they haven’t had the ‘footsoldiers’ to actually carry out [protests],” Hartshorn said. “Obviously the downturn in the economy, unemployment, repossessions, changes that. Suddenly there is the opportunity for people to mass protest. “It means that where we would possibly look at certain events and say, ‘yes there’ll be a lot of people there, there’ll be a lot of banner waving, but generally it will be peaceful’, [now] we have to make sure these elements don’t come out and hijack that event and turn that into disorder.”
Via this:
Kettling is a police tactic wherein protesters are prevented from leaving an area by cordons of police. Peaceful protesters, potential rioters and bystanders alike are corralled once they have congregated into one or more larger group(s). Although large groups are difficult to control this can be done by concentrations of police. The tactic is to prevent the large group breaking into smaller splinters which have to be individually chased down and for the policing to break into multiple small battles. Once the kettle has been formed the cordon is tightened including with baton charges to restrict the territory occupied by the protesters. The cordon is then maintained for a number of hours in which those within the cordon are denied food, water and toilet facilities, the aim is to leave would be violent protesters too tired to do anything but want to go home.
To this:
Yesterday, the IPCC began managing an investigation by City of London police into the circumstances of Tomlinson’s death after the Guardian published photographs of him on the ground and witness statements indicated he had been assaulted by police officers. The IPCC’s commissioner for London, Deborah Glass, said: “Initially, we had accounts from independent witnesses who were on Cornhill, who told us that there had been no contact between the police and Mr Tomlinson when he collapsed. “However, other witnesses who saw him in the Royal Exchange area have since told us that Mr Tomlinson did have contact with police officers. “This would have been a few minutes before he collapsed. It is important that we are able to establish as far as possible whether that contact had anything to do with his death.”
Brian Massumi once wrote that the point of pre-emption, as a general strategy, is to turn a potential future into a affectively real force in the present: the summer of rage becomes a flashpoint in April. And the result is that the potential future, once named, causes itself.
UPDATE: And as the debates get going about who intended or didn’t intend x, let’s all remember how the law works.
What ruthless and utter destruction
March 20th, 2009
Views: 281
Posted in: israel & palestine, political
From Haaretz, details of testimonies from Israeli soldiers on what the Iron Wall means when you’re clearing houses in Gaza:
A second squad leader, who described the killing of the elderly woman, says he argued with his commander over loose rules of engagement that allowed the clearing out of houses by shooting without warning residents beforehand. After the orders were changed, soldiers had complained that “we should kill everyone there [in the centre of Gaza]. Everyone there is a terrorist.” The squad leader said: “To write ‘death to the Arabs’ on walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing: To understand how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics.”
From tactics to strategy, and the words of the geographer, strategist and head of research at the IDF’s National Defence College, Arnon Soffer, which I quoted here back in January.
I didn’t recommend that we kill Palestinians. I said we’ll have to kill them. […] The point is that our young people are leaving the country and we are an island in a sea of Middle Eastern countries. This is why we have to fortify ourselves with a fence. Then, whoever tries to cross it gets a bullet to the head.
Congratulations due
February 27th, 2009
Views: 272
Posted in: israel & palestine, political
Looks like CSAW deserves a case of virtual champers. Marvellous stuff.
CBA, Quick and Dirty
February 27th, 2009
Views: 262
For anyone in the process of soldering the final circuits into the positronic brain of their ultimate behemoth of total security, Phila has a quick question:
Which, in turn, brings up the question that always fascinates me about projects like these: what’s the cost to evildoers of adapting to a barrier of this sort, versus the cost to us of re-engineering the system once it’s been overcome?
Ship Ahoy
February 17th, 2009
Views: 489
Posted in: environment, gas, political, uk
For regular visitors who are interested in the current whereabouts of the Tembek, the first tanker to transport LNG to the new South Hook terminal at Milford Haven, here’s a handy little embed from the indispensible marinetraffic.com (might not work on IE7, but why would you want it to?):
ETAs for the vessel have of course varied widely, just like projected completion dates for the terminals and South Wales gas pipeline. We heard 9 February at one point, 12 February another time. It’ll probably take around 9-10 days to reach Milford in good weather, so even if it reaches full steam ahead today, it won’t be here before March.
That is of course if Milford is, indeed, going to be the destination.
The Tembek has been anchored off Malta since at least the end of January - is it waiting for a signal from Exxon Mobil, triggered by changes in the spot price gas market, which will see it heading off to Italy, the Netherlands, the USA, Japan or even Korea in response to the waving of metaphorical handfuls of euros, dollars or yen?
Fascism and Representation
February 16th, 2009
Views: 319
Posted in: art and media, ethics, political
After Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful, what to make of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas? The impact of the much discussed ending gets you to the heart of why TBitSP is a better film “about” the Holocaust than either of the foregoing (not that Benigni’s tin-eared effort should detain anyone for long).
Why those quotation marks? The problem that films about the Holocaust have to face is one which Gillian Rose described, in commenting on Schindler’s List. What is the purpose of representing the Holocaust? Is it to imbue a new generation with a pious commitment to “never again”? Is it to document, impossibly, the Real of horror? Any film which introduces any kind of figurative element, dwells on the perspective of those who were not the victims, or manifests historical errors will be subjected to critical excoriation for its lack of “realism”. This has been the case with TBitSP in some quarters, most notably perhaps in this review from Linda Grant:
When I watched the film, my attention was drawn away from the unintentional death of the innocent Nazi child in the gas chamber to the extras without speaking parts, the grown-up men and women standing around him. The enforced identification with Bruno as an innocent victim of a taste for exciting adventures left a sour taste in my mouth. He isn’t in the camp long enough for him to be lost, swallowed up inside the system. At the point of death, he still thinks they’re sheltering from the rain. Nothing at all disturbs his innocence. The true horror would have been the child’s gradual starvation, the narrow moral choices open to the camp inmates, reduced to stealing a smaller child’s spoon to eat and live. He has a mercifully quick death.
The idea of innocence “in Nazi form” revolts Grant - it represents the failure of representation to get at the inner grain of experience, which is something she cannot forgive.
Yet what could “realism” really mean here? Grant writes like someone standing outside looking in, who is disappointed with what she has witnessed, is concscious of there being something missing. But to charge a film about the Holocaust with being “unrealistic” is a charge that ultimately stands in for the guilt of the observer: representation is, as Rose writes, a difficult business. Because there is no simple empiricism here: representation is not about bearing witness to an unspeakable reality. Representation implies more than witnessing, it implies identification. To represent, on the page or on film, is to re-present a perspective, to invite the reader or viewer to participate in a movement which bears us up and invites us to stage our own drama. To invite people to participate, in this sense, in the Holocaust, is therefore fraught with difficulty.
Who do we identify with? Do we identify with the perpetrators? But then we lose our assurance of our own goodness, which we are loath to do. So do we identify with the victim? But then we are invited to see the Real as present in the violence of the Nazis, and thus we dance our own version of fascism, in transforming Nazism into a natural force. Spielberg allows us the get-out clause of identifying with a hero, whose place in history and goodness are part of “common sense”. This saves us from having to acknowledge that we are identifying with anyone, as it sets things, morally speaking, on the right footing. It gives us licesnse to watch beatings, killings and degradations safe in the comforting knowledge that everything turned out alright, because, well, because Schindler.
OK, spoiler alert:
What TBitSP does, in its final 15 minutes, however, is to shift identifications in a way which dissolves our identification with Bruno, and demands that we identify with a different perspcetive entirely. And it is this shift, I’d wager, that leaves people sitting quietly in the cinema until the credits are over, rather than the death of a boy who has charmed us. There is a moment, a crucial moment, where the commandant father and Bruno’s mother are searching desperately for their child, where we are invited to identify with them, and to want them to find their child. In our promiscuous capacity for empathy, we will find ourselves seeing them as lifted above context, above history, above complicity - as, above all, a father and a mother. And that moment promises us, like the heroism of Schindler, an illusory escape - even the Nazis loved their kids. But then we ask ourselves: why should he, he alone, be saved? If we want him to be saved, then we care nothing for the fate of all those others who are to die with him. So, to maintain our integrity, we must want him to die, to be killed along with the others. In the absence of a hero who would save us from having to acknowledge the difficulty of representation by saving everyone, we must want Bruno to die too. And so we experience our own implication in the representation of fascism - it is no longer simply a spectacle.
The true horror is not, as Grant wants it to be, beyond the scrapings and scrabblings of representation at the dark granite of the Real. It is in the dramatic knot which takes us from identifying with Bruno to needing him to die with Shmuel and the anonymous Jews that surround them.
Blears Busted
February 6th, 2009
Views: 1335
Posted in: environment, nuclear power, political, uk
Hazel Blears in today’s Graun, whilst attacking cultures of cynicism, the elitist commentariat, blah blah blah, in the name of her oppressed colleagues, lays into George Monbiot:
Then he turns his fire on consultations (which he claims are rigged) and citizens’ juries (which he says “are used to lend a sheen of retrospective legitimacy to decisions already taken”). Rigged consultations and faked citizens’ juries? Surely this would be the stuff of front-page exclusives, if only there was any evidence to back it up.
Actually, Hazel, it’s more the stuff of legal judgements, e.g. this one [PDF] concerning your government’s 2006 consultation on nuclear power, an exercise for which Mr Justice Sullivan considered “rigged” to be a too-generous description:
For the reasons set out above, the consultation exercise was very seriously flawed. Adopting the test put forward by Mr Drabble, “something has gone clearly and radically wrong.” The purpose of the 2006 Consultation Document as part of the process of “the fullest public consultation” was unclear. It gave every appearance of being an issues paper, which was to be followed by a consultation paper containing proposals on which the public would be able to make informed comment. As an issues paper it was perfectly adequate. As the consultation paper on an issue of such importance and complexity it was manifestly inadequate. It contained no proposals as such, and even if it had, the information given to consultees was wholly insufficient to enable them to make “an intelligent response”.
This legal judgement on the “rigging” of this consultation was, in fact, the reason the Government undertook another - and arguably equally inadequate - consultation in 2007. Perhaps the next piece Hazel writes will complain about how exposure to corrosive miasmas of cynicism is making her lose her memory.
UPDATE (10/02): Monbiot responds, leaving behind nothing but a smoking pile of ashes with a ginger wig atop it.
Part of an Occasional Series
February 5th, 2009
Views: 396
Posted in: environment, gas, political, uk
An update on the Milford Haven LNG terminals and their receding completion date.
“We are in the final stages of completion and we are expecting it to be onstream in the second quarter of this year,” a BG spokesman said.
So, April at the earliest then. South Hook is still supposed to be coming online this month, possibly even next week.
For The Record
January 30th, 2009
Views: 325
Posted in: israel & palestine, political
Here we have Henry Siegman in the LRB, setting down some points for consideration:
Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network. […] Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie.
And the big question follows on a little later:
Why then are Israel’s leaders so determined to destroy Hamas? Because they believe that its leadership, unlike that of Fatah, cannot be intimidated into accepting a peace accord that establishes a Palestinian ‘state’ made up of territorially disconnected entities over which Israel would be able to retain permanent control.
Ice Blue Solid Air
January 29th, 2009
Views: 281
Posted in: art and media, music
Ah, shit. Saw him in Cardiff the year before last. Unimpeachably great.
Herbivores of War
January 27th, 2009
Views: 323
Posted in: israel & palestine, political
Via Phila, news that Israel’s military is active on the country’s border with Lebanon, replacing tooled up Sabrakids with hungry antelopes.
The antelope have been stationed on Israel’s border with Lebanon, to eat up the “problematic foliage that distorts views of the Lebanese side and within which Hezbollah guerrillas could hide,” Ha’Aretz reports…. There are now “between 500 and 700 elands” at military bases throughout Israel, according to the paper.
Phila notes:
Now that Israel has pressed this exotic animal into military service, how will its enemies respond? If the countries surrounding Israel suddenly start stocking up on spotted hyenas, this might suggest that a new biological arms race is underway. It’d probably be wise to classify zoos as dual-use facilities, just in case.
Watch for the Discovery Channel becoming the subject of ritual denunciations on Fox News.
Some Explicit Polaroids
January 21st, 2009
Views: 353
Posted in: environment, gas
Back to the South Wales gas pipeline. Via email comes some photographic evidence of just how National Grid’s race to get the pipeline finished in order to avoid contractual penalties may have led to subcontractors cutting corners and ignoring engineering best practice.
The problems have been fully documented by an independent group of civil engineers and metallurgists who inspected the pipe while it was being laid. Their report is available here. Therein, they note that:
The pipe has not been laid throughout in accordance with this specification which requires a bed of fine material 6” or 150mm thick to be provided, and the pipe then to be surrounded with the same minimum thickness of fine material in the course of back filling, up to 6” over the top of the pipe. All sharp objects are to be excluded from this bed and surrounding, stones and such like. This is correctly required in order to preserve intact the anti-corrosion coating provided over the whole outer surface of all the pipes. Wherever this coating is damaged, corrosion will start immediately, and lead to explosions sooner than would otherwise be the case.
Numerous spots along the pipeline where this procedure has not been followed were photographed - here’s a couple of examples (click on images for larger versions).
Other problems, such as voids being left under the pipe which contribute to strain and further damage, were also documented.
The Carlsbad gas pipeline explosion in 2000 in New Mexico is thought to have been caused by internal corrosion. 12 people from the same family were killed by the detonation, which left a 17-metre wide crater and projected an eight-and-a-half metre piece of steel pipe a distance of nearly a hundred metres. 
The corrosion is thought to have been caused by increased levels of chlorides in the pipe, resulting from microbial activity. A vital precaution against this sort of internal corrosion is to ensure internal welds are cleaned and painted before the pipe is sealed. This, it appears, has not been done in several cases.
There’s plenty more, and the European Commission has been poring over the pretty pix for a while now.
A Lazy Cynic Writes
January 21st, 2009
Views: 407
So, it’s probably a sign of how resoundingly thirty years of Kulturkampf have buggered up American public life that one of the most deflationary political texts I’ve ever read could be called The Audacity of Hope.
And yesterday, the ideological hurricane tore once again through Washington:
The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.
Overall, a speech that would definitely have benefited from with leaving out all that “we are ready to lead” stuff and a different ending. Something along the lines of “Your day is over, George Bush! Mine is beginning! Guards, seize him!”.
The long game
January 19th, 2009
Views: 347
Posted in: israel & palestine, political
Analysis of the long-term logic of Israel’s policy position from John Mearsheimer.
But these are not the real goals of Operation Cast Lead. The actual purpose is connected to Israel’s long-term vision of how it intends to live with millions of Palestinians in its midst. It is part of a broader strategic goal: the creation of a “Greater Israel.” Specifically, Israel’s leaders remain determined to control all of what used to be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement between them, the air above and the water below them.
A pathological logic, of course. Exemplified elsewhere by the demographer Arnon Soffer, who responded thus to the widespread citation of the remarks he made in 2004 which are quoted by Mearsheimer:
That statement caused a huge stir at the time, and it’s amazing to see how many dozens of angry, ignorant responses I continue to receive from leftists in Israel and anti-Semites abroad, who took my words out of context. I didn’t recommend that we kill Palestinians. I said we’ll have to kill them. […] The point is that our young people are leaving the country and we are an island in a sea of Middle Eastern countries. This is why we have to fortify ourselves with a fence. Then, whoever tries to cross it gets a bullet to the head.
No related posts
What do they want?
January 16th, 2009
Views: 302
Posted in: art and media, europe, hegel, pol. phil., political
Finally got along to my local arts centre to see The Baader-Meinhof Complex last night. Everyone smokes heroically and looks - yes - extremely glamorous, there’s little context (tell us more about Hanns-Martin Schleyer… and so on) and no room for development (what is the point of Horst Herold as depicted here? How does Andreas Baader get from bollock-brained fool to political theorist?), and of course it’s way too long.
But (to wax Hegelian for a moment) in documenting the irrationality (even if you accept a revolutionary terrorist group’s own terms of reference, just how do you get from disconnected acts of violence to mass insurrection?), the film does manage to squeeze out one or two moments of rationality. For instance, in the midst of the shootings and kidnappings, Meinhof states in a comunique that the killing of police officers stands as a reminder that any official of the State can be called to account for their actions at any moment. Now, this is obviously morally dubious insofar as the reality of the actions it describes is that any official of the State can be “called to account” for the actions of any other member of the State, at any moment, and forced to pay with their lives. The BRD was not fascist; there can be no suggestion that, for example, being in the employ of the German State was tantamount to being a member of the Nazi party after, e.g. the Nuremberg Laws were passed.
However, the film opens by delineating the historical situation by showing the violent interventions by Iranian security men and, following their lead, the German police, at the student demonstration on June 2 1967 in Berlin against the visit of the Shah of Iran, the demonstration at which the first-time demonstrator Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead. The Shah, returned to power in Iran 14 years earlier through the good offices of the CIA, was undoubtedly a potent symbol of America’s foreign adventures. What this scene does is to leave a demand for accountability hanging in the air, after we have seen a police riot instigated to accompany a a dramatisation of American power. It is such a demand for specific and individual accountability, as well as for an examination of the institutions which enable individual power to be exercised, levelled at an authoritarian regime which was engaging in repressive policies in part for reasons of economic engineering, that stands unanswered by standard responses to the RAF and the German New Left more widely (stupidities such as this, for example: “the country’s anti-American, anti-establishment left started to employ tactics that were just as fanatical and violent as those of their perceived Nazi enemies”).
And of course it’s this same demand which is levelled against the authorities responsible for the shooting of de Menezes, against the neo-liberal champions of precarité in France, and against the murderers of Alexandros Grigoropoulos.
Sharp Practice over Heathrow
January 16th, 2009
Views: 333
Posted in: aviation, environment, oil, political, uk
Following the news that Heathrow is going to get its third runway (after a planning enquiry, judicial review, and general election, each one of which the Government is likely to lose), the New Economic Foundation makes essentially the same point that I posted about nearly a year ago. The essential point to consider is how, in the context of economic forecasts produced by consultants to support large infrastructure projects, how massive uncertainties become transformed, via highly questionable assumptions, into quantitative estimates of risks and benefits.
The Government has been relying, in its crude estimates of costs and benefits, on a very low CO2 price:
The Department for Transport (DfT) said that construction of a third runway would generate an additional 210m tonnes of carbon dioxide over the 70 years to 2080, which it priced at £2.8bn – the equivalent of £13.33 a tonne. A further cost of £2.5bn would be generated by non-C02 emissions, the DfT said today. Despite these costs, it said the net economic benefit over 70 years would be £5.5bn.
£19 per tonne of CO2 was the rather conservative figure quoted in the Stern Review. The Government, despite the lack of certainty over the future price of CO2, has chosen to undercut this by around one third in producing its figures. There are several factors which have disappeared from these calculations.
However, the New Economics Foundation said that this estimate did not reflect the fact that aviation emissions can be up to five times more damaging than CO2 emitted at ground level. The thinktank put the carbon cost, conservatively, at £70 a tonne - a level which is at the mid-range of government estimates on the social cost of carbon emissions on any development.
And then there’s peak oil:
The International Energy Agency predicted that global oil production would peak much earlier than expected in 2020 – the year that a third runway was scheduled to open. The airline industry growth projections used by the government are predicated on an oil price of between $53 and $64 a barrel, which would help keep down ticket prices and boost air travel from 228 million people per year, to 465 million by 2030, according to the DfT.
.
No related posts
Full Disclosure
January 8th, 2009
Views: 316
Posted in: environment, ethics, gas, pol. phil., political, uk
Tomorrow will apparently see a “safety briefing” being given ahead of the completion of the LNG terminals at South Hook in Milford Haven. Will this include a full explanation of the risks attendant on LNG transportation - both in general and in relation to the specific geography of this multi-use port? Or will it simply be an exercise in trust management, with the companies who will run the terminals using the emergency services as point-men, allowing them to field the difficult questions?
Pembrokeshire council’s head of civil contingencies Richard Brown:
People can turn up anytime and talk directly with representatives from the emergency services and supporting agencies. I think they will be reassured that the risk of an incident is very low and that the safety standards are extremely high and, in the very unlikely event there is a problem, there are good multi-agency response plans in place to mitigate the impacts.
Telling people that contingency plans (presumably, to rescue whoever manages to survive an initial explosion…) exist and explaining the extent of current knowledge about LNG risks are two very different things. It’s interesting that the case against the siting of the terminals, together with the linked case (on safety grounds, citing multiple violations of best practice by under-pressure and under-supervised subcontractors) against National Grid’s South Wales Gas Pipeline which is up before the European Commission included in its evidence the manifest failure on the part of the Milford Haven Port Authority to date to publish a full risk assessment for the proposed operation.
As well as providing a full account of the risk scenarios and associated assessments, it’s necessary to give a full acknowledgement of where uncertainty and ignorance, as opposed to quantified estimates of risks, limit a full understanding of the situation. International best practice on the siting of LNG terminals discourages placing them in multi-use ports, precisely because of the extra risk factors and complex interactions between such factors that this would bring. The LNG transporters to be used are themselves new and largely untried.
Criticisms of objections to the siting of energy infrastructure are generally advanced on the grounds that protestors appeal to emotion above rationality. It’s rather more often the case that objections are based on the failure of the relevant authorities to disclose essential information, particularly where this information concerns what they do not know and perhaps cannot know. The acceptability of risks cannot be rightly decided on the basis of one party to the decision concealing from other parties the nature of the risks involved, insofar as they are known. This ethical principle is one which objectors to installations like the South Hook LNG plant understand only too well.
No related posts
Nanotechnology in the Food Chain
January 7th, 2009
Views: 308
Posted in: environment, nanotechnology
Many of the greatest uncertainties surrounding nanomaterials with novel, sometimes highly unpredictable properties surround not the effects of exposure on human health, but what consequences will result from the presence in the environment. At the moment, much research on nanotechnology remains in the early R&D or manufacturing stages. There isn’t much data available to conduct detailed life-cycle analyses which would give us an idea of what might happen should nanoparticles (like the various nano-engineered metal oxides) or nanostructures (like nanotubes or quantum dots) be released into the environment when a product is disposed of.
We’ve come a long way from talk of grey (or green) goo: one of the key problems researchers are interested in is the well-established concern of biopersistence and bioaccumulation of synthetic materials. What happens if nanomaterials cannot be broken down by organisms which ingest them in a way that renders them incapable of having harmful effects? And then, what if they should be transmitted up the food chain to accumulate, at much higher levels, in other predatory organisms?
But still another concern is the environmental toxicity of nanomaterials which may, in their bulk form, not be particularly dangerous. Their effects on the food chain may not be transmitted through their persistence or potential for being accumulated by predators, but as a result of their lethality to vital aquatic or soil organisms. New research from the University of Massachusetts indicates that non-biodegradable particles of aluminium oxide, zinc oxide and titanium dioxide (the latter two being currently used widely in cosmetics products like toothpaste and sunscreens, often without labelling or other notification) are toxic to the reproductive systems of the nematode C. elegans, which forms an irreplaceable part of soil ecosystems. Further, there is marked potential for transport up the food chain through predation. The researchers have not been able to identify the mechanism which would account for the increased lethality of the nanoparticles.
Little is known about the potential environmental fate of nanoparticles released “into the wild” through the flushing or washing away of cosmetics. Yet their commercial use continues to increase, without public consultation or concerted regulatory action.
Shlaim on Israel’s Latest “War”
January 7th, 2009
Views: 330
Posted in: israel & palestine, political
Avi Shlaim in today’s Guardian:
The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, “crying and shooting”.
A wide gap separates the reality of Israel’s actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It di d so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel’s objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
And perhaps most telling of all, on the one-way recognition that the Israeli mindset demands: “The problem with Israel’s concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community.”
Gaza
January 6th, 2009
Views: 302
Posted in: ethics, israel & palestine, pol. phil., political
Back in 2006, during the Lebanon war, I wrote this post, which drew a level of interest very unusual for SW (i.e. one or two people even linked to it).
The current situation, in all its growing horror, made me revisit the quotation in that post from David Grossman. I reproduce here the final lines.
Israel is now slipping back into the psychological stance that is most dangerous for itself - the stance of the victim, of the persecuted Jew. Almost every threat to it - even from the Palestinians who can never defeat Israel on the battlefield - is perceived as an absolute peril requiring the harshest response.
Beyond Realpolitik, there is pathology. The fantasy of rational actors confronting each other across zones of tension is just that - a fantasy. There are dynamics, priorities, modes of organisation and practice which militate against any purely instrumental setting of goals and means to achieve them. There are no limits, and those who are unable to set limits on what they are capable of are powerless before their own power to do evil.
The ideology and practice of the Iron Wall, whose analysis by Avi Shlaim inspired my previous comments, leads to what I referred to as the strategy of the decisive gesture, designed to finally transform the relationship between Israel and the world into a one-sided recognition - this time they will listen, will understand. In the ongoing attempts to finally undermine and cast out Hamas, there is more of the same. But there is something else, too.
Where I went wrong, in that previous post, was undoubtedly in casting the pathological dynamic of Israeli actions in far too short-termist a mould. The desire for a final purification of the threat expresses itself A reading of, for example, Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land reveals how the destruction of the possibility of a Palestinian polity is a long-term goal that reaches into the design of settlements, administrative arrangements, access to crucial resources like water and so on. The ideology of the Iron Wall is ultimately one, as Lenin notes, of expulsion, one which is cast into material form throughout the many influences Israel brings to bear on the everyday lives of Palestinians.
The maintenance of unbearable tension, deprivation and suffering is the Separation Wall practised as the totality of Palestinian existence. And, if we follow Grossman’s remarks, we might add that this reality first became possible because a Separation Wall permeated and defined the political reality and material existence of Israel itself.
