The Powerlessness of Israel

July 19th, 2006

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Posted by ChrisG at 8:58 pm

The temptation when faced with an escalation of aggression as utterly unwarranted as this is to turn moral.

Because yes, a nation’s right to defend itself brings with it responsibilities also. Not to seek war beyond the requirements of self-defence, not to harm non-combatants – whether directly or by cynically exploiting the doctrine of double effect, USAF or RAF-style, in dropping 200lb bombs on residential areas of Beirut, which the BBC now routinely refers to as ‘Hizbollah strongholds’. Not to pursue collective punishment, and to avoid targeting entirely non-military objectives. The advantage of moral rhetoric is that it brings into play the power of the charge of inconsistency, or rather, hypocrisy. Yes, in Israel soldiers with their M16s ride everyday on buses with civilians – in a country whose government routinely condemns its opponents for hiding among non-combatants. Yes, Israel acts as if its sovereignty, in grand realpolitische style, gives it the right to overturn the sovereignty of other countries if it so wishes. But the weakness of moral rhetoric, in aiming to establish the requirements of justice, is that it is promiscuously reversible. Once in use, it spreads like brushfire, and almost immediately all sides are employing body-counts to establish who is at fault, accusing their opponents of being poisoned by a unique evil, and tu quoque-ing sententiously in the service of their indignation.

In the midst of this kind of horror, morality is an easy resort. And the language of right, in such an atmosphere, is easily reduced to the language of the playground: he started it, no you did. And from there it’s a short distance to the language of annihilation, of crying for an end to ‘evil’ even if it involved the extermination of every man, woman and child of the group who you imagine your opponent represents.

So instead, ask, with Ilan Pappe: what does Israel want? But not strategically speaking – let’s leave aside the cynicism of its leaders, and of its foreign backers, as another invitation to morality. What does it want as a collective? What does it desire? Peace and security? But those universals, in this particular context, what do they mean? Behind them is a pathology of ceaselessly maintained tension, one that is at odds with the interests of the nation and its people, but one that nonetheless makes its presence felt every time an Israeli politician employs the rhetoric of the decisive blow and of the iron wall of security and military deterrence, which is always about to be completed. And every time too that the final victory is deferred again – the fighting lessens, the troops withdraw across the border, returning people to the everyday dread so well described by David Grossman writing in 2001.

Israel has plunged into a kind of apathy. Seemingly, life goes on as usual. Everyday affairs are conducted with the characteristic Israeli mixture of vigour and edginess. But as anyone who has lived here all his life knows, everything has a strange and disheartening kind of impassivity. Life in slow motion. 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 [or Hizbollah - R.] who can never defeat Israel on the battlefield – is perceived as an absolute peril requiring the harshest response.

(Death as a Way of Life)

The idea, anathema to its supporters, that Israeli military action produces aggressive responses, receives an affirmation from within this everyday fear, the repression of which is a necessary condition of life continuing at all. Following the IDF’s latest incursion in Gaza or the West Bank, the expectation of bombs on buses or in cafes mounts. In such an atmosphere, more military action is, if anything, a relief – and the grander in scale the better. And each time, the violence is anchored to weariness, to a once-more gathered desire to have done with violence, by way of the final victory, the perfect iron wall.

This time the Palestinians will understand that we mean business: they didn’t get it in 1989, or in 1997, or in 2002 but they will now.

The Lebanese failed to comprehend in 1982, 1993 and 1996 – but they will now.

The history this desire feeds on is one of repeated failures by the ‘Arab world’ to knuckle under to the acceptance of the security of Israel. It is a history that affirms, on the one hand, the military power of Israel, its ingenuity, its independence – and on the other its weakness, its incapacity to use its power to protect its citizens. And it always returns to the desire for the the decisive gesture, generating a pathology that is a hugely dangerous one to fall prey to in politics, and indeed in war. History always continues: slights, real or imagined, are suffered and remembered. The parents of dead children and the children of dead parents nurse their grief, their rage and their shame. No single gesture settles all accounts. But a pathology of desire wants to repeat, above all.

The history that forms the backdrop to the rhetoric of decisive gestures is also, never forget, the history of Israel’s failures – under Shamir, Netanyahu, Sharon – to cease provocations in the name of security, to avoid adding to existing tensions, to escape the temptation to return to open war from out of a state of hidden war. The reliance on the idea of the final strike, the ultimate defeat of all the enemies, is a fantasy that gives birth to the strangest efflorescences: an underground wall to keep out the tunnellers of Hamas; an invasion of Lebanon to destroy ‘terrorist infrastructure’ and ‘remodel’ the politics of the country.

That particular stab at the ‘decisive gesture’ was tried before in 1982, when the enemy was the PLO rather than Hizbollah. Following Israel’s decision to annex the Golan Heights in 1981 and the resulting increase in tension, in 1982 the Israeli ambassador to London was shot and wounded by terrorists led by Abu Nidal, an ememy of the PLO leadership. Blaming this attack on the PLO gave the Israeli government the perfect opportunity to seek to ‘destroy’ the PLO and install a friendly government in Lebanon. This particular ‘release of tension’ took in. amongst other things, Lebanon reduced to political chaos, 600 Israeli troops killed, the massacres at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and the birth of Hizbollah – a movement founded to drive out the Israeli invasion. Another intervention that produced only further chaos, more hatred, more injustice, and more insecurity for Israel.

The conclusion is inescapable. Behind the ceaselessly failing logic of the decisive gesture, there is the desire to maintain that state of tension, of enervating deadlock that Grossman describes. A militarised society, secure in its bomb shelters, suffused with the constant fear of being blown apart in a bar, a nightclub, on a bus.

What Israel wants is to repeat.

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