How
the West and Free Press Have
Accepted, Approved and Underwritten Israel’s Long-Term Ethnic Cleansing
and
Institutionalized Racism, In Violation of All Purported Enlightenment
Values,
and With Mind-Boggling Hypocrisy
by Edward S. Herman
(March 8, 2006)
One of the most dubious clichés
of the humanitarian intervention intellectuals and media editors
and
pundits is that human rights have become more important to the United States
and other NATO powers and a major influence on their foreign policy in
recent
decades. David Rieff writes that human rights “has taken hold not
just as
a rhetorical but as an operating principle in all the major Western
capitals, “
and his comrade in righteous arms Michael Ignatieff claims that
our
enhanced “moral instincts” have strengthened “the presumption of
intervention
when massacre and deportation become state policy.” [1] This
perspective was
built in good part on the basis of the experience--and
misreading--of
developments during the dismantlement of Yugoslavia in the 1990s,
where the
propaganda line was that NATO had reluctantly and belatedly entered
that
conflict to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide perpetrated by the
Serbs, and
had done so successfully. This was allegedly an intervention rooted in
Blair-Clinton-Kohl-Schroeder humanism, supported and pressed on these
leaders
by journalists and human rights protagonists.
There were many things wrong with
this explanation and analysis of recent Balkans history, one of
the most
important of which was that NATO intervention was not late--it
came
quite early and was a primary cause of the ethnic cleansing that
followed as it
encouraged a breakup of Yugoslavia in a manner that left large
unprotected
minorities in the newly formed republics, thereby assuring ethnic
conflict;
it sabotaged peace agreements within these new states in the
years1992-1994; and it encouraged non-Serb minorities to hope for NATO
military
aid in arriving at final settlements—which they finally did get. The
NATO
powers even actively or passively supported the most complete ethnic
cleansings
of the Balkan wars—which was of Serbs in Croatia’s Krajina area and
Serbs in
NATO –occupied Kosovo from June 1999. [2]
There were other problems with the
notion that the NATO intervention in the Balkans had a humanitarian
basis and
effect, but it is equally important to recognize the selectivity
in this
focus and the political root of that selectivity. The humanitarian
interventionists were almost completely silent during the 1990s
massacres and
deportations by Indonesia
in
East Timor, the Turkish slaughters and village burnings in their
Kurdish areas,
the killings and huge refugee exodus in Colombia,
and the large-scale massacres in the Congo
carried out in good part by invaders from Rwanda
and Uganda.
For some reason the “moral instinct” of the humanitarian politicians
didn’t
reach these cases, where the killers were allies of these
politicians—and
obtained arms and military aid and training from them. Equally
interesting, the
moral instinct of the humanitarian interventionist intellectuals
and
journalists failed to over-ride the biased focus of their political
leaders but
instead worked in parallel with those biases. This helped their
political
leaders go after the targeted villains with greater violence, partly by
diverting attention from the approved villains and the damage they were
inflicting on their (implicitly unworthy) victims.
The Remarkable Case of Israel
The most interesting and perhaps
most important case of an aborted “moral instinct” is that
involving
Israel, where the state has been engaged in a systematic policy
of
dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians on the
West Bank
and in East Jerusalem for decades, not only without a meaningful
response on
the part of the Free World, but with steady support from the United
States and
spurts of approval and support from its democratic allies. The
ability of
the Western political leaders, media and humanitarian intellectuals to
get
enraged at approved villains like Arafat, Chavez, and Milosevic, while
treating
Begin, Netanyahu and Sharon kindly as statesmen deserving of
economic and
military aid and diplomatic support, is a small miracle of
self-deception, advanced double standards, and moral turpitude.
What makes it a miracle is that the
basic premises as well as performance of the Israeli state fly in the
face
of the entire range of enlightenment values that supposedly
underlie Western civilization.
First, it is a racist state as
a matter of ideology and law. It is officially a Jewish state, 90
percent
of the land in the state is reserved for Jews, Palestinians have been
barred
from leasing or buying state-owned lands that were seized in 1948 and
later,
and Jews from abroad have a right to immigrate and become citizens with
privileges superior to those of indigenous non-Jews. This kind of
ideology and
law was unacceptable as regards the apartheid state of South
Africa,
although it is interesting that Reagan was “constructively engaged”
with that
state, Margaret Thatcher found it quite tolerable, and South
African
“anti-terror” operations were integrated with those of the Free World.
[3] The
Nazis treatment of the Jews in Germany
even before the organization of the death camps was and still is
considered
outrageous; and the Soviet mistreatment of its Jewish population
even led
to punitive U.S.
legislation (the Jackson-Vanik bill, still on the books). But the
Israeli
analogue of the Nuremberg
laws and its construction of a state built on racial
discrimination is
acceptable to the enlightened West. The “chosen people” replace the
“master
race,” and that is not only acceptable, Israel is held up as a
model
democracy and “light unto the world” (Anthony Lewis). And by
implication, Israel’s
creation of a body of humans who are second class citizens
by law
(or of a still lesser class in the occupied territories), legally
and
politically “untermenschen,” is also acceptable. This is a
unique
system of “privileged racism.”
Second, the Israeli state has been
allowed to ignore numerous Security Council resolutions and the Fourth
Geneva
Convention regarding its occupation of the West Bank, as well as the
International Court of Justice ruling on its apartheid wall, and simply
dispossess the Palestinians of a large fraction of their land and
water,
demolish thousands of their homes, cut down many thousands
of their
olive trees, destroy their infrastructure, and create a modern network
of roads
through the occupied West Bank for Jews only while imposing
serious
obstacles to Palestinian movement within the West Bank. [4] This
systematic
ethnic cleansing has been implemented by an extremely well trained and
well
equipped army working over a virtually unarmed indigenous population,
to make
room for Jewish settlers—and in violation of international law on
the
proper behavior of an occupying power. This is a unique system of
“privileged ethnic cleansing,” “privileged law violations,” and
“privileged
exceptions to Security Council and International Court
rulings.”
Third, Israel has periodically
crossed its borders to make war on its neighbors—Egypt, Syria, and
Lebanon—has
engaged in supplementary bombing or acts of terrorism against those
three
countries plus Tunisia, and for many years maintained a terrorist proxy
army in
Lebanon while carrying out numerous terrorist raids there under its
Iron Fist
policy, inflicting heavy civilian casualties. [5] While the 1982
invasion of Lebanon
was
proclaimed to be in response to terrorist attacks, in fact it was based
on the absence
of terrorist attacks (despite deliberate Israeli provocations) and the
fear of
having to negotiate with the Palestinians rather than continue to
ethnically
cleanse them. [6] There was of course no punishment or sanctions
against Israel for
these actions, as Israel
benefits from a “privileged right to
aggression, state terrorism, and sponsorship of terrorism,” which is
not unique
but which follows from the country’s status as a U.S.
ally and client state.
Fourth, given its right to
ethnically cleanse and terrorize in violation of Security Council
resolutions and international law, its victims have no right to resist.
They
may be pushed off their land, their homes demolished, olive trees
uprooted, and
their people killed by IDF and settler violence, but forcible
resistance on
their part is unacceptable “terrorism,” to be deeply deplored. A
thousand odd
Palestinians were killed by the Israelis during their first and
non-violent
phase of resistance in the initial intifada (1987-1992), but
their
passive resistance had no effects on the illegal occupation, the
international
community did nothing to alleviate their distress, and Israel had a
tacit
understanding with the United States that it would be supported in its
violent
response to the intifada until that resistance was broken. The ratio
of
Palestinians to Israelis killed in these years was 25 to 1 or higher,
but given
Israel’s
privileged right to terrorize, it was the Palestinians still labeled
the
terrorists.
Fifth, with full rights to
ethnically cleanse and terrorize, and exempt from international law,
the
Israelis were also free to put in charge of the state a man responsible
for a
string of terrorist attacks on civilians and, at Sabra and
Shatila, a
massacre of somewhere between 800 and 3000 Palestinian civilians.
Amusingly,
the Yugoslav Tribunal argued that genocidal intent could be inferred
from an
action seeking to kill all the people of a given group in one area,
even
if not part of a plan to kill all them elsewhere, citing their own
earlier
decisions plus a UN Assembly resolution of 1982 that the slaughter of
800 at
Sabra and Shatila was “an act of genocide.” [7] But that kind of
Tribunal judgment was applied only to target Serbs—it was not
only not
applied by the West to Sharon,
it didn’t even interfere with his becoming an honored head of state.
Sixth, with rights to ethnically
cleanse and terrorize, such invidious words were made inapplicable to
Israeli
actions. They were applied with great indignation to Serb operations in
Kosovo,
which were features of a civil war (stoked from abroad) and were
not, as
in the Israeli case, designed to remove and replace an indigenous
population in
favor of a different ethnic group. Israel was not only exempt
from
charge of an extremely applicable pair of words, it has also been
the
beneficiary of privileged usage of the words “security” and
“violence.” The Palestinians may be far more insecure than the Israelis
and
subject to a much higher and more sustained level of violence, but
again it is
the Palestinians who must reduce their resort to violence and the big
issue is
how Israel
can be made more secure. Palestinian security is not an issue in the
West,
because their victimization is of no concern and because their
insecurity is a
result of their failure to accept the ethnic cleansing process
and their
resistance to that process. They are “unworthy victims,” by virtue of
deep-seated political bias.
The ethnic cleansing process,
which involves wholesale terrorism, and is the causal force that has
elicited a
responsive Palestinian retail terrorism, is actually put forward (along
with
the wall), not as a deliberate program to “redeem the land” for the
chosen
people but as necessary for “Israel’s legitimate response to
terrorism.”
[8] And the primary terrorists get away with this!
Seventh, Israel
is the only Middle Eastern state that has built up a stock of nuclear
weapons,
and it has been aided in this not only by the United States but also by France
and Norway.
This has happened despite the 39 years of ethnic cleansing, steady and
record-breaking violations of Security Council demands and
international
law, and periodic invasions of Israel’s neighbors. This
privileged right
to nuclear weaponry and exemption from the jurisdiction of the
International Atomic Energy Agency and Non-Proliferation Treaty flows
from
Israel’s other privileges noted earlier, and ultimately the protection
and
cover of U.S. power.
Eighth, the Free World has been
aghast at the possibility that Iran
might be positioning itself to acquire nuclear weapons at some future
date.
Iran has of course been threatened with “regime change” and
bombing and
other attacks by both the United States and Israel, but Iran’s actions
conflict
with the regime of privilege in which only Israel (and its
superpower
underwriter) have a security problem and right of self defense; others,
like
the Palestinians on the West Bank, must accept a position of
inferiority, acute
insecurity, and ethnic cleansing and apartheid walls and policies.
Still
others, like Iran,
must cope
with the threat of attack and sanctions for engaging in
legal
actions and possibly seeking nuclear means of self-defense, without
help from a
Free World busily appeasing the United States and its
Middle Eastern client. So
Israel not only has a nuclear privilege, it is able to get the
Free World
to help it monopolize that privilege in the Middle East, which of
course gives
it greater freedom to ethnically cleanse.
Ninth, the Free World has also been
upset at the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian election of
January 26,
2006. It is widely held that this may disturb the “peace process,” and
George
Bush is not prepared to negotiate with a group that employs “violence”!
Violence, however, is the Bush and U.S. specialty, with three major
aggressions
in the last seven years and an openly announced program of
domination
based on military superiority; and Israel’s operations in Palestine are
violent
beyond anything the Palestinians have been able to muster, although in
the
ludicrously biased West “suicide bombing” is horrifying whereas
“targeted
assassinations” are not (although if the Palestinians had the
capability
of targeting Israeli officials who can doubt that this would horrify?).
But
just as “terrorism” cannot apply to the actions of the United States
and its Israeli client, neither can an invidious word like “violence.”
These
states only “retaliate” and reluctantly use force in “self-defense” and
with
the best of intentions in service to their “security” and
humanitarian
ends—and the West buys this.
Hamas has grown in popularity
because Fatah and its leaders have failed to stop the ethnic cleansing
process
and have been unable to halt a steady increase in Palestinian misery,
with Israel
simply
walking over Fatah’s leaders and making their tenure a complete
failure. Hamas
was actually funded by Israel
years ago with the objective of splintering the Palestinians and
weakening the
secular Fatah. It succeeded in this, but now that an Islamic
group has
taken on power they and their patron will be able to find another
reason to
avoid any final negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, who have
now voted
in a party that does not eschew violence as Sharon and Bush have done!
Hamas also refuses to disarm and insists on a right to defend its
people
against a ruthless ethnic cleansing occupation, but in the West this is
unreasonable as only one side has the right to arms, self-defense and a
concern
over “security.” There is no right to resistance in this case
of
shriveled moral instincts.
The “peace process” is an
ultimate Orwellism, which I defined years ago in a Doublespeak
Dictionary as
“Whatever the U.S.
government happens to be doing or supporting in an area of conflict at
the
moment. It need not result in the termination of conflict or
ongoing
pacification operations in the short or long term.” So the “peace
process” in
Palestine, steadily accepted or actively supported by the U.S.
government, has
been characterized by intensified ethnic cleansing, the destruction of
the
Palestinian infrastructure, the settlement of some 450,000 Jews in the
West
Bank, the construction of an apartheid wall, and the Israeli takeover
of
much of East Jerusalem—in other words, the establishment by state
terrorism of
enough “facts on the ground” to make any kind of viable
Palestinian state
unthinkable. But for the propaganda organs of the Free World, there has
been a
meaningful “peace process” going on that the election of Hamas
might
halt! [9]
How Do We Explain These Abominations
and This Hypocrisy?
This has all come about because the
Israeli leadership has wanted lebensraum for the chosen people,
the
indigenous Palestinians have stood in the way and have had to be
removed, and
the Israelis have been able to do this, with critical U.S.
military and diplomatic
support. This process has fed on itself. That is, the eventual
Palestinian
violent resistance, along with Palestinian relative weakness and
vulnerability,
have exacerbated the racist underpinning of the ethnic cleansing
project, with
a resultant increase in its savagery over the years, helped along by Israel’s
elevation to its recent leadership of a major war criminal. U.S.
aid and
protection in the project has been crucial, as that has prevented any
effective
international response to policies which violate basic morality as well
as law,
and which if carried out by a target state would result in bombing and
trials
for war crimes. [10]
The U.S. role, and the
neutralization of any “moral instinct” in the United States
itself,
results in part from geopolitical considerations and the role of Israel
as a
U.S. proxy and enforcer, and in part from the ability of the
pro-Israel
lobby and its grass-roots and Christian right supporters to cow the
media and
political establishment into tacit or open support of the ethnic
cleansing project. The lobby’s tactics include aggressive exploitation
of
guilt, with references to the Holocaust, identification of
criticism
of Israeli ethnic cleansing with “anti-semitism,” along with
straightforward bullying and attempts to stifle criticism and debate
[11]—efforts which intensify in parallel with increases in the
viciousness of
the ethnic cleansing process.
These efforts have been aided by
9/11 and the “war against terror,” which have helped demonize Arabs and
make
Israeli policy a part of that supposed war. The lobby and its
representatives
in the Bush administration were eager supporters of the attack on
Iraq,
and they are now fighting energetically for war against Iran—in
fact the
lobby is the only sector of society calling for a confrontation with
Iran and
it is already engaged in a major campaign on Bush and Congress to get
the
United States to take action. The Iraq
war provided an excellent cover for intensified ethnic cleansing in Palestine, and a
further
war, despite its serious risks, might help in a further phase of ethnic
cleansing and possible “transfer” of a population that poses a
“demographic threat.”
The performance of the
“international community” in the face of the ethnic cleansing
project has
been a disgrace. Gung-ho for a war and trials of alleged villains
in the
ex-Yugoslavia, where the United States was pleased to oppose ethnic
cleansing,
selectively, the EU, Japan, Kofi Annan, most of the NGOs, and the Arab
states,
have been gutless and their “moral instinct” paralyzed by the
U.S.
commitment to Israel, the strength of Israel and its diaspora,
the
Israeli exploitation of Holocaust guilt, and in the EU the racist
bias
held over from the colonial past and exacerbated by the flow of
propaganda that
features “suicide bombers,” not targeted assassinations and massive and
illegal
brutalization and land theft.
Holocaust denial is reprehensible,
but in the current political context it is confined to marginal
elements and
has no real impact, except for possibly providing a diversion from
those
engaged in “ethnic cleansing denial,” which as regards Israel
is real
and widespread among Western elites and has serious consequences.
Conclusions
Palestine is a crisis area par
excellence, where a virtually helpless people has been abused,
humiliated,
beggared, and steadily displaced by force in favor of settlers
protected
by a huge military machine, supplied in turn and protected by the
United
States, and with the tacit agreement, if not more, of the rest of the
Free
World. The big issue now for the Free World is, will Hamas behave and
accept
ethnic cleansing (still in very active process) and possible bantustan
status
at best, or will it threaten to resist and to commit “terrorism”? Power
and
racism have neutralized that “moral instinct” in the West in respect of
this
very important case.
It is a very important case in part
because several million Palestinians are being immiserated in a
tragic
system of violence that could be terminated easily by the United States
and international community by simply saying stop and threatening
an end
to aid and possibly sanctions. But in the Free World the causal force
is not
seen as the occupation and ethnic cleansing but rather the resistance
to these
abuses. This perspective is stupid, vicious, and is
actually a
rationalization of the racist and politically opportunistic
support
of the ethnic cleansing project.
The situation in Palestine
is also very important because hundreds of millions of Arabs and a
billion or
more people of the Islamic faith, and billions beyond that,
interpret the
West’s treatment of the Palestinians as a reflection of a racist and
colonialist attitude toward Arabs, Islamists, and Third
World people more broadly. It is a wonderful producer
of
anti-Western terrorism, but also and even more importantly a deep
anger, hatred
and distrust of the West and its motives. It is a cancer that
bodes ill
for the future of the human condition.
Notes:
1. David Rieff, “A New Age of
Liberal Imperialism?,” World Policy Journal, Summer 1999.
Ignatieff is
quoted by Rieff.
2. See Susan Woodward, Balkan
Tragedy (Brookings: 1995); Diana Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade
(Pluto
and Monthly Review: 1999); David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (Harcourt
Brace:
1995); Lenard J. Cohen, Serpent in the Bosom: The Rise and Fall of
Slobodan
Milosevic (Westview: 2001).
3. That integration of Western
security services and “experts,” including those of apartheid South
Africa, is described in Edward Herman and Gerry O’Sullivan, The
Terrorism Industry (Pantheon: 1990).
4. For good accounts of this
dispossession, brutalization and immiseration process, see Noam
Chomsky, The
Fateful Triangle (South End: 1999), Chap. 8; Kathleen
Christison, The
Wound of Dispossession (Ocean Tree Book: 2003); Norman
Finkelstein, Beyond
Chutzpah (University of California: 2005), Part 2; Michel
Warschawski, Toward
An Open Tomb (Monthly Review: 2004); Jeff Halper, "Despair:
Israel’s Ultimate Weapon," Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine,
March
28, 2001, (http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/carryover/pubs/20010328ib.html ); and
Jeff Halper, "The 94 Percent Solution: A Matrix of Control," Middle
East Report, Fall, 2000 (http://www.merip.org/mer/mer216/216_halper.html ).
5. Noam Chomsky, Pirates &
Emperors (Claremont Research: 1986), chap. 2; Chomsky, Fateful
Triangle, chap. 9.
6. Yehoshua Porath, an Israeli
expert on the Palestinian national movement, wrote in Haaretz,
June 25,
1982, that “It seems to me that the decision of the government
[to invade
Lebanon]…
flowed from the very fact that the cease fire had been observed [by the
Palestinians].” For more details, Chomsky, Fateful Triangle,
pp.
198-209.
7. In
the August 2, 2001 Judgment in the case of Prosecutor v. Radislav
Krstic
(IT-98-33-T), (http://www.un.org/icty/krstic/TrialC1/judgement/index.htm
), Section G, “Genocide” (http://www.un.org/icty/krstic/TrialC1/judgement/krs-tj010802e-3.htm#IIIG
), approx. pars. 589 -
595, and also note 1306, the Tribunal relied on a “1982 UN General
Assembly
Resolution that the murder of at least 800 Palestinians in the Sabra
and
Shatila refugee camps that year was ‘an act of genocide’.” The UN
General
Assembly Resolution was “The situation in the Middle
East”
(A/RES/37/123), Section D, December 16, 1982 (http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/37/a37r123.htm
).
8. Quoting Israeli political
scientist, Gerald Steinberg, in Chris McGreal, “Worlds apart,” Guardian,
February 6, 2006: http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1703245,00.html
9. See “Washington’s Peace Process,” chapter
10 in
Chomsky’s, The
Fateful Triangle.
10. Slobodan Milosevic was indicted
by the Yugoslav Tribunal on May 22, 1999 for command
responsibility for
the death of 344 Kosovo Albanians, almost all of whom were killed in
the
aftermath of NATO’s commencement of a bombing war on March
24,
1999; Sharon, on the other hand, was found even by an Israeli
commission to
have been responsible for a Sabra and Shatila massacre in which more
than twice
as many Palestinians, almost all women, children and the elderly,
were
slaughtered. But as noted in the text Sharon
is subject to a different system of evaluation and treatment.
11. See Joan Wallach Scott, “Middle East Studies Under Siege,” The Link,
January-March 2006.