[spectre] Punishment by detail: Edward Said

[JSalloum@aol.com]

Punishment by detail

Edward Said

AL-AHRAM WEEKLY 8 - 14 August 2002

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Aside from the obvious physical discomforts, being ill for a long

> period of time fills the spirit with a terrible feeling of

> helplessness, but also with periods of analytic lucidity, which, of

> course, must be treasured. For the past three months now I have been

> in and out of the hospital, with days marked by lengthy and painful

> treatments, blood transfusions, endless tests, hours and hours of

> unproductive time spent staring at the ceiling, draining fatigue and

> infection, inability to do normal work, and thinking, thinking,

> thinking. But there are also the intermittent passages of lucidity and

> reflection that sometimes give the mind a perspective on daily life

> that allows it to see things (without being able to do much about

> them) from a different perspective.

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> Reading the news from Palestine and seeing the frightful images of

> death and destruction on television, it has been my experience to be

> utterly amazed and aghast at what I have deduced from those details

> about Israeli government policy, more particularly about what has been

> going on in the mind of Ariel Sharon. And when, after the recent Gaza

> bombing by one of his F-16s in which nine children were massacred, he

> was quoted as congratulating the pilot and boasting of a great Israeli

> success, I was able to form a much clearer idea than before of what a

> pathologically deranged mind is capable of, not only in terms of what

> it plans and orders but, worse, how it manages to persuade other minds

> to think in the same delusional and criminal way. Getting inside the

> official Israeli mind is a worthwhile, if lurid, experience.

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> In the West, however, there's been such repetitious and unedifying

> attention paid to Palestinian suicide bombing that a gross distortion

> in reality has completely obscured what is much worse: the official

> Israeli, and perhaps the uniquely Sharonian evil that has been visited

> so deliberately and so methodically on the Palestinian people. Suicide

> bombing is reprehensible but it is a direct and, in my opinion, a

> consciously programmed result of years of abuse, powerlessness and

> despair. It has as little to do with the Arab or Muslim supposed

> propensity for violence as the man in the moon. Sharon wants

> terrorism, not peace, and he does everything in his power to create

> the conditions for it. But for all its horror, Palestinian violence,

> the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, has been

> stripped of its context and the terrible suffering from which it

> arises: a failure to see that is a failure in humanity, which doesn't

> make it any less terrible but at least situates it in a real history

> and real geography.

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> Yet the location of Palestinian terror -- of course it is terror -- is

> never allowed a moment's chance to appear, so remorseless has been the

> focus on it as a phenomenon apart, a pure, gratuitous evil which

> Israel, supposedly acting on behalf of pure good, has been virtuously

> battling in its variously appalling acts of disproportionate violence

> against a population of three million Palestinian civilians. I am not

> speaking only about Israel's manipulation of opinion, but its

> exploitation of the American equivalent of the campaign against

> terrorism without which Israel could not have done what it has done.

> (In fact, I cannot think of any other country on earth that, in full

> view of nightly TV audiences, has performed such miracles of detailed

> sadism against an entire society and gotten away with it.) That this

> evil has been made consciously part of George W Bush's campaign

> against terrorism, irrationally magnifying American fantasies and

> fixations with extraordinary ease, is no small part of its blind

> destructiveness. Like the brigades of eager (and in my opinion

> completely corrupt) American intellectuals who spin enormous

> structures of falsehoods about the benign purpose and necessity of US

> imperialism, Israeli society has pressed into service numerous

> academics, policy intellectuals at think tanks, and ex-military men

> now in defence-related and public relations business, all to

> rationalise and make convincing inhuman punitive policies that are

> supposedly based on the need for Israeli security.

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> Israeli security is now a fabled beast. Like a unicorn it is endlessly

> hunted and never found, remaining, everlastingly, the goal of future

> action. That over time Israel has become less secure and more

> unacceptable to its neighbours scarcely merits a moment's notice. But

> then who challenges the view that Israeli security ought to define the

> moral world we live in? Certainly not the Arab and Palestinian

> leaderships who for 30 years have conceded everything to Israeli

> security. Shouldn't that ever be questioned, given that Israel has

> wreaked more damage on the Palestinians and other Arabs relative to

> its size than any country in the world, Israel with its nuclear

> arsenal, its air force, navy, and army limitlessly supplied by the US

> taxpayer? As a result the daily, minute occurrences of what

> Palestinians have to live through are hidden and, more important,

> covered over by a logic of self-defence and the pursuit of terrorism

> (terrorist infrastructure, terrorist nests, terrorist bomb factories,

> terrorist suspects -- the list is infinite) which perfectly suits

> Sharon and the lamentable George Bush. Ideas about terrorism have thus

> taken on a life of their own, legitimised and re-legitimised without

> proof, logic or rational argument.

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> Consider for instance the devastation of Afghanistan, on the one hand,

> and the "targeted" assassinations of almost 100 Palestinians (to say

> nothing of many thousands of "suspects" rounded-up and still

> imprisoned by Israeli soldiers) on the other: nobody asks whether all

> these people killed were in fact terrorists, or proved to be

> terrorists, or were about to become terrorists. They are all assumed

> to be dangers by acts of simple, unchallenged affirmation. All you

> need is an arrogant spokesman or two, like the loutish Ranaan Gissin,

> Avi Pazner, or Dore Gold, and in Washington a non-stop apologist for

> ignorance and incoherence like Ari Fleisher, and the targets in

> question are just as good as dead. Without doubts, questions, or

> demurral. No need for proof or any such tiresome delicacy. Terrorism

> and its obsessive pursuit have become an entirely circular,

> self-fulfilling murder and slow death of enemies who have no choice or

> say in the matter.

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> With the exception of reports by a few intrepid journalists and

> writers such as Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Amos Elon, Tanya Leibowitz,

> Jeff Halper, Israel Shamir and a few others, public discourse in the

> Israeli media has declined terribly in quality and honesty. Patriotism

> and blind support for the government has replaced skeptical reflection

> and moral seriousness. Gone are the days of Israel Shahak, Jakob

> Talmon, and Yehoshua Leibowitch. I can think of few Israeli academics

> and intellectuals -- men like Zeev Sternhell, Uri Avneri, and Ilan

> Pappe, for instance -- who are courageous enough to depart from the

> imbecilic and debased debate about "security" and "terrorism" that

> seems to have overtaken the Israeli peace establishment, or even its

> rapidly dwindling Left opposition. Crimes are being committed every

> day in the name of Israel and the Jewish people, and yet the

> intellectuals chatter on about strategic withdrawal, or perhaps

> whether to incorporate settlements or not, or whether to keep building

> that monstrous fence (has a crazier idea ever been realised in the

> modern world, that you can put several million people in a cage and

> say they don't exist?) in a manner befitting a general or a

> politician, rather than in ways more suited to intellectuals and

> artists with independent judgment and some sort of moral standard.

> Where are the Israeli equivalents of Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink,

> Athol Fugard, those white writers who spoke out unequivocally and with

> unambiguous clarity against the evils of South African apartheid? They

> simply don't exist in Israel, where public discourse by writers and

> academics has sunk to equivocation and the repetition of official

> propaganda, and where most really first-class writing and thought has

> disappeared from even the academic establishment.

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> But to return to Israeli practices and the mind-set that has gripped

> the country with such obduracy during the past few years, think of

> Sharon's plan. It entails nothing less than the obliteration of an

> entire people by slow, systematic methods of suffocation, outright

> murder, and the stifling of everyday life. There is a remarkable story

> by Kafka, In the Penal Colony, about a crazed official who shows off a

> fantastically detailed torture machine whose purpose is to write all

> over the body of the victim, using a complex apparatus of needles to

> inscribe the captive's body with minute letters that ultimately causes

> the prisoner to bleed to death. This is what Sharon and his brigades

> of willing executioners are doing to the Palestinians, with only the

> most limited and most symbolic of opposition. Every Palestinian has

> become a prisoner. Gaza is surrounded by an electrified wire fence on

> three sides; imprisoned like animals, Gazans are unable to move,

> unable to work, unable to sell their vegetables or fruit, unable to go

> to school. They are exposed from the air to Israeli planes and

> helicopters and are gunned down like turkeys on the ground by tanks

> and machine guns. Impoverished and starved, Gaza is a human nightmare,

> each of whose little pieces of episodes -- like what takes place at

> Erez, or near the settlements -- involves thousands of soldiers in the

> humiliation, punishment, intolerable enfeeblement of each Palestinian,

> without regard for age, gender, or illness. Medical supplies are held

> up at the border, ambulances are fired upon or detained. Hundreds of

> houses demolished, and hundreds of thousands of trees and agricultural

> land destroyed in acts of systematic collective punishment against

> civilians, most of whom are already refugees from Israel's destruction

> of their society in 1948. Hope has been eliminated from the

> Palestinian vocabulary so that only raw defiance remains, and still

> Sharon and his sadistic minions prattle on about eliminating terrorism

> by an ever-encroaching occupation that has continued now for 35 years.

> That the campaign itself is, like all colonial brutality, futile, or

> that it has the effect of making Palestinians more, rather than less,

> defiant simply does not enter Sharon's closed mind.

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> The West Bank is occupied by 1,000 Israeli tanks whose sole purpose is

> to fire upon and terrorise civilians. Curfews are imposed for periods

> of up to two weeks, without respite. Schools and universities are

> either closed or impossible to get to. No one can travel, not just

> between the nine main cities, but within the cities. Every town today

> is a wasteland of destroyed buildings, looted offices, purposely

> ruined water and electrical systems. Commerce is finished.

> Malnutrition prevails in half the number of children. Two thirds of

> the population lives below the poverty level of $2 a day. Tanks in

> Jenin (where the demolition of the refugee camp by Israeli armour, a

> major war crime, was never investigated because cowardly international

> bureaucrats such as Kofi Annan back down when Israel threatens) fire

> upon and kill children, but that is only one drop in an unending

> stream of Palestinian civilian deaths caused by Israeli soldiers who

> furnish the illegal Israeli military occupation with loyal,

> unquestioning service. Palestinians are all "terrorist suspects".

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> The soul of this occupation is that young Israeli conscripts are

> allowed full rein to subject Palestinians at check-points to every

> known form of private torture and abjection. There is the waiting in

> the sun for hours; then there is the detention of medical supplies and

> produce until they rot; there are the insulting words and beatings

> administered at will; the sudden rampage of jeeps and soldiers against

> civilians waiting their turn by the thousands at the innumerable check

> points that have made of Palestinian life a choking hell; making

> dozens of youths kneel in the sun for hours; forcing men to take off

> their clothes; insulting and humiliating parents in front of their

> children; forbidding the sick to pass through for no other reason than

> personal whim; stopping ambulances and firing on them. And the steady

> number of Palestinian deaths (quadruple that of Israelis) increases on

> a daily, mostly untabulated basis. More "terrorist suspects" plus

> their wives and children, but "we" regret those deaths very much.

> Thank you.

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> Israel is frequently referred to as a democracy. If so, then it is a

> democracy without a conscience, a country whose soul has been captured

> by a mania for punishing the weak, a democracy that faithfully mirrors

> the psychopathic mentality of its ruler, General Sharon, whose sole

> idea -- if that is the right word for it -- is to kill, reduce, maim,

> drive away Palestinians until "they break". He provides nothing more

> concrete as a goal for his campaigns, now or in the past, beyond that,

> and like the garrulous official in Kafka's story he is most proud of

> his machine for abusing defenceless Palestinian civilians, all the

> while monstrously abetted in his grotesque lies by his court advisers

> and philosophers and generals, as well as by his chorus of faithful

> American servants. There is no Palestinian army of occupation, no

> Palestinian tanks, no soldiers, no helicopter gun-ships, no artillery,

> no government to speak of. But there are the "terrorists" and the

> "violence" that Israel has invented so that its own neuroses can be

> inscribed on the bodies of Palestinians, without effective protest

> from the overwhelming majority of Israel's laggard philosophers,

> intellectuals, artists, peace activists. Palestinian schools,

> libraries and universities have ceased normal functioning for months

> now: and we still wait for the Western freedom-to-write-groups and the

> vociferous defenders of academic freedom in America to raise their

> voices in protest. I have yet to see one academic organisation either

> in Israel or in the West make a declaration about this profound

> abrogation of the Palestinian right to knowledge, to learning, to

> attend school.

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> In sum, Palestinians must die a slow death so that Israel can have its

> security, which is just around the corner but cannot be realised

> because of the special Israeli "insecurity". The whole world must

> sympathise, while the cries of Palestinian orphans, sick old women,

> bereaved communities, and tortured prisoners simply go unheard and

> unrecorded. Doubtless, we will be told, these horrors serve a larger

> purpose than mere sadistic cruelty. After all, "the two sides" are

> engaged in a "cycle of violence" which has to be stopped, sometime,

> somewhere. Once in a while, we ought to pause and declare indignantly

> that there is only side with an army and a country: the other is a

> stateless dispossessed population of people without rights or any

> present way of securing them. The language of suffering and concrete

> daily life has either been hijacked, or it has been so perverted as,

> in my opinion, to be useless except as pure fiction deployed as a

> screen for the purpose of more killing and painstaking torture --

> slowly, fastidiously, inexorably. That is the truth of what

> Palestinians suffer. But in any case, Israeli policy will ultimately

> fail.

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