Punching Bag Mentality
It’s times like these, I almost fall victim to despair. The immediate feeling of injustice, it’s hard to scale into words. The conflict has leaped into a new strategy, and a new war of de-legitimization is being waged against Israel. We are now being forced into circumstances where the only course of action we have will bring about global condemnation.
To try and express what it feels like, it feels like being the nerdy kid in a classroom that always gets picked on. That no matter what you do, you’re going to be picked on. Right or wrong, you’re always going to be picked on. Other kids in class get away with absolutely ridiculous feats of idiocy, but no one cares about that. They only care about what you do. Succeed or fail, try and defend yourself or bite the bullet, it doesn’t even matter, you’ll still be picked on. In private, when no one else is watching, some of the kids in the class are willing to befriend you, and admit that what’s going on is crazy and wrong, and would really like to have those biotech/solar tech/agricultural tech/military tech/etc. innovations you made. But then, when other kids in the class are watching, those kids just join in the choir of hate like everyone else, or at best abstain. Everybody knows that the rowdy kids who lead the aggression are assholes, so while no one really wants to be their friend, no one really wants to mess with them either, and besides, as long as you’re taking the heat, it’s less slack off their back anyway. The rowdy kids, they get away with murder because no one expects them to behave, and no one wants to stir up their anger and no get oil. Basically, you’re the punching bag for the whole world, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You just want this bullshit to stop, but the rowdy kids have basically told you that the only way they’ll ever stop picking on you is if you jump out of the window and break your neck. Sometimes some Stockholm-Syndrome voices in your own head tell you that maybe you should try and make the plunge. Maybe you won’t break your neck trying, if you could only receive certain guarantees and not be pushed over the ledge and plan your jump really well… But any time you even approach the ledge, the rowdy kids start yelling and shoving and make moves to push you off, and so you back away.
I could continue with this metaphor forever I think. I don’t know if the point gets across as much as I’d like, but there’s this feeling of helplessness and injustice which just burns through my stomach.
The specific points of recent events don’t even matter. Of course Israel and Egypt are allowed to enforce a blockade against a hostile territory; of course force can be used to divert or destroy ships trying to break the blockade; of course it would be better if it didn’t come to it; and of course innocents suffer due to the blockade — this is true in Gaza as it is true in North Korea, Iraq, and anywhere else that has been under a blockade. Gazans are not the only people in the world suffering due to evil or foolish leaders. It sucks but who is to blame?
The path to end this blockade has been known from the start – essentially, an end to hostilities.
The international quartet (UN, US, EU and Russia) imposed 3 demands on Hamas:
1. Renounce Violence.
2. Recognize Israel.
3. Accept all previous agreements signed by the Palestinian National Authority.
Any sane person can see that these are absolutely reasonable requests.
Hamas, however, is allowed to behave unreasonably. It’s allowed to deny access to International Red Cross to it’s captive soldier Gilad Shalit. It’s allowed to fire rockets from schools, directed at schools. No one cares. They’re allowed to be unreasonable, but Israel is condemned for legitimately trying to defend itself from these attacks.
As I try and figure out “Why?” why are they allowed to behave unreasonably? Why does the world not expect and demand the Palestinians behave like civilized peace-seeking human beings? The only answer I have is: Orientalism. Or, Racism, of the worst kind. Hamas is allowed to do whatever it wants, play by whatever rules it chooses, behave as violent savages behave, because it is comprised of brown people. And the west is used to expect a lot less from the “savage” brown peoples of the world.
That’s the only reason I can think of why everybody expects Israel to cease the blockade, but no one expects Hamas to cease the hostilities which brought about the blockade in the first place.
The real question is, when does it stop being the world’s (or Israel’s) responsibility to dance around the savage behavior of radicals, and it starts becoming the people of Gaza’s responsibility to change their leadership? Yes, it’s terrible that Gazans suffer due to the blockade, just as it is terrible that the people of North Korea suffer due to the roguish behavior of their leadership, but when does it stop being our fault and start being their responsibility to enact change? Who will guarantee Israel’s safety if ships are allowed to freely access Gaza? Just this month more than a dozen rockets landed in Israel’s poor southern towns. Who will guarantee that Iranian or Syrian weapons, more accurate and more powerful will not reach the hands of the terrorists who now control Gaza, whose overt goal is not peace, but the destruction of Israel, annihilation of the Jews, and the establishment of an Islamic Republic in all of the territory between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea?
That’s what I thought.
Sorry, this post is a mess, no proper beginning and no proper end, but I just needed to throw some of these thoughts into the air. I need them to leave me because they’re eating me up. Hope you understand, meager readership.
Tagged as acquired helplessness, anger, despair, flotilla, gaza, hamas, hopelessness, israel, Israeli-Arab Conflict, orientalism, punching bag + Categorized as Current Events, Meta/Personal, Social Politics
When in doubt, I try counting corpses. I sometimes mitigate that by looking at things like quality of life and more nebulous concepts like liberty and suffrage.
Most Palestinians are as civilized as most Israelis. To equate either group as “uncivilized” is dehumanizing. Likewise referring to people as “savages”. I wouldn’t refer to the IDF as “violent savages” either… even if they happen to have a much higher kill ratio and much more capital intensive weapons. To use such pejorative terminology is to invite accusations of racism and dehumanization.
I haven’t checked the latest casualty figures, but Baltimore City has often higher homicide rate than all Israeli related Israel-Palestine conflict deaths. Baltimore City also had higher homicide rate than all Palestinian related Israel-Palestine conflict deaths until 2000 (though Baltimore was back on top for 2005). The U.S. war in Iraq and Afghanistan dwarfs the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Israel gets such criticism because, for whatever reason, people wish to hold it to the standards of a modern democracy… and less to the standards of a authoritarian state (either modern, or a democracy during it’s settlement/foundation) phase. Israel gets such criticism in the U.S. because it is the primary recipient of U.S. foreign aid, particularly military aid, and that has been the case for decades–yet despite all that criticism neither dominant political party is willing to change that or even significantly criticize Israel. How could the U.S. do so when what the U.S. did and is currently doing is magnitudes worse.
Rather than complain that Israel is criticized you might take it as a compliment that people want Israel to do better.
Israel has the highest military spending per capita in the world and controls the economy (through blockade) of millions of people it does not grant suffrage to. Any historical parallel I might draw to the situation you might regard as unfair.
As a citizen of the country with the highest military spending in the world and the third highest per capita military spending, which seems to go from one war to another without even taking a breath, that has long traded liberty for security–what Israel is doing is just not economically or diplomatically sustainable. If you want peace and freedom you are going to have to allow for the potential for terrorists to do harm.
I would guess that peace would be much more possible if terrorists were treated as civil criminals rather than a state of war against non-state actors. I say the same thing for the U.S. “war on terror”; though it is hard to say whose policy influenced whom in regards to that Quixotic campaign.
I’m sorry you feel that Israel is the picked on nerdy kid. I think you might be taking foreign policy to personally.
In terms of tactics, it seems blockade running with humanitarian supplies is a far preferable tactic to other violent tactics. I welcome the turn of Palestinian tactics away from a military conflict that is impossible for them to win to largely non-violent tactics of civil resistance. Historically speaking, as long as a state is unwilling (or unable) to actually use wide spread murder… such tactics can win in a representative democracy… even if the folks protesting don’t have suffrage.
I’m not sure I understand what your point is. I did not use the term “savages” myself, but rather I believe this is what the people who spare criticism from Hamas must think. I find no other good explanation why Israel is expected to cease the blockade (let’s call this an act of violence, legitimate as it may be), while the same people do not seem to call on Hamas to end their hostilities against Israel (definitely a form of violence) which would in turn end the need for the blockade anyway. Hamas are allowed to behave unreasonably, so I take it, because they are brown people, and what can you expect from savages? Or so the rhetoric must go. I do not think they are savages, aue contraire. If the Palestinian people are to find a place among the nations, they must be upheld to the same standards of civilization as we have come to expect in modern times.
I do not believe Israel is beyond criticism, it is worthy of criticism just as any other nation is, but there is a doublestandard being upheld with anything having to do with Israel in the international arena. Thousands of innocent civilians were bombed by NATO forces in Yugoslavia, and no one thought to call a South African judge out of retirement and put all NATO member states on trial. Where was the “proportionality” then?
North Korea torpedoed a South Korean boat, killing dozens, and it’s barely a newsflash. in fact, hundreds of people have died in acts of senseless violence around the world just this month, in Thailand, Sudan, Turkey, and other places, and no one seems to care, but when 9 people out of a mob of 40 or so armed individuals get shot after assaulting soldiers enforcing the law, that’s “Our 9-11″ as the Turkish Prime Minister put it, causing outrage and condemnation around the globe.
Looking left and right of Israel, you see violations of human rights which make Israel’s meager violations (the blockade funnily enough, not being one of them) pale in insignificance. Around the world, there are conflicts, and death and human rights violations are part of those conflicts. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is merely one of them, and in terms of both body count and violation count, not an impressive one. In fact, the conflict bearing the least number of casualties in the previous decade was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Somalia, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Chechnia – the body count and level of destruction are incomparably higher than those claimed during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And yet, the world chooses to focus on Israel. Israel has the most UNHR resolutions against it, more than twice number 2 on the list (Sudan), yet the reality on the ground does not justify it.
Turks, who occupy and settle northern Cyprus in much the same way that Israel has the Palestinian territories, feel they can point fingers at Israel. Turks, who are still unwilling to live up to the genocide they enacted upon the Armenian people, accuse Israel of enacting a genocide against the Palestinians whose life expectancy and population growth since the occupation began have both been on the rise. Turks, who deny Kurdish national and civil rights to this day, feel they can accuse Israel of being an Apartheid state, when Israel has no laws that would deny an individual their own ethnicity as Turkey has.
Turks only feel they can do this, because the world allows them to do so, without holding them first accountable for their own sins, which are factually greater and more troublesome than Israel’s.
I was one of the few people in the U.S. that took a stand against the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. First time Germany had bombed Serbia since WWII. Actually, I think that might have been the first time I publicly opposed a U.S. war. While I didn’t like the first Gulf War, I don’t remember doing anything about it except studying it.
If you want Israel to be held to the standards of North Korea, you are setting a low bar. Hell, I think holding Israel to U.S. standards is also a low bar.
Much of the ambiguity in Israel situation is specifically because the tangled mess to what extent Israel is engaging in war with foreign powers and with dealing with a domestic terrorists.
The casualty counts in the Israel-Palestine conflict are closer to North Ireland’s Troubles. The U.K. dealt with that situation more in a law enforcement manner than a matter of war. I suppose it could have tried to blockade certain towns or neighborhoods, maybe threatened war with the Republic of Ireland, and maybe sent death squads to take out IRA funders in Boston. I don’t think that would have worked very well.
You take criticism of Israel so personally. I’m not sure why. There is plenty of criticism in Israel that sees the raid on the flotilla as a fuck up. “Most Israelis, in spite of criticism of the pro-Palestinian activists, appear to have made up their mind as to the domestic culprit. According to a poll published on Wednesday in Maariv, 43 per cent believe the defence minister was responsible for the mission’s outcome. Only 21 per cent blamed the military, with another 16 per cent holding the prime minister responsible. Almost two in three said that the flotilla should have been stopped by means of an “alternative method” – and three out of four said that Mr Barak should resign. Israelis seem in little doubt that the decision ultimately taken was the wrong one.”
I don’t think “We’re not as bad as Kim Jong-il” is some sort of great defense. The raid was fucked up, 9 people died and 70 were injured. Small beans in terms of atrocity humanity regularly dishes out, but still a big fuck up in international waters on a controversial blockade. It’s really hard to propaganda spin that shit laden hay into gold.
Tamil Tigers are the #1 users of suicide attacks, but they don’t get international condemnation of say Hamas/Hezbollah/PLO/PLFP, etc… If you don’t think various Palestinian terrorist groups don’t get criticized… I don’t know what to tell you. In the U.S. we are continually bombarded with that message. They really aren’t so different than the Haganah/Irgun/Lehi/Palmah. Einstein probably rightly called Begin a terrorist in 1948–even if such criticism is pale into comparison to the Holocaust and the general slaughter of World War II. .
Yep, Turks treat Kurds like shit. It’s the primarily reason that the U.S. is such a fair weather friend to Iraqi Kurdistan. That itself is dwarfed by the Armenian genocide. I do wonder what you think the proper resistance Kurds in Turkey should mount, if any? Or Chechens to Russia?
In some ways your protest of criticism seems largely to be “THE OTHER KIDS ARE JUST AS BAD OR WORSE”. As true as that might be, it doesn’t make Israel better. Rather, Israel is following the logic of a nationalist settler state with a huge military build up. Israel’s actions and policies are almost predictable in past historical comparisons. Nothing unusual at all.
But you know… it’s no modern Sweden. I think lots of folks would like it to be, but it can’t achieve that until it addresses it’s as you might say, it’s original “sins”. I would prefer to think that it can’t reach that goal unless somehow resolving it’s demographic and democratic issues in regards to the entire population under it’s practical military control.
This is the second time you’ve had a serious reading comprehension problem when addressing my text. Nowhere did I suggest that Israel should be compared to North Korea, or upheld to the standards of that rogue state.
In fact, I do not believe different nations should be held to different standards, and find that notion inherently racist. I did suggest a comparison between Gaza and North Korea, in that in both territories, innocents suffer due to the unreasonable and violent behavior on the part of their leadership.
And yes, I do take intl criticism of Israel very personally, though I’d suggest no more so than most Israelis. This is the fate of my country and my people at stake, how could I not?
It must be such a privilege, to treat politics as an intellectual exercise, with no vested emotions. Lucky you.
And while it’s great that you had an unpopular opinion about the Kosovo conflict, it is inconsequential to the point I was making;
The world-at-large knew then as it consistently “fails to remember” when it comes to Israel, that civilian loss of life and suffering is an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of conflict.
There are certain standards of jus ad bellum and jus in bello that need to be upheld of course, but Israel, for the most part, upholds them above and beyond most other nations in conflict, to the degree they are possible to uphold in fourth generation warfare.
To be frank, while we all try to improve, no one else is doing any better, to say the least (I think we’re doing better than anyone else) but no one else gets the slack that we do, and these standards need to be reformed to take into account the cases left for interpretation due to the ambiguity created by the conditions of contemporary warfare. They were not designed with this sort of conflict in mind.
Re: the domestic polls, I wouldn’t take those too seriously. Hindsight bias is a bitch. I heard Israel’s Navy commander say (paraphrasing): “I’ve been 41 years at sea, 37 of them in uniform, and I do not know of any means to stop a boat of that size without use of force.”
It’s part of the way these spectator-sport debates are handled, everybody becomes a supreme navy officer, a star international lawyer, and a brilliant political leader with the ability to make the right decision every single instance.
If the operation was successful, and the Mavi Marmara would have been stopped in the same peaceful manner as the other five boats, no one would be butthurt about the operation, despite the present risk of failure.
Re: the comparison with Ireland, though I’m no expert, besides body count, I don’t see many similarities between the conflicts.
To your question, Israel is dealing with both domestic terrorism and war with foreign powers. These are not mutually exclusive circumstances.
Re: the Kurds, their situation in Turkey is very different than the Palestinian’s circumstances. I wouldn’t know what course of action would be best for them, and don’t really feel like going into this tangent, though I reckon it’s plainly obvious the path they have taken has not helped them achieve their goals thus far.
I am not familiar enough with the Chechen-Russian conflict to comment on that.
I don’t know what you call being “continually bombarded with that message”. You must be hypersensitive to it. In world journalism, academia, UN bodies, hell in google search results — you’ll find endless criticism of Israel. Libelous claims of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, war crimes, what have you.
Criticism of Palestinians in these establishments pales in comparison. I tried finding a good source from a meta-study count that was conducted, but couldn’t find it. Perhaps you’ll have better luck, but I do not doubt this is more than just a “feeling” I have.
“And yes, I do take intl criticism of Israel very personally, though I’d suggest no more so than most Israelis. This is the fate of my country and my people at stake, how could I not?
It must be such a privilege, to treat politics as an intellectual exercise, with no vested emotions. Lucky you.”
I’m done with the conversation and shall not return to it again with you.