I always figured that it must be a splendid thing, to believe in something, and I mean most anything, without reservation: wholeheartedly, without qualification, without condition. And to be able thereby to take part in whatever communal ritual affirms that belief, without inhibition: you know, to bellow “Priestly People” at Sunday Mass, to beat the hell out of fans wearing rival colors at Philly’s Veterans Stadium, to be drunk at noon on the streets of South Boston on St Patrick’s Day. I was never very good at that, but I always wanted to be. To belong. To be a Catholic, or a feminist, or a marxist, or a punk, or a Deadhead; a Democrat, a libertarian; a Hegelian, a Cartesian; an Irish-American, a Bostonian. Hell, I think I’d be happy just to feel like I was from some place. Which probably explains a lot.
So I found myself surprisingly comfortable these past 7 years when parading about downtown Boston making noisily clear our opposition to the God damned war. I suppose it’s defining oneself in the negative—I am, if nothing else, against the war; I am against militarism, I am against empire; but I’ll take what I can get these days. I hate this war, without reservation; hated it before it started, without qualification; hated it, wholeheartedly and unconditionally like I have hated few things in life, and, umm, that’s actually saying quite a lot. And they meant a lot, those demonstrations, those opportunities to stand up for simple sanity much less decency, morality, and constitutionality. And if you think that the ongoing Occupation proves the antiwar marches were futile, and I can see where you would, consider this: you could feel real, real lonely in November 2002. Still, I recognize the implicit tragedy: when we marched back then, we were jeered plenty; most people turned their faces from us. When we marched last October, we were cheered and applauded by pretty much everyone. (Not us, of course: our cause). Thus the tragedy: despite popular opposition, the war goes on nonetheless. Maybe we’re not loud enough? But as the war proceeds apace, so does the cause. In short: it’s good to believe in something.
But would that all issues were so clear cut.
Resistance …. Is … Justified ….?
Last Tuesday, December 30, I read the following report:
Pierced by an Israeli missile, the mosque exploded at 1 in the morning, crushing the Balousha family’s flimsy metal roof next door.Anwar Balousha awoke on the floor, covered by rubble, and heard moans from the bedroom next to his. Neighbors crawled over a collapsed wall and pulled him, his wife and four of their nine children to safety. Five Balousha girls — Tahir, 17; Ikram, 14; Samar, 12; Dina, 8; and Jawaher, 4 — were dead, swelling the list of Palestinian civilians killed in three days of Israeli airstrikes on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip
It’s safe to assume that whatever weaponry murdered these children came via the largesse of The United States of America—that’s you and me, kids—so I joined a group outside the Israeli Consulate on glam Park Plaza in Boston on a bitterly cold Tuesday night last week to chant down Babylon, in this case, manifested in the ongoing destruction of Gaza. There were Palestinian flags, and signage being assembled on the spot, and, of course, there were chants. Some were ludicrous: whatever else the Israelis are up to, “genocide” is not among their aims. Some were commonsensical: yes, occupation is a crime. But one struck me as provocative in a way it never had in the past, when it seemed mightily appropriate; instead there was an ominous, unthinking aspect to it the other night:
Resistance is justified
When people are occupied.
I didn’t feel too good hearing that. Because this isn’t quite so clear cut as the Iraq debacle. Not quite. Because across the street there were a few dozen equally loud supporters of Israel also sporting printed signs, banners, and plenty of Israeli flags. Adults, small children, teenagers, rabbis, and all quite (shamelessly) vociferous in their support of the bombing. Now it struck me, watching them, how absurd it is to stand outside not simply defending but celebrating what was and remains an ongoing massacre of innocents—what is it with these people?—but at the same time, I had to wonder what that chant sounded like to them. We know what “resistance” means, we Chavistas, Zapatistas, Sandinistas, those of us who claim to bleed so profusely—metaphorically, of course—for the wretched of the earth. Or do we? Because if I’m standing on the other side waving my Star of David and I hear that “resistance is justified” I’m not thinking of anticolonial youth standing up to tanks with slingshots; I’m thinking about Leon Klinghoffer being dumped wheelchair and all into off the side of a cruise ship into the Mediterranean after being shot in the forehead; I’m thinking about Jewish Olympic gymnasts being executed in Munich; I’m thinking about pizza parlors exploding and raining the streets of Tel Aviv with the severed limbs of teenagers. And I’m thinking: this is resistance? This, this resistance is justified? What is it with those people?
In any case, it looked like this. Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.
But there’s a reason why I’m in the street and why I’m not on that side of the street. What’s transpiring in Gaza is sickening. Here’s Max Blumenthal:
While the cheerleaders testified to the superior moral fiber of their team, the Palestinian civilian death toll mounted. Israeli missiles tore at least fifteen Palestinian police cadets to shreds at a graduation ceremony, blew twelve worshipers to pieces (including six children) while they left evening prayers at a mosque, flattened the elite American International School, killed five sisters while they slept in their beds, and liquidated 9 women and children in order to kill a single Hamas leader. So far, Israeli forces have killed at least 500 Gazans and wounded some two thousand, including hundreds of children. Yesterday, the IDF blanketed parts of Gaza with white phosphorus, a chemical weapon Saddam Hussein once deployed against Kurdish rebels.
“It was Israel at its best,” Yossi Klein Halevi declared in the New Republic.
No. That’s Israel at its worst. And the ringing endorsement by Bush and the abysmal silence on Obama’s part is as much part and parcel of this atrocity as are Israeli ground maneuvers. As is our own silence, our own complicity, our own easy acquiescence. To murder. Hmmm. The best lack all conviction? No.
The Enemy of My Enemy … is Not My Friend
And yet. As this latest atrocity crystallizes the stomach churning ambiguity at the heart of American foreign policy. I am reminded of something Arundhati Roy said:
“…Then the only people who are actually engaging the forces of empire are the resistance movement in Iraq or the people in Palestine. And because they are not pristine and secular and feminist and democratic and perfect, all of us curl up in moral distaste. We have to find a way of becoming the resistance or we have to find a way of supporting whatever resistance there is.”
I love Ms Roy. Which may something to do with my having been haunted by this statement since I first read it back in 2004. I understand it: if, say, your opposition to the Iraqi War is symptomatic of your larger opposition to US militarism, itself a vehicle by which to maintain the real, overarching object of your opposition, US imperialism, then, maybe, yeah, “by all means necessary.”
And the American-Israeli bombardment of Gaza and occupation of the West Bank is nothing if not a display of imperial arrogance and brute military power, as a nuclear power savages a people lacking an army, a navy, hell, an airplane, targeting mosques and hospitals and schools and universities and journalists, and this following an 18-month embargo regularly labeled a humanitarian disaster by relief agencies. And all the while ensuring that there’s zero critical media coverage coming out of Gaza. Resistance is justified … well, since no one else is going to doing a damn thing for Palestine—not the Arab states, that’s for damn sure, not the US, not the UN, not the EU, not Africa, not Russia, not Iran or Korea or Cuba—how can you not justify it?
But Roy’s absolution of theocratic antifeminist undemocratic movements doesn’t hold up so well against this:
I asked him if he believed, as some Hamas theologians do (and certainly as many Hezbollah leaders do) that Jews are the “sons of pigs and apes.” He gave me an interesting answer that reflects a myopic reading of the Koran. “Allah changed disobedient Jews into apes and pigs, it is true, but he specifically said these apes and pigs did not have the ability to reproduce. So it is not literally true that Jews today are descended from pigs and apes, but it is true that some of the ancestors of Jews were transformed into pigs and apes, and it is true that Allah continually makes the Jews pay for their crimes in many different ways. They are a cursed people.”
The great thinker here is Hamas leader Nizar Rayyan. He was killed January 1.
(In the interests of fairness, let’s not, however, forget the wisdom of the great Israeli leader Menachim Begin, who once told the Israeli parliament “”[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs.”)
You want to hope that this is mere rhetoric—say, a la Hugo Chavez, who happily sells America his oil while trading in gusty socialist sloganeering. But then you realize—this guy Rayyan had actually studied and pondered this question. These people take this stuff seriously. That’s crazy and murderous to boot. When we hear similar stuff in the states, say, those on the fringe right who make no bones about the good Lord’s demand that homosexuals be put to death—we do in fact curl up in moral distaste, unless we’re Mitt Romney. We do not make common cause with domestic bigots, especially the homicidal kind. It is critical, it is mortally critical, that we treat lunatics for what they are.
It’s a bad idea to reduce current conflicts to slogans. It’s a bad idea to see Hamas as anything but what they are (they were warned three weeks ago to cut the useless rocket attacks or experience hell), just as it is to see the Israelis as anything but what they are (over 600 dead and over 2000 wounded in Gaza to date). You wish Hamas were a stridently secular Marxist outfit, but they aren’t. Or maybe you want brave little democratic Israel standing up to the Moorish hordes, but that ain’t the case any more either. It’s a bad idea to take sides.
To take sides, that is, when it comes to political factions. Hamas or Fatah; Labor, Likud, Kadima, Yisrael Beiteinu; Republican, Democrat—the parties come and go, and yet how much has really ever changed for the people who live in Gaza City? That’s a side worth taking.
The fact is that when it comes to electioneering the Palestinians and Israelis are every bit as likely to vote against their real and common interests as we are. Remember: we elected George W. Bush. Twice. Twice! (I’ll save the idiocy of so-called “progressives” voting for Obama in light of his plans for Afghanistan and the miiltary budget for later). So: the majority of Palestinians are willing to make concessions for peace. Then they go and put Hamas in power. And the sickest part is that were I living in Gaza, I would too. Meanwhile, the majority of Jews in Israel support making some concessions for peace. Then they put people like Sharon and Netanyahu in power. And, yeah, if I lived in Sderot, I probably would too.
God shed his grace on thee and etcetera
But I live in America. I live in a country unbound by ancient prejudices and tribal memories. I live in a place where we make it up as go along, where, as a boy, I saw pictures of Civil Rights marchers set upon by snarling dogs in the pages of LIFE magazine and where as an adult I saw a black couple moving into the White House after narrowly defeating a woman in the primary. I live in a country that knows how to get over it. I live in a country where blacks marry whites and jews marry Christians and Irish marry Italians, hey, I live in a state where men marry men and women marry women—and nobody cares. I live in a country that isn’t beholden to antique wild man prophecies:
Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” (TheMartyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).(From the Hamas Covenant, 1998)
I raised the question of whether Jewish parents who place their children within range of Palestinian rockets had their priorities in order. Exasperated, Rachel [an Israeli living in a fortified settlement in Gaza]said, “If I believe in holy law, that the settlement of the land of Israel is a commandment of God, and I want my children to be raised as Jews, I have to take them where they’re going to fulfill this mitzvah. I have to take my child and physically he has to settle the land with me. I can’t say I won’t do things because I don’t want him to suffer.”
I live in a genuinely existential wonderland where we are what we do, not what we worship, not what we believe, not who we follow, not where we’re from. We are free to choose who we are, but equally important, we are free to reject what we will. I live in a land where nothing is written.
(That’s about as blatantly nativist, not to mention optimistic, as I’m ever going to be. If it’s too much, I’ll cheerfully remind you that all that existential giddiness is as apt to graduate into existential horror, as we go about choosing to be laid off, divorced, alcoholic, bankrupt, overprescribed, obese, depressed, cross-addicted, xenophobic, superstitious, media saturated, overextended, dope addicted, ignorant, tasteless, and, increasingly, psychotic. Freedom has its downside).
When in Rome
So why stand out in the cold? Because, like us, as individuals, ours is a country perpetually in the process of figuring out what we are, a country defined by its actions in the here and now, not by legends and memory. And too many of us are defined by out silence, our easy acquiescence to murder. And because we are Rome. If you live in one of America’s great cities, you sit at the very heart of the most extended, most powerful (and most expensive) empire in history. An empire that still tolerates a degree of dissent, at least within its own borders, undreamt of the citizens of empires past. A liberty not to be taken lightly, an opportunity not to be missed.
And when your emperor and his minions perpetrate mass murder, or countenance mass murder, political distinctions disappear. It’s always, always always always, the same people doing the dying. Endorsing and assisting in the deaths of hundreds of innocent people and the maiming of thousands more in a firestorm of 2000-pound bombs and white phosphorus is a lousy thing to have become, to want to become, to take part in becoming.
Because when Robert Scheer asks, “Why are we so indifferent to the death and destruction in Gaza?,” we can answer: we’re not.
Because Chris Hedges reminds us via Shakespeare that we can “show the heavens more just:
Can anyone who is following the Israeli air attacks on Gaza—the buildings blown to rubble, the children killed on their way to school, the long rows of mutilated corpses, the wailing mothers and wives, the crowds of terrified Palestinians not knowing where to flee, the hospitals so overburdened and out of supplies they cannot treat the wounded, and our studied, callous indifference to this widespread human suffering—wonder why we are hated?
Our self-righteous celebration of ourselves and our supposed virtue is as false as that of Israel. We have become monsters, militarized bullies, heartless and savage. We are a party to human slaughter, a flagrant war crime, and do nothing. We forget that the innocents who suffer and die in Gaza are a reflection of ourselves, of how we might have been should fate and time and geography have made the circumstances of our birth different. We forget that we are all absurd and vulnerable creatures. We all have the capacity to fear and hate and love. “Expose thyself to what wretches feel,” King Lear said, entering the mud and straw hovel of Poor Tom, “and show the heavens more just.”
Because it’s not about Hamas. Or Fatah or Likud or Kadima. It’s about us. Not supporting Hamas, but resisting from within, utilizing whatever small options we have. That resistance isn’t simply justified, isn’t simply morally unimpeachable, it’s a moral necessity. Because our leadership is as morally bankrupt as that of Israel and Palestine (with exceptions like Nader and Kucinich). Take your courageous Obama, who refuses to say a word about this massacre, begging off with excuses about “one president at a time,” which didn’t prevent him from cashing in right away deploring the slaughter in Mumbai. In fact, this was Obama a few days ago, while the first missiles were raining down (remind you of anybody else?).
During the 2004 campaign, I complained to a friend that the Democrats were no more likely than the GOP to stand up for Palestine. She wrote back with all the cynical certitude that passes today for “pragmatism” that “ well, the Palestinians don’t have much of a PR campaign, do they?”
No, they sure didn’t. And no, they sure don’t.
All they–Tahir, Ikram, Samar, Dina, and Jawaher–all they got is you and me.
