The challenge for democracies is to provide an alternative means of satisfying the quest for glory that motivates those who join in Isis’s barbarism
Scott Atran Guardian/UK 4 September 2014
In a speech on Wednesday, President Obama said: “Whatever these murderers think they will achieve by murdering innocents like Steven [Sotloff], they have already failed.”
Not so, says the evidence. Publicity, Islamic State (Isis) knows, is the oxygen of terrorism. And publicity it has received in spades with the beheadings of two American journalists. So an organisation that hardly anyone knew existed only a few months ago is now the world’s, and particularly the west’s, premier political and public concern, eclipsing Iran’s nuclear programme and Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
The aim of Isis’s strikingly gruesome spectacle is to terrorise and fascinate public sentiment. Especially in the media-driven political theatre of western liberal democracies, public fury reliably leads to precipitate political reaction. Like the kind of heedless, scatter-gun approach pursued by America and Britain that transformed al-Qaida from a small band of fairly well-educated violent extremists into a youthful social movement that appeals to many thousands of disaffected Muslim immigrants in the western diaspora, and many more millions who are economically and politically frustrated back home.
Unlike al-Qaida, though, from which Isis was expelled earlier this year, Isis tolerates no compromise with other interpretations of Islam, much less with Islam’s duty to rule the world. In its view, America and Britain are too weak in the conviction of their ideas and ideals to ultimately matter. For the devoted actor, rightness of cause will always win against apparent material advantage as long as the cause has the minimal material means to endure.
Western volunteers for Isis are mostly youth in transitional stages in their lives – immigrants, students, between jobs or girlfriends, having left their homes and looking for new families. For the most part they have no traditional religious education and are “born again” to religion. They are self-seekers who have found their way to jihad in myriad ways: through barbecues or on the web; because they were perhaps uncomfortable with binge-drinking or casual sex; or because their parents were humiliated by form-checking bureaucrats or their sisters insulted for wearing a headscarf.
What inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Qur’an or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends. Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer: fraternal, fast-breaking, glorious and cool.
Volunteers for Isis are surfing for the sublime and all that is lacking in the jaded, tired world of democratic liberalism, especially on the margins where Europe’s immigrants mostly live. Many are just “vacationers” for jihad, going to Syria over school breaks or holidays for the thrill of adventure and a semblance of glory. The beheadings are doing what the images of the collapsing twin towers did for al-Qaida, turning terror into a display of triumph over and through death and destruction. In Burke’s sense, a display of the sublime.
Awe of God and its myriad representations in art and ritual was once the west’s sublime, followed by the violent struggle for liberty and equality. The great historian Arnold Toynbee argued that civilisations rise and fall on the vitality of their cultural ideals, not their material assets as such. In studies carried out with support from the National Science Foundation and the US defence department, my co-researchers and I found that most societies have “sacred values” for which their people would fight, risk serious loss and even die rather than compromise. In 1776, the American colonists had the highest standard of living in the world. Frustrated not over economics but “sacred rights”, they were willing to sacrifice “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” against the world’s mightiest empire.
Is our ideal now merely one of “ease, security, and avoidance of pain”, as Orwell surmised in explaining why Nazism, fascism and Stalinism had such a strong pull on engagement and commitment, especially among adventurous youth? For the future of liberal democracies, even beyond the threat from violent jihadis, this may be the core existential issue. [Abridged]
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/04/jihad-fatal-attraction-challenge-democracies-isis-barbarism
Monday, 8 September 2014
Far from keeping the peace, Nato is a threat to it
Seumas Milne Guardian/UK 4 September, 2014
After 13 years of bloody occupation of Afghanistan and a calamitous intervention in Libya, the western alliance has got an enemy that at last seems to fit its bill. Swinging through the former Soviet republic of Estonia today, the US president declared that Nato was ready to defend Europe from "Russian aggression". Nato's secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen – who insisted as Danish prime minister in 2003 that "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction … we know" – has released satellite images supposed to demonstrate Russia has invaded Ukraine. Not to be outdone, the British prime minister has compared Vladimir Putin to Hitler.
The summit is planning a rapid reaction force to be deployed across eastern Europe to deter Moscow. Britain is sending troops to Ukraine for exercises. In Washington, Congress hawks are squealing appeasement and demanding action to give Ukraine "a more capable fighting force to resist" Russia.
Ukraine's prime minister, Arseny Yatseniuk – an American favourite in Kiev – described Russia as a "terrorist state" and demanded that Ukraine be allowed to join Nato. It was precisely the threat that Ukraine would be drawn into a military alliance hostile to Russia that triggered this crisis in the first place. Instead of keeping the peace, Nato has been the cause of escalating tension and war. Which is how it's been since Nato was founded in 1949, six years before the Warsaw pact, supposedly as a defensive treaty against a Soviet threat.
After the USSR collapsed, the Warsaw Pact was duly dissolved. But Nato was not, despite having lost the ostensible reason for its existence. If peace had been the aim, it could have been turned into a collective security arrangement including Russia, under the auspices of the United Nations. Instead, it gave itself a new " mandate to wage unilateral war, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan and Libya, as the advance guard of a US-dominated new world order. In Europe it laid the ground for war in Ukraine by breaking a US pledge to Moscow and relentlessly expanding eastwards: first into ex-Warsaw Pact states, then into the former Soviet Union itself.
But the biggest prize was ethnically divided Ukraine. It was scarcely paranoid for Russia to see the takeover of the neighbouring state as a threat to its core interests. Six months on, Moscow-backed eastern Ukrainian resistance to the Nato-backed nationalists in Kiev has become full-scale war. Thousands have died and human rights abuses have multiplied on both sides, as government troops and their irregular auxiliaries bombard civilian areas and abduct, detain and torture suspected separatists on a mass scale.
The Ukrainian forces backed by western governments include groups such as the neo-Nazi Azov battalion, whose symbol is the Nazi stormtroopers' wolf's hook. The increasingly repressive Kiev regime is attempting to ban the Ukrainian communist party, which won 13% of the vote at the last parliamentary elections.
But then Nato, whose members have often included fascist governments in the past, has never been too fussy about democracy. Evidence for its claims that Russian troops have invaded eastern Ukraine is also thin on the ground. Arms supplies and covert intervention in support of the Donbass rebels – including special forces and state-backed irregulars – are another matter. But that's exactly what Nato powers such as the US, Britain and France have been busy doing all over the world for years, from Nicaragua to Syria and Somalia.
That's not to say the proxy war between Nato and Russia in Ukraine isn't ugly and dangerous. But it's not necessary to have any sympathy for Putin's oligarchic authoritarianism to recognise that Nato and the EU, not Russia, sparked this crisis – and that it's the western powers that are resisting the negotiated settlement.That settlement will have to include federal autonomy, equal rights for minorities and military neutrality as a minimum – in other words, no Nato. With the scale of bloodshed and the centre of political gravity in Kiev shifting to the right as Ukraine's economy implodes, only its western sponsors can make that stick. The alternative, after Crimea, is escalation and disintegration.
Nato likes to see itself as the international community. In reality it's an interventionist and expansionist military club of rich-world states and their satellites used to enforce western strategic and economic interests. As Ukraine shows, far from keeping the peace, Nato is a threat to it. [Abridged] Twitter: @SeumasMilne
https://twitter.com/SeumasMilne/status/507475767555813376
Monday, 1 September 2014
The Fun of Empire: Fighting on All Sides of a War in Syria
Glenn Greenwald The Intercept Common Dreams August 27, 2014
CBS News, August 18, 2011: President Barack Obama officially demanded that Syrian President Bashar Assad resign for the sake of his own people, saying he was no longer fit to lead after “imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people” during a crackdown on pro-reform protesters.
New York Times, October 24, 2012: Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster, according to American officials and Middle Eastern diplomats.
Barack Obama, August 31, 2013: Now, after careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets. . . . [W]e are the United States of America, and we cannot and must not turn a blind eye to what happened in Damascus.
New York Times, August 27, 2014: President Obama has authorized surveillance flights over Syria, a precursor to potential airstrikes there, but a mounting concern for the White House is how to target the Sunni extremists without helping President Bashar al-Assad. . . . The flights are a significant step toward direct American military action in Syria, an intervention that could alter the battlefield in the nation’s three-year civil war. . . .
On Monday, Syria warned the White House that it needed to coordinate airstrikes against ISIS or it would view them as a breach of its sovereignty and an “act of aggression.” But it signaled its readiness to work with the United States in a coordinated campaign against the militants.
It was not even a year ago when we were bombarded with messaging that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a Supreme Evil and Grave Threat, and that military action against his regime was both a moral and strategic imperative. The standard cast of “liberal interventionists” – Tony Blair, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Nicholas Kristof and Samantha Power - issued stirring sermons on the duties of war against Assad. Secretary of State John Kerry actually compared Assad to (guess who?) Hitler, instructing the nation that “this is our Munich moment.” Striking Assad, he argued, “is a matter of national security. It’s a matter of the credibility of the United States of America. It’s a matter of upholding the interests of our allies and friends in the region.”
U.S. military action against the Assad regime was thwarted only by overwhelming American public opinion which opposed it and by a resounding rejection by the UK Parliament of Prime Minister David Cameron’s desire to assume the usual subservient British role in support of American wars.
Now the Obama administration and American political class is celebrating the one-year anniversary of the failed “Bomb Assad!” campaign by starting a new campaign to bomb those fighting against Assad – the very same side the U.S. has been arming over the last two years.
Read the full article at The Intercept.
Glenn Greenwald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, constitutional lawyer, commentator, author of three New York Times best-selling books on politics and law, and a staff writer and editor at First Look media. His fifth and latest book is, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/08/27/fun-empire-fighting-all-sides-war-syria
CBS News, August 18, 2011: President Barack Obama officially demanded that Syrian President Bashar Assad resign for the sake of his own people, saying he was no longer fit to lead after “imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people” during a crackdown on pro-reform protesters.
New York Times, October 24, 2012: Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster, according to American officials and Middle Eastern diplomats.
Barack Obama, August 31, 2013: Now, after careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets. . . . [W]e are the United States of America, and we cannot and must not turn a blind eye to what happened in Damascus.
New York Times, August 27, 2014: President Obama has authorized surveillance flights over Syria, a precursor to potential airstrikes there, but a mounting concern for the White House is how to target the Sunni extremists without helping President Bashar al-Assad. . . . The flights are a significant step toward direct American military action in Syria, an intervention that could alter the battlefield in the nation’s three-year civil war. . . .
On Monday, Syria warned the White House that it needed to coordinate airstrikes against ISIS or it would view them as a breach of its sovereignty and an “act of aggression.” But it signaled its readiness to work with the United States in a coordinated campaign against the militants.
It was not even a year ago when we were bombarded with messaging that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a Supreme Evil and Grave Threat, and that military action against his regime was both a moral and strategic imperative. The standard cast of “liberal interventionists” – Tony Blair, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Nicholas Kristof and Samantha Power - issued stirring sermons on the duties of war against Assad. Secretary of State John Kerry actually compared Assad to (guess who?) Hitler, instructing the nation that “this is our Munich moment.” Striking Assad, he argued, “is a matter of national security. It’s a matter of the credibility of the United States of America. It’s a matter of upholding the interests of our allies and friends in the region.”
U.S. military action against the Assad regime was thwarted only by overwhelming American public opinion which opposed it and by a resounding rejection by the UK Parliament of Prime Minister David Cameron’s desire to assume the usual subservient British role in support of American wars.
Now the Obama administration and American political class is celebrating the one-year anniversary of the failed “Bomb Assad!” campaign by starting a new campaign to bomb those fighting against Assad – the very same side the U.S. has been arming over the last two years.
Read the full article at The Intercept.
Glenn Greenwald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, constitutional lawyer, commentator, author of three New York Times best-selling books on politics and law, and a staff writer and editor at First Look media. His fifth and latest book is, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/08/27/fun-empire-fighting-all-sides-war-syria
John’s Gospel Revisited
Ian Harris Otago Daily Times August 29, 2014
One of the great things about Christianity is that the moment you think you have it sussed, something emerges that makes you think again. Or rather, should make you think again – lots of people in the church and out of it will resist the invitation and stick with convictions arrived at long ago.
An example of this is the recent re-appraisal of the gospel of John. In the other three gospels Jesus comes across as reassuringly human, but in John he is disquietingly other-worldly. Instead of beginning as a human baby born to a human mother, for example, Jesus is here retrojected right back to be alongside God in the busyness of creating of the world. He therefore doesn’t need (and John doesn’t give) a Christmas story.
That provides a clue to how John’s gospel should be approached. It is not an eye-witness account of Jesus’ life and ministry, but rather an extended parable about the import of Jesus. John doesn’t set out to record the actual words and deeds of Jesus, but to convey the religious significance his followers were finding in him 60 years and more after his death.
The authors (there were more than one) achieve this through highly creative stories of incidents that never happened and words Jesus never spoke. Yet in a powerful, almost mystical way it is entirely true to the spirit of Jesus and to the inwardness of religious experience.
John also reflects the bitterness which Jesus’ followers felt after the rabbis ejected them from the synagogues around 88 AD. Till then Christians had worshipped alongside Jews and looked for synergies between traditional understandings and their experience of Jesus. Now they were out on their own.
Right, one can imagine them musing, if the Jews of the old Israel reject Jesus as messiah, we’ll just have to get on with establishing a new Israel, centred on Jesus, without them. Tragically, this repudiation of “the Jews” in John’s gospel was in later centuries lifted out of its 1st-century context and used to fuel a virulent anti-Semitism.
That was a deplorable fate for a book which American Bishop John Spong, for one, sees as shot through with Jewish mysticism. The target was the hostile authorities in the synagogues, not all Jews. The writers were themselves Jews.
A major part of this gospel comprises seven “signs”, all pointing to the possibility of living life more fully and at depth when people enter into the kind of God-presence which Jesus’ followers experienced in him.
Typical is the sign or story of a man born blind. According to the lore of the day, such a fate had to be the consequence of sin. But whose sin, asked Jesus’ disciples. Not the newborn baby’s surely? His parents’, maybe?
Neither, Jesus answered and, declaring “I am the light of the world”, he gave the man his sight.
People who came across the man later were incredulous – he had to be a lookalike! “Not at all,” he told them. “It’s me, all right! Jesus opened my eyes.” If this was a regular miracle story, it would end there. But the point is still to come, set squarely in the fraught circumstances of the time.
The leaders of the synagogue grilled the man who could now see: “Who did this for you? How? Such things are forbidden on the Sabbath, so that rules God out of it. A prophet, you say? There’s something murky here – what can his parents tell us?”
But they could add nothing. Meanwhile word was getting around that the rabbis were determined to expel from the synagogue anyone who thought Jesus was the messiah. The authorities concluded that Jesus must be a sinner to heal on the Sabbath, and told the man so. “I know nothing about that,” he replied. “All that matters is that I was blind, and now I see.” And he cheekily asked whether they would like to be his disciples, too.
“Never!” they bellowed. “We are true followers of Moses. Now get out of our synagogue.” And the man joined the fledgling Jesus community.
That bruised and defiant company would know exactly how to understand this story, because it was actually about them. They were like the man born blind in all the years before Jesus opened up to them another way of seeing.
So the “sign” is about the choice between darkness and light, between being blind to new possibilities for life and faith and embracing them, between the old Israel and the new. Echoes resonate still.
http://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/opinion/314143/gospel-john-demonstrates-another-way-seeing
One of the great things about Christianity is that the moment you think you have it sussed, something emerges that makes you think again. Or rather, should make you think again – lots of people in the church and out of it will resist the invitation and stick with convictions arrived at long ago.
An example of this is the recent re-appraisal of the gospel of John. In the other three gospels Jesus comes across as reassuringly human, but in John he is disquietingly other-worldly. Instead of beginning as a human baby born to a human mother, for example, Jesus is here retrojected right back to be alongside God in the busyness of creating of the world. He therefore doesn’t need (and John doesn’t give) a Christmas story.
That provides a clue to how John’s gospel should be approached. It is not an eye-witness account of Jesus’ life and ministry, but rather an extended parable about the import of Jesus. John doesn’t set out to record the actual words and deeds of Jesus, but to convey the religious significance his followers were finding in him 60 years and more after his death.
The authors (there were more than one) achieve this through highly creative stories of incidents that never happened and words Jesus never spoke. Yet in a powerful, almost mystical way it is entirely true to the spirit of Jesus and to the inwardness of religious experience.
John also reflects the bitterness which Jesus’ followers felt after the rabbis ejected them from the synagogues around 88 AD. Till then Christians had worshipped alongside Jews and looked for synergies between traditional understandings and their experience of Jesus. Now they were out on their own.
Right, one can imagine them musing, if the Jews of the old Israel reject Jesus as messiah, we’ll just have to get on with establishing a new Israel, centred on Jesus, without them. Tragically, this repudiation of “the Jews” in John’s gospel was in later centuries lifted out of its 1st-century context and used to fuel a virulent anti-Semitism.
That was a deplorable fate for a book which American Bishop John Spong, for one, sees as shot through with Jewish mysticism. The target was the hostile authorities in the synagogues, not all Jews. The writers were themselves Jews.
A major part of this gospel comprises seven “signs”, all pointing to the possibility of living life more fully and at depth when people enter into the kind of God-presence which Jesus’ followers experienced in him.
Typical is the sign or story of a man born blind. According to the lore of the day, such a fate had to be the consequence of sin. But whose sin, asked Jesus’ disciples. Not the newborn baby’s surely? His parents’, maybe?
Neither, Jesus answered and, declaring “I am the light of the world”, he gave the man his sight.
People who came across the man later were incredulous – he had to be a lookalike! “Not at all,” he told them. “It’s me, all right! Jesus opened my eyes.” If this was a regular miracle story, it would end there. But the point is still to come, set squarely in the fraught circumstances of the time.
The leaders of the synagogue grilled the man who could now see: “Who did this for you? How? Such things are forbidden on the Sabbath, so that rules God out of it. A prophet, you say? There’s something murky here – what can his parents tell us?”
But they could add nothing. Meanwhile word was getting around that the rabbis were determined to expel from the synagogue anyone who thought Jesus was the messiah. The authorities concluded that Jesus must be a sinner to heal on the Sabbath, and told the man so. “I know nothing about that,” he replied. “All that matters is that I was blind, and now I see.” And he cheekily asked whether they would like to be his disciples, too.
“Never!” they bellowed. “We are true followers of Moses. Now get out of our synagogue.” And the man joined the fledgling Jesus community.
That bruised and defiant company would know exactly how to understand this story, because it was actually about them. They were like the man born blind in all the years before Jesus opened up to them another way of seeing.
So the “sign” is about the choice between darkness and light, between being blind to new possibilities for life and faith and embracing them, between the old Israel and the new. Echoes resonate still.
http://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/opinion/314143/gospel-john-demonstrates-another-way-seeing
The War for Nothing
Uri Avnery's Column Gush Shalom 30 August 2014
The war is over. Hallelujah. On the Israeli side: 71 dead, among them 66 soldiers, 1 child. On the Palestinian side: 2,143 dead, 577 of them children, 263 women, 102 elderly. 11,230 injured. 10,800 buildings destroyed. About 40,000 damaged homes. Also, 12 West Bank demonstrators, mostly children, who were shot.
So what was it all about? The honest answer is: About nothing. Neither side wanted it. Neither side started it.
Two young Arab men kidnapped three young Israeli religious students near the West Bank town of Hebron. The kidnappers belonged to the Hamas movement, but acted on their own. Their purpose was to exchange their captives for Palestinian prisoners. The kidnappers were amateurs, and they panicked and shot the hostages. All of Israel was in an uproar. The kidnappers have not yet been found.
The Israeli security forces used the opportunity to implement a prepared plan. All known Hamas activists in the West Bank were arrested, as well as all the former prisoners who were released as part of the deal to free the Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit. For Hamas this was the violation of an agreement.
The Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip could not keep quiet while their comrades in the West Bank were being imprisoned. It reacted by launching rockets at Israeli towns. The Israeli government could not keep quiet while its towns and villages were bombarded. It responded with a heavy bombardment of the Gaza strip from the air.
Hamas then did something that was, in my opinion, a cardinal mistake. It used some of the clandestine tunnels which it had built under the border fence to attack Israeli targets. The purposeless war acquired a purpose: It became the War Against the “Terror-Tunnels". The infantry was sent into the Gaza Strip to search out and destroy them. Eighty thousand soldiers entered Strip. After destroying all the known tunnels, they had nothing to do except stand around and act as targets.
The next logical step would have been to move forward and conquer the entire Gaza Strip, some 45 km long and an average of 6 km wide, with 1.8 million inhabitants. But the Israeli army detested the idea of conquering the Strip for the third time (after 1956 and 1967). Predictions of military casualties were high, many more than Israeli society was ready to suffer, in spite of all the patriotic hyperbole.
The war deteriorated into an orgy of killing and destroying, with both sides "dancing on the blood", blessing every bomb and missile, completely oblivious to the suffering caused to the human beings on the other side. And still without any realizable aim.
IF CLAUSEWITZ was right about war being but a continuation of policy by other means, then every war must have a clear political aim. For Hamas, the aim was clear and simple: Lift the blockade on Gaza. For Israel there was none. Binyamin Netanyahu defined his aim as "Calm in return for Calm". But we had that before it all started. Some of his cabinet colleagues demanded to "go to the end" and occupy the entire strip. The army command objected, and one cannot fight a war against the wishes of the army command. So everyone stood around waiting for Godot.
What brought about the final ceasefire agreement? Both sides were exhausted. On the Israeli side, the feather that broke the camel's back was the plight of the settlement around the Gaza Strip, called the "Gaza envelope". Under the unceasing barrage of short-range rockets and – even worse – mortar shells that cost next to nothing, the inhabitants, mostly kibbutz members, started to move quietly to safer regions.
That was almost sacrilege. One of the founding myths of Israel was that in the 1948 war, in which the state was born, Arab villagers and townspeople ran away when they were shot at, while our settlements stood firm even in the midst of hell. That was not entirely so. Several kibbutzim were evacuated by order of the army when their defense became impossible. In several others, women and children were sent away, while men were ordered to stay on and fight with the soldiers. But on the whole, Israeli settlements stood fast and fought.
But 1948 was an ethnic war for territory. Land evacuated was lost forever (or at least until the next war). This time, the whole rationale was different.
LIFE IN the "envelope" became impossible. Sirens sounded several times within the hour, and everybody had 15 seconds to find shelter. Hundreds of families moved away. The myth was abandoned and the government was compelled to organize a mass movement. That did not look like victory.
The Palestinian side underwent a terrible ordeal. About 400 thousand people had to leave their homes. Whole families found shelter in UN buildings, several families in a room or in a corner of the courtyard, without electricity and with very little water, mothers with 6, 7 or 8 children.
It is almost a wonder that under these conditions, the Hamas government and command structure did function. Orders passed from hidden leaders to hidden cells, contacts were maintained with leaders abroad and between different organizations, while spy drones circled overhead and killed any civil leader or commander who showed his face.
After the action to kill the Hamas military Commander in Chief, Mohammad Deif, Hamas started to shoot the informers without whom such actions are impossible. But with all their remarkable ingenuity, Hamas could not go on forever. Their large stocks of rockets and mortar shells were being depleted. They also needed an end.
The result? Clearly a draw. But, as I have said before, if a small resistance organization achieves a draw against one of the mightiest military machines in the world, it has cause to celebrate – as it indeed did, last Monday, the 50th day of the War for Nothing.
WHAT DID the two sides lose? The Palestinians sustained huge material losses. Thousands of homes were destroyed in order to break their spirit, some with some slim pretext, others without any. In the last days, the Air Force systematically brought down the luxurious high-rise buildings in the center of Gaza. Palestinian human losses were also enormous. Israelis did not shed any tears.On the Israeli side, human and material losses where comparatively light. Economic losses were significant, but bearable. It is the unseen losses that count.
The delegitimization of Israel throughout the world is accelerating. Millions of people have seen the daily pictures coming out of Gaza, and, consciously or unconsciously, their image of Israel has changed. For many, the brave little country has turned into a brutal monster.
Anti-Semitism, we are told, is dangerously on the rise. Israel claims to be the Nation-State of the Jewish People, and most Jews defend Israel and identify with it. The new rage against Israel sometimes looks like old-time anti-Semitism, and sometimes is. We don't know how many Jews will be driven to Israel. Nor do we know how many Israelis will be driven by the eternal war from Israel to Germany, the US or Canada.
One tends to overlook the most dangerous aspect. A huge mass of hatred has been created in Gaza. How many of the children we saw running with their mothers from their homes will become the "terrorists" of tomorrow? Millions of children throughout the Arab world have seen the pictures beamed daily into their homes by Aljazeera, and become bitter haters of Israel. Aljazeera is a world power. While its English-language edition tried to be moderate, the Arab edition had no brakes - hour after hour its reports showed the heart-breaking pictures from Gaza, the children killed, the homes destroyed. On the other side, the generations-old enmity of Arab governments towards Israel has been broken. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf States (except Qatar) are openly collaborating now with Israel.
Can this bear political fruit in the future? It could, if our government were really interested in peace. In Israel itself, fascism, vile and unmistakable, has raised its ugly head. "Death to the Arabs" and "Death to the Leftists" have become legitimate battle-cries. Some of this foul wave will hopefully recede, but some may remain and become a regular feature. Netanyahu's personal fortunes are clouded. During the war his popularity ratings rose sharply. Now they are in a free fall. It is not enough to make speeches about victory. Victory must be seen. If possible, without a microscope.
WAR IS a matter of power. The reality created on the battlefield is generally reflected in the political results. If the battle ends in a draw, the political result will also be a draw. Celebrating a similar triumph long ago, Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, remarked: “Another such victory and we will be lost!”
[Abridged]
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1409319940
The war is over. Hallelujah. On the Israeli side: 71 dead, among them 66 soldiers, 1 child. On the Palestinian side: 2,143 dead, 577 of them children, 263 women, 102 elderly. 11,230 injured. 10,800 buildings destroyed. About 40,000 damaged homes. Also, 12 West Bank demonstrators, mostly children, who were shot.
So what was it all about? The honest answer is: About nothing. Neither side wanted it. Neither side started it.
Two young Arab men kidnapped three young Israeli religious students near the West Bank town of Hebron. The kidnappers belonged to the Hamas movement, but acted on their own. Their purpose was to exchange their captives for Palestinian prisoners. The kidnappers were amateurs, and they panicked and shot the hostages. All of Israel was in an uproar. The kidnappers have not yet been found.
The Israeli security forces used the opportunity to implement a prepared plan. All known Hamas activists in the West Bank were arrested, as well as all the former prisoners who were released as part of the deal to free the Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit. For Hamas this was the violation of an agreement.
The Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip could not keep quiet while their comrades in the West Bank were being imprisoned. It reacted by launching rockets at Israeli towns. The Israeli government could not keep quiet while its towns and villages were bombarded. It responded with a heavy bombardment of the Gaza strip from the air.
Hamas then did something that was, in my opinion, a cardinal mistake. It used some of the clandestine tunnels which it had built under the border fence to attack Israeli targets. The purposeless war acquired a purpose: It became the War Against the “Terror-Tunnels". The infantry was sent into the Gaza Strip to search out and destroy them. Eighty thousand soldiers entered Strip. After destroying all the known tunnels, they had nothing to do except stand around and act as targets.
The next logical step would have been to move forward and conquer the entire Gaza Strip, some 45 km long and an average of 6 km wide, with 1.8 million inhabitants. But the Israeli army detested the idea of conquering the Strip for the third time (after 1956 and 1967). Predictions of military casualties were high, many more than Israeli society was ready to suffer, in spite of all the patriotic hyperbole.
The war deteriorated into an orgy of killing and destroying, with both sides "dancing on the blood", blessing every bomb and missile, completely oblivious to the suffering caused to the human beings on the other side. And still without any realizable aim.
IF CLAUSEWITZ was right about war being but a continuation of policy by other means, then every war must have a clear political aim. For Hamas, the aim was clear and simple: Lift the blockade on Gaza. For Israel there was none. Binyamin Netanyahu defined his aim as "Calm in return for Calm". But we had that before it all started. Some of his cabinet colleagues demanded to "go to the end" and occupy the entire strip. The army command objected, and one cannot fight a war against the wishes of the army command. So everyone stood around waiting for Godot.
What brought about the final ceasefire agreement? Both sides were exhausted. On the Israeli side, the feather that broke the camel's back was the plight of the settlement around the Gaza Strip, called the "Gaza envelope". Under the unceasing barrage of short-range rockets and – even worse – mortar shells that cost next to nothing, the inhabitants, mostly kibbutz members, started to move quietly to safer regions.
That was almost sacrilege. One of the founding myths of Israel was that in the 1948 war, in which the state was born, Arab villagers and townspeople ran away when they were shot at, while our settlements stood firm even in the midst of hell. That was not entirely so. Several kibbutzim were evacuated by order of the army when their defense became impossible. In several others, women and children were sent away, while men were ordered to stay on and fight with the soldiers. But on the whole, Israeli settlements stood fast and fought.
But 1948 was an ethnic war for territory. Land evacuated was lost forever (or at least until the next war). This time, the whole rationale was different.
LIFE IN the "envelope" became impossible. Sirens sounded several times within the hour, and everybody had 15 seconds to find shelter. Hundreds of families moved away. The myth was abandoned and the government was compelled to organize a mass movement. That did not look like victory.
The Palestinian side underwent a terrible ordeal. About 400 thousand people had to leave their homes. Whole families found shelter in UN buildings, several families in a room or in a corner of the courtyard, without electricity and with very little water, mothers with 6, 7 or 8 children.
It is almost a wonder that under these conditions, the Hamas government and command structure did function. Orders passed from hidden leaders to hidden cells, contacts were maintained with leaders abroad and between different organizations, while spy drones circled overhead and killed any civil leader or commander who showed his face.
After the action to kill the Hamas military Commander in Chief, Mohammad Deif, Hamas started to shoot the informers without whom such actions are impossible. But with all their remarkable ingenuity, Hamas could not go on forever. Their large stocks of rockets and mortar shells were being depleted. They also needed an end.
The result? Clearly a draw. But, as I have said before, if a small resistance organization achieves a draw against one of the mightiest military machines in the world, it has cause to celebrate – as it indeed did, last Monday, the 50th day of the War for Nothing.
WHAT DID the two sides lose? The Palestinians sustained huge material losses. Thousands of homes were destroyed in order to break their spirit, some with some slim pretext, others without any. In the last days, the Air Force systematically brought down the luxurious high-rise buildings in the center of Gaza. Palestinian human losses were also enormous. Israelis did not shed any tears.On the Israeli side, human and material losses where comparatively light. Economic losses were significant, but bearable. It is the unseen losses that count.
The delegitimization of Israel throughout the world is accelerating. Millions of people have seen the daily pictures coming out of Gaza, and, consciously or unconsciously, their image of Israel has changed. For many, the brave little country has turned into a brutal monster.
Anti-Semitism, we are told, is dangerously on the rise. Israel claims to be the Nation-State of the Jewish People, and most Jews defend Israel and identify with it. The new rage against Israel sometimes looks like old-time anti-Semitism, and sometimes is. We don't know how many Jews will be driven to Israel. Nor do we know how many Israelis will be driven by the eternal war from Israel to Germany, the US or Canada.
One tends to overlook the most dangerous aspect. A huge mass of hatred has been created in Gaza. How many of the children we saw running with their mothers from their homes will become the "terrorists" of tomorrow? Millions of children throughout the Arab world have seen the pictures beamed daily into their homes by Aljazeera, and become bitter haters of Israel. Aljazeera is a world power. While its English-language edition tried to be moderate, the Arab edition had no brakes - hour after hour its reports showed the heart-breaking pictures from Gaza, the children killed, the homes destroyed. On the other side, the generations-old enmity of Arab governments towards Israel has been broken. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf States (except Qatar) are openly collaborating now with Israel.
Can this bear political fruit in the future? It could, if our government were really interested in peace. In Israel itself, fascism, vile and unmistakable, has raised its ugly head. "Death to the Arabs" and "Death to the Leftists" have become legitimate battle-cries. Some of this foul wave will hopefully recede, but some may remain and become a regular feature. Netanyahu's personal fortunes are clouded. During the war his popularity ratings rose sharply. Now they are in a free fall. It is not enough to make speeches about victory. Victory must be seen. If possible, without a microscope.
WAR IS a matter of power. The reality created on the battlefield is generally reflected in the political results. If the battle ends in a draw, the political result will also be a draw. Celebrating a similar triumph long ago, Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, remarked: “Another such victory and we will be lost!”
[Abridged]
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1409319940
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