Got Peace?
For a long time, I have followed events in the Middle East. The area holds an inexplicable interest for me, and even though I have never visited the area, I harbor a deep fascination with its peoples, languages, cultures, and histories. A friend of mine from high school is in the Marines, and during one of his tours in Iraq, he took some photographs of the countryside and sent it back to me with the commentary that what was pictured in the images was the wasteland in which he spent his days.
“Wasteland” is not the word that came to mind when I saw the pictures. Strangely, the word that first entered my mind when I saw the images was ‘home.’
One of the issues which bothers me the most about the current political situation in the Middle East is the continuing and ongoing conflict between Israel and its neighbors. Israel is not a country of which I think highly. I disagree vehemently with a wide array of the political decisions which its leaders make, and I find many of the actions of the state to be manifestly unjust, unjustified, and deeply immoral.
In 1967, the state of Israel invaded its neighbors in a naked land-grab that would have provoked WWIII if done in Europe. The invasion seized lands belonging to several of its neighbors, and the world nearly unanimously censured Israel for the invasion. The land seized was not part of Israel’s internationally recognized borders, and Israel still occupies this land.
The seized land was placed under military rule, and remains under military rule to this day. Checkpoints are set up on all major roads that impede the flow of people and commerce. Individuals cannot get to major hospitals because of the long queues at checkpoints, and people have died in ambulances as the drivers argued with soldiers refusing to allow the vehicle through on the road. Israeli soldiers have committed what much of the world has labeled war-crimes on peoples in the occupied territories. Palestinians in some of the occupied land had legal deeds to land that was owned by their fathers, and by their fathers’ fathers before them, and can only look on helplessly as Israeli tanks prevent them from setting foot on what legally should be theirs. Many villages are placed under curfews and those breaking the curfew can be shot on sight. In some villages, it is not uncommon to be placed under curfew for days at a time and curfews can be set for entire days (such that nobody can leave their homes). Palestinian children are routinely arrested and sent to military prisons where they are beaten and tortured (read the book “Stolen Youth” for a study of this phenomenon), and held for years at a time. Whereas the United States abolished bills of attainder (where you could be punished for the crimes of another due to the taint of their corruption rubbing off on you) constitutionally, it is not uncommon for homes with a dozen occupants of an extended family to be bulldozed with only minutes warning (not enough time to save your possessions and sometimes not pets) when another family member commits a crime.
To suggest that a brutal military occupation that is illegal under nearly universally accepted international law would be met with peaceful compliance is bewildering, yet this is precisely what Israel expects. Understandably, many in the occupied territories are upset, and willing to fight back in what ways they can to free their land from an illegal and brutal occupation by a foreign invading army. How the United States supports Israel in this is beyond me.
If this were the extent of the problem, I wouldn’t be quite so incensed. However, Israel is engaging in a practice that caused Americans to burn the flag on the Capitol steps when it was done in South Africa: apartheid. Israel has built extensive (dozens and dozens) of settlements (towns) in occupied territories, fenced them off, ringed them with soldiers, and moved in Israelis to set up shop. These settlements are for Israelis only, and Palestinians are not allowed to live in them. This segregationist policy is upheld on the grounds of safety, as if Israelis were the ones under attack. In the short term, I suppose they are, but to suggest that the attacks on Israelis were somehow unexpected and unjustified strains common sense.
Many people will disagree with this statement. I ask those people, though, to imagine an alternate history for a moment. Let us suppose that Russia decides that it wants to invade the United States in 1970. Russia seizes all of Alaska, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, and part of Nevada. Russia demolishes long-held properties, uproots the existing legal system, and marches hundreds of thousands of soldiers into the area. Russia then sets up a military government over the newly ‘Russian’ lands. Russia then prevents people from going to hospitals, their businesses, shoots people who leave their homes on Tuesdays, kidnaps young children and tortures them into confessing crimes, prevents individuals from attending churches, and prevents people from traveling from city to city, and all while having armed and hostile troops stationed on every street corner. Fast forward to the year 2006. Would the people living in those occupied territories be fighting back? I certainly hope so. But more important is the question: Are they right to fight back? What if they were reduced to abject poverty and couldn’t afford tanks and planes, and in many cases couldn’t afford to buy guns to attack the Russians? What if all they had were stones and bottles and homemade explosives?
This is a very real scenario, and the Palestinian people do not have to imagine a hypothetical. They are living this reality, and behaving exactly as I would expect my fellow Americans to act under such circumstances.
The United States is indirectly responsible for the atrocities being perpetuated on an entire people. We support the illegal occupation with money and weapons. Even though Israel has such a powerful military that it would take an alliance of most of the Middle East to defeat it in a full-scale war, we continue to give phenomenally gigantic ‘gifts’ of money and weapons to the Israeli state every year, further financing their aggressive militaristic expansion and brutal subjugation of people in the occupied territories.
In the United States, people defend our help by saying that we need to strengthen democracy in the Middle East and that (until Iraq comes around) Israel is our only democratic ally in the middle of a sea of dictatorships and corrupt governments. To call Israel a democracy is laughable. Israel is an apartheid state, where a powerful, privileged group holds and maintains power at the expense of a weak, impoverished group. Palestinians are not voting for the Knesset which authorizes military funding to further oppress them. In a state that refuses to allow everyone to vote, seizes land and resources from its weaker neighbors and gives them to the privileged, sets up elite-only cities, and routinely starts wars, democracy is dead. These are not the fruits of democracy. These are the fruits of militant nationalism: fascism.
If we need further proof of the expansionist plans of Israel, we need look no further than their recent invasion of Lebanon. Israel claims that this invasion was provoked by the kidnapping of some of their soldiers, but the soldiers were on occupied land that was originally taken from Lebanon during the 1967 wars. The Lebanese militia that carried out the attack, Hezbollah, was fighting back against an occupying military dictatorship of foreign imposition, not just engaging in random acts of violence against innocent people.
In response to this predictable act of defense of the Lebanese nation, Israel responded by invading Lebanon and occupying a large swath of it. Only under overwhelming international pressure (basically the entire world except for the United States), did Israel cease the invasion. Israel’s stated goal for the invasion of Lebanon was to set up a buffer zone, policed by Israeli troops, that would safeguard northern Israel – in other words, another military occupation.
The eventual ‘peace’ that was brokered by the UN is quite in line with the Israeli interests. The ‘buffer zone’ that will be set up in southern Lebanon will be policed by UN troops (which are largely, though not entirely, without the ability to use force). The UN troops which will be stationed have been authorized to use force to stop Hezbollah from arming and acting in the region, but has no ability to respond if Israel invades again. They simply do not have that mandate.
What the area is left with then, is a profound weakening of Israel’s northern neighbor, on whom Israel has evinced territorial designs, and a military force occupying Lebanon that can weaken Lebanon, but do nothing to stop Israel if it decides to invade again.
That such a decision is vastly pro-Israel should not be surprising, since the United States was the dominant player in the negotiations for the temporary peace. Israel should be happy with the result, but it is a true mark of worry that the Israelis want more concessions. The Israeli people, by a wide margin, viewed the peace treaty brokered by the UN as a defeat in the war. They did not want to end the invasion, but rather continue and extend it.
An interesting, though somewhat dated (it is a few months old, and does not contemplate an invasion into Lebanon) documentary on the subject can be found on Google Video, here.
How the United States can support a nation with so many shockingly anti-democratic tendencies, horrifyingly unjust legal rules, expansionist agendas, and militaristic dreams is bizarre and puzzling. I’m not sure how people in the United States side with Israel by a wide margin over those they are oppressing, but such is the case. The documentary (mentioned previously) makes some claims at understanding this phenomenon, but I am still appalled.
I’m still waiting for a mainstream politician to stand up and say these things, and to point at the 900-pound pink gorilla in the corner. I fear I may have to wait for a long time.
“Wasteland” is not the word that came to mind when I saw the pictures. Strangely, the word that first entered my mind when I saw the images was ‘home.’
One of the issues which bothers me the most about the current political situation in the Middle East is the continuing and ongoing conflict between Israel and its neighbors. Israel is not a country of which I think highly. I disagree vehemently with a wide array of the political decisions which its leaders make, and I find many of the actions of the state to be manifestly unjust, unjustified, and deeply immoral.
In 1967, the state of Israel invaded its neighbors in a naked land-grab that would have provoked WWIII if done in Europe. The invasion seized lands belonging to several of its neighbors, and the world nearly unanimously censured Israel for the invasion. The land seized was not part of Israel’s internationally recognized borders, and Israel still occupies this land.
The seized land was placed under military rule, and remains under military rule to this day. Checkpoints are set up on all major roads that impede the flow of people and commerce. Individuals cannot get to major hospitals because of the long queues at checkpoints, and people have died in ambulances as the drivers argued with soldiers refusing to allow the vehicle through on the road. Israeli soldiers have committed what much of the world has labeled war-crimes on peoples in the occupied territories. Palestinians in some of the occupied land had legal deeds to land that was owned by their fathers, and by their fathers’ fathers before them, and can only look on helplessly as Israeli tanks prevent them from setting foot on what legally should be theirs. Many villages are placed under curfews and those breaking the curfew can be shot on sight. In some villages, it is not uncommon to be placed under curfew for days at a time and curfews can be set for entire days (such that nobody can leave their homes). Palestinian children are routinely arrested and sent to military prisons where they are beaten and tortured (read the book “Stolen Youth” for a study of this phenomenon), and held for years at a time. Whereas the United States abolished bills of attainder (where you could be punished for the crimes of another due to the taint of their corruption rubbing off on you) constitutionally, it is not uncommon for homes with a dozen occupants of an extended family to be bulldozed with only minutes warning (not enough time to save your possessions and sometimes not pets) when another family member commits a crime.
To suggest that a brutal military occupation that is illegal under nearly universally accepted international law would be met with peaceful compliance is bewildering, yet this is precisely what Israel expects. Understandably, many in the occupied territories are upset, and willing to fight back in what ways they can to free their land from an illegal and brutal occupation by a foreign invading army. How the United States supports Israel in this is beyond me.
If this were the extent of the problem, I wouldn’t be quite so incensed. However, Israel is engaging in a practice that caused Americans to burn the flag on the Capitol steps when it was done in South Africa: apartheid. Israel has built extensive (dozens and dozens) of settlements (towns) in occupied territories, fenced them off, ringed them with soldiers, and moved in Israelis to set up shop. These settlements are for Israelis only, and Palestinians are not allowed to live in them. This segregationist policy is upheld on the grounds of safety, as if Israelis were the ones under attack. In the short term, I suppose they are, but to suggest that the attacks on Israelis were somehow unexpected and unjustified strains common sense.
Many people will disagree with this statement. I ask those people, though, to imagine an alternate history for a moment. Let us suppose that Russia decides that it wants to invade the United States in 1970. Russia seizes all of Alaska, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, and part of Nevada. Russia demolishes long-held properties, uproots the existing legal system, and marches hundreds of thousands of soldiers into the area. Russia then sets up a military government over the newly ‘Russian’ lands. Russia then prevents people from going to hospitals, their businesses, shoots people who leave their homes on Tuesdays, kidnaps young children and tortures them into confessing crimes, prevents individuals from attending churches, and prevents people from traveling from city to city, and all while having armed and hostile troops stationed on every street corner. Fast forward to the year 2006. Would the people living in those occupied territories be fighting back? I certainly hope so. But more important is the question: Are they right to fight back? What if they were reduced to abject poverty and couldn’t afford tanks and planes, and in many cases couldn’t afford to buy guns to attack the Russians? What if all they had were stones and bottles and homemade explosives?
This is a very real scenario, and the Palestinian people do not have to imagine a hypothetical. They are living this reality, and behaving exactly as I would expect my fellow Americans to act under such circumstances.
The United States is indirectly responsible for the atrocities being perpetuated on an entire people. We support the illegal occupation with money and weapons. Even though Israel has such a powerful military that it would take an alliance of most of the Middle East to defeat it in a full-scale war, we continue to give phenomenally gigantic ‘gifts’ of money and weapons to the Israeli state every year, further financing their aggressive militaristic expansion and brutal subjugation of people in the occupied territories.
In the United States, people defend our help by saying that we need to strengthen democracy in the Middle East and that (until Iraq comes around) Israel is our only democratic ally in the middle of a sea of dictatorships and corrupt governments. To call Israel a democracy is laughable. Israel is an apartheid state, where a powerful, privileged group holds and maintains power at the expense of a weak, impoverished group. Palestinians are not voting for the Knesset which authorizes military funding to further oppress them. In a state that refuses to allow everyone to vote, seizes land and resources from its weaker neighbors and gives them to the privileged, sets up elite-only cities, and routinely starts wars, democracy is dead. These are not the fruits of democracy. These are the fruits of militant nationalism: fascism.
If we need further proof of the expansionist plans of Israel, we need look no further than their recent invasion of Lebanon. Israel claims that this invasion was provoked by the kidnapping of some of their soldiers, but the soldiers were on occupied land that was originally taken from Lebanon during the 1967 wars. The Lebanese militia that carried out the attack, Hezbollah, was fighting back against an occupying military dictatorship of foreign imposition, not just engaging in random acts of violence against innocent people.
In response to this predictable act of defense of the Lebanese nation, Israel responded by invading Lebanon and occupying a large swath of it. Only under overwhelming international pressure (basically the entire world except for the United States), did Israel cease the invasion. Israel’s stated goal for the invasion of Lebanon was to set up a buffer zone, policed by Israeli troops, that would safeguard northern Israel – in other words, another military occupation.
The eventual ‘peace’ that was brokered by the UN is quite in line with the Israeli interests. The ‘buffer zone’ that will be set up in southern Lebanon will be policed by UN troops (which are largely, though not entirely, without the ability to use force). The UN troops which will be stationed have been authorized to use force to stop Hezbollah from arming and acting in the region, but has no ability to respond if Israel invades again. They simply do not have that mandate.
What the area is left with then, is a profound weakening of Israel’s northern neighbor, on whom Israel has evinced territorial designs, and a military force occupying Lebanon that can weaken Lebanon, but do nothing to stop Israel if it decides to invade again.
That such a decision is vastly pro-Israel should not be surprising, since the United States was the dominant player in the negotiations for the temporary peace. Israel should be happy with the result, but it is a true mark of worry that the Israelis want more concessions. The Israeli people, by a wide margin, viewed the peace treaty brokered by the UN as a defeat in the war. They did not want to end the invasion, but rather continue and extend it.
An interesting, though somewhat dated (it is a few months old, and does not contemplate an invasion into Lebanon) documentary on the subject can be found on Google Video, here.
How the United States can support a nation with so many shockingly anti-democratic tendencies, horrifyingly unjust legal rules, expansionist agendas, and militaristic dreams is bizarre and puzzling. I’m not sure how people in the United States side with Israel by a wide margin over those they are oppressing, but such is the case. The documentary (mentioned previously) makes some claims at understanding this phenomenon, but I am still appalled.
I’m still waiting for a mainstream politician to stand up and say these things, and to point at the 900-pound pink gorilla in the corner. I fear I may have to wait for a long time.
posted by The Academian | 1:57 AM
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