Westward Ho

“Wherever they stayed, the soldiers left behind piles of refuse: not just empty bags of provisions, sleeping bags and other military gear, but plastic bottles filled with urine and ‘waste disposal bags’ containing human faeces. In many cases they smeared shit on floors, walls, mattresses. Some of the people I talked to say they can’t return to their own homes even after having cleaned them. The stench clings to the walls.” –Amira Hass, London Review of Books, 26 Feb 2009

This is one of many similar descriptions of the aftermath of Gaza, and although one in search of apologia might dismiss them as isolated incidents or ‘War Is Hell’ boilerplate, taken as a whole the accounts suggest a qualitative shift in attitude of the occupying troops and, by extension, Israeli society toward the entrapped residents. In previous wars and even during the intifadas, you would read stories about young Israeli recruits acting decently or even being appalled at the official policies that dictated their actions.

Now, however, the accoutrements of the attacks—aside from the slaughter involved in the attacks themselves—is of a piece with the tone of Israeli politics and the ascendancy of ever-more reactionary tendencies, such as the overtly racist Avigdor Lierberman, the recent arrival from Moldova who now heads Israel’s third-largest party. (See ‘Lieberman’s Anti-Arab Ideology Wins over Israeli Teens’ in Haaretz.) Hardly any of the leading groups even pretend to believe in the Oslo accords or any of the peacemaking efforts of recent decades—and why should they when straight conquest works fine?

Hass, the journalist quoted above, notes that Gazans are not starving because food always manages to get into the Strip. More importantly, she says, building supplies do not; the strategy seems to be strangulation of any possibility of economic activity, leaving the Gazans in the role of permanent beggars. She writes: ‘The denial of the right to a livelihood is the essence of the siege, the foundation block of the separation policy.’

Many commentators seize upon certain parallels with the Warsaw ghetto, which has become almost a cliché at this point aside from inflaming survivors’ sensibilities. But there is a more precise metaphor, in my view, that should be meaningful to Americans.

The same LRB issue carries a review of the works of S. Yizhar, an early Hebrew author who grew up in an ethnically mixed environment rather than among the proto-socialist but exclusionary kibbutzim. Yizhar’s world was bound up with the Arab village society that 1948 decimated, and he wrote sympathetically as an eyewitness to the triumphant Israeli army driving local families into an exile from they would never return.

Yet the review notes that Yizhar’s elegaic tone carries with it a fatalistic acceptance of the extinction. ‘Today there is no Mansoura, and you won’t find it, it has been wiped out, it no longer exists, and in its place there is just a road, eucalyptus trees and some stone ruins.’ Or this: ‘These Arabs will not remain. . . Zarnuga will not remain and Qubeibeh will not remain and Yibneh will not remain, they will all go away and start to live in Gaza’.

We see similar feelings of doom and tragedy in the creepily effective animated documentary Waltz with Bashir that, not surprisingly, failed to win an Oscar for its treatment of Israeli complicity in the refugee camp massacres in Lebanon (described by the movie-star announcers at the ceremony as ‘a controversial military action’). The young Israeli soldiers are scared about the fighting, trying to save their skins and finally dumbfounded by the deliberate slaughter of Palestinian refugees by their own Christian fascist allies—while they guard the perimeter.

What is this but a replay of the nineteenth century American fascination with the ‘noble savage’ of the western plains, whose decline and annihilation were to be mourned while nothing was done to stop it? They must disappear so that white settlers could safely pass through and homestead in the ‘uninhabited’ interior, all formalized in religious terms as our Manifest Destiny. No wonder the Israeli occupation appears to received American opinion as the most reasonable thing in the world.