I see that some on-line groups are agitating—and attracting broad support—for a special prosecutor to look into the Bush cabal’s torture and wiretapping crimes. They say Obama should assign the chore to Patrick Fitzgerald, and others insist that Attorney-General-designate Eric Holder should be asked the same question that current A-G Mukasey dodged: Is waterboarding torture?
We may recall that Mukasey’s appointment went through despite his failure to answer and weasel-y indirect support for torture, thanks to Democratic senators Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein who did what Democrats love best: cut loathesome deals with Republicans for individual gain. This should be a warning sign to those who anticipate that Truth, Justice and the American Way will now triumph given that the Dems control Washington’s commanding heights.
If my past experience is any guide, the opposition critics of these practices now nearing the halls of power will proceed to do the absolute minimum to bring the criminals to justice. While a few low-ranking patsies may get it in the neck, the Obama team’s priorities are all about winning their legislative programs, for which they’ll need cooperation from the ancien regime. So expect some window-dressing gestures while the political operatives hold their breaths and hope the whole seamy topic disappears.
Unfortunately for them, it won’t. As I’ve said repeatedly here (and it’s nothing original, either), torture lingers in the air like the aroma of a dead rat under the floorboards. People, some people anyway, are morally outraged by it, and they’re not likely to let Obama, Biden and the incoming crew off the hook. Judges also tend to resuscitate the issue because year after year, decade after decade, they see the awful consequences of the practices in the persons of those who come before them seeking redress or, for that matter, en route to prison.
You’d be surprised how this whack-a-mole issue pops up no matter what forces are deployed to bury it. Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet issued a notorious amnesty in 1981 covering all political crimes committed since the 1973 coup d’etat, a blatant attempt to cover up his own. But some human rights attorneys argued that the amnesty could not be generic, that is, it could only be applied once each crime was fully investigated and blame individually assigned, not awarded in advance to a vague, undefined group.
That didn’t get too far with the pinochetista judges who dominated the country’s bench in the early post-regime years, and many of us thought the truth would never come out. But the ingenious lawyers weren’t finished: they argued that the crime of ‘disappearance’, that is, snatching individuals off the street and carrying them to secret dungeons, was an ongoing crime. So while outright murder of political opponents might be amnestied under the 1981 law, those thousands of disappearances were violations of law being committed continuously into the present.
This argument, surprisingly, held. The military authorities either had to admit to murder and seek application of the amnesty law or face criminal inquiries.
That meant investigations continued, accompanied by the Rettig and Valech Commissions that dug into the sordid facts of kidnapping, torture and murder, with the country’s political and economic elite kicking and screaming all the way. More than 20 years after the plebiscite that began to dismantle the dictatorship, officials and civilian enforcers still trudge wearily through the nation’s courts to face the long-delayed music.
Meanwhile, the lovely practice of ‘funao’ accompanies those snakes who managed to hide their identities as torturers and fascist muscle. ‘Funao’ is a kind of outing in which activists expose the nazis in their midst with leaflets on telephone poles or sudden guerrilla theatre eruptions at unexpected venues. I witnessed one during a 2003 sexology conference in Santiago.
In short, although President Obama is unlikely to put the torturers in the hotseat, they’re equally unlikely to escape it. They will pay.
Friday, 9 January 2009
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
Excusing the inexcusable [Updated]
As the crushing of Gaza’s civilian population continues, our historic racism peeks out at us once again with depressing clarity. Innocent civilians living in Sderot have the right to live in peace, goes the refrain, but innocent civilians living in Khan Younis do not—in fact, their deaths are their own fault.
Pardon me if I’m dense, but I just don’t see the difference between slaughtering Palestinian children in a schoolyard and slaughtering Israeli children in a pizza parlor. All the lame excuses about ‘targeting’ are pretty unconvincing. One side puts a bomb under a bus; the other puts them on a rooftop. This is supposed to matter?
Maybe Americans are more comfortable with the latter because it’s been our war-making style for decades from Vietnam through Iraq. So we can see the unashamed racism in Hamas’ rhetoric celebrating the deaths of Israeli civilians while failing to see that Mayor Bloomberg applauding the carnage during his campaign tour there is its full-on moral equivalent, just a tad better disguised. What a sad, pathetic spectacle just as we are about to pat ourselves on the back in two weeks for abolishing Jim Crow.
[Update] Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur, reports that 50 percent of Gazan children under 12 have been found to have no will to live. Whose fault is that? Their parents’?
Ladies on the Hill
It didn’t take long to be reminded that when it comes to scraping the bottom of the moral barrel, congressional Democrats do just as well as their counterparts on the Republican side although more as undisciplined free-lancers than in lockstep.
Thus Obama’s first clear break with Bush’s appalling misuse of the spy agencies to bamboozle the American people and lead us into crimes against human rights prompts California Senator Dianne Feinstein to rise up and criticize the choice because of CIA-pick Leon Panetta’s supposed ‘lack of experience’ in the intelligence field, which under the circumstances should be an excellent recommendation. By naming Panetta instead of a CIA insider, Obama suggests that no one from within the tainted agency should be rewarded at this time, an idea plenty of his voters would applaud.
But not Feinstein. Leave it to the centrist, ‘moderate’ Democrats to immediately squawk and complain, something they did precious little of when Bush was juicing up phony facts to justify the Iraq conquest and arranging for the torture of hundreds of suspects detained on flimsy charges. Feinstein not only went along with all that, she (and the loathesome Charles Schumer of my state) broke ranks and helped Bush shoehorn our current Attorney General into office, thus assuring continued impunity for all those complicit with the infamous torture memos and the politicizing of the entire Justice Department.
Whereas Republicans could spend six months parsing Clinton’s use of the word ‘is’, these Democratic stalwarts didn’t even bother to insist that Michael Mukasey define ‘torture’ as he sailed through his congressional hearing with their blessing.
It’s hard to imagine a Republican senator daring to defy an incoming president from their own party with a decisive electoral mandate given that outfit’s notoriously vindictive approach to wielding power. But Feinstein—like her equally complicit colleague Jay Rockefeller, also unhappy with Panetta—may be more worried about having excessive light shown on their own cooperation with the crimes of the last decade.
Meanwhile, across the Capitol a woman named Carolyn is showing why she should take the Senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton. No, not the latest celebrity from Eastern Hollywood but Queens/Manhattan Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney who grilled the Inspector General from the useless Securities and Exchange Commission over its monumental failure to do its job. The IG, an annoying pipsqueak who spoke in layers of conditional-tense, say-nothing verbiage, had his only moments of discomfort when Maloney blasted his agency for standing by while her constituents were bilked and New York’s financial industry driven into the ground as a laughingstock.
The SEC should be in receivership by now after failing to uncover a decades-old Ponzi scheme at the heart of Wall Street, not permitted to engage in chin-stroking discussions about how it plans to investigate itself. Maloney was the only Member I saw take part in the hearing who came close to the outrage that the Madoff debacle merits. That’s what we need in the Senate, not more photo-ops.
Thus Obama’s first clear break with Bush’s appalling misuse of the spy agencies to bamboozle the American people and lead us into crimes against human rights prompts California Senator Dianne Feinstein to rise up and criticize the choice because of CIA-pick Leon Panetta’s supposed ‘lack of experience’ in the intelligence field, which under the circumstances should be an excellent recommendation. By naming Panetta instead of a CIA insider, Obama suggests that no one from within the tainted agency should be rewarded at this time, an idea plenty of his voters would applaud.
But not Feinstein. Leave it to the centrist, ‘moderate’ Democrats to immediately squawk and complain, something they did precious little of when Bush was juicing up phony facts to justify the Iraq conquest and arranging for the torture of hundreds of suspects detained on flimsy charges. Feinstein not only went along with all that, she (and the loathesome Charles Schumer of my state) broke ranks and helped Bush shoehorn our current Attorney General into office, thus assuring continued impunity for all those complicit with the infamous torture memos and the politicizing of the entire Justice Department.
Whereas Republicans could spend six months parsing Clinton’s use of the word ‘is’, these Democratic stalwarts didn’t even bother to insist that Michael Mukasey define ‘torture’ as he sailed through his congressional hearing with their blessing.
It’s hard to imagine a Republican senator daring to defy an incoming president from their own party with a decisive electoral mandate given that outfit’s notoriously vindictive approach to wielding power. But Feinstein—like her equally complicit colleague Jay Rockefeller, also unhappy with Panetta—may be more worried about having excessive light shown on their own cooperation with the crimes of the last decade.
Meanwhile, across the Capitol a woman named Carolyn is showing why she should take the Senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton. No, not the latest celebrity from Eastern Hollywood but Queens/Manhattan Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney who grilled the Inspector General from the useless Securities and Exchange Commission over its monumental failure to do its job. The IG, an annoying pipsqueak who spoke in layers of conditional-tense, say-nothing verbiage, had his only moments of discomfort when Maloney blasted his agency for standing by while her constituents were bilked and New York’s financial industry driven into the ground as a laughingstock.
The SEC should be in receivership by now after failing to uncover a decades-old Ponzi scheme at the heart of Wall Street, not permitted to engage in chin-stroking discussions about how it plans to investigate itself. Maloney was the only Member I saw take part in the hearing who came close to the outrage that the Madoff debacle merits. That’s what we need in the Senate, not more photo-ops.
Sunday, 4 January 2009
Destroy and revive?
A Muslim temple in downtown Washington hosted a seminar years ago on anti-Semitism and Israel, which was not the knee-jerk trashing of the zionist bad-guys some of expected. Middle Eastern scholars and diplomats were invited (excluding Israelis) to reflect on the long history of the conflict and its nutrients.
Surprisingly, speakers identified anti-Semitism itself as one of the culprits for the decades of war and slaughter because, the Gulf Muslims and Christian Palestinians said, that long history and any modern flowering of anti-Jewish racism fed Israel’s determination to remain an apartheid state. Every act of anti-Semitic violence reminded the world of centuries of oppression and reinforced the raison d’etre of the zionist project.
One questioner asked what, given this logic, were the Palestinian movements and Arab governments in the region doing to combat anti-Semitism, and the replies were most unsatisfactory. Three decades later the public face of Israel’s adversaries remain the most backward of the bunch from Bashir al-Assad to the Hizbollah gunners, whose anti-Semitic chants only fuel the fires of Israeli victimhood and provide excellent cover for the continued land grab that exacerbates the endless conflict.
It is therefore curiously consistent although counterintuitive to hear that the current offensive in Gaza, as some commentators argue, will strengthen Hamas, whose support has been slipping badly in the last two years. After diplomatic errors and an erosion of internal democracy, the Hamas-led Gaza government was taking a lot of blame. Now, with the chance to appear as heroic resisters and martyrs, the religious fundamentalist movement may be physically decimated but at the same time politically revived.
A cynic might conclude that this outcome will not particularly disturb the Israeli leadership. As long as permanent warfare against homicidal enemies continues, Israel can continue to consolidate its control over newly seized lands and crush any Palestinian infrastructure or institutions, thus further delaying any formation of a rival state. Hamas—which the Israelis once encouraged as a religious thorn in the side of Arafat’s hated, secular PLO—remains a perfect foil for the zionist project, the face of a thousand-year blood feud that most of the Israeli public apparently believes is eternal, built into the DNA of deluded goyim.
All of which makes me recall that Barack Obama is coming into office with a pledge to bring Republicans and Democrats back together. That’ll be a snap compared to finding sane interlocutors on either side of this tragedy.
Surprisingly, speakers identified anti-Semitism itself as one of the culprits for the decades of war and slaughter because, the Gulf Muslims and Christian Palestinians said, that long history and any modern flowering of anti-Jewish racism fed Israel’s determination to remain an apartheid state. Every act of anti-Semitic violence reminded the world of centuries of oppression and reinforced the raison d’etre of the zionist project.
One questioner asked what, given this logic, were the Palestinian movements and Arab governments in the region doing to combat anti-Semitism, and the replies were most unsatisfactory. Three decades later the public face of Israel’s adversaries remain the most backward of the bunch from Bashir al-Assad to the Hizbollah gunners, whose anti-Semitic chants only fuel the fires of Israeli victimhood and provide excellent cover for the continued land grab that exacerbates the endless conflict.
It is therefore curiously consistent although counterintuitive to hear that the current offensive in Gaza, as some commentators argue, will strengthen Hamas, whose support has been slipping badly in the last two years. After diplomatic errors and an erosion of internal democracy, the Hamas-led Gaza government was taking a lot of blame. Now, with the chance to appear as heroic resisters and martyrs, the religious fundamentalist movement may be physically decimated but at the same time politically revived.
A cynic might conclude that this outcome will not particularly disturb the Israeli leadership. As long as permanent warfare against homicidal enemies continues, Israel can continue to consolidate its control over newly seized lands and crush any Palestinian infrastructure or institutions, thus further delaying any formation of a rival state. Hamas—which the Israelis once encouraged as a religious thorn in the side of Arafat’s hated, secular PLO—remains a perfect foil for the zionist project, the face of a thousand-year blood feud that most of the Israeli public apparently believes is eternal, built into the DNA of deluded goyim.
All of which makes me recall that Barack Obama is coming into office with a pledge to bring Republicans and Democrats back together. That’ll be a snap compared to finding sane interlocutors on either side of this tragedy.
Saturday, 3 January 2009
2009: Hope or Illusion?
I resisted emitting a sonorous year-end review or set of predictions for fear of bloviating, but now that we’re a few days into January and almost ready to (shudder) go back to work, I feel the need to take stock in a summary, if whimsical, way. Where are we, where are we going, what does it all mean for my chances and yours at health and happiness, a bit of enjoyment, a flash of satisfaction, protection in sickness, safety in old age?
Both the person of Barack Obama and the event of his election obviously mark the transition from 2008 to 2009, and it remains to be seen if it will mark a larger historical transformation as well. Let’s hope so. Biped mean-spiritedness and egotism have reached heretofore unknown heights in these last decades, and as always the seeds of destruction of the Reagan-Bush-Falwell-Rove regime grew from within itself.
It must come as quite a shock to the hordes of church-going faithful—especially the women—that their loyalty to an ideology of Christian altruism and self-abnegation helped feed a giant maw of incompetence, corruption, conquest and disdain for the weak. They must be a little uneasy at the results of George Bush’s steady reliance on mystical communication with God as a guide for public policy upon viewing the ruins of New Orleans and Baghdad, not to mention the Arctic ice sheet. Obama’s courtship of Rick Warren looks like an attempt to give them new wine to put into those old skins, and if Obama manages to peel a few believers away from their exclusive fascination with the genital doings of us bipeds toward concern for the rest of the body as well, the possibilities for change will be enormous. Like it or not, a whole lot of people view the world through the prism of religious belief.
The other burning issue is, as usual, war and war-making, which marks us as a nation and pretty much always has. We are always refighting the last war or getting ready for the next one; our generals speak for us and lead us; veterans dictate the shape and tenor of patriotism and loyalty. Defeat in Vietnam weakened the militarists, but they were assiduous and patient and restored their monopoly on public discourse culminating in the destruction of John Kerry’s candidacy in 2004 as an aging hippie flag-burner.
I think Obama will represent a huge shift away from the adolescent male posturing of the neocons to a more female style of decision-making whose impact may be too subtle to notice at first. Obama is the product of a matriarchal system, was raised by women and goes home to a female household. He has a woman’s toughness, a non-confrontational style that is less concerned with ‘winning’ than with drawing strict boundaries and enforcing them. The geopolitical game is about scoring points, but Bush has shown us the limits of bullying as a strategy as did John McCain. Obama’s campaign generally avoided it, and he still won.
The other development related to warfare that I anticipate is largely out of Obama’s hands, which is the slow but inexorable confrontation with our national decision to commit torture and abuse of prisoners that occurred under Republican orders with Democratic complicity in a line running from Dick Cheney and John Yoo through Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller all the way to John and Jane Q. Public. We felt threatened; we wanted revenge; we got it. Now come the consequences both for our consciences and ourselves.
Torture is a funny thing: it doesn’t go away after the fact. ‘Once tortured, always tortured,’ said a victim from the French resistance in World War II, and that goes for countries, too. No matter what deals are cut to brush the happenings at Guantánamo and Bagram under the rug, no matter how many whitewash commissions sign off on the secret prisons and the rendition to Egyptian and Syrian dungeons, the torture issue will come back to haunt all its perpetrators and abettors even if the bodies have long since been dumped at sea.
Obama will have a lot to say about whether we get our civil liberties back, and his record so far is not encouraging given his buckling on telecom immunity. (He caught hell for it, too, and seemed surprised at how many of us noticed.) But even he can’t stop the putrifaction that arises from the body politic when it commits these crimes, and the foul ooze will bubble forth willy-nilly.
Gazing into the crystal ball on the economic and domestic policy front is much trickier, but I anxiously hope that the proposals are as Rooseveltian and audacious as some suggest, not just the infrastructure spending plans but also radical surgery on our moribund health systems at long last. While most everything else can advance through the usual process, health care reform needs swift action based on Obama’s electoral mandate. Otherwise, the reactive interest groups like doctors, insurance companies and pharmaceuticals will certainly mobilize to keep us enslaved to their profits.
In short, I have high hopes in Obama while not shedding my illusions about the essential contrariness and self-sabotaging instincts of the biped race as a whole. But for some strange reason the country has produced this remarkable guy and decided to take a chance on him. He reflects the times just as Clinton and Bush did, which tells us a lot about those egocentric and self-indulgent years. I want to trust Obama because he is not only smarter than I am but because he may actually have embarked on this crazy mission primarily to get something decent done.
Both the person of Barack Obama and the event of his election obviously mark the transition from 2008 to 2009, and it remains to be seen if it will mark a larger historical transformation as well. Let’s hope so. Biped mean-spiritedness and egotism have reached heretofore unknown heights in these last decades, and as always the seeds of destruction of the Reagan-Bush-Falwell-Rove regime grew from within itself.
It must come as quite a shock to the hordes of church-going faithful—especially the women—that their loyalty to an ideology of Christian altruism and self-abnegation helped feed a giant maw of incompetence, corruption, conquest and disdain for the weak. They must be a little uneasy at the results of George Bush’s steady reliance on mystical communication with God as a guide for public policy upon viewing the ruins of New Orleans and Baghdad, not to mention the Arctic ice sheet. Obama’s courtship of Rick Warren looks like an attempt to give them new wine to put into those old skins, and if Obama manages to peel a few believers away from their exclusive fascination with the genital doings of us bipeds toward concern for the rest of the body as well, the possibilities for change will be enormous. Like it or not, a whole lot of people view the world through the prism of religious belief.
The other burning issue is, as usual, war and war-making, which marks us as a nation and pretty much always has. We are always refighting the last war or getting ready for the next one; our generals speak for us and lead us; veterans dictate the shape and tenor of patriotism and loyalty. Defeat in Vietnam weakened the militarists, but they were assiduous and patient and restored their monopoly on public discourse culminating in the destruction of John Kerry’s candidacy in 2004 as an aging hippie flag-burner.
I think Obama will represent a huge shift away from the adolescent male posturing of the neocons to a more female style of decision-making whose impact may be too subtle to notice at first. Obama is the product of a matriarchal system, was raised by women and goes home to a female household. He has a woman’s toughness, a non-confrontational style that is less concerned with ‘winning’ than with drawing strict boundaries and enforcing them. The geopolitical game is about scoring points, but Bush has shown us the limits of bullying as a strategy as did John McCain. Obama’s campaign generally avoided it, and he still won.
The other development related to warfare that I anticipate is largely out of Obama’s hands, which is the slow but inexorable confrontation with our national decision to commit torture and abuse of prisoners that occurred under Republican orders with Democratic complicity in a line running from Dick Cheney and John Yoo through Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller all the way to John and Jane Q. Public. We felt threatened; we wanted revenge; we got it. Now come the consequences both for our consciences and ourselves.
Torture is a funny thing: it doesn’t go away after the fact. ‘Once tortured, always tortured,’ said a victim from the French resistance in World War II, and that goes for countries, too. No matter what deals are cut to brush the happenings at Guantánamo and Bagram under the rug, no matter how many whitewash commissions sign off on the secret prisons and the rendition to Egyptian and Syrian dungeons, the torture issue will come back to haunt all its perpetrators and abettors even if the bodies have long since been dumped at sea.
Obama will have a lot to say about whether we get our civil liberties back, and his record so far is not encouraging given his buckling on telecom immunity. (He caught hell for it, too, and seemed surprised at how many of us noticed.) But even he can’t stop the putrifaction that arises from the body politic when it commits these crimes, and the foul ooze will bubble forth willy-nilly.
Gazing into the crystal ball on the economic and domestic policy front is much trickier, but I anxiously hope that the proposals are as Rooseveltian and audacious as some suggest, not just the infrastructure spending plans but also radical surgery on our moribund health systems at long last. While most everything else can advance through the usual process, health care reform needs swift action based on Obama’s electoral mandate. Otherwise, the reactive interest groups like doctors, insurance companies and pharmaceuticals will certainly mobilize to keep us enslaved to their profits.
In short, I have high hopes in Obama while not shedding my illusions about the essential contrariness and self-sabotaging instincts of the biped race as a whole. But for some strange reason the country has produced this remarkable guy and decided to take a chance on him. He reflects the times just as Clinton and Bush did, which tells us a lot about those egocentric and self-indulgent years. I want to trust Obama because he is not only smarter than I am but because he may actually have embarked on this crazy mission primarily to get something decent done.
Friday, 2 January 2009
I said/I said
When describing warfare in the Middle East, the careful accusation-and-denial trope used in standard American journalism goes out the window.
Take yesterday’s flattening of the residence of a Hamas principal in Gaza. Both the New York Times and AP stories read like Israeli army communiqués without the benefit of the otherwise essential ‘balancing’ clarification or disputation. The death of Nizar Rayyan’s four wives and ten children, which sounds a little extreme at first, is fully explained (away?) by paragraphs such as these:
‘The military said he had helped plan a deadly suicide bombing in Israel in 2004, had sent his own son on a suicide mission against Jewish settlers in Gaza in 2001 and was advocating renewed suicide missions against Israel in retaliation for the current offensive. His funeral was planned for Friday.’ (Times online version)
We also learn that the Israelis think Rayyan’s house probably was used to store bomb components and that the attackers carefully warned everyone beforehand. So let’s see, air raid sirens, bombs in the basement, guilty children. . . I guess we are to conclude that everyone who lived there pretty much deserved to die, grandma included.
In any case, we don’t have to consider any alternative viewpoints because none are given. There isn’t even the typical vox populi quotation from someone wandering through the rubble-strewn streets. No, no, the voice of the Israeli Defense Force is the one we need to hear.
It’s significant that no coherent elaboration of the attitudes and arguments of the half-million people trapped inside the 15 square miles of Gaza City is allowed to filter onto the pages of our main news sources. Even Bernie Madoff’s lawyer soon will be duly given a chance to spin away daily in the news items about that scumbag’s antics. Everyone gets equal time—except dead Gazans.
Take yesterday’s flattening of the residence of a Hamas principal in Gaza. Both the New York Times and AP stories read like Israeli army communiqués without the benefit of the otherwise essential ‘balancing’ clarification or disputation. The death of Nizar Rayyan’s four wives and ten children, which sounds a little extreme at first, is fully explained (away?) by paragraphs such as these:
‘The military said he had helped plan a deadly suicide bombing in Israel in 2004, had sent his own son on a suicide mission against Jewish settlers in Gaza in 2001 and was advocating renewed suicide missions against Israel in retaliation for the current offensive. His funeral was planned for Friday.’ (Times online version)
We also learn that the Israelis think Rayyan’s house probably was used to store bomb components and that the attackers carefully warned everyone beforehand. So let’s see, air raid sirens, bombs in the basement, guilty children. . . I guess we are to conclude that everyone who lived there pretty much deserved to die, grandma included.
In any case, we don’t have to consider any alternative viewpoints because none are given. There isn’t even the typical vox populi quotation from someone wandering through the rubble-strewn streets. No, no, the voice of the Israeli Defense Force is the one we need to hear.
It’s significant that no coherent elaboration of the attitudes and arguments of the half-million people trapped inside the 15 square miles of Gaza City is allowed to filter onto the pages of our main news sources. Even Bernie Madoff’s lawyer soon will be duly given a chance to spin away daily in the news items about that scumbag’s antics. Everyone gets equal time—except dead Gazans.
Thursday, 1 January 2009
Debate within Israel
Israeli author Avraham Burg’s 2007 book is now out in English as, ‘The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from Its Ashes’, a title no American writer would have dared utilize for fear of having his work consigned to the neo-Nazi bins. Burg was once speaker of the Israeli Knesset and is an old figure on the Israeli political scene although that doesn’t save him from being accused by the Israeli right of being virtually a Nazi himself, the usual label for any critic.
I haven’t seen anything from Burg on the latest Israeli actions—such as today’s news of the IDF’s success in ‘precision targeting’ and killing a top Hamas official, plus four of his ‘collateral damage’ children. But if I can extrapolate from Burg’s somewhat meandering, memoir-filled book, which I read last week, he would view the attack on Gaza as merely another manifestation of Israel’s psychological enslavement to the Shoah.
Burg compares Israel to an abused child who becomes a violent parent. He laments that rather than tap into the humanistic and egalitarian Judaic traditions, Israel has retreated into permanent victimhood accompanied by a comfortable, Weimar-like exclusion of Israeli Arabs from any significant role in the country’s life (mirroring historic European anti-Semitism) while ignoring the ominous growth of a dangerous ultra-nationalist faction. He proposes overtures toward eventual EU membership for Israel and a Palestinian state, which he thinks would dangle an important set of possible rewards in front of both intransigent leaderships.
Whether or not Burg’s analysis makes sense, it does address one peculiar aspect of the Gaza assault: why Israel continues to repeat failed tactics with the expectation of obtaining a different outcome. After all, the first invasion of Lebanon nearly 30 years ago was supposed to end Palestinian attacks, but it didn’t, and the periodic repetitions of these military campaigns bring nothing but temporary lulls.
Burg’s account explains this apparent irrationality as the result of the overwhelming influence of trauma-induced ideology in which the outcome of the Gaza or other battles is less important than the psychological balm provided by the act of striking out at the enemy.
We can easily recognize this in ourselves as the Bush cabal drummed up support for the Iraq invasion as therapy for our own 9/11 trauma. Whether the Iraqis had anything to do with the Twin Towers or not was perfectly irrelevant then and, to a large extent, now. We were bound and determined to ‘show ‘em’, whoever ‘em’ might turn out to be.
There’s a disturbing extension to this thinking, however, that Burg dances gingerly around. Violent assaults on Israel from within Gaza and elsewhere won’t be eliminated with the usual tactics, devastating though they are, UNLESS the slaughter is much more thorough. Although Burg specifically doesn’t equate current Israeli tactics with fascist antecedents, he clearly sees the possibility that the country will evolve in that direction.
If that were to happen, he would be among its first victims.
I haven’t seen anything from Burg on the latest Israeli actions—such as today’s news of the IDF’s success in ‘precision targeting’ and killing a top Hamas official, plus four of his ‘collateral damage’ children. But if I can extrapolate from Burg’s somewhat meandering, memoir-filled book, which I read last week, he would view the attack on Gaza as merely another manifestation of Israel’s psychological enslavement to the Shoah.
Burg compares Israel to an abused child who becomes a violent parent. He laments that rather than tap into the humanistic and egalitarian Judaic traditions, Israel has retreated into permanent victimhood accompanied by a comfortable, Weimar-like exclusion of Israeli Arabs from any significant role in the country’s life (mirroring historic European anti-Semitism) while ignoring the ominous growth of a dangerous ultra-nationalist faction. He proposes overtures toward eventual EU membership for Israel and a Palestinian state, which he thinks would dangle an important set of possible rewards in front of both intransigent leaderships.
Whether or not Burg’s analysis makes sense, it does address one peculiar aspect of the Gaza assault: why Israel continues to repeat failed tactics with the expectation of obtaining a different outcome. After all, the first invasion of Lebanon nearly 30 years ago was supposed to end Palestinian attacks, but it didn’t, and the periodic repetitions of these military campaigns bring nothing but temporary lulls.
Burg’s account explains this apparent irrationality as the result of the overwhelming influence of trauma-induced ideology in which the outcome of the Gaza or other battles is less important than the psychological balm provided by the act of striking out at the enemy.
We can easily recognize this in ourselves as the Bush cabal drummed up support for the Iraq invasion as therapy for our own 9/11 trauma. Whether the Iraqis had anything to do with the Twin Towers or not was perfectly irrelevant then and, to a large extent, now. We were bound and determined to ‘show ‘em’, whoever ‘em’ might turn out to be.
There’s a disturbing extension to this thinking, however, that Burg dances gingerly around. Violent assaults on Israel from within Gaza and elsewhere won’t be eliminated with the usual tactics, devastating though they are, UNLESS the slaughter is much more thorough. Although Burg specifically doesn’t equate current Israeli tactics with fascist antecedents, he clearly sees the possibility that the country will evolve in that direction.
If that were to happen, he would be among its first victims.
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