In Mirror for man: The relationship of anthropology to modern life (New York: Macmillan, 1949), Harvard anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn articulated what was a virtual “mission statement” for anthropology in the modern world:
“Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today: how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together?” (p. 1)
How can they remains a crucial question that ought to engage us all as anthropologists, and an anthropology committed to humanity cannot but be staggered by the inhumanity witnessed by something like today’s (Tuesday’s) Israeli massacre of 43 civilian refugees at a U.N. school in Jabaliya, Gaza, the third time that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have attacked a school in the Gaza strip during its ground invasion, where schools now house upwards of 15,000 civilian refugees who have nowhere to hide in the crowded ghetto that is Gaza. And let us be clear about this, this was no “accident” by an army that boasts of precision, of surgical strikes, that was given the precise GPS coordinates to the school by United Nations workers. Nor is it the only time that Israel has struck a U.N. edifice, knowingly and deliberately, as it did in southern Lebanon in 2006 when it killed four U.N. peacekeepers. Moreover, today’s attack was carried out by a tank — that is rather “up close and personal,” and there is no claim from Israel that its forces somehow did not see all the civilians at the school. The claim is that Israel was targeting Hamas operatives, and we have to assume that at the same time there was a sudden shortage of sniper rifles on the Israeli side which instead chose to use its usual elephantine response for targeting a couple of individuals and wiping out 43. And all of this is if one even believes the IDF that there were Hamas operatives present and engaged in attacking the IDF. The attack was neither surgical, nor did it avoid targeting civilians.
[Update: since this was posted a few hours ago, the IDF has changed its story. Now it claims that Hamas fighters were inside the school, using civilians as human shields…except that no one can corroborate that, and the U.N. has denied it, as reported in today’s TIME. In the meantime, the Israeli blockade against the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza is receiving stern responses even from the likes of CNN.]
This massacre is all that was on my mind Tuesday, thinking the thoughts appearing here even when lecturing on unrelated topics. I was tempted to begin class by saying, “Aren’t we lucky to be in a school that is not being bombed?” I thought that with this massacre, and with much more before it, the Israeli state concedes priceless moral and political territory in its quest to define and defend its expanding physical territory. What I will focus on later is the question of the “right to exist.” I would also encourage the reader to carefully examine the supporting quotes that follow this post.
Today’s massacre was an event, an event that begs the question as to what kinds of assumptions about humanity do the perpetrators of such an attack work with in their own minds. There is an Israeli state “anthropology,” maybe not formally conceived as such, but certainly nonetheless a perspective on the condition(s) of humanity, on who is human, what is human behaviour, and what kinds of rights are to be enjoyed by what kinds of humans. I want to address those, often unspoken, anthropological assumptions of the Israeli state, and I will do so pending three personal caveats:
- That objectivity is not neutrality, despite the popular confusions of the two by individuals who do not know better. A good therapist listens quietly, assessing facts external to his/her mind, the objective facts of the condition of the patient. Presumably there is some objectivity in the listening, but from that objectivity neutrality is definitely not the result. A prescribed action is the result — the therapist takes a committed stance, and comes down on one side. A neutral therapist would either prescribe nothing at all, and thus be utterly useless, or prescribe everything imaginable, just to be neutral, and would be harmful to the point of lethality. I do not mention subjectivity, which is not to malign subjectivity since it is a fundamental, necessary, and inevitable part of the thought process behind the very identification of something as a “problem” to be researched. Subjectivity is also what “gave” the person who became a therapist the values and personal beliefs that were a prerequisite for him or her to one day decide, “I want to become a therapist.” We begin with subjectivity, and we build on it, but what we should not do is to naively abjure it as if it were a stain on a pristine white lab coat.
- That an assessment of the conflict between Hamas and the Israeli state must be balanced, but only if the forces and actions in question are of equal weight. I do not know how many readers have seen scales, and tried to find a balance, but if you have then you know that for there to be balance the two sides of the scale must hold objects of identical weight. Does that apply here? Does it apply when one side fires homemade rockets and the other side has an army, navy, and air force that can demolish entire neighbourhoods? Does it apply when four civilians are killed on one side, while over 100 are killed on the other? Does it apply when one side is an independent state backed by the financial and military resources of the world’s leading superpower, and the other side relies on smuggling basic goods and crude arms through tunnels? Does balance apply when one side has captured the lion’s share of the land that previously belonged to the other side, and that other side is now confined to a subordinate ghetto that is the size of a postage stamp? Do we have balance when only one of the two sides can shut down power, water, and food supplies that the other side depends upon to merely survive? Anyone looking at the Israeli attacks against the people of Gaza who can then walk away with a “balanced” statement is necessarily unbalanced as an analyst, as a person.
- That I am not unfairly picking on the Israeli state alone, when land expropriations and the dispossession of native peoples is the very same reality of the nation-state that governs over me. To back up that claim, anyone can verify it by seeing my previous posts that liken the very conceptualization of a “Canada” to a hate crime, that cite “Canada” as an invasion phenomena, and that barely mask my belief that the Canadian state ought to be ruptured and dissolved (see here, here, here, here, and here, ). Now, what would have been truly surprising is if I had not adopted similar principles when speaking of Israel.
Anthropology teaches us not to naturalize any human construction, and to recognize the arbitrariness of culture, not to mention the arbitrariness of power. Political Anthropology invites us to recognize that the state is the most violent of all arbitrary institutions in human history, that all states on earth owe their existence to massive and bloody assaults, and continue to preserve and promote themselves through violence against the peoples governed by other states. To say that Israelis have biological bodies ought not to naturalize the state of Israel — the state is not the individual writ large, nor is every body the state, except in truly fascist, nationalistic ideologies. To say that those human bodies have a right to life should not mean that the state that governs those bodies enjoys the same right. States make their own rights, they announce their own rights, and they establish those rights for themselves through might.
There is no balance in question here — what we see is a tacit endorsement by the Israeli and American states, and many other Western states and their media, of an observation that has been attributed to Josef Stalin: “When one dies, it is a tragedy. When a million die, it is a statistic” (some argue that this really comes from the novel Der schwarze Obelisk by Erich Maria Remarque (1956): “Aber das ist wohl so, weil ein einzelner immer der Tod ist — und zwei Millionen immer nur eine Statistik“). The Israeli state pleads that we count the value of the lives of Israelis over all others, at many times the value. The United Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that of all the deaths due to violence between Israelis and Palestinians from September 2000 to July 2007, 4,228 have been Palestinians, and 1,024 were Israelis. More than four times as many Palestinians were killed. Of the overall number of children killed, 88% were Palestinian, and 12% were Israeli. In the current Israeli attacks on Gaza, Al Jazeera has been keeping a toll which at this moment reads: “590 Palestinians killed…and 9 Israelis killed.” In terms of the rocket attacks that Israel claims as a provocation, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has kept its own tally, and for the purposes of comparison using available numbers, while the MFA says that in 2006 there was a drastic increase in the number of rockets fired at Israel (946 in total), the OCHA reports that for the same year, 2006, 14,000 Israeli artillery shells were fired into Gaza. Yet when it comes to media coverage of deaths, one study calculated that “ABC, CBS, and NBC reported Israeli deaths at rates 3.1, 3.8, and 4.0 times higher than Palestinian deaths, respectively,” even worse in the case of deaths of children from conflict, where Palestinian children died at 22 times the Israeli rate and yet “deaths of Israeli children [were] covered at rates 9.0, 12.8, and 9.9 times greater than the deaths of Palestinian children by ABC, CBS, and NBC, respectively.” When the Israeli propaganda machine, and U.S. mainstream media, monopolize “tragedy” under an Israeli banner, they endorse Stalin’s alleged statement. Palestinian deaths are a statistic, an underreported one at that. That is appropriate for a monster regime.
“Might makes right” is possibly one of the most brilliant popular sayings we have. Might thinks itself right, when it succeeds; but when might meets counter-might, as it does in Gaza, Iraq, and Afghanistan, then might goes insane. Israel has no moral right to exist as a state, and in this world, history has seen many states come and many go. If I say this about Israel, I say it about all states. What Israel does have is the might to exist — and all might is temporary and conditioned by contextual factors outside of the control of the given state. To borrow one of Hugo Chavez’s favourite phrases, por ahora.
Israel is trying to write its own political anthropology, but it does not stop there. It is “writing” its own general anthropology as well. Examine the assumptions, both unspoken, and spoken (and see the quotes at the end).
What does the Israeli state assume about the humanity of Palestinians when it expects them to succumb to force and accept the right of Israeli might? It assumes that Palestinians, unlike Jews, unlike human beings, have no memory, no capacity for remembering, and no capacity for emotion either. The Palestinians, presumably, will merely bury their dead, forget about it all, and move on.
What does the Israeli state assume about the humanity of Palestinians when it demands that they surrender, that they cease to respond to forcible Israeli expropriations of their lands, barring Palestinian refugees from returning to their lands while establishing a “Law of Return” so that anyone from New York to Kiev can assume possession of a land they have never been to but to which they claim a relationship as eternal natives? In assuming that Palestinians will cease to respond, they assume the humanly impossible. And in assuming the humanly impossible, the Israeli state furnishes itself with a pretext for genocide — the killing of Palestinians can never stop, because their response to such killings will never stop.
What does the Israeli state assume about the intelligence and emotional makeup of Palestinians when it suggests that suffering incurred by Palestinian civilians ought to turn them against their Hamas leadership, that they should blame Hamas for their suffering? It assumes that victims of a bombing will blame a fellow target, not the bomber. Why, do Israelis react that way to rocket attacks? Do Israelis say, “it’s the fault of the other settlers, they deserved to die, the Palestinians were right to fire at us”? In fact, where has the assumption that punishing civilians turns them against their leaders ever worked? And indeed it is a tested assumption, tested against North Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Iraq. Nowhere did the people targeted show themselves as any less human than the attackers.
What the Israeli state implicitly assumes, to the extent that it takes its own propositions seriously, is that Palestinian life matters less, is of less value, and the only way it can be of less value is if one sees Palestinians as less human. Israeli identity is thus assumed to be better, more deserving of rights and privileges, with an exclusive emphasis on Israeli suffering.
Meanwhile, the humanity of the Palestinians is denied, and it is in this context of its creation that the Israeli state expects its “right” to exist to be accepted? Of course all anthropologists should be feeling their stomachs turn, that is, if they see their discipline as being anything like a science in service of humanity.
* I would like to thank my colleagues, Lorenz Khazaleh at antropologi.info (see his post on “Anthropologists on the War on Gaza“) and “Pamthropologist” at Teaching Anthropology (see her post, “Gaza: A Frightening Anthropological Analogy“), for inspiring me to continue writing on this subject. In return, I hope they continue to keep up their own great work.
••• ••• ••• ••• ••• •••
SUPPORTING QUOTES:
On using massive firepower and knowingly accounting for high Palestinian civilian losses, to reduce Israeli military losses and maintain high Israeli public morale, see:
ANALYSIS / Using aggressive tactics in Gaza to save soldiers’ lives
By Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff
HAARETZ
January 7, 2009
Senior officers admit that the IDF has been using enormous firepower.
“For us, being cautious means being aggressive,” explained one. “From the minute we entered, we’ve acted like we’re at war. That creates enormous damage on the ground … I just hope those who have fled the area of Gaza City in which we are operating will describe the shock. Maybe someone there will sober up before it continues.”
What the officer did not say explicitly was that this is deliberate policy. Following the trauma of the war in Lebanon in 2006, the army realized that heavy IDF casualties would erode public (and especially political) support for the war and limit its ability to achieve its goals. Therefore, it is using aggressive tactics to save soldiers’ lives. And the cabinet took this into account when it approved the ground operation last Friday, so it has no reason to change its mind now.
••• •••
On Israeli public opinion, see:
Poll: Most Israelis support continuing Gaza military op
By Yossi Verter, Haaretz Correspondent, and Haaretz Service
January 1, 2009
“…just 19 percent say the Israel Defense Forces should launch an extensive ground incursion.”
“In contrast, 19 percent of respondents say the government should negotiate a cease-fire as soon as possible.”
••• •••
On the lack of balance:
Pitfalls that Opponents of Israeli Attack Must Avoid
by Titus North / January 5th, 2009
DISSIDENT VOICE
“…we need to be careful to avoid two pitfalls while we criticize Israeli policy: the first being the blaming of both sides for the violence and the second being the vilification of Hamas.”
“In referring to the ongoing crisis, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said ‘Let me be clear. I condemn unequivocally and in the strongest possible terms the ongoing rocket and mortar attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian militants. But I also condemn the excessive use of force by Israel.’ What’s wrong with this statement? First let’s look at the content. Obviously, the condemnation of Hamas was unequivocal and in the strongest possible terms, where as the condemnation of Israel included no such emphasis. Also, the Hamas rockets were labeled ‘attacks’ whereas the Israeli bombs (where were not specifically mentions) were simply referred to as ‘use of force.’ More importantly, Ban only condemned the ‘excessive’ use of force by Israel, thus implicitly legitimizing violence by Israel up until the point it become ‘excessive,’ which of course is a subjective call.”
••• •••
On previous recognition of the fact that Israel itself broke the ceasefire with Hamas:
UNRWA chief: Gaza on brink of humanitarian catastrophe
By Reuters
November 21, 2008
carried by HAARETZ
“Israel closed the crossings after Palestinian militants responded with daily rocket salvoes to an Israeli army incursion on Nov. 4 into the Hamas-run territory, where a five-month-old, Egyptian-brokered ceasefire had largely been holding.”
Update: this point was also made forcefully on CNN, which is no friend of the Palestinian cause:
••• •••
On the “right to exist” in light of breaches of international law and ethnic cleansing:
Silence is Complicity: We’re All War Criminals Now
by Joe Mowrey / January 5th, 2009
DISSIDENT VOICE
“…Israel has refused to abide by UN resolution 194 which guarantees Palestinians the right of return to or compensation for lands taken from them during the war in 1947-48. As a result of that war and the 1967 war Israel expanded well beyond the borders allotted to it by the original partition of Palestine and has been in violation of the Geneva Conventions as well as the terms of the original United Nations partition plan since its inception.”
“The widely accepted and vociferous contention that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself,’ is a bizarre transposition of the rule of law. It is like saying the family that occupied your home has a right to defend itself from your actions to remove them. Israel does not have any right under international law to ‘defend’ its ethnic cleansing and illegal occupation of Palestine. The attack on Gaza, and indeed, any Israeli action taken against Palestinian resistance, whether that resistance be violent or nonviolent, is not an act of self defense. It is an act of aggression against a legitimate resistance movement. Israel is not defending itself, it is defending its illegal colonization of Palestinian lands.”
••• •••
On collective punishment, on Palestinian memory, on the assault on humanity:
Palestinians Will Never Forget
by Susan Abulhawa / January 6th, 2009
DISSIDENT VOICE
“Many have compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to Apartheid South Africa. But not in their cruelest hour did the Apartheid regime wreak such wanton murder and destruction. Let us stop mincing words. What is happening to Palestinians now whispers of Warsaw and Lodz.”
“Schools, universities, mosques, police stations, homes, water treatment plants, factories, and anything that supports civil society, including the only mental health clinic in Gaza, have been blown to rubble from planes that rain death from clear skies without any resistance, because Palestinians have no opposing air force. Nor do they have an army or navy. No mechanized armor or heavy weaponry. Thanks to Israel, they haven’t even had continuous electricity or fuel for the past two years. Or food and medicine. Israel’s siege and blockade of Gaza has prevented the movement of people and goods in and out of Gaza, including the import of the most basic goods necessary for survival.”
A recent study by the Red Cross showed that 46 percent of Gazan children suffer from anemia. Malnutrition affects 75 percent of Gaza’s population, half of whom are under the age of 17. There has been widespread deafness among children due to Israel’s intentional and frequent sonic booms from low overflights. An alarming number have stunted growth and serious mental disorders due lack of food. The only way they have been able to survive thus far has been due to the tunnels that smuggle food and goods from Egypt.”
“Half of Gazan children under 12 have lost their ‘will to live.’ Can anyone fathom the kind of oppression that leads small children en mass to lose their will to live?”
“This is what Israel has done to Gaza over the past two years. They ghettoized Gaza and turned it into an open air prison – a concentration camp of civilians with no way to earn a living, no way to defend themselves and no place to run from the slaughter bombarding them from air, land, and sea….”
••• •••
From Moshe Dayan (1915-1981), former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, former Minister of Defense, former Minister of Foreign Affairs for Israel:
Fixing a high price for Israeli blood:
“It is not in our hands to prevent the murder of workers… and families… but it is in our hands to fix a high price for our blood, so high that the Arab community and the Arab military forces will not be willing to pay it.”
Fixing a high price for Israeli blood and might makes right:
“it was in our power to set high price for our blood, a price too high for the Arab community, the Arab army, or the Arab governments to think it worth paying. . . It was in our power to cause the Arab governments to renounce ‘the policy of strength’ toward Israel by turning it into a demonstration of weakness.”
Occupation to provoke a response, to justify occupation:
“Along the Syria border there were no farms and no refugee camps — there was only the Syrian army… The kibbutzim saw the good agricultural land … and they dreamed about it… They didn’t even try to hide their greed for the land… We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was…The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.”
Palestinians can live like dogs, or leave:
“We have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads.”
Righteous victims defend “their” borders:
“Using the moral yardstick mentioned by [Moshe Sharett], I must ask: Are [we justified] in opening fire on the Arabs who cross [the border] to reap the crops they planted in our territory; they, their women, and their children? Will this stand up to moral scrutiny . . .? We shoot at those from among the 200,000 hungry arabs who cross the line — will this stand up to moral review? Arabs cross to collect the grain that they left in the abandoned villages and we set mines for them and they go back without an arm or a leg. . . [It may be that this] cannot pass review, but I know no other method of guarding the borders. Then tomorrow the State of Israel will have no borders.”
Of course Palestinians should hate Israelis:
“Let us not today fling accusation at the murderers. What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.”
Expansion without end:
“During the last 100 years our people have been in a process of building up the country and the nation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and additional settlements in order to expand the borders here. Let no Jew say that the process has ended. Let no Jew say that we are near the end of the road.”
____
ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Guanaguanare
Max,
Thank you so much for pulling all these threads together and calling us to blow away the fog. I agree with your conclusions but confess that apart from my small protest, I have not had the stomach or maybe the charity to try to assist others by elucidating or contributing a more consistent and earnest plea for justice.
What strikes me always is how much easier it is for me to direct my anger at the ones “responsible” for these man-made crises – world leaders, politicians, who by their scheming interventions or their despicable lack of action and lack of solidarity with the victims, allow the chaos to continue unchecked. I then do my “When will they ever learn?” shrug and turn back to my life. I entertain only briefly the suspicion that I am part of the problem but I guess the numbing factors of distance and my comfortable bed allow me to wash my hands and move on.
The fact remains though that I AM part of the problem because I don’t raise my voice loudly and often enough when injustice is staring me in the face. I leave it to the politicians and leaders and the relatively few marching protesters to find a solution, the same politicians and leaders who I know are incapable of or don’t see any personal/national benefit in finding a fair solution. As long as we continue to distract ourselves and to let them act unquestioned, they are very happy to take advantage of our complicity. It is the biggest cop out ever and it is the game that most of us are quite contented to play.
I’ve been thinking about Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and a particular excerpt that really struck me the first time I read it many years ago:
“You can’t understand. How could you?– with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums–how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammeled feet may take him into by the way of solitude–utter solitude without a policeman– by the way of silence, utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbor can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong–too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil: the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil– I don’t know which. Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place– and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won’t pretend to say. But most of us are neither one nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells too, by Jove!–breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don’t you see? Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in–your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business. And that’s difficult enough.”
I love the entire thing but it’s the subject of “solitude” that jumps out at me as being relevant to this situation…not so much what solitude can bring out in a human being but how we must all help each other to come out of that solitude in one piece (or ONE PEACE) and wiser. I think that on an individual level when we do not consciously address our own solitude and the demons we can encounter there, we do not advance ourselves beyond the passivity or self-delusion that we can fall back on to avoid the truth. Outside of ourselves, we do nothing to aid others in their solitude when we hang back and take refuge in passivity and popular delusions to avoid the truth. Israel and Palestine are so deeply alone now, so locked in the deepest of solitudes. Let us look at the most obvious of signs and that is the fact that foreign journalists are not being allowed into Palestine to report what is really happening. Other news agencies are buying into, for whatever reasons, the delusions that they’ve decided that we want to or should be fed. Israel cannot voice its wants except in the most guttural of tones, the sound of weapons. Palestine cannot voice its pain without a voice to express the anguish of a people who are being systematically displaced, dispossessed and murdered. On both sides, their mouths are opening in their solitude but no sound that can reach us is coming out…and we over here “with solid pavement under [our] feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer [us] or to fall on [us], stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman” we don’t read lips. We didn’t read the Jews’ lips when they were being eliminated by the Nazis and we didn’t read their lips as we chased their shiploads of refugees from our ports. We don’t read the lips of Palestinians continuing to bury their babies with no recourse but to bring many more into the world to continue the struggle.
We are all human beings and Israel cannot be left in its solitude to forget this. We have to tell it that we are seeing its turmoil and that it has gone terribly wrong and that their fear of persecution is self-fulfilling. The Palestinians are human beings and we cannot leave Palestine in its solitude to believe that we have forgotten this. We have to tell it that we are seeing its pain.
Since we cannot write it on the sky or command divine intervention or get our acts together just yet to speak with one voice, all we have for the while and hopefully not for too long a while, are people like you, Max – people who ask, and ask and ask only that the truth be told and that we start doing as we so easily preach.
“…the earth for you is only a standing place” –Heart of Darkness/ Joseph Conrad
Blessings.
Maximilian Forte
As I started to read your extremely sensitive and incisive contribution here, and as usual yours always stand out Guanaguanare, I thought that today I get the good (your commentary) and the bad (some imperialist rant from another commenter that I just finished addressing). What is common to both, understood by you, barely recognized by the other, is something that goes to core of this blog, and that you are helping me to do:
That the mission of a publicly engaged anthropological blog is to teach the powerful, comfortable, and the smug, that THESE other people are also human too. To teach them that they are human. To not treat any sign of difference as mere malady or pathology. That is our contribution.
And this particular situation is especially painful for, as you say, we have people whose history, whose very recent history as well, included the grossest forms of persecution by others, who found no shelter anywhere, treated like vermin, like garbage to be burnt. We have those people inflicting immeasurable pain on others, reducing others to wandering vagrants, stunted in growth, hungry, dirty, without basic services, and they bomb them mercilessly. It’s doubly painful because people who should know better, who should recognize their tormentor in their own actions, act blindly, as if mere technological superiority was the determinant and provider of all that is right, good, true, and beautiful.
The quote by Conrad, not a writer whose politics I would otherwise praise, is just astoundingly relevant here.
Just one last observation: silence may be complicity, but silence may also be just dumbfounded shock.
Thanks again for taking the time you did to visit and to write in depth, it really deserves to be its own post to say the least.
Pingback: Academic Boycott (Israel, Palestine, and Academia) « Green Resistance
Maximilian Forte
Guanaguanare, since I last wrote here, I think I come around more fully to your interpretation. The continued silence about Gaza on a whole range of anthropology blogs, more noticeable among those that publish regularly, is not dumbfounded shock like I imagined might have been possible. It is deliberate, and meant as a statement in itself. And as I reject the massacres, I reject the complicit among us, I find them revolting.
Pingback: Campus Gaza: Academic Boycotts and Complicit Silence « OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY
Maximilian Forte
In place of personal assaults and other juvenilia, perhaps irate readers could consider addressing some questions for a change, in place of the tired tirade of convenient “anti-Semitism” charges (forgetting, as ALWAYS, that Palestinians are included as “Semites”), and the stock recitations of WWII history:
1. Agreed that Jews, among others, suffered terribly during WWII. Why did the Arabs in Palestine have to pay for the sins of Europeans by losing their lands? Is a second persecution the way of making amends for the first? Why would anyone who has suffered persecution abide by such a state of affairs?
2. What does it mean to recognize the “right” of Israel to “exist”? How was that right supposedly achieved and in what is it rooted? What right do the Palestinians have? What does Israel recognize? If Hamas recognized the right of Israel to exist, as a crowded camp centered in and around Tel Aviv, would Israelis be content with that? Therefore the question is an unsettled one of borders, and recognizing an Israeli right is, at best, premature.
3. By what right does Israel continue to occupy land it seized in the 1967 war, which it actually started? No? Which side avoided any last minute negotiations, and began firing? Hint: it was not the Arab side.
For people not interested in the usual Israeli propaganda and whitewash, I highly recommend:
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20269
Moish
I noticed you quoted Hugo Chavez. Does Venezuela have the right to exist?
Do any people have the right to self determination (the swedes, the french, the romani, etc)? Or is it just the Jews whom you deny?
Maximilian Forte
No, I was pretty clear in my post, right at the start. I said I do not support states. All states impose themselves, and declare their rights unilaterally, without regard to what you or I think. I have a lot of sympathy for Hugo Chavez, within a world of states and statesmen, but I don’t kid myself about what ultimate alliances, pacts, and compromises he has made, and the existing ways of exercising power that he reinforces. He may be more of a radical from an American, mainstream, political perspective than anything else.
I don’t write about Jews, or all Jews, and in any event there are also many Jews who do not support Israel and who are anti-Zionist. I have also made it clear that I am aware of that, in posts that followed this one, i.e.:
https://openanthropology.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/against-occupation-voices-within-israel-and-the-diaspora/
Before I wrote about Israel (which clearly does not stand for all Jews), I wrote several posts denouncing the Canadian state. As someone with anarchist orientations, I take the same stance toward all states. As I said, had I written all of these things about Canada and other states, and remained silent about Israel, then that would have been really amazing.
All people have the right to self-determination. Is that the same as having a state? Not even a body that represents states, the U.N., agrees on that proposition. In any event, clearly the conflict here is between a state and a people who are allowed self-determination, versus those who are allowed neither statehood nor self-determination. So I turn the question back to you: are you in favour of self-determination, but only for Jews, and never for Palestinians?
Moish
So first of all I’m glad to see your at least intellectually consistent.
Secondly I took a look at your list of organizations who are critical of Israel. Very few of them are actually anarchist organizations. Most of them would in fact support the right of a people toself determination in the form of a nation state. For example you have the website of the Neturei Karta. They are very much in favor of states and statehood, just not a Jewish state. Clearly you don’t support them do you?
Do you believe Jews have the right to self determination? It’s a clear question, and your answer must be an affirmative, you have no other option. If so then Jews have the right to forge their own destiny, to exert their agency as a self-governing people and not serve at the fickle whim of some outside body. What other means is there to self determination other then statehood?
Regarding your last point, fair question. International law has stipulated (since 1937!) that the Palestinians have the right to self determination and staehood. So yes both Jews and Palestinians have the same right. Now the only question that remains is geography. There is very little land, resources, and water between the Jordan River and the Mediterenean. The trick is to squeeze two nations states within that sliver of land. I’ll posit that to be impossible. There simply isn’t room for two staes that hate each other. In which case as you so aptly put in a previous post “Might makes Right”. In my humble opinion, the Jews have the land and the guns, and the Palestinians are more then welcome to try their luck.
Finally, your not the first person who has made this point, and I don’t really understand it. Maybe you can clarify. You claim, “in any event there are also many Jews who do not support Israel and who are anti-Zionist.” I don’t get it, who cares? Even if your right (and I don’t think you are) that there are ‘many’ Jews who are both anti-Zionist and anti-Israel, that doesn’t negate the fact that there are just as many, if not more jews who are very supportive of Israel! Are you the one to define who the ‘true’ jews are? Gosh how imperialist is that. So even if your right, I don’t see the argument. I’m sure if I looked hard enough I could find Palestinians who support Israel. But that would be a silly argument. There are many jews are support Israel, and are Zionists. And there are many palestinians who support Hamas and are anything but Zionists. It’s those people who we are dealing with.
Maximilian Forte
“Secondly I took a look at your list of organizations who are critical of Israel. Very few of them are actually anarchist organizations.”
I did not say they were anarchist organizations. I said they were Jews critical of Israel, or Israeli state policy. I said I have an anarchist orientation, not them.
“What other means is there to self determination other then statehood?”
Lots. The vast majority of the human experience on earth stretching backs for hundreds of thousands of years, or more if you include our ancestor species, has been life without states.
Then you forgot your own argument altogether when you wrote:
“You claim, “in any event there are also many Jews who do not support Israel and who are anti-Zionist.” I don’t get it, who cares? Even if your right (and I don’t think you are) that there are ‘many’ Jews who are both anti-Zionist and anti-Israel, that doesn’t negate the fact that there are just as many, if not more jews who are very supportive of Israel! Are you the one to define who the ‘true’ jews are? Gosh how imperialist is that. So even if your right, I don’t see the argument.”
Excuse me, but this was a response to you when you said: “Or is it just the Jews whom you deny?”
I recognized the typical cover, that to be critical of Israel must mean you are anti-Jewish. As I explained, that is false, patently so, as proven by the many Jews and Jewish organizations, inside Israel and abroad, who are critical of Israel and Zionism. There was no argument that I was making about “true Jews,” so please don’t put words in my mouth if you are already encountering difficulty with the words I actually do write.
Moish
The words you write are all to clear to the point of simplicity. You’re very simple thinker. But then again I guess I wasn’t expecting much, from an anthropologist who replaces the academy with trite politics. The sad thing is people like you are becoming the Majority in the AAA
“I recognized the typical cover, that to be critical of Israel must mean you are anti-Jewish.”
It wasn’t really a cover. In fact I’ll spare you the trouble. You’re an anti-semite. Plain and simple. Really I don’t blame you. It must be very difficult for you seeing Jews in power. Jews who take their destiny into their own hands, who choose not to be victims, who make mistake, and yes Jews who make immoral decisions just like any other nation-state. You choose the kind of Jews you like. You choose your good Jews, your Uncle Tom’s. The same argument was made in the antebellum American south “oh the slaves really enjoy their servitude”. Yes I’m sure there were slaves who were more then happy remaining as such. But that wasn’t really the point. You really can’t stand Jews in power. You choose the kind of Jews who you do like. That’s as imperialist as Geert Wilders who says he “has no problem with muslems, just not the believing kinds”. I understand your contempt. But please just be honest about it.
“The vast majority of the human experience on earth stretching backs for hundreds of thousands of years, or more if you include our ancestor species, has been life without states.”
Gee that warms my soul. What about in the real world, far removed from your utopian messianic vision. In a post industrial post holocaust world, I submit that there is no way to express national self-determination outside of the framework of a state. There is no other way to secure the political, physical, and spiritual (in the religious and Herderian sense) of the jewish people outside of the framework of a state. The same is true for the Palestinians by the way.
At the end of the day whether of not the State of Israel has the ‘right’ to exist simply isn’t relevant. The State of Israel needs to exist and you’re part of the reason.
.
Maximilian Forte
Regarding my “simple” thinking, it seemed to be more than just a monumental challenge for you to even follow the basics. You’ve proven yourself a fool and I leave this last comment of yours here as an ethnographic specimen, as a trace of the troglodyte.
It took very little time for you to break yourself down into a complete, ignorant jackass, and to reveal your dishonesty. My mistake was in initially thinking this would be a dialogue with a minimally intelligent person — thanks for disabusing me of that generous delusion. However, congratulations on initially faking a glimmer of intelligence, apparently you have the momentary ability to mimic select aspects of an adult.
The reason the state of Israel exists is for people like you, bigots, chomping at the bit to clamp down on any form of dissent. If you see yourself at the losing end of critical thinking, playing the eternal victim with limitless special rights, then you banish yourself from any kind of civilized discourse.
Your notion that real Jews must all think alike, and have the exact same aspirations, is fundamental racism, and it is a racism that makes anti-semitism possible and respectable. You are, then, your own worst enemy, an extremist, a fanatic, and an anti-intellectualist asshole who has just lost the privilege to post on my blog.
Maximilian Forte
Then, as the perfect fool, “Moish” sputters this hypocritical garbage:
“What about in the real world, far removed from your utopian messianic vision”
That reads like a description of Zionism, in a single sentence, a utopian religious experiment performed at the expense of other people. With defenders like Moish, such Zionist utopianism will remove itself very far from the real world. Right now it cannot tolerate that the real world condemns Israel.
The danger of extremists like Moish, as I have said before, is that they will in fact make anti-semitism respectable, by making pro-semitism nothing more than a whitewash for unabashed racism and imperialism. They dismiss themselves ultimately, and it’s always a pleasure to see such goons unravel themselves in public.
Notice again: they cannot make a single argument without stuffing the necessary words into opponents’ mouths. An argument without evidence, proceeding as a lie…what a lovely “case for Israel.”
Maximilian Forte
Here is what people, smarter and more honest than extremists and racists like Moish, have to say:
https://openanthropology.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/against-occupation-voices-within-israel-and-the-diaspora/
Moish in the meantime is guilty of libel.
palkodimir
UN chief Ban Ki-moon has flayed Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. UN Boss Ban Ki Moon is an American Puppet. The UN had in the past 63 years passed 32 resolutions condemning Israel on its inhuman actions, aggression, occupation, settlements, dispossession. And the reply by Israel to all these resolutions is GO TO HELL WITH THE UN. Go to hell with the International Courts. What would have happened to a weaker nation such as Iran if the SC’s resolution had condemned it? The SC would pass resolutions on sanctions by bribery or arms twisting and within a few months the US B52s would do their job of destroying Iran’s infrastructure. Can the UNO and its puppet secretary move his little finger in the case of Israel which will drop SC’s resolutions in the waste paper basket? Any sanctions on Israel. Impossible. No jokes please. Israel is a high caste Brahmin created from the head of Jehovah. Palestinians are polluted untouchables created from the dirty feet of jehovah That is why the former Prime Minister of Malaysia Dr.Mahathir said the Jews rule the world by proxy, in one sentence he summarized the power, might and political domination of the Zionists in the world. Please Mr Ban, you can do on your own do nothing without the approval of your American masters
Maximilian Forte
I am amazed that Ban Ki-moon has said as much as he says, certainly not the kind of mainstream commentary we find in North America where such overt criticism of Israel is almost unthinkable and quickly labeled “anti-Semitic.” This is as true in Canada as in the United States. Ban Ki-moon at least manages to positively respond to the question, “Does this man think?”
Many thanks for your visit and comment.