Groundhog Day in Gaza?

The major violence in and around Gaza appears to be over; the ceasefire is holding.  This is to the good.  Unfortunately, multiple factors are still in place which will very likely make such horrendous bloodshed happen again.  Why?

None of the structuring or framing features of the Gaza situation which I drew attention to in my 'Eyeless in Gaza' blog-post are altered by the ceasefire.  The illegal Israeli siege and blockade on the Strip has not been lifted, though border crossing is meant to become easier.  The Strip remains a densely populated, semi-starved, non-sovereign ghetto, where half the population are minors and where more than 80% of the population are 'food insecure', according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.  Gaza still remains technically under Israeli occupation, and Israel's legal obligations to an occupied territory and the population of that territory have not changed: collective punishments of such a population, whether by food and aid restriction, or by drone strikes, are war crimes under the terms of the Geneva Conventions.

'Conflict', as the mainstream Irish media quaintly like to call the hell unleashed principally on the Palestinians of Gaza over the last 10 days, will erupt again because Hamas and other militias in the Strip will come under pressure from their constituencies to show resistance to Israel - and it must be admitted that an occupied people is entitled to resist that occupation - and because Israel feels it has a free hand in meting out overwhelming violence to the people of Gaza.  

Yet Operation Pillar of Cloud has revealed a couple of things, militarily and politically, that make it a little different from Operation Cast Lead.  It has revealed the effectiveness of Israel's battlefield anti-missile missile system, 'Iron Dome' - Israel's main success emerging from Pillar of Cloud.  Otherwise, the bombardment has mostly shown that Israeli leaders will continue cynically to use violence against Palestinians as an election strategy, and that Israel has no other serious strategy vis-a-vis the Strip.  Regarding Hamas, the struggle has shown that it can fire rockets into Israeli cities, and that it can go on firing rockets even when under Israeli bombardment, even if many of those can be brought down by 'Iron Dome'.  But more importantly, Hamas has been able to take advantage of the new political cleavages and alignments in the region, an adjustment Israel seems as yet unable to make.  Hamas has worked effectively with the new regime in Egypt (being an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood in its origins in any case), it has won implicit recognition by the United States (which still officially regards Hamas as a 'terrorist' organisation but which nevertheless negotiated with that organisation by way of Egyptian proxies) and it has wrested from Israel an abrogation of the policy of 'targeted assassination' (though it must be said that this was always illegal anyway).

Israel still thinks it can bestride the stage of the Middle East, and smack the Palestinians around when it pleases.  It has 'a right to defend itself', after all, as the New York Times likes to remind us.   But the ground is shifting under Israel's feet, and no amount of belligerence or naked brutality can alter this.  Adam Shatz has written about Israel/Palestine for the London Review of Books (one of the few British or American mainstream journals to take a seriously critical view of the Middle East and of the question of Palestine) for some years, and his column 'Why Israel Didn't Win' is well worth reading in full:

Adam Shatz: Why Israel Didn’t Win

 

Eyal Weizman is one of the most striking and imaginative writers dealing with the Israel-Palestine conflict at the moment.  His books - A Civilian Occupation, Hollow Land, and most recently The Least of all Possible Evils - are fascinating and appalling accounts of the spatial and topographical logics of the discipline of detail that characterises the Zionist project of conquest, colonisation and politicide as it is practiced today.  'Another acre, another goat' used to be an old popular Zionist formulation of the colonial undertaking.  The technology has changed, but the ideology has not, and Weizman illustrates this in the most compelling way:
 

Eyal Weizman: The Book of Destruction

Conor

Eyeless in Gaza

Violence once more soars in and around Gaza.  This blog is not capable of offering sustained regular reporting or commentary on the situation, but I will put up some posts or links which I think will help people understand what is happening.

The first thing that needs to be said is that in a very real sense the Gaza Strip is constituted in violence: that is, violence is part of its structures.  By this I mean several things:

1) the great majority of the population of the Strip are refugees or the children and grandchildren of refugees of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians attendant on the creation of the State of Israel in 1947-49;

2) Gaza has long  been a site of Israeli punitive violence, for example the raid in 1955 which 'punished' Egypt for its alleged sponsorship of Palestinian 'infiltration' of southern Israel from the Strip;

3) Gaza was for a long time the site of the institutionalised and incremental violence embodied in illegal Israeli colonisation, land confiscation, settlement construction, and population-transfer;

4) Israel's unilateral withdrawal of its settlers has not, in fact, altered the juridical status of the Strip in international law, which is still held to be that of occupied territory, towards which (along with its denizens) Israel as the occupying power has a legal duty of care and protection.  Israel has built a 'fence' around its entire border of the territory, and illegally controls and seeks to exploit Gaza's maritime industries and potential hydrocarbon resources in the Mediterranean;

5) Gaza has been under continuous siege since the creation of its Hamas government: that government has no sovereignty over Gaza's borders, over its territorial waters or its airspace.  The territory is routinely subjected to Israeli shellfire, airstrikes and incursions, mostly carried out with impunity.  In 2011 alone, over 100 Gazans were killed in such interventions;

6) By controlling all trade, movement of persons and of goods and food, Israel has reduced most Gazans to the condition of what the renowned Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (who recently spoke at Trinity College Dublin) has termed 'bare life' - a largely inert, legally and discursively 'semi-human' population almost entirely without rights, deprived of basic human needs, and which it is possible to persecute, maim and slaughter with no serious risk of reprisal, either by Gazans or (even less) by the 'international community'.

It is within this barbaric framework that all that is currently happening in the Strip must be considered.

A great deal of discussion, even now as Israeli airstrikes shatter Palestinian lives and infrastructure, and as Palestinian rockets continue to be fired into southern Israel, turns and will continue to turn on the chronology of the breaking of the most recent ceasefire.  Adam Horowitz has published on the excellent Mondoweiss website information from the Institute for Middle East Understanding which clarifies this matter and which contextualises Israel's handling of ceasefires in the past:

Two new resources: Timeline of Israeli escalation in Gaza and Israel’s history of breaking ceasefires

I have invoked the name of John Mearsheimer, one of the most clear-eyed and brilliant contemporary American International Relations theorists, on this blog already.  In 2007, he and Stephen Walt authored a major study of the Israel lobby in the United States, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.  Mearsheimer and Walt underwent the usual barrage of criticism as anti-Semites for having had the temerity to challenge one of the most invidious and enduring pillars of American foreign policy.  Yet it should be stressed that Walt and Mearsheimer are not wild-eyed leftists; they are mainstream establishment academics.  Honorably and impressively, this has not prevented them describing the situation in the Middle East and its echoes inside the Beltway starkly and ruthlessly.  Mearsheimer has a short article on the current Gaza situation on the London Review of Books website:

 

John Mearsheimer: The War on Gaza

 

Conor

Shatter Shattered

Alan Shatter is Ireland's Minister for Justice and Defence (formerly separate ministries).  He is a partner in one of Ireland's leading law practices specialising in family law.  He is also one of Israel's foremost 'friends' in Ireland.

A few days ago, Shatter opened a conference at Trinity College Dublin on the legacy of Raoul Wallenberg, the courageous Swedish diplomat posted in Budapest, who in 1944 devised ways of escape for tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust. The Irish Times took the unprecedented step of publishing Shatter's speech in its 3000 word entirety.  It contains a number of dubious elements, including his assertion of the ahistorical 'uniqueness' of the Holocaust, and, egregiously, the recruitment of Wallenberg's illustrious name to the defence of Israel and to the legitimation of a potential Israeli attack on Iran.

Raymond Deane has written an excoriating and brilliant critique of Shatter's speech for Irish Left Review.  Read it here:

Exploiting Wallenberg

 

Conor

Israel, Iran and the Bomb

There has been a lot of talk lately about Israel, Iran, and nuclear weapons.  Obviously this is not a new story, but it is getting ratcheted-up in its news profile and in its intensity.  This is happening for at least a couple of reasons.  One would be that the Israeli political leaders who are keen on an airstrike to destroy or at least set back the Iranian nuclear programme - Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak - maintain that the time remaining before Iran manages to locate its most important nuclear facilities in hardened - un-bomb-able - locations is shrinking quickly.  Whether this is true or not is hard to determine. 

The other reason why this issue has attained prominence in the last two weeks is because of a speech by Netanyahu arguing that the United States has no 'moral' right to hinder Israeli action when it is slow or reluctant to take action against Iran.  Most of the media coverage of this has focussed on Netanyahu's 'unprecedented' attack on Obama, or on his seeming intervention in the US presidential race.  Fewer commentators note how revolting it is to hear Netanyahu discuss politics in moral terms: Israel, after all, has a nuclear arsenal but never officially acknowledges its existence, is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, yet seeks to attack Iran which has no nuclear weapons and is a NPT signatory still operating within its rights.  Yet these are mostly trivial matters: Israel has always been prepared to go it alone in aggressive foreign policy, and the question is more whether this occurs with explicit or tacit American support.  The real issues at stake lie elsewhere.

For we must remind ourselves that the whole Iranian nuclear weapons scare is largely a red herring, albeit one which Israel is very keen to pull out every so often.  The fact is that the only significant nuclear arsenal in the Middle East is that of Israel itself, which possesses an estimated 200-300 nuclear warheads, and has ample means to deliver them.  Furthermore, Israel is one of the few countries on the planet that has threatened to use its nuclear weapons since 1945:  in the early days of the Yom Kippur War, when it looked like there might be a Syrian breakthrough in the Golan Heights and down into the Galilee, and both the Syrian and Egyptian armies were knocking Israeli planes out of the sky with modern Soviet-made anti-aircraft missiles at an exceptional rate, one of the ways that the Israelis extorted more and faster resupply from the United States was by threatening to use nuclear weapons in Syria, possibly even on Damascus itself. Very quickly the United States was resupplying the Israeli Defence Forces with combat aircraft simply requisitioned from US Air Force service, and repainted in IDF colours, and flown straight to Israel.

There are indications, however, that the tectonic plates of foreign policy consensus in Washington regarding Iran might be shifting.  Travelling from Montreal to Dublin a month ago, I was browsing the current issue of Foreign Affairs in the Dorval airport newsagent.  Foreign Affairs is a solidly mainstream American foreign policy journal, published by the Council for Foreign Relations. Yet there as the lead article was a piece by Kenneth Waltz, the great doyen of International Relations 'realism', advocating that Iran should have the bomb, in order to balance Israel. This is the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction - maybe not altogether so mad as Stanley Kubrick wished to argue all those years ago.

People like Waltz, and his greatest contemporary inheritor John J Mearsheimer (author of one of the best, and most pessimistic, discussions of post-9/11, post-Cold War interstate relations, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics), make the point that the whole Iran scare is predicated on an idea that the Iranian leadership is itself bent on suicide, that it is irrational, and that it has no concern either for its allies or its own people. But this is wrong; in fact it's an ignorant and racist assumption. Any Iranian nuclear strike on Israel would have the following consequences: 1) a massive and catastrophic nuclear counterstrike by Israel, which could kill millions of Iranians, which would wipe out Iran's economy and shatter the state apparatus, and prostrate the country for decades to come; 2) a massive and maybe nuclear counterstrike by the United States; 3) very likely enormous 'collateral damage' - due to clouds of fall-out -  in casualties in the Palestinian Territories, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon i.e. amongst the allies Iran would purport to aid; the disastrous consequences could be maybe even the collapse of some of those states; 4) diplomatic and political ostracism for decades to come; 5) enormous economic turmoil in the region more generally; 6) massive and unpredictable social and political turmoil in the region also, much of which might not necessarily redound to Iranian political advantage.  In other words, the crudest cost-benefit analysis shows that Iran has much more to lose by the use of nuclear weapons than to gain.  Accordingly, we can say that no Iranian leadership is going to use the bomb.

Furthermore, just to the east of Iran sits Pakistan, which does possess a nuclear arsenal.  Yet Pakistan is a state in a perpetual condition of near-collapse, and which houses many radical Salafi or other Sunni guerrilla groups of the most virulent anti-American and anti-Israel disposition, a state which supported the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and which offered some kind of succour to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.  This is a regime and political milieu vastly more dangerous to the region, to Israel, and to the world than Iran, and yet we hear no talk of disarming Pakistan.  The reason for this is partly that Pakistan already has the bomb, but also that Pakistan is held (extraordinarily) to be an ally of the West.  Accordingly, we hear no blather from Israel about 'taking out' the Pakistani nuclear programme.

It is, of course, the political significance of a military nuclear capacity that would be useful to Iran.  Possession of nuclear weapons would confirm Iran's status as the major power in the Persian Gulf, and as the only power in the region capable of standing up to Israel and its American ally and occasional proxy.  Possession of nuclear weapons would also compel other regional powers, such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates, to be much more circumspect in their approach to Iran, and to reform their repressive policies vis-a-vis their own local Shia populations.  

Israel, however, is the regional superpower, and wishes to retain the strategic, qualitative and symbolic edge that possession of the bomb, while not admittting it officially, confers.  This is why Israel is keen to destroy Iran's nuclear capacity.  It has nothing to do with 'morality' - a term soiled in Netanyahu's mouth - or the threatened new 'holocaust' which Bibi says he is trying to prevent.

Conor

Germany and the Critique of Israel

For a variety of reasons - not all of them actually obvious or honourable - the space for speaking out in Germany about Israel's crimes against the Palestinians is particularly narrow and contested.  My friend and admired comrade Raymond Deane has written on this topic - pertinent most immediately to the situation regarding Judith Butler and the Adorno Prize - with great lucidity and intelligence.  Here's a piece of his on Irish Left Review:

 

Dissident Jews: Unwanted in Germany?

Raymond Deane is one of Ireland's most important contemporary classical composers.  More than any other living Irish artist, he exemplifies the engaged intellectual, through his brave radical political activism.  Would that we had more like him.  Here is Raymond's blog:

 

The Deanery

Conor

Judith Butler and the Adorno Prize

Starting this blog last April, I took my example from two great writers - whom I will never match.  Alexander Cockburn, who died recently, and Theodor Adorno both produced significant writing in a style akin to that of a diary: Adorno's work that I referred to was his wonderful Minima Moralia.  Of course, this book is not a diary as such, but it is composed in jottings - not 'loose jottings', but frequently aphoristic musings so tight and dense that reading them you can almost hear the whiplash crack of Adorno's relentlessly dialectical mind as you parse and re-parse his sentences.

Adorno was one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century.  He is best known now as a leading figure and latter-day director of the Frankfurt School, or the Institut fur Sozialforschung, whose early members included luminaries such as Max Horkheimer (with whom Adorno wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment and to whom he dedicated Minima Moralia), Leo Leowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock and Franz Neumann, and whose more recent alumni include major living German philosophers such as Axel Honneth and Jurgen Habermas.  The Institut carried out a wide array of social and political research, most of it informed by the brand of Hegelian humanistic Marxism initiated by an earlier generation of writers such as Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch and Antonio Gramsci, and boosted by the discovery of Marx's Paris Manuscripts in the 1930s.  Adorno himself wrote extensively and brilliantly about society, literature and culture, politics, philosophy, and music most of all.  The Institut, and Adorno, also wrote importantly about anti-Semitism.   Many of the Institut's staff were Jewish, and in fact during the Second World War, it decamped first to New York, and then to Los Angeles: an academic institution in exile.  Tragically and famously, Walter Benjamin, an older associate of the Institut, and a good friend of Adorno's, did not escape, taking his own life whilst fleeing the Nazis in France in 1940.

In 1977, the city of Frankfurt established the Adorno Prize, an award given every three years to a major philosopher.  Previous winners include Habermas, Jacques Derrida, and Zygmunt Bauman.  This year, the winner is to be the American philosopher Judith Butler - the first woman to win the prize.  She is due to receive the award on September 11 next.

I have already referred to Butler's work on this blog - her essay 'No it's not anti-Semitic', published in the London Review of Books in 2007.  The thinking behind this piece has now issued in a new book, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press) where she turns back to her own Jewish education, and, while also in critical dialogue with Palestinian writers - Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said principally - seeks to scour the work of great modern Jewish philosophers and writers - Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Primo Levi - for the resources of a Jewish critique of Zionism.  Butler even goes so far as to suggest that in our times Jewish thought might be most itself when criticizing Zionism for its crimes of ethnocratic domination and state violence.  She seeks to derive an ethic of 'cohabitation' that would be pertinent to the situation of Jews and Palestinians and which would not be predicated on a simple universalism, but would eventually issue in a binational state.  Ultimately, her philosophical message is that a properly effective Jewish ethics must be prepared to transcend itself, and leave its Jewishness behind.

And now she is paying a price: multiple campaigns, letter-writings, Facebook maunderings, and other hypocrisies are underway, in Israel and Germany, to deny one of our most important contemporary thinkers an honour that is her due.  Copious character-assassinations and accusations of Jewish self-hatred have already been flung: the quickest google search will reveal this.  Here's an example, from Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (one notes immediately that fairly unpeaceful 'scholars' such as Efraim Karsh and Daniel Pipes are members or former members of this grouping):

German Jewish leader: Rescind Israel hater's prize

And here is Butler responding to her critics generally, and at the Jerusalem Post specifically - this is taken from the excellent liberal Jewish website, Mondoweiss:

Judith Butler responds to attack: ‘I affirm a Judaism that …

Butler, I reckon, is an exemplar of an all-too rare quality in thinkers and writers: she does not become conservative, or lax, or repetitive as her career develops and her work expands and gets older.   She gets tougher, harder, more radical, more rigorous, and she steels herself to the most formidable and difficult tasks.  She is a courageous and brilliant woman, and deserves support and recognition.

Conor

Adieu to Alexander Cockburn

Little did I think, when setting up this blog only 3 months ago, and taking as one of my guides the great Alexander Cockburn, that I would soon be mourning his passing.  Cockburn died on July 20 of cancer, having kept his illness secret for the last two years, all the while continuing his wonderful coruscating writing.

Disgracefully and sadly, Alex's death was barely covered at all in the Irish media.  I published this tribute on Irish Left Review, an excellent leftwing website edited by Donagh Brennan.  Warm thanks to Donagh for his help with this piece.

Adieu to Alexander Cockburn

Conor