Writer's Blockade

The Israeli boarding of the Free Gaza humanitarian flotilla was just the latest in a long, sad line of failed Israeli actions trying to prosecute a policy that is ill-fit for the problem at hand, that of ensuring Israel’s security against the threats posed by the Palestinian populace. When discussing these matters it is inevitable that we end up in discussions of legitimacy, legality, and rights to exist. It’s not that these things are not important because of course they are, and they are fundamental issues for Israel and for the Palestinian people as well. The disconnect occurs because those issues, which must always come up in these discussions are actually irrelevant to the issue of Palestinian - Israeli issues.

I’ve already lost half the audience, but for those of you still reading, bear with me a moment. Sometime in the dawn hours, commandoes of the Shayetet 13 unit of the Israeli armed forces, made legendary by the movie “Munich,” slid down the ropes replete with body armor, bristling with weapons and armed also with laminated cards containing names and photographs of persons of interest. In the course of the events, nine people died and autopsies have shown multiple gun shot wounds including those to the back of heads and other places that would call into question the defensive nature of those shootings. There’s no question that some members of the boat either tried to defend themselves or attacked depending on which account you hear.

The world, as it does, has gotten into an uproar about the incident with partisans on all sides making moderate to insane remarks. The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy writing in the influential Israeli daily Ha’aretz falls into a particularly pernicious version of the revisionism and theatre of the absurd that characterizes the discussion: “it is an indisputable fact that the Israelis who man the checkpoints between the territories night and day are the first to make the elementary but essential distinction between the regime ?(that they seek to isolate?) and the population (which they are careful not to confuse with the regime, and in particular not to penalize as, once again, aid has never stopped passing into Gaza?).” Why does Levy believe that the aid has never stopped passing? Because of, “the daily arrival, via Israel, of between 100 and 120 trucks laden with foodstuffs, medical supplies and humanitarian goods of every kind.”

Levy is not a stupid man, so he must be mendacious. Surely he is aware that aside from goods entering Gaza via tunnels, those 100-120 trucks daily constitute the entire flow of goods into Gaza, an area 25 miles long by 4-7 miles wide and a population of 1.5 million. The sum total of grain entering Gaza annually would, if made exclusively into bread, would account for two-thirds of a slice of bread per person per day. 100-120 trucks daily is a mere raindrop in the ocean.

Levy also re-fashions a long and admirable career of opposition to oppression and refashions it into anti-authoritarianism, rather than pro-justice. “a man like (Levy), someone who takes pride in having helped to conceive, with others, this kind of symbolic action (the boat for Vietnam; the march for the survival of Cambodia in 1979; various and sundry anti-totalitarian boycotts…)”{emphasis mine} Nonsense Bernard-Henri; your movement was only anti-authoritarian by necessity, it was pro-justice. In Vietnam you marched against a democratic nation that was occupying a nation and using disproportional force against it. Yes, the United States with her endless line of corrupt and would be totalitarian proxies was your “target.”

But these are all the emotional self-deceptions each of us engage in to rationalize our beliefs. Levy knows as well as you and I that the lack of people dying in the streets does not mean that there is no privation. He knows full well that regardless of what lies in the hearts of the infallible border guards, ceaselessly distinguishing between “regime” and “people” that 100-120 trucks doesn’t mark just the regime, But he emotionally has to believe that; that the acts are, if not perfect, then legitimate. Perhaps he, the veteran of all these actions, formerly done on principle and now used as a well-worn credential (rationalizing his own legitimacy), would do this differently or better, but it is legitimate.

Levy also concerns himself with the legal. Stating that what Israel does not want is a replay of the United Nations Goldstone report for the Cast Lead invasion. Levy writes that the commission took “575 pages of interviews of Palestinian fighters and civilians, conducted under the watchful eye of Hamas political commissioners (an absolute and unprecedented heresy in this kind of work), in a matter of mere days. Heresy? Perhaps but a heresy that led this biased commission to conclude, “These actions would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity,” and, “The Mission finds that security services under the control of the Gaza authorities carried out extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrest, detention and ill treatment of people, in particular political opponents, which constitute serious violations of the human rights to life, to liberty and security of the person, to freedom from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, to be protected against arbitrary arrest and detention, to a fair and impartial legal proceeding; and to freedom of opinion and expression, including freedom to hold opinions without interference.”

 “The Mission also concludes that the Palestinian Authority’s actions against political opponents in the West Bank, which started in January 2006 and continued with increased intensity during the period between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, constitute violations of human rights and of the Palestinian’s own Basic Law.”

The final of our trio is existential. The Palestinian people, even if they were so disposed and were faithful to the nearly universally disowned (and infamous) Charter do not pose an existential threat to Israel. The kinds of actions Israel routinely excuses out of security concerns, violations of international law and the repudiation of the very body whose umbrella serves as Israel’s international legal basis are done so under the excuse that somehow these people, these impoverished 1.5 million civilians represent an existential threat.

This is not to say there are not people who wish Israel’s destruction. You can find these by the bushel in America’s heartland. A lot of “real” Americans would dispense with Israel, Jews, blacks, Latinos, the revenuers, Irish and more. But this is not the same as an actual existential threat.

The reality is that questions of Legitimacy, Legality, and Existence are fig leafs for other political positions. Both Israel and the Palestinians have has much legitimacy as each other, the same legal basis (the failed UN resolution 181), and we would hope any reader here would agree they both have the right to exist as a people. We need to stop producing embarrassing documents such as Bernard-Henri Levy’s (admirably rebutted here by Gideon Levy) and spend our efforts in finding justice for the Palestinian people and Security for the Israelis. They are mutually dependent and almost no one Israeli, Arab, Jew, or American disagrees. Let’s spend our efforts working for this, rather than torturing our logic and our souls in attempts to justify policies that we can only say one thing with complete assurance, they have not worked.