Escalation

Resolution

excerpted from the book

The Other Israel

Voices of Refusal and Dissent

edited by Roane Cary and Jonathan Shainin

The New Press, 2002, paper

p165

A QUEUE OF BOMBERS
by Uri Avnery
March 23, 2002

When a whole people is seething with rage, it becomes a dangerous enemy, because the rage does not obey orders.

When it exists in the hearts of millions of people, it cannot be cut off by pushing a button.

When this rage overflows, it creates suicide bombers-human bombs fueled by the power of anger, against whom there is no defense. A person who has given up on life, who does not look for escape routes, is free to do whatever his disturbed mind dictates. Some of the suicide bombers are killed before they reach their goal, but when there are hundreds of them, thousands of them, no military means will restore security.

The actions of Chief of Staff Mofaz during the last month have brought this rage to an unprecedented pitch and instilled it into the hearts of every Palestinian, be he a university professor or a street boy, a housewife or a high-school girl, a leftist or a fundamentalist.

When tanks run amok in the center of a town, crushing cars and destroying walls, tearing up roads, shooting indiscriminately in all directions, causing panic to a whole population-it induces helpless rage.

When soldiers crash through a wall into the living room of a family, inducing shock among children and adults, ransacking their belongings, destroying the fruits of a life of hard work, and then break the wall to the next apartment to wreak havoc there-it induces helpless rage.

When soldiers shoot at everything that moves-out of panic, out of lawlessness, or because Sharon told them "to cause losses"-it induces helpless rage.

When officers order troops to shoot at ambulances, killing doctors and paramedics engaged in saving the lives of the wounded, bleeding to death-it induces helpless rage.

When these and thousands of other acts like them humiliate a whole people, searing their souls-it induces helpless rage. And then it appears that the rage is not helpless after all. The suicide bombers go forward to avenge, with a whole people blessing them and rejoicing at every Israeli killed, soldier or settler, a girl in a bus or a youngster in a discotheque.

The Israeli public is dumbfounded by this terrible phenomenon. It cannot understand it, because it does not know (and perhaps does not want to know) what has happened in the Palestinian towns and villages. Only feeble echoes of what is really happening have reached it. The obedient media suppress the information, or water it down so that the monster looks like a harmless pet. Television, which is now subject to Soviet-style censorship, does not tell viewers what is going on. If somebody is allowed to say a few words about it, for the sake of "balance' the words are drowned in a sea of chatter by politicians, commentators acting as unofficial spokespersons, and the generals who caused the havoc.

These generals look helplessly at a struggle they do not understand and make arrogant statements divorced from reality. Pronouncements like "We have intercepted attacks' "We have taught them a lesson' and "We have destroyed the infrastructure of terrorism" show an infantile lack of understanding of what they are doing. Far from "destroying the infrastructure of terrorism' they have built a hothouse for rearing suicide bombers.

A person whose beloved brother has been killed, whose house has been destroyed in an orgy of vandalism, who has been mortally humiliated before the eyes of his children, goes to the market, buys a rifle for 40,000 shekels (some sell their cars for this) and sets out to seek revenge. "Give me a hatred gray like a sack' wrote our poet Nathan Aherman, seething with rage against the Germans.* Hatred gray like a sack is now everywhere.

Bands of armed men now roam all the towns and villages of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with or without black masks (available for ten shekels in the markets). These bands do not belong to any organization. Members of Fatah, Hamas and the Jihad team up to plan attacks, not giving a damn about the established institutions.

Anyone who believes that Arafat can push a button and stop this is living in a dream world. Arafat is the adored leader, now more than ever, but when a people is seething with anger he cannot stop it either. At best, the pressure cooker can cool off slowly, if the majority of the people are persuaded that their honor has been restored and their liberation guaranteed. Then public support for the "terrorists" will diminish; they will be isolated and wither away.

That was what happened in the past. During the Oslo period there were attacks too, but they were conducted by dissidents, fanatics, and the public aversion to them limited the damage they caused.

American politicians, like Israeli officers, do not understand what they are doing. When an overbearing Vice President Cheney dictates humiliating terms for a meeting with Arafat, he pours oil on the flames. A person who lacks empathy for the suffering of the occupied people, who does not understand its condition, would be well advised to shut up. Because every such humiliation kills dozens of Israelis.

After all, the suicide bombers are standing in line.

p205
THE TURNING POINT
by Meron Benvenisti

No one has ever been able to predict exactly when the opposition to war and bloodshed turns from treachery into a legitimate, indeed proper approach; when moral condemnation of acts of war becomes politically correct-and when a phrase like "a war for our homes" changes from being a battle cry into blathering nonsense. Nobody has predicted it in advance, but experience shows that the moment when the patriotism of the herd turns into critical skepticism does inevitably arrive, sooner or later-sometimes in weeks or months, or sometimes a generation or two later.

Past experience proves that international condemnations, exposure to the horror, demonstrations and political protests have a cumulative influence, but those are countered by feelings of tribal unity, moral superiority and self-righteousness. One would expect that the price of the bloodshed from the continuing violence would lead to a rational calculation of the value of human lives versus the goals for which they are killed. But communities that grow used to calculating their steps according to absolute values do not do so according to pragmatic assessments of cost and benefit. Even making the comparison between the cost in human lives and its purpose is problematic: The most costly price has already been paid in human lives, and the need to justify it requires inflating the value of what they were paid for.

Leaders who inflict great sacrifices upon their people cannot let it be known to all and sundry that they were wrong, so they make the goals absolute: "A war for our homes" or "a war for our existence"-goals with infinite price tags. The issue of the relationship between the goal to its price is decried as irrelevant, and raising rational arguments is considered blasphemy, an attempt to quantify something that has no price.

Nonetheless, experience shows that manipulating values to justify the sacrifice of human lives can never succeed because the survival instinct is stronger than the manipulation. Eventually, the cynicism of inflated, counterfeit patriotism is revealed(as happened in the Lebanon war.)

Nobody can predict when the moment will come and all the experts and commentators will start competing over who was the first to expose the failure, the misguided strategy, the uselessness, the illusions, the political stupidity, the surrender to vengeance and the ruthlessness-the real price of the current operation. But the manipulators should not delude themselves: That moment will come...

The Other Israel

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