REMEMBRANCE AS NONVIOLENT
RESISTANCE
Forbidden Memories as National Policy in the United
States and Israel
By Daniel C. Maguire, Marquette University (Daniel.maguire@marquette.edu)
Keynoters:
Prime
Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon, May 2003: "You cannot like the word, but
what is happening is an occupation-to hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation.
I believe that is a terrible thing for Israel and for the Palestinians…It
can't continue endlessly."
George Orwell: "He who controls the
past, controls the future; and he who controls the present, controls the past."
George
Orwell, "Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful
and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
The
military historian, Sir B. H. Liddell Hart says: "In no field has the pursuit
of truth been more difficult than that of military history."
German
philosopher Heinrich Heine: "Whenever they burn books they will also, in
the end, burn human beings." (Suppressing memories is like burning books.
When you suppress memories, you end up burning human beings.)
Professor
of Jewish Studies Marc Ellis: "History sneaks up on the powerful."
Robert
MacAfee Brown: "War is the coward's escape from the problems of peace."
My
final Keynoter is a ten year old Afghan boy, Mohammed Noor. At the beginning of
the American invasion of Afghanistan, this boy was having his Sunday dinner when
an American bomb hit his home. He lost both eyes and both hands. Did President
Obama forget about him when he ordered tens of thousands more military killers
into this boy's tortured country?
Planned Oblivion
In 1882,
in a speech at the Sorbonne, Ernest Renan observed that "forgetting"
is "a crucial factor in the creation of a nation." In creating a national
unifying narrative, certain difficult memories of unseemly events have to be erased.
As Renan said, this will even include the wholesale slaughter of certain ethnic
and religious groups within the claimed national borders.
This violence
must be whitewashed off the screen of public consciousness. There are many tricks
on the way to planned oblivion. Nations specialize in those tricks regarding state-sponsored
violence, i.e. war, with the inevitable mayhem that war entails. The ugliness
of state-inflicted slaughter does not fit comfortably into any national narrative
and so every nation spins its own self-serving Aeneid. Neither the government
nor the people can face with candor the horrors wreaked by their wars. So we forget
with a vengeance. And with a purpose.
Forgetting becomes policy, a systematic,
enforced effort to suppress the memory of inconvenient past events or to spin
them into mythic euphemisms. All nations do this but here I am looking at two
nations, the United States and Israel, both of whom see themselves as distinguished
by a kind of moral exceptionalism and impunity.
Suppressed memories have
evil offspring. As true memory is erased, fictive memory takes its place. When
Americans forget the double genocide that marked their birth as a nation the fictive
memory of "self-made men" takes its place. The Indian hunter and the
slaver are replaced by the fictional Horatio Alger, who made it on his own with
his wit and grit. Republican Senator Chauncey M. Depew, speaking at Vanderbilt
University shortly after the abolition of slavery, put it this way: "We have
become a nation of self-made men…the same open avenues, the same opportunities
which [Commodore Vanderbilt] had before him are equally before every other man."
Notice: no classism, no racism, no sexism, no slavery, no genocide. All of those
supporting foundations of white American comfort-especially white American male
comfort-had become forbidden memories.
In a similar feat of amnesia, modern
Israel and many Jews worldwide forget that 700,000 Palestinians were driven from
their homes to make room for Israel. Myth has replaced fact. A fictive memory
of "a people without a land" coming to a "land without people"
provided the consoling mythology. As American Jewish scholar Marc Ellis says,
unlike that popular myth, "Israel did not have a virgin birth."
Propaganda
is a form of manipulative fiction. It requires selective amnesia. Remembrance
is non-violent. And remembrance is the only way to fight the violence of suppressed
memories and self-serving myths. Inconvenient truths, once remembered, have prophetic
power but have to be shouted from the rooftops to end the malignant silence.
Israel
and the United States: A Special Relationship
Israel and the United
States have a unique relationship, one so close that Israel has been called the
51st state, a privileged state that pays no US taxes and receives ten million
dollars a day in aid. In a concrete symbol of this unique relationship, the Holocaust
Museum in Washington DC is the only edifice on the Washington Mall not dedicated
to events and persons in American history. The prime alleged reason for this intimate
bonding is a shared commitment to democracy, with Israel being, allegedly, a bastion
of democracy in a hostile Middle East. As ever in statecraft, the alleged is rarely
the real. Closer to reality would be the following seven unflattering, generally
unmentioned, but unmistakable similarities between Israel and the US.
1)
Both nations were founded on ethnic cleansing, the Indians for the US, the Palestinians
for the Israelites. As an early American critic Sylvester Judd put it in 1842:
"The people of this country would not be taxed without representation. They
did not tax the Indians without representation, but exterminated them and planted
themselves in their territories." In one example, to pay for the Revolutionary
War, early America expropriated 25,000,000 acres of Indian land to be sold to
Europeans and Americans to pay for the war. Like Israel's "settlements,"
this was land forcibly stolen from the indigenous peoples.
The foundations
of the United States, however, rest on a second genocide. Early American economic
success depended upon its African slave base and the effective caste system that
produced the American apartheid still evident in the ghettoes and barrios of American
cities.
In an ethnic cleansing parallel to the American experience, in 1948,
in what the Israelis call the War of Independence, and what the Palestinians call
Al Nakba, "the Catastrophe," some 700,000 Palestinians were driven from
their homes. Al Nakba led to "the cleansing (i.e. killing and expulsion)
of at least 86% of the indigenous Palestinian population that lived in the area
that would become Israel and the erasure of at least 531 of their villages and
towns, with the explicit goal of creating an exclusively Jewish state in the same
area." As with the Indians in America there was, thus, a racist base for
this cleansing.
2) Both Israel and the United States claim religious warranty
for their existence and expansionism. Both imagine a God who was into real estate
distribution, a God who hands out parcels of land with a perpetual deed. Israel
is seen as "the promised land" chosen by God for the Jewish nation.
Early America saw itself as "the new Zion," the new chosen people with
a "manifest destiny" to expand. Pity those who had lived on those lands
for centuries. Religiously enforced nationalism breeds fanatical claims and arrogance.
As the poet Alexander Pope put it: "the worst of madmen is saint gone mad."
Not
all Israeli Jews are blinded by these myths of modern Israel's innocent birth.
Israeli historians like Simba Flapan, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Marc
Ellis, Michael Lerner, and others have written honest studies of the expulsion
of the Palestinians. Most recently Dr. Shlomo Sand, a son of Holocaust survivors,
and professor at the University of Tel Aviv argues that the Jews who settled modern
Israel may not descend from the Palestinian Jews of the Roman era but that the
Palestinian Semites locked into Gaza and the West Bank might have a better claim
to being the actual descendants of Palestine's original Jews, even though they
later converted to Islam.
3) Both the United States and Israel claim that
their special security needs justify violence, unchecked militarism, torture,
violations of human rights and international law, and imperial expansion. The
United States violates the UN Charter's proscription of preemptive wars by engaging
in vigilante wars. It employs occupation, torture and rendition as security needs.
Israel stands in violation of the 1948 UN Resolution 194 saying that Palestinian
refugees violently removed from their homes should be allowed to return. It also
is in violation of the 1967 UN Resolution 242 citing "the inadmissibility
of the acquisition of territory by war," after Israel tripled its size in
the six day war. This Resolution was reinforced by Resolution 338 in 1971.
Both
the United States and Israel claim unique victimhood. Both make strategic use
of recent tragedies to claim the immaculate conception of their expansionist policies,
the Holocaust for Israel and 9/11 and an unspecified pandemic "terrorism"
for the US.
4) Both the US and Israel are sacrificing their original idealism
at the altar of empire. Early Israel birthed ideals of justice and peace that
inspired Christianity and Islam and found their way into the constitutions of
many modern states and international law. That great moral history has gone sour.
The United States is no longer a City built on a hill to edify the world, and
modern Israel is no longer a representative of prophetic Judaism which was to
be a light to all nations.
5) Both make claims of moral unimpeachability
by virtue of their very identity. Illustrative of this, the erstwhile House Un-American
Activities Committee was predicated on "American" as a moral norm, so
that to be un-American would be evil, making you liable to criminal prosecution.
In a similar way, any criticism of Israeli policy is branded as anti-Semitic.
Jews who criticize Israeli policies are dubbed "self-hating Jews." (I
would see them as justice-loving and peace-loving Jews.)
6) Both the United
States and Israel preach nuclear disarmament while armed to the teeth with nuclear
weapons. Both are like the village sot preaching sobriety.
7) Both the US
and Israel use strategic amnesia as policy to cover over inconvenient imperial,
expansionist, and genocidal truths.
I now turn to examples of this enforced
forgetfulness.
The United States of Amnesia
The US forgets
its long romance and early marriage to state-sponsored violence, i.e. to war.
The long tenured American pretense is that we have only gone to war reluctantly.
We forget how we provoked conflicts when we wanted war. We remember nothing of
war as persistent failure. Prior to the Washington black wall Vietnam memorial,
American memorials were triumphalist. The gore and blood were buried under monuments
of feigned glory. The antidote to this long-tenured denial is remembrance.
Howard
Zinn strips away the fog and distorted memory of America's wars. In each case
we thought our cause just but in each case war was the wrong solution. In 1898
Spain was oppressing Cuba so we went to war and then we took over oppressing Cuba.
We also picked up the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam in the process.
North
Korea was invading South Korea. There was a dictatorship in North Korea and a
dictatorship in South Korea, so we went to war. The result? Two to three million
dead and a dictatorship in North Korea and a dictatorship in South Korea and an
unending presence of American soldiers in South Korea. The Revolutionary War that
gave us independence from England is hallowed in song and festival. But Canada
won Independence without bloody revolution. In the year before shots were fired
at Lexington and Concord, farmers had thrown the British out in Western Massachusetts
without firing a shot. The American Indians do not celebrate the Revolutionary
War. In the Proclamation of 1763, England drew a line and said you could not go
westward into Indian territory. After the war that line was erased and genocide
and the American "settlement" process began.
The Civil War
ended slavery but other nations ended slavery without slaughter. 600,000 people
died in the Civil War, equivalent to five million today, and amputated limbs filled
the bloody fields severed from bodies without benefit of anesthesia. Did the Second
World War end fascism, did it end militarism, imperialism? It did end fifty million
lives and inaugurated nuclear weaponry. The idea that only war could stop Hitler
ignores the peace-making failure that ended World War I making a Hitler almost
inevitable.
And what about Hitler and what about Rwanda? Militarists always
return to the charge that non-violence would not have stopped Hitler. Rwanda they
note was where we should have gone to war to stop genocide, but we failed to do
so.
One of deepest convictions that grips our imagination in its steely
claws is the belief that the bullet is the final arbiter. When the ultimate push
comes to the ultimate shove, sound the trumpet, bring on the marines. Did not
even Gandhi say that if there were only two choices in the face of evil, cowardice
or violence, he would prefer violence?
However, and this is key, there is
a third option. It is called peace-making. The poets of early Israel imagined
it; we read their scriptures but ignore or forget what is there. Peace-making
is intelligent politics, and exercise in non-violent power. The Rwanda argument
fails to remember the years preceding that eruption of violence. A distinguished
group of experts put it this way: "Had there been international determination
to make the Arusha peace accord work-had there been an amnesty provision in the
agreement; a demobilization plan; a genuine attempt to deal with the refugee problem;
radio broadcasts to challenge the views of extremists; humanitarian coordination;
provision of adequate policing; resources such as riot gear, maps, up-to-date
information, early warning systems linked to institutions that could initiate
preventative nonviolent action; and a culture of accountability and strong international
institutions-the genocide would have been prevented. The failure in Rwanda was
a failure of politics-the result of a lack of faith in and commitment to the slow
and unglamourous work of nonviolent political action….Military options only
seem morally compelling because of a host of lost opportunities.
The reparations
imposed on Germany after World War I made a Hitler inevitable. Wars become inevitable
because nations have no Department of Peace working to spot and defuse tensions.
American vigilante wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan are waged
because we forget the historic breakthrough made in the United Nations Charter.
Richard Falk writes: "World War II ended with the historic understanding
that recourse to war between states could no longer be treated as a matter of
national discretion, but must be regulated to the extent possible through rules
administered by international institutions. The basic legal framework was embodied
in the UN Charter, a multilateral treaty largely crafted by American diplomats
and legal advisers. Its essential feature was to entrust the Security Council
with administering a prohibition of recourse to international force (Article 2,
Section 4) by states except in circumstances of self-defense, which itself was
restricted to responses to a prior 'armed attack' (Article 51), and only then
until the Security Council had the chance to review the claim.
Collective,
multi-nation action, coordinated by the UN, could also address internal problems
of nations when crimes against humanity are ongoing, as in Darfur and Zimbabwe
at this writing. Articles 43 and 45 of the UN Charter provide for this, though
there has been little political will to do this. This use of the UN, when in place
and organized, would also act as a deterrent and would buttress resolutions of
the Security Council just as the presence of a well organized police force deters
crime within a nation.
We forget. And this conniving forgetfulness allows
us to think war inevitable.
Reluctant Warriors?
We are fond
of thinking that we go to war as noble, reluctant warriors responding to a crisis.
We forget out inveterate habit of faking crises to find an excuse for the war.
Nafeez Ahmed writes that our wars "have been justified on the basis of either
[our] provocations or fabrications of attacks on US symbols of power. The systematic
use of this strategy…indicates that it is, indeed, intrinsic to the structure
of US decision-making…." Historian John C. Miller traces this use of
provocation to justify war back to Sam Adams. In his Stanford University Press
book, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda, Miller shows that Boston revolutionaries
under the leadership of Sam Adams provoked the British into "the Boston Massacre,"
the shooting of five Americans. Adams plastered the town with posted notices-supposedly
from the British!!-that the British troops were about to attack the people. This
precipitated chaos that led to the shooting incident. Adams then said the massacre
was "proof that there was no alternative to war." That became a mantra
of American policy used by every president in all of America's wars.
The
American public was averse to going to war at the beginning of World War II. Robert
Stinnett, a naval officer in that war, earned 10 battle stars and a Presidential
Unit Citation. After seventeen years of archival research, gathering over 200,000
documents and interviews, he concluded that the US deliberately provoked the attack
on Pearl Harbor to rally Americans to war. Although his book has been challenged
by some scholars, he does include in his study an "Action Proposal"
from Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, dated October 7, 1940, urging eight
actions to provoke Japan to attack. All eight were, in fact, executed and Japan
attacked and Roosevelt, like Sam Adams, had his excuse for war. He gave his "day
of infamy" speech. Stinnett's book is entitled Day of Deceit.
It is
now widely conceded that the Tonkin Bay attack by North Vietnam on August 4, 1964
(used by Johnson to get Congress to pass the Tonkin Bay Resolution) never happened
just as Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. Again, we will lie and
deceive to make war happen. "Conventional" American wisdom tries not
to remember this.
There is no irrefutable proof that the US government provoked
the 9/11 attacks. What is a matter of record is that members of that government
planned a "Project for the New American Century," a "blueprint
for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival,
and shaping the international security order in line with American principles
and interests." What is also an uncontested fact is that the attacks were
permitted "to occur entirely unhindered for over one and a half hours in
the most restricted airspace in the world." Rigid protocols are in place
for the immediate interception of any plane that is off course. When golf professional
Payne Stewart's plane missed a scheduled turn, heading north instead of south
to Texas, fighter planes were in the air quickly from Florida, Oklahoma, and North
Dakota. On 9/11 no fighter planes were dispatched until after the plane hit the
Pentagon. That is a fact testified to by the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Even
during our undefinable "war on terror," our amnesia is actively present.
(Gore Vidal says a war on terrorism makes no more sense than a war on dandruff.)
Terrorism is defined as attacking innocent people to send a message to their government.
Hitler did it in Rotterdam and Coventry and we and our allies joined in. As Michael
Walzer said, terrorism "became a feature of conventional war" in World
War II. The two greatest acts of terrorism in history, the bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, were done under the flag of the United States of America, the nation
that is now sanctimoniously denouncing terror. Amnesia is an effective analgesic
and an essential ingredient of American hypocrisy.
When it comes to war,
the US has multiple layers of forgetfulness. We forget that wars are fought by
the lower classes. The upper classes, like five-deferment Dick Cheney, have "other
priorities." At the time of the Revolutionary War, "the rich, it turned
out, could avoid the draft by paying for substitutes; the poor had to serve…."
The same is true at the time of the Civil War. As Howard Zinn writes: the wealthy
Mr. Morgan had escaped military service in the Civil War by paying $300.00 to
a substitute. So did John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, Jay
Gould, and James Mellon. Mellon's father had written to him that "a man may
be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are
plenty of lives less valuable." We forget that "We the People"
do not go to war; We the Poor do the fighting and We the Rich usually end up getting
richer.
Marilyn Young, in her essay "Remembering to Forget," looks
at an appalling American atrocity from the Korean War, called by historians "the
forgotten war," and shows how it immediately became a forbidden memory. The
massacre at No Gun Ri in Korea, however, did happen. Korean refugees, who were
driven from their homes by American bombs that had leveled their cities and towns
were herded onto a railroad track, where US planes then began strafing them. "Running
for their lives, dragging their children, abandoning the dead and dying, people
took shelter in a culvert beneath the tracks. American soldiers then opened direct
fire on the people in the culvert. One Korean survivor, Chung Koo Hun, told a
Washington Post reporter that American soldiers then walked among the wounded,
'checking every wounded person and shooting them if they moved.'"
When
this story leaked out into public view years later, Democratic Senator James Webb,
once Secretary of the Navy, wrote an angry rebuttal in the Wall Street Journal.
Webb regretted that the incident had been dredged up again and he blamed rapacious
lawyers "trying to squeeze millions out of a long-ago tragedy of the sort
that seems always to accompany battle fought where other people live." As
Young comments, we might well wonder why Americans like to fight their battles
where other people live.
Like a cuckolded lover who cannot face the fact
of betrayal, or like an addict who is not ripe for recovery, we deny, we insist
on forgetting, and we will keep on paying in blood and money for our addiction
to state sponsored violence. To transpose the words of the Gospel, show me your
budget and I will tell you where your heart is.
The Center for Defense Information
notes that the 2008 official budget for military spending was drastically understated
and that the real figure was over 900 billion dollars when all war expenses were
included. Rounded off, what that means is that this nation, which cannot decide
whether basic health care is a human right, is spending on kill-power:
77
billion dollars a month
19 billion dollars a week
Over 2 ½
billion dollars a day
Over 100 million dollars an hour
Almost 2 million
dollars a minute
And over 31 thousand dollars a seond.
With just a
portion of that wasted money, all education could be free, health care, including
reproductive health care, could be universal, world hunger, illiteracy, and thirst
could be ended, slums transformed, and full employment guaranteed as we move from
capital intensive military spending to labor intensive social and green infrastructure
spending.
Israel's Enforced Amnesia
As already noted, Israel
is our soul mate when it comes to tactically imposed forgetfulness.
Two
incidents illustrate how effectively and ruthlessly forgetfulness can be enforced.
On June 8, 1967, during Israel's six day war with its neighbors, Israeli naval
and air forces, with full knowledge of what they were doing, attacked and almost
sank an American ship, the USS Liberty. In a relentless one hour attack, they
murdered 34 American seamen and wounded 171. Consider these well forgotten facts:
Israeli
reconnaissance planes flew over the USS liberty every half hour on a cloudless
day starting at dawn. American sailors sun-bathing on deck waved at the Israeli
pilots as they flew over. Nine hours before the attack the Israeli pilots had
identified the ship with its American colors aloft as American, and from its prominent
hull markings they were even able to identify and report the name of the ship,
the USS Liberty. Israel also knew the ship was unarmed, alone, and slow.
The
unarmed surveillance ship was sailing in international waters off the coast of
Egypt. The sailors on board the Liberty were cheering reports of Israeli victories
in the ongoing war. Suddenly in a total surprise, in the early afternoon, in a
carefully coordinated naval and air force attack, Israeli planes and torpedo boats
pummeled the ship with 821 shells including napalm and torpedoed and almost sank
the ship. Their clear purpose was to sink the ship and leave no survivors, witnessed
by the fact that the Israeli torpedo boats shot and sank the life rafts put out
by the crew of the Liberty. As recently reported by former CIA officer Ray McGovern,
the following exchanges took place between an Israeli pilot and Israeli headquarters:
Israeli
pilot to ground control: "This is an American Ship. Do you still want us
to attack?"
Ground control: "Yes, follow orders."
Pilot:
"But sir, it's an American ship-I can see the flag."
Ground control:
"Never mind. Hit it"
The Israeli's shot down the American flag.
But first, to prevent an SOS going out they jammed and then disabled the communications
antennae on the deck. The sailors hoisted a larger American flag. That flag was
also riddled with bullets. As the attack raged, seaman Terry Halbardier eventually
rigged up a makeshift antenna and signaled the US Fleet. When that Mayday signal
for help went out, the Israelis heard it and the relentless one hour attack stopped
instantly. Approaching Israeli helicopters filled with armed soldiers coming in
to finish off the American crew suddenly retreated when the Mayday alarm went
out.
The Israelis immediately claimed it was an innocent mistake, which
is a lie of epic proportions. At first President Johnson protested and said it
was not a mistake but an Israeli deliberate attack on the US surveillance ship
so that we would not pick up their signals during their very successful six day
war, a war that tripled the size of Israel. However, Johnson, taken up with his
own failing war in Vietnam and under pressure from his Jewish constituency in
the United States, yielded to the "innocent mistake" lie and buried
the incident in a rushed eight day "inquiry" that was haphazardly completed
before all the dead were buried. The surviving crew of the Liberty were "threatened
with court-martial and prison if they so much as mentioned to their wives what
had actually happened. They were enjoined as well from discussing it with one
another." The suggestion was even made at the Pentagon that we, the Americans,
should sink the Liberty "in order that newspaper men would not be able to
photograph her and thus inflame public opinion against the Israelis." There
was more concern for Israel than there was about our own sailors murdered by the
Israelis.
Admiral John McCain, father of Senator John McCain, was a major
figure in the coverup. He barred investigators from going to Israel to seek interviews
or to view the logs, diaries, or radio communications from the attackers. The
Washington Post called his investigation "a shabby coverup."
The
truth of the deliberate attack, the first such surprise attack on an American
ship since Pearl Harbor, was clear at the time. Secretary of State Dean Rusk fumed
over the attack and said it was not an accident. Clark Clifford said it was "inconceivable"
that it was an accident given the excellence of Israeli intelligence. Robert McNamara
issued a release from the Department of Defense that the Israeli claim of an "accident"
was "implausible." Arthur Goldberg, the American ambassador to the United
Nations confided in Mr. Harman (the Israeli ambassador) that the United States
had intercepted the communications of Israeli pilots Identifying the ship as American."
A cursory Israeli "investigation" found no fault or even negligence
and no one was ever punished. The lack of punishment was further proof that the
Israeli forces were following orders. Israel offered no records for inspection
of the attack and made no pilots or seamen available for an inquiry. Israel paid
a token reparation. Immediate calls for a Congressional investigation were quashed
and the coverup continues to this day. It is the only such incident of an attack
on an American ship that has never been investigated by Congress. Calls to finally
investigate it while some of the survivors of the USS Liberty and some of the
Israeli attackers are still alive go unheeded. My appeals to Wisconsin Senators
Feingold and Kohl receive no reply. Senator Feingold, the maverick in the senate,
will take on almost anyone, but not Israel.
The attack on the Liberty should
not be allowed to be buried for the sake of the murdered dead and wounded of the
Liberty crew. But the attack on the Liberty was also a symbolic policy-maker.
It had disastrous consequences. George Ball, a former undersecretary of state,
said that the Liberty coverup set the tone for US/Israeli relations in the following
years. He wrote: "If America's leaders did not have the courage to punish
Israel for the blatant murder of American citizens, it seem clear that their American
friends would let them get away with almost anything." And so we have. And
so we still do. Once you burn memories, you end up burning people.
The attack
on the USS Liberty is a forbidden memory and forbidden memories have evil progeny.
With ten million dollars of American aid coming their way every day, Israel has
turned Gaza into the largest jail in the world, with 1.4 million malnourished
inmates. The December 2008 attack on Gaza which continued the wrecking of hospitals,
sewer systems, schools, water wells, homes, and mosques went unpunished by the
Obama administration. Ten million dollars continues to flow daily to Israel from
the nation that has become the paymaster for Israel's crimes. Only twice did American
presidents call a halt to American support for Israeli expansionism. Eisenhower
did it in 1956 when Israel had occupied Sinai and the Gaza strip. He threatened
to "halt all foreign aid and eliminate private tax-deductible donations to
Israel if it did not withdraw" and they withdrew. George H. W. Bush did it
in 1989. Jimmy Carter reports: President Bush "threatened to withhold a substantial
portion of America's $10 million of daily financial aid to Israel unless the settlements
were stopped between Jerusalem and Bethlehem…and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir
halted construction." Construction resumed when Bush Sr. left office and
continues to this day as Prime Minister Netanyahu senses the same reliable old
weakness in President Obama. Impotent pleas to withdraw from illegally occupied
land without financial sanctions will not work. They never have; they never will.
Talk
of a two state, Palestinian and Israeli, has become a mask. Israel is succeeding
in making it impossible. As Eduardo Galeano writes: "Little of Palestine
remains. Bit by bit, Israel is erasing it from the map." It is becoming a
de facto single state on the apartheid model. In 1999, Ehud Barak, former Israeli
Prime Minister, told The Jerusalem Post that if there were a single bi-national
state there would be no Jewish state unless the Arabs are denied a vote in what
he called an "apartheid state." Apartheid, I submit, is what has happened.
Gaza is a prison in shambles: Israel is tightening its grip on East Jerusalem,
limiting Palestinians' movement and voting. In May 2008, The Economist magazine
reported that "in the West Bank, Israeli settlements and military zones take
up 40 percent of the land." The World Bank and the BBC reports that the Jewish
settlers control 80 percent of the West Bank water. The 2.5 million Palestinians
are divided into "dozens of largely separate enclaves." The 1.1 Palestinians
inside Israel have "long suffered legal and economic discrimination."
Note the words: "separate enclaves," "discrimination," vote
deprivation: all of that is the language of apartheid, American-financed apartheid.
Once
you burn memories, you end up burning people.
The Murder of Rachel Corrie
Another
more recent incident is being pushed into the "forbidden memory" hole.
On March 16, 2003, a 23 year old American citizen, Rachel Corrie, as part of a
group committed to nonviolence, was peacefully protesting the destruction of Palestinian
homes in Gaza. She had previously been trying to prevent Israeli forces from destroying
water wells. As in the case of the USS Liberty, this was a cloudless day. Rachel
was fully visible, wearing an orange flack-jacket and speaking into a bull-horn.
She saw the Israeli bulldozer which was used to destroy Palestinian homes heading
toward the home of the Nasrallah family, occupied by two brothers, their wives
and five children. The American made Caterpillar bulldozer had two occupants in
the cab and nearby there was an armored personnel carrier observing. Rachel was
high enough to look straight into the cab of the bulldozer and into the eyes of
its two drivers. The bulldozer did not stop. Her fellow workers screamed and waved
their arms, but the bulldozer did not stop. She was run over twice and killed.
She died in the arms of Alice, a Jewish member of her group from England.
Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon promised President Bush a "thorough, credible, and
transparent" investigation. As in the case of the USS Liberty, the investigation
concluded that it was simply an innocent accident. The US State Department wrote
to Rachel's family that the investigation by Israel was neither thorough, credible
or transparent and the State Department also testified before a subcommittee of
the US House of International Relations Committee to the same effect. But nothing
was done about it. Israel once again could murder an American citizen with impunity.
George Ball was right, and Congress ignores repeated appeals to investigate. All
who are silent, in the Congress and in the citizenry of this nation, are complicit
in this coverup of murder.
The command of Israel and the United States is
that the murder of Rachel Corrie is to be forgotten. This is a command that must
be disobeyed. The nonviolent, peace-making response to truth suppressed is truth
remembered, and remembered out loud…very, very loud.
Conclusions
The
United States chooses to forget its imperial past and to ignore its imperial present.
It chooses to forget its passionate commitment to state-sponsored violence, war,
as the final, most trusted arbiter. At this moment President Barack Obama embraces
this fanatical faith in violence by trying to kill our way to success in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Pakistan while spending ourselves to death on more kill-power.
Israel
is courting disaster by stubbornly forgetting March 2002. That is when all twenty-two
members of the Arab League offered to recognize Israel's right to exist and have
normal relations with Israel. This offer has since been repeatedly reconfirmed.
In April 2002, the Organization of the Islamic Conference which includes fifty-seven
nations concurred with the Arab League offer, and the Iranian delegation expressed
its full approval. The condition was Israel's compliance with the United Nations
Resolutions 194, 242, 338 and the return to the pre-1967 borders. Hamas has said
it will acknowledge Israel's right to live in peace within its pre-1967 borders.
Israel
ignores that since it would take away their prime excuse for imperial expansion,
their claim of unique victimhood and insecurity. Israel even forgets the words
of David Ben Gurion shortly after the 1967 war when Israel was drunk with military
conquest. At a conference of the Labor Party Ben-Gurion punctured the euphoria
telling the party that Israel was overextended, that it had bitten off more than
it could handle and that it should return almost all the conquered territory immediately.
Forgetfulness could destroy Israel and much of the Middle East. The nuclear
genie is out of the bottle and bombing Iran will not put it back in. As Marc Ellis
says, "the scenario of Israel going down and bringing the middle East down
as its last act is hardly far-fetched." Israel's intransigence may provoke
a nuclear holocause giving Hitler and evil posthumous victory. Before it is too
late, Israel should remember the words of the prophet Micah. You cannot build
"Zion in bloodshed" (Micah 3:10). Zechariah said it also: "Neither
by force of arms nor by brute strength" would the people be saved (Zech 4:6).
The United States and Israel, these twinned amnesiacs, forget prophetic wisdom
to their own peril and undoing.
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