A collective punishment against common sense

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Periodically, you hear of boycotts against Israel, Israelis and Israeli products for their long occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Even in unassuming New Zealand, you saw a bizarre protest against an Israeli tennis player and a restaurant owner declaring he wouldn't serve Israeli guests. Bear in mind, these protests weren't against Israeli leaders or anyone in any kind of decision making capacity or even against Israeli bureaucrats. They 'shrewdly' targeted tennis players and tourists because they were too impotent to think of action that was meaningful like, I don't know, organizing fundraisers to help Gazan families.

They protest a collective punishment by... imposing a collective punishment.

People who do this insist they are not anti-Semitic and that they just detest what the Israeli STATE is doing. I have some sympathy for that. What the Israeli state is doing in the occupied territories, keep them as de facto prisons for 40 years, is unconscionable. Their recent annihilation of Gaza (1300 Palestinians dead, 5300 wounded, 1.5 million made homeless) is the worst atrocity of all.

But how often do you hear for such sanctions against other human rights abusing countries? I've never been sure why human rights abuses by the Israeli state merit a boycott against everything related to that country but human rights abuses by Syria, Sri Lanka, Eritrea and countless other places barely merit a mention, let alone a cause célèbre. How come no one boycotts the local Chinese restaurants in solidarity with, say, Tibet?

The Israeli government should be punished. Their leaders should be sent to The Hague or, at the very least, be subject to a travel ban like Robert Mugabe and his thugs. Protest in front of Israeli embassies and consulates all you want. But what purpose does it serve to protest tourists, except reinforce the already impenetrable Israeli siege mentality?

Most absurdly, I've periodically heard members of western academia call for cultural boycotts against Israel. If you call for a cultural boycott against any country or people, then you should be automatically kicked out of academia. The whole point of universities is to foster cross-cultural understand, increase exposure to different ideas and expand knowledge. It's completely antithetical to that purpose to call for a cessation of cultural links, a decrease in exposure to different ideas and shrink knowledge.

In times of war and other time, cross-cultural exchanges, such as via universities, are even more important not less. If these so-called academics are going to make their ivory tower into a prison, then they have no business being paid to influence young people.

Today, I read a great example of the sheer stupidity of such cultural boycotts. I'm sure many of you have heard of the film Waltz With Bashir, which was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign film. The film maker Ari Forman was part of an Israeli army unit that was involved with the infamous Sabra and Sathila Massacre, in which Israeli-backed Lebanese Christian militia slaughtered nearly 3000 Palestinians refugees during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The film maker had great guilt about being part of such an atrocity and the film explored that. Much like All Quiet on the Western Front, the film was an anti-war piece made all the more powerful by the fact that it was told by a soldier.

So here you have a powerful anti-war film, an anti-war against Lebanon film, an anti-massacre film, a film that casts the Israeli army in a dubious light.

And it is banned in Lebanon, because the country has a law prohibiting the importation and viewing of all Israeli films, regardless of content.

Sounds more like a collective punishment against common sense.

Some are more equal than others

Ed. note: I usually try to avoid writing about the monthly Israeli-Palestinian wars because hardly anyone can comment on it in a civilized, rational manner and I'll probably regretting making an exception but here goes...

The most famous line of the US Declaration of Independence reads, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..."

I've concluded that this line is not true. Because whenever erupts the monthly violence in the Middle East, what I hear is that either (though not both) Israeli lives or Palestinian lives are worth more than those of any other human being.

Why?

Because when a few Israelis get killed by Hamas rockets, it's an outrage that requires a massive, completely disproportionate military response. If hundreds of Gazan civilians die in the process, it's unfortunate but it's 'worth it' if it saves the life of one Israeli civilian. There you have it quite explicitly and unashamedly. The life of one Israeli civilian is greater than the lives of hundreds (soon to be thousands?) of Palestinians.

But Israel apologists are not unique in this regard. Several hundred Palestinians have died during the recent Israeli aggression against Gaza. There has been deafening international condemnation of this action.

Some of it has been from Arab countries. Most of these countries have human rights' records that are at least as bad, if not far worse, than Israel's. Most of these are countries that arbitrarily arrest people, make sure opponents are 'disappeared' and ban free speech... except of course when it comes to anti-Israel protests.

A lot of the protest comes from western Europe. They claim it's a disgrace, an outrage, amassive crime against humanity what Israel's doing to Gazans. These poor civilians who had nothing to do with Hamas rockets shouldn't be murdered, claim European (and a few American) protesters.

But this also begs the question. A few hundred have died in Gaza and this has provoked international outrage, especially from the western left. By contrast,5.4 MILLION people have died during the last 10 years of war and chaos in the DR Congo. Are there mass protests in the European streets about this far greater tragedy? The Central African Republic. Burma. Darfur. Northern Uganda. North Korea. There are at least half a dozen places around the world with a humanitarian situation comparably bad to Gaza. You haven't heard about most of them.

Why? Because the Israel-Palestine is a cause celebre. Some see Israel as a projection of their own militaristic tendencies. Some see Palestine as a projection of their own anti-imperialist beliefs.

The truth is that, with a few exceptions, global "concern" for the Israel-Palestine situation really has little to do with the Israeli and Palestinian civilian victims of the violence. The concern has to do with supporting or opposing the US' unconditional support of everything Israel does.

If you oppose this, then Hamas is justified in rocketing Israeli villages and using civilians as human shields. If you support this, then Israel is justified in bombing UN schools and banning humanitarian assistance from Gaza and, if they felt like it, nuking the Occupied Territories.

Viewed objectively, viewed as a human being rather than as a member of one tribe or the other, ALL of these are war crimes. Too bad hardly anyone views it that way.

If the US government weren't involved in this, most Americans wouldn't give a damn what happened to Israeli civilians and most of the rest of the world wouldn't give a damn what happened to Gazan civilians. Just ask the Congolese. Or the Burmese. Or any of the thousands of political prisoners in Syria or Egypt or Iran. Who's protesting on their behalf?

"If you jail a prisoner you at least give him food"

"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." -Thomas Jefferson

I've written before about Israel's criminal starvation of Gaza. And Gaza has often been called the world's largest prison. However, the BBC intreviews one Gazan who contends that making Gaza into a prison would be an improvement. He notes, "If you jail a prisoner you at least give him food."

Update: To the shock of no one with a rudimentary understanding of human nature, Israel's attempts to starve Gaza into submission has only made violence worse by increasing resentment. Young men who were once busy laboring in Israel were rendered idle, hungry and angry. And anyone with a basic knowledge of history knows that this is the worst combination of circumstances for reducing violence. So the potential solution? Invade Gaza. It seems to me that if you don't understand the most basic premise of human nature, you don't deserve to run a supposedly respectable state like Israel: when you treat people like savages, this is exactly how they are going to act.


Further update: Apparently the Israeli people are more sane than their leaders. According to a poll published in Haaretz, one of the country's leading papers, nearly two-thirds of Israelis support a truce with Hamas as the only way to stop rocket attacks. CBS News' correspondent in Jerusalem points out that although talks with Hamas would once have been considered taboo, "recently radio talk shows have featured some former defense officials who say the only way to stop the rocket fire is to talk to Hamas about a truce.

A kid's birthday in Gaza

Ever wondered what every day life was like in the Israeli-imposed humanitarian disaster that is the Gaza Strip?

Perhaps not.

But if you're curious, check this out.

The criminal starvation of Gaza won't make Israel safer

I usually don't write about IsraelStine. And I know that, for ideological (not humanitarian) reasons, this smaller man-made disaster will provoke far more reaction than my piece on the much greater man-made catastrophe in the DR Congo (5.4 million deaths = 0 comments). But this story is so disgusting even by the normal low standards of the conflict's participants that I can't help but vent.

In response to rocket attacks on Israeli border villages by Palestinian militants, the Israeli authorities have decided that this situation can only be solved by starving people in the Gaza Strip to death.

The Israelis closed all crossings between occupied Gaza and Israel proper. The state created in response to the Nazi Holocaust EVEN PREVENTED HUMANITARIAN SUPPLIES FROM THE UNITED NATIONS from entering what had been described even before this abomination as the world's largest prison.

The illogic of the Israeli government is that starving Gazans will pressure the militants to stop the rocket attacks. In reality, this will only INCREASE support by ordinary Gazans for the militants. This is what has happened in with past collective punishments. And this is what will happen again. I believe that it was Benjamin Franklin who described insanity as trying exactly same thing over and over and expecting different results. As such, the Israeli government is stupid. The primary cause of terrorism is despair and there's little despair more primal than starving to death.

I am not a reflexive critic of the Israeli government, current or past. Israel has the right to exist in peace. Israel has the right to defend itself. Israel faces real threats. I've said that Israel ought to be allowed to join NATO in exchange for allowing the creation of a truly sovereign Palestinian state.

But the right of self-defense has certain implicit qualities: the self-defensive act should be specifically targeted to the threatening entity and its only objective should be to end the threat.

Israel has been trying collective punishments on its Occupied Territories for over two decades. And the same problems of insecurity remain. This is not surprising to anyone with an iota of understanding of human nature. Sure, you have the rare heroic exceptions like in South Africa. But when you treat people as sub-human savages, it is almost inevitable that they will react in a sub-human savage way.

Let me repeat that: when you treat people as sub-human savages, it is almost inevitable that they will react in a sub-human savage way.

In such crises such as the rocket attacks, there is a completely understandable desire on the part of the aggrieved that their government DO SOMETHING. What often happens is that the government ends up being more concerned about DOING SOMETHING, anything, than about doing something that's ACTUALLY GOING TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM. The appearance of concern ends up trumping common sense and judgment and ultimately results.

This is why the Israel irrationally invaded Lebanon in 2006 and it ended up being the disaster it was always likely to be. This is why the US launched its irrational aggression against Iraq and it ended up being the disaster it was always likely to be.

These governments may have made disastrous decisions that hurt their national interests and security. But hey, at least they DID SOMETHING.

The bottom line is that heavy handed collective punishments in occupied lands do not work. They create resentment and hostility and resistance. Somehow, people forget that the collective punishment (in al-Qaeda's eyes) known as 9/11 failed to cower Americans into subservience to the Islamists. It hasn't worked for America in Iraq. It hasn't worked for Israel in the West Bank.

And Israel's criminal attempts to starve Gazans to death aren't going to serve Israel's interests any better.