Something I frequently reflect on from my time living in Gaza were a couple conversations I had with left-wing friends. When discussing armed resistance, they’d say that they abhorred any attacks on civilians, even though Israel freely massacres Palestinian civilians. What they were saying was that they had no desire to sink to the abyss in which their oppressors resided. There is something about those remarks that moves me and humbles me: their piquancy, perhaps, their nobility, a feeling that manifested in a different way when I read about children in Nil’in studying the shoah.
Those recollections came to my mind as I read Dimi Reider’s short polemic, “The entire activist Left must condemn the murder of the settler family.” He recounts a recent incident in which a “Palestinian” “militant” killed most of a family of settlers: an 11-year-old boy, a 4-year-old girl, a three-month-old girl, and their parents. The first two paragraphs of his account are a nearly pornographically visceral account of those deaths, oddly descriptive, graphically precise. What those paragraphs order us to do is feel the raw immediacy of pain and horror. What they aim to elicit is mechanic response: condemn the animals that killed those four people. What condemnation is meant to achieve is to make us huddle, numb and unthinking, in tribal solidarity. At what cost do we ignore Reider’s demands for what words should or shouldn’t fall from our mouths? Well, I guess we lose our entry pass to his moral universe. Might not be the worst thing. Consider Reider’s arguments.
First, he assumes that the killers were Palestinian. Not so fast, Dimi. For one, Palestinian factions have rejected responsibility. And if one were wondering if the Zionists were willing to kill their own in order to further the messianic state-building project, one need only remember Ben-Gurion: “If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter.” So while noting the presumptuous ahistorical racism of Reider’s account, let’s accept the hypothesis. What follows?
Well, Reider ascends to the pulpit in the Church of Self-Righteousness of Latter-day Triangulators, and informs us that “our community has yielded to one of the most common afflictions of a conflict area, and dehumanized an entire community, consciously or subconsciously rendering it second-class, semi-legitimate target for brutal violence,” and goes on to refer to the killing of four settlers near occupied Hebron several months ago and the radical left’s “silence” as “even more deafening than today.” He notes that “two of them were spouses who left nine orphans behind.” Don’t soldiers, “legitimate” targets, leave orphans behind when they die? Is a crime worsened because its victim has children? Is murdering the sterile more appropriate? This is a reductio ad absurdum, but I carry it out for a reason: Reider requests we react and not reflect, and to get that reaction he resorts to the war-porn of the opening paragraphs and the emotional manipulation of the latter ones.
Can we do better than this atavistic raging? How does he know what “his” “community…has yielded to”? Has he carried out interviews? Asked questions? Probed, debated, sampled? Apparently, he has ferreted out some information on Facebook, zeroed in on one statement, dismissed the rest as casuistry, and concluded that some of the very best people in Israeli society have “dehumanized” the settlers, and thunders about the “shameful double standard.” OK.
Are there any differences between the 300 children massacred during Cast Lead and the three children killed in Itamar? Well, Reider casually refers to the illegality of the settlements, and then dismisses those who cite that illegality to defend the killings, which he considers illegal. Are things so simple? No.
First, Itamar is an illegal settlement. Most of the people living there are from the Gush Emunim bloc. Five years ago the settlers of Itamar had already stolen 6,000 dunum of Palestinian land. Two and a half years ago, settlers from Itamar apparently shot Yahya Atta Riahin, an 18-year-old Palestinian, at least 20 times from close range. No one knows exactly who did it, because no one investigated the case. The elected head of the Itamar town council once said at a funeral: “These Palestinians do not deserve any human rights. We cannot talk of human rights for people who are not human.”
Second, some interpret international law to allow for “belligerent reprisals”: when your enemy is targeting your civilian population, you are permitted to target theirs. This is coldly utilitarian, and some states reject that doctrine. The issue of protected persons is a gray area.* Nonetheless, for Reider to frame the legal issue so simply is convenient – law isn’t something you can wave around willy-nilly because you think it strengthens your case. If he wants to raise international law he cannot do so selectively. Furthermore, reports are circulating that we are talking about just two people, and many, including Reider, are using the rhetoric of “war crimes.” The corollary is that the settlements are by their very existence engaged in hostilities – which they are.
Third, the Israeli military leadership obeys even less stringent standards vis-à-vis its own armed operations. On July 22 2002, it assassinated Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh in Gaza along with eight children and five other adults, breaking a ceasefire and leading to the resumption of murderous violence. The IDF whitewash – I mean, report – stated, “Despite the outcome which resulted in this instance, the means of targeted killing was and continues to be a lawful tool in the war against deadly terrorism, provided that the operation is carried out in accordance with the principles and rules set out by Israeli and international law.” That is, in juxtaposition to the Bil’in statement on the killing of civilians, the Israeli army actually says slaughtering civilians is perfectly fine.
Fourth, settlers carry out pogroms. Regularly. They are doing so I as I write these words, throwing stones at Palestinians in Awarta, a nearby village. Between 1998 and 2002, there were three other murders quite close to Itamar: in October 1998, Ahmad Suleiman Hatataba, 68, from Bet Furiqin was killed; in October 2000, Farid Nasasra, 29, also from Bet Furiq was killed; in October 2002, Hani Bani Manya, 22, from ‘Aqqraba was killed. B’Tselem notes, “In the first case, the person responsible was convicted of murder, but in the other two, the perpetrators have not been apprehended or prosecuted.” They harass Palestinian peasant olive harvesters, shooting them freely. Non-violent activists are murdered regularly –21 since 2005, 10 of them minors. So much for Gandhi. How many pogroms must pogromists carry out before we hesitate before condemning their murders?
Reider is so busy accusing the radical left of moral corruption (in English, bizarrely) that he omitted these facts. Why, I wonder.
Reider goes on to write that “On the larger scale, the settlers are not only beneficiaries, but instruments and, crucially, human shields of a cynical state policy running through all the governments, left, right and “center.”… there is just no reasonable way to keep the onus of the blame upon the parents.” Blame for barbarity is forever displaced onto structures, state institutions. It’s always someone else’s fault.
Does Reider mean to say that the settlers are not illegally occupying land and thus carrying out a war crime, violating the Geneva Conventions? I hate to be the one to break it to him, but Zionist is consensual and hegemonic. At some point in history, blame must be shared. Incidentally, I do not blame the settlers first – I blame the Ashkenazi soft left which wrings their hands in anguish and then treats David Grossman like a patron saint because he occasionally notices after the Israeli army has killed a few thousand Arabs that perhaps some of the dead were innocents. I doubly blame the Ashkenazi soft left which forgets how much blood its privilege is built on – including the privilege to feel superior to a killer of children (Zionists never, of course, kill children). I triply blame the war-merchants in Israel and America making money off these deaths and the destruction of Palestinian society. At some point, a society must take responsibility for the crimes of its state. In the case of Israel, with a huge percentage of the population in the army or the reserves, the distinction between society and state is simply evasive. No one is saying the killer of the children is not at fault for killing the child. But to say the parents and the society have no blame is unacceptable.
His next paragraph is more trouble: he writes, “To those of us saying that no Israeli has the right to criticize any political violence by Palestinians, no matter how abhorrent,” Reider demurs: “the inability to formulate your own opinion or criticize the party you generally support wins you no respect on either side of the conflict.” If he thinks criticism from the Israeli “radical” left will win it social support for de-Zionizing cis-Jordan, he is not thinking straight. It is one thing to hope that cracks in Zionism will eventually emerge. Does he think that the racists and war-criminals of Israeli society must be coddled and argued with until they are won over to anti-Zionism? A sick society does not heal so quickly (Revealingly, Reider wants the “respect” of the other side of the conflict. No doubt: they cut some of his paychecks).
Reider writes, ripping into the radical left, “you imply by your silence that the brutal murder of a family of five is just as legitimate as engaging in combat with occupation troops or holding mass protests of civil disobedience in Bilin, Nialin and Nebi Salach.” It is stunning how silence speaks in such a way that lets Reider elevate himself over his comrades.
Finally, Reider administers the last blow: “But killing innocent members of a civilian community in order to get the rest of the community to leave has one name and one name only in international law – ethnic cleansing. In fact, this is exactly the method used, to everlasting shame, by Israel to ethnically cleanse many of the Palestinian communities in the Nakba of 1948.”
Killing a family of settlers is the same as al-Nakba, the great trauma of Palestinian history. I am not sure how to register the racist insult of this comparison, the casual contempt for Palestinians latent in equating their mass ethnic cleansing with the killing of a family of illegal settlers. Whatever one thinks about where on the moral spectrum to place the killing of the innocent baby of an illegal settler complicit in torturing the killer’s people, anyone in their right mind can agree that this is not at the moral level of the Nakba, and to raise that analogy is disgusting.
Still, punch-drunk on righteousness, Reider continues: “We must find a way of loudly and unreservedly condemning atrocities committed in the names of causes we believe in.”
Why? The default assumption must be our communal humanity. If you know nothing about someone, you have to assume that they are a good human being. Reider’s call for the “activist left” to condemn is the cant of the inquisitor.
It’s good company.
Hillary Clinton, an inhuman criminal, calls the actions an “inhuman crime,” presumably what she was advising Bill when he was presiding over the sanctions regime that killed 500,000 Iraqi children. Shimon Peres, who has done as much as anyone to make Jews ashamed of being Jewish, says that there is “no faith that permits such atrocities” – if only. The White House refers to this “heinous crime,” silent as a week ago its armed forces incinerated nine Afghani children. When such scoundrels speak, all you can hear is silence.
But both words and silences speak, and as Reider knows, sometimes silences speak louder than words. Sometimes silence means confusion, sometimes shame, sometimes thought, reflection, anguish. All this Reider peremptorily spits on, hurrying up the mob to set up vigils for the dead. Anyone so eager to sidestep thought and usher all to public cleansing rituals must be either responding to deep ideological pressures, or have an ulterior motive, or both.
Due to the willful historical amnesia that we politely call liberalism, we forget that we paid for the weapons that tortured the society that produced the men that killed the children. We forget that we voted for the politicians that gave the diplomatic support to the country that occupied the land of the men that killed the children. We forget that we cleansed the villages that pushed the people into cities where they stewed in anger and from whence two of them came to kill the children. And we forget that we dispossessed the land and built a society on the suffering of the people two among whom committed the killings that we now condemn.
Look at how much we forget in order to condemn. Something else that we forget is that, being the historical beneficiaries of an unending chain of catastrophe, we now get to play angel: staff the ranks of B’Tselem and condemn “these horrific killings,” write for “progressive” magazines, ream out “our” comrades for not “condemning these killings,” and so on. It’s fun to forget these things. Maybe some of the more quiet sectors of the radical left are not so quick to forget and are choking on what would be hypocritical and vacuous condemnations. Sometimes choking is more graceful than speaking. What do the condemnations of the left add to a moral atmosphere already saturated with condemnations? What would such condemnations add to MK Orli Levy–Abekasis (Yisrael Beiteinu), comment that “These …who came to slaughter children in their sleep, have sealed their own fate. They are not worthy of a trial or of any other human process”? When a country’s politicians adopt the mentality of the lynch mob, is it really an act of solidarity for the left to add its voices to their frenzy? Meanwhile, while we condemn, Netanyahu prepares to commit more war crimes: expanded settlement construction, 500 units. More war crimes. Let’s condemn some more.
I remember Yitzhak Laor’s poem: “The moderates who said let’s wait & see the party hack who fell over himself in praising the army… “They” shall not be cleansed.” Drenched in Arab blood, we piously insist on judging our victims, thinking that it shows some kind of purity.
Some will say that all moral judgment entails hypocrisy. The solution is to start judging the conduct we can change: our own governments’. That means cutting off arms supplies. That means sanctions until the Israeli government stops destroying the Palestinian future. We know from history that if you occupy, torture, and humiliate a people, kill their children, destroy their homes, ravage their mosques, burn their olive trees, and degrade their hopes to dust, some of them will snap. You want my condemnation? You will not have it. No one should respond to such demagogic moral blackmail. We killed those children. There are those who will warp my words. Good luck. I do not want children to die, no child deserves to die or deserves such parents or deserves to be born into such a society or such a state. However, I don’t think judgment of the Palestinians is the best way to prevent such murders. I have a better idea: war crimes trials for those most responsible. They will be easy to find – they are all over the television, and we vote for them regularly. If we are interested in stopping the killing of Jewish children and Palestinian children alike, then let’s point our fingers at those responsible for creating the conditions that make those murders almost inevitable: the endless chain of military commanders-turned-bourgeois ahusalim sitting in the suburbs of Tel-Aviv clucking at the latest barbarity spawned by the barbarities they’d rather forget. We know names, we know who to blame: Netanyahu, Livni, Peres, Bush, Obama, Clinton. How convenient, for us to blame the victims. How pathetic and cowardly. How shameful.
*Edited slightly, for whatever it’s worth. I had mis-interpreted the doctrine of belligerent reprisals. Elise Hendrick corrected me. Nonetheless the ambiguity of the law especially vis-a-vis targeting settlers stands.
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Excellent piece. However, it’s worth noting that the Geneva Conventions provide no support for the idea of “belligerent reprisals” against a civilian population. In fact, they are expressly prohibited in absolute terms.
But other sections of customary international law, do they not?
They probably did at some point, certainly, but multilateral treaties (particularly those that, like the Geneva Conventions, are considered to reflect peremptory norms) trump customary law.
interesting.
of course it does not seem clear that those settlers that far out are civilians right
True enough. Everything I said about the Hebron case holds, at least for the parents.
Though it’s worth remembering that any serious murder inquiry starts with the people closest to the victims, especially when the alternative is as improbable as a Palestinian making it undetected in and out of a heavily fortified and protected military enclave, and doing so armed with nothing more than a knife despite the likelihood of encountering people with guns.
Yes, I re-read earlier today, was very helpful.
In Itamar they are rounding up Thais apparently.
It should be crystal-clear that I am not advocating or justifying killing the children, anyway.
Certainly (though the same people who think that failure to join child killers in condemning child killing is proof that one supports child killing will have no trouble missing the point. Speaking of which, I have it on good authority that you’ll be hearing from Reider himself soon).
like a sword sitting on top of my head.
“I have often been asked by policy analysts, policy-makers and those stuck with implementing those policies for my advice on what I think America should do to promote peace or win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. It too often feels futile, because such a revolution in American policy would be required that only a true revolution in the American government could bring about the needed changes. An American journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified. My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the Jews in Nazi Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.
Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims’ struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.
Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.
Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.
Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people is being eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure on Israel. Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.”
GAZA: THE LOGIC OF COLONIAL POWER
“Terrorism” as it is used in public discourse certainly is not a descriptive term; however, “terrorism” is in fact a legal term with a very clear legal definition. The reason this definition is virtually never relied on or even mentioned in public discourse is clear enough — it would constitute a confession that our political and intellectual class regularly engages in and condones terrorism.
I hope you will understand when I say — Israeli terrorists use the settlements and settlers as human shields. How does that sound for an equal and opposite line? Does that excuse the killings of the settlers, infants women and children? Seems to work well for the Israelis, why is that? Hint: re-read Gaza, the logic of colonial power (above)
In other words, Ms. Hendrick, I do not believe in the legitimacy of the nations, or statehood — believe they essentially are franchises for the elite (their governments, their institutions, etc.). Why should I believe differently in their collective reasoning in International law? Indeed, their domestic laws for the most part reflect no “rule of law” (which is just a replacement for the divine right of kings, the “rulers” are just better hidden) but in the “law of rule,” essentially. It somewhat reduces down to what Mr. Rosen says in his article I posted (although, I do not believe he understands the implications reasoned back to the individual participants):
“Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition.”
You might say this is a bleak review, but I say it is full of clarity, and until we recognize this endemic problem there will never be a proper application and equal application of any law, either domestic or international. What this necessitates is the complete dismantling of the system(s), not the continual recitation of that which will never be used equally or justly. If this is not recognized we will be forming arguments for naught till the day we die.
Hysterically funny, this righteous rage of yours. Proves once more that more often than not, on the Internet people are talking to themselves. Knowing Mr. Reider from the day he was born, I can testify before the Grand Jury that he is anything but a scoundrel. You are inventing things. This is not what he says.
abba Reider is clearly as talented with words as the kid. is it worth pointing out that within 20 words you contradicted yourself?
First, I’m not his father, my friend. Second, here are 56 words. Third, no contradictions.
read. slowly. your comment.
You wrote 56 words. But you did not read Max’s comment. He refereed to your first 20 words. Count. Read. Think about it: Who are you having a conversation with?
his brain is asleep and you mustn’t wake it.
[…] and Israeli police are even treating Thai workers as suspects. Itamar: Already, The Aftermath you are a scoundrel Dimi Reider IDF continues mass West Bank arrests in wake of Itamar massacre : According to reports from […]
Here’s a random thought. If the ‘activist Left’ would like to prove themselves worthy of the name, they could point out that no one actually knows who committed the killings and condemn the cynical exploitation of the killings by people who have never shown any compunction when it comes to murder.
As a shameless member of the ‘activist left’ I would like to point out that the current mass round-up of foreign Asian workers in the settlement is itself a grave racist act based solely on he said/she said rumor which it would not surprise me if the rumor originated from the settler crowd.
activist left, too busy angling for publication in jerusalem post apparently.
I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say that the likelihood that the person who killed the family in Itamar was probably not Oj Simpson, a cab driver from Holon or a random tourist from Norway. The fact that no group claimed responsibility means only that no group want to claim responsibility.
Considering the behavior of the people of Itamar, it doesn’t seem hard to construct a likely place to conduct a search, or to think of a motive.
Otherwise there isn’t a thing you here wrote that answers Mr. Reider’s piece in any meaningful way, and if anything you come off as just the sort of spoiled American histrionic Leftist activist that embarrasses the grownups trying to stop the Occupation and make life less shitty for everyone.
Don’t shoot down people like Dimi Reider who showed a commitment to independent thought and due diligence before he hit the “send” button.
If you can’t do the same, I suggest you go back to Brooklyn. I’m sure your tales of sacrifice and bravado will serve you well in the name of felatio, but don’t don’t presume for a moment that your ancestry anoints you as spokesman for…or against the colossal amount of stupidity that goes on here. If anything, you are adding to it.
ill let this through because it’s exemplary in totally missing the point. you don’t end an occupation by coddling a sick culture, much less so by participating it.
There’s no point to a terrorist attack for which the group involved claims no responsibility. The whole idea is to press certain specific demands, which does not work unless the group responsible lets people know who did it.
The reality is that most people who are murdered are murdered by people they know. Any serious murder inquiry begins with a thorough examination of the lives of the people involved in order to determine whether there was anyone amongst their family and acquaintances who might have had a motive and opportunity to kill them. This is particularly true when a murder takes place in a location to which access is heavily restricted. Before one simply assumes that someone with no right of access was able to enter and exit a heavily fortified, fenced-in, armed enclave without being detected or stopped, one starts by looking at the people for whom the issue of securing access doesn’t arise — those living in or visiting the place (either the settlement or the home of the victims).
No attempt has been made to do any of this. It has merely been assumed that dead settlers equal Palestinian killers (though there has also been a roundup of Thai workers).
It is absurd to claim that questioning the immediate assumption that the killer must be Palestinian (even though no suspect has been identified and no group has claimed responsibility) means that one assumes that ‘no Palestinian would ever do this’. No one has claimed that, and, to my knowledge, no one has operated on that assumption. On the other hand, there is a widespread, unchallenged assumption that no Jew could possibly have done this, which is the sort of thinking that one has encountered in places such as Kishinev in 1903.
As for the rest of Zach’s post, it’s childish, ad hominem nonsense and discredits itself.
Max, do you believe that the one who carried out the murder in Itmara was palestinian ? since the very beginning of the incident, I was sure that it was criminal rather than political. Local news beside Aljazeera hinted that a Thai worker was the one who killed a family of 5 in Itmat because the father of that very family refused to give him a wage as he worked for him for a period of time.Israel is accusing pals so far, however, future will show otherwise.
Yousef:
I happen not to think it was a Palestinian, for any number of reasons: the report about the Thai worker, the delayed response to the breach in the fence, the fact that no Palestinian faction claimed responsibility for the killings. Could it be? Sure, I guess. Is the presumption of Palestinian guilt itself racist? Oh yea. But I had to accept the hypothetical to write a response to Reider.
Firstly: The fact that no faction claimed responsibility means one thing and that is that no faction finds this action to be politically attractive amongst Palestinians to draw support to the faction (which just showcases that Palestinian society at large, despite rightful urge for revenge for decades of massacres and bloodletting that been visited upon its citizens in the name of the settler movement, are more humane society than the society which their oppressors come from).
Secondly: This act, committed by supposed twosome, is an act of crime NOT war-crime. It may be a “hate crime” but it doesn’t in any way implicit Palestinian society and political movement at large, as much as a Labor voter killing his neighbor who is a of religious-Zionism strand implicit the entire labor/liberal Zionist movement in an act of war-crime against religious Zionism and their hip knitted yarmulkes.
Thirdly: The current witch-hunt that is happening now in the Itamar area where armed settlers and soldiers are rounding up Asian foreign workers, currently, stands upon baseless accusations and racism.
Michael: “are more humane society than the society which their oppressors come from“
I mean Israeli civil society at large, not only the settler movement.
so you are saying some one else did the killing, someone other than arabs? are you saying thins because an arab would never do such a thing? because an arab never has according to you done something like this.
i once worked as a private security contractor in that area, i would wander for weeks in the hills from yassuf to etzar and itamar and end back to my pick up point. I have seen Arabs kill inocent’s children, they have tried to enter covertly itamar on the sabbath in fall 2002, plant a road side bomb near tapuach, murdered an entire family in late december 2001
those people are scumb. least the nazi’s had the ability to admit to their crime, these “Falsestinian” imposters have not an ounce of honor. they should be given no quarter on the field of capture as directed under the Geneva convention regarding the capture of uniformed enemy combatants. further israel should stop trying to rescue arab children who are wearing explosive belts, they should hold them of at a distance and let them detonate.
Yes, like the most recent killings at checkpoints near Nablus the army shouldn’t shoot Palestinians, they should allow
1) a soda bottle to be opened (http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=347306) –2011
2) a boy to switch tunes on his mp3 player and (http://palsolidarity.org/2008/05/3154/)
They should go ahead and let those things happen instead of settlers and the army executing people based on the same racist fear and paranoia you evoke in your troll attempt. They would also give out less IDF medals in the process.
You may have a point about lax security in 01. In 02 you indicated an attempt to enter failed. Imagine it would since the Intifada was in full force. When I lived in the area 06–07, you couldn’t even WALK the settler road between Beit Furik and Itamar. Soldiers arrived within minutes of stepping onto the road, even at dusk. From the northern approaches, it is a massive mountain. From the southern approaches, it is a military zone.
Meanwhile today, settlers are shooting cars, throwing bombs on cars, and attacking Palestinians all over the West Bank with army support. Your delusions, pharrow, will end in a bloody disaster for the country many of us have deep connections to. Based on the settlers misreading of reality, I tend to think that is what they desire though.
Pure hate speech. (though I’m not necessarily criticizing you Max for letting this steaming load through.)
It was what it was. Go look at +972. These people comment freely over there. Evidence that the only thing you can dilute radicalism with in Israeli society is poison.
Hey, I just looked at Dimi Reider’s blog, looking for his denunciation of the Israeli Army’s murder of twenty-nine members of the Samouni family during the Gaza Massacre. I just did a little old site search on GOOGLE: site:/reider.wordpress.com/ Samouni.
Can you believe it? Nothing at all? And Dimi WAS blogging in January 2009. The silence of Dimi on this unspeakable atrocity cannot go on. How can you explain it, Dimi? It couldn’t have anything to do with the ethnicity of the dead, could it? Some corpses just bleed ink, while others just sit there.
Is it really so hard to generate a meaningful discussion about how generations of occupation, dispossession, and expulsion might be brought into otherwise abstract and moralistic reflection on legitimate forms of resistance, the dilemmas of ethical detachment, the salience of social causation (likely outcomes, initial conditions,…), regarding atrocities such as in Itamar, “debate” about “a Palestinian Gandhi,” and all the rest? Wasn’t the point of your reply to invite a serious discussion of how to integrate ethical demands and empirical realities in thinking the vagaries of activism, human rights, resistance, and criminality in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Was your position not that whether the disgusting murders in Itamar represent some Palestinian’s notion of “resistance,” occupier’s notion of “terrorism,” or jurist’s notion of a “war crime” — as reflected in ethical judgment and engaged response — cannot be assessed outside the history and political economy of Zionist and Israeli de-humanization of the Palestinians? Was your position not that to make such judgments abstractly in “general moral terms” is an empty, complicit, or sanctimonious gesture with harmful effects on the anti-occupation movement? These positions are reasonable in this and any other conflict, and are built into the juridical concepts at hand, as well as all sensible normative or “moral” considerations. One can usually judge how serious persons are about the suffering of others (whether in the Itamar or the Palestinian community) by the substance and mode of their address. You deserve many better readers and responders, Max, to respond to your considered views about significant and painful matters. Sayres
Max I really don’t know whether to be disgusted or in awe of your ideological clarity and sense of purpose. I truthfully don’t know which side I’m on. I read Dimi’s article and I empathize with him, understand his point of view, and feel the need to cut him some slack. I also realize that to a large degree that’s utter bullshit on my part and allows me to ignore the brutality that an entire forgotten and maligned population has suffered for decades. It’s between these two extremes where I find myself confused.
I think Dimi and many other Israelis are struggling between their sense of multiple identities, (as a Jew, Israeli, Westerner, Colonizer) and the disgusting facts on the ground that occur just miles away from their homes. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when I see your complete lack of empathy and understanding for this position. Whether this is attributed to your enlightenment and moral purpose on the issue or your single-minded callousness I honestly do not know.
Ultimately though, this navel-gazing doesn’t do anyone any good. I just flipped through some pictures on activestills.com and I see the anger in the eyes of the dispossessed. How can anyone be surprised that there are those who wish to kill Israelis? We need to stop looking at this conflict in the convoluted paradigms of religion, colonization, “clash of civilizations”, etc, and understand the very simple reality that when someone knocks down your home, kills your family, and interns your children, you’re going to be angry. It’s a wonder that you dont have seas of Palestinians committing heinous crimes. And for this I can find some perverse sense of hope — that for the most part humans are good, and they know that reciprocal violence does nothing but quench bloodthirst.
But when the Israelis punish an entire society year after year after year — how for the love of all that is good on god’s green earth can they act surprised that some Palestinians will respond with violence and not with the almost super-human quality of non-violent resistance.
I think this article is a pretty interesting.
Thanks Max
And here’s an even more horrible guilt pandering from Dimi Reider, this time in Hebrew: http://www.haokets.org/2011/03/15/13912/
Here he openly accuses the Israeli ‘activist left’ of practically valuing Palestinian lives over Israeli Jewish lives by pointing out that that ‘left’ hadn’t condemned the previous killing of 4 settlers on road 60 in September. It appears as if Dimi at a beginning of shedding his leftist skin, a journey taken by many previously conscious Israelis (including one of the esteemed founders of Meretz who is now a Likudnik, there are too many examples). It is as if he’s suddenly shocked by this particular murder and he suddenly sees a terrible malaise afflicting the dedicated left..
This does not look good.
If you want a pretty reliable indicator that someone is not speaking in good faith about an issue, it is when they start bleating about how “the radical left must condemn” or “US Muslims have no condemned Islamic terrorist strongly enough” or … you get the idea.
It is a sure sign that the person saying it is more interested in scoring points against a perceived adversary than they are actually engaging the subject itself. I have posted blog entries for nearly 6 years, and I have never engaged in this cheap rhetorical device for precisely this reason.
I am saddened by these deaths of these people, but, unlike the New York Times, where the reporter published an article with an undercurrent of righteous indignation, while emotionally personalizing the victims, something that the paper never does with the many Palestinian victims of the occupation, I understand the context, a context that the Times consciously concealed. Indeed, one could even go so far as to say that the Times meretriciously exploited the deaths of the victims for the ideological purpose of legitimizing the settlements.
(con’t)
As an activist first and then as a Palestinian, whose paternal grandmother’s family was literally forced out of Yafa in ’47 (and that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what members of my immediate and extended family experienced both during and in the aftermath of the Nakba), I find Dimi’s rant just a little bit insulting. Not that I’m going to play on guilt, because that is cheap, but really, Dimi? Equating the Nakba with the murder, however heinous and really just plain amoral (but that’s a given), of a family whose very existence in the West Bank is riddled with illegalities is not only disingenuous, it is revelatory as to the fabric of: a) the so-called Israeli Left (what with blanketed support for his polemic from other +972 contributors, including Yossi Gurvitz’ rebuttal), and b) Dimi’s maturity as both a writer, as well as a self-proclaimed activist and harbinger of leftist Israeli political commentary, which incidentally has come at the expense of the Palestinian struggle (exposing Eden Abergil only to excuse her behavior as the potential product of “the effect of conflict” and not, perhaps, the product of a sickly militarized society; see http://reider.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/the-best-y.… Or has Dimi forgotten that settlements are an illegal enterprise? That settlers, who are militarized, freely shit on the Palestinians, not to mention others (foreigners, foreign and Israeli activists, migrant workers, GOD only knows who/what else)?
The very basis of Dimi’s condemnation of the Left, in its entirety, is seriously unwarranted. Beyond that, it is injurious to both the Palestine solidarity movement and the microcosm of Israeli society that is legitimately invested in the solidarity movement.
Labeling the murders a politically-charged crime is called incitement. Dimi, who enjoys a very wide readership and whose voice as an Israeli makes (or ought to) a difference, has a moral obligation to relay an honest message.
As for the trolls on both your site and elsewhere: are you seriously going about this by pointing the finger at Palestinians (yeah, nice try with your choice of naming Pharrow, you little shit)? Nobody ever said Palestinians are incapable of violence and the very basis of such an argument is both dumb and baseless. It’s not even the point when no one has claimed responsibility and when the perpetrators of the crime have yet to be apprehended.
SWA, I would say with this entry the mask Dimi was wearing came off completely, it was kind of slipping here and there in the past posts. Apparently he is angling for a more prominent position in the tribe. Some play the deceptive part well, but nothing lasts forever.
Also, Sayres Rudy, while I understand your frustration, some of us are Jewbonics loyalists.
Max, I cannot thank you enough for this brilliant response. And if you haven’t already seen it, you are referenced in Ash’s latest for JSF http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2011/03/cr…
SWA, we agree on the situation, so I am replying in solidarity. Just to clarify: 1. I specified that Max deserves MORE rigorous interlocutors, not that he has NONE; your retort is inapposite. 2. I specified that Max deserves more RIGOROUS interlocutors. That point remains: his post about Itamar has sparked disagreement, but not analytically careful discussion, about ethics, resistance, and occupation. People have counter-listed offenses and crimes and insults, but have not set out and defended principled arguments. In this sense, my point was about the distinction between “loyalist” and “analyst.” It doesn’t mean much to be a “loyalist” to a website or a person or even a cause — this is the very point of Max’s initial post, to reject Reider’s thoughtless interpretation of what loyalty to the Palestinian struggle entails. Thanks for inviting clarification. SR
Excellent…
General response to things on here:
I’ve met Israelis before who don’t consider the West Bank part of Israel. However, they still support the repressive measures like house demolition. This probably means a) they only don’t want to occupy uncleansed land themselves and b) would readily accept the West Bank if handed on a silver platter. The supposed willingness of Israelis to give up the 1967 land in exchange for peace can’t be taken seriously. Not to mention they can take a position on house demolitions, something they won’t bear any consequences for.
So assuming this family was killed in retaliation for their illegal squatting, it tells me that for all their indulgence by the government and security, the fanatical settlers volunteered themselves into a lower rung on the Israeli Jewish hierarchy, a byproduct of their being Orthodox. That’s why living near the enemy and taking the very rare reprisal is good enough for them and why they’re scorned by the Peace Now crowd who flip-flop during the many Operation Cast Leads.
In any case, Israel could defend its citizens much easier from ’48 than ’67 if the Palestinian civilian population were such a paramilitary threat. So even that can’t be taken seriously. There are settlements in the West Bank at all because the Palestinians are less inclined to kill civilians for a political objective than their Zionist colonizers. Just as, as Ilan Pappe pointed out, many aliyah pioneers stayed with Palestinians whom they called “strangers” in their diaries.
When a Palestinian takes that action, condemning it only gives your green light for another repressive measure. I don’t want to say collective punishment because that implies they’re being punished for what someone did, as opposed to just being Palestinian.
Reading back my post, I don’t think ‘illegal squatting’ was a good choice of words. Let’s say ‘breaking art. 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention’.
There’s absolutely nothing that can justify slitting the throat of a 3 month old baby. The depravity of your attempt is quite revealing as to your true character and the true character of supporters of the palestinian arabs. If you aren’t sickened by this massacre then I question your humanity.
Way to miss the point.
I enjoyed your piece, although I think you were not at your scathing best and I definitely would not have given Dimi any quarters here. I don’t know much of Reider as I have in recent months detached myself somewhat from the Israel-Palestine issue for a more broader scope of revolution (who can keep up with the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa nowadays?) and from this commentary alone, he seems more like the bread-and-butter liberal Zionist pukebags who want to “shoot and cry” at their occupation. I have yet to read Gabriel’s take on this and will put it at the top of my list.
How silly is it that being an advocate of justice has to come with disclaimers to the likes of those like Reider. We have to condemn this, we have to adhere to this, or else we’re just reactionary anti-Zionists who revel in Jew-blood being spilled. It certainly smacks of sheer lunacy that such folk are the ones who want to equate isolated acts of violence to organised state terror on a population that has been disenfranchised for over sixty years.
If the perpetrator is not Palestinian, will anyone apologise for the profiling?
Last question: no, of course not. History does not exist.
I did pull some punches. One can hope that Dimi pulls himself back from the precipice. We will see.
I also meant to mention, before being blinded by Dman’s brilliance… superb piece, Max. The last paragraph, in particular, couldn’t be more true and vitally important. How utterly shameful is right.
[…] the recent killings in Itamar of a family including three children, demonstrate how weapons are used by Israel’s enemies […]
[…] the recent killings in Itamar of a family including three children, demonstrate how weapons are used by Israel’s enemies […]
[…] of organized armed liberation, which I justify and support. For more in that vein, Max Ajl wrote a beautiful and eloquent rebuttal of Reider that ought to be required reading in […]