A ceasefire by Israel. As if.

WAR IN THE MIDEAST

A ceasefire by Israel. As if.

There will be no end to war while Israel continues expanding and eliminating everything in its path in its quest for greater Lebensraum, writes ISMAIL LAGARDIEN.

ANGELA TUCK
ANGELA TUCK

I AM sitting here in my village, quite content. Nature is the only threat to my home life, such as it is. In search of something to eat, the wild baboons in my village ripped the herbs from the plant boxes in my yard. They tore down the bird feeder and ate the seed. Last season, and the season before that I put seedlings into the soil; the baboons came again, and destroyed it all, again. I have given up the idea of growing my own food …

Spring is hesitant. It is, also, as uncaring as autumn can be. I have little to complain about.

On the Levant people are dying. Yesterday death stalked Gaza, today it is Beirut, tomorrow it may be Tehran, some day in the future it may be Medina and Medina as part of greater ambitions to “purify” the region. More than a little like Adolf Hitler wanting to expand German territory for more Lebensraum, and remove impure people from his Dream Reich.


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In some ways Israel has challenged Death to a game of chess that can only end in its own destruction. Right now, however, people are dying on the Levant. Israel holds, but for how long?

For a year now the images of death and destruction in Palestine have exhausted some of us, those of us who have been reduced to being mere spectators. In Palestine there are people who are still alive and live in anticipation of imminent death. They have no home, no family and no friends left to die. That is what war is about. More than anything else, war is about killing and breaking things. War is a human thing. It is, at least, what we have come to expect about humanity.

All of these make it easy to call for a ceasefire.

Sat in the comforts of home, thousands of kilometres from the carnage, it is easy to talk about a ceasefire, and for peace. If peace is merely the absence of war, then peace is no more than stopping the guns and stopping the bombings, or stopping terror. This is what a ceasefire would be in Palestine. If peace is more than the silence after the killing and breaking, then a ceasefire would be meaningless.

There is just so much land on Earth

On the face of things, the war in Palestine is about the land. The Jews believe that their god promised them the land more than 3 000 years ago, and the Palestinians (Christians and Muslims) have lived on that land for millennia, it is true. The conflict in the Levant may be the closest we have come to a holocaust, in the original sense of the word – the destruction of people, their homes, their families, their religious and cultural heritage – but it is, ultimately about the land. There is just so much land to go around, and Israel wants to take as much of it (from others) as they need to satisfy their biblical aspirations.

In 1917 the English poet Edward Thomas was asked why he had enlisted at the age of 37. He reached down, scooped up a handful of soil and said, “literally, for this”. The Palestinians can dig their hands in the earth in their gardens, on their farms and fight to defend and die, “literally, for this”.

A single (important) aspect, if you take biblical promises tout court, is that the Israelis have staked a claim for a promise that could never be kept, by a god whom nobody knows, for sure, but in whom they believe anyway. Nothing else matters. The land is theirs and their god said it was. Any move they make on the chess board is based on faith, but Death may have a few more moves up its sleeve.

For now, it seems as if the Israelis are locked in an infernal machine of biblical violence.

The victims of Israel’s war that began in 1947 were never, and may well never be viewed with compassion, which is reserved only for their own people. Supported by biblical certainty, the Israelis are eternally innocent, even when they kill and burn and destroy and rape. Everything, anything, that the Israeli military does to Palestinians is “legitimate”. Add to this the statement attributed to Golda Meir, who in 1970 said the Palestinians could never be forgiven for “forcing” Israelis “to kill their children”.

Think about that for a minute. It is like saying we are killing you because you make us kill you.

Under these conditions, underwritten by the Bible, stopping the guns and bombs would be a ceasefire, to be sure, but only because there is a cessation of military or paramilitary conflict. Even the most conventional of endings of war seem improbable. In this conventional sense there are three main endings; an outright victory by one side or the other; a negotiated ceasefire leading to a peace settlement of some kind, and an inconclusive outcome, with the fighting gradually subsiding and leaving a stalemate or frozen conflict.

For Israel, the future (to establish a greater Israel across the lands of Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis and Saudis) will be an extension of the carnage of today. Benjamin Netanyahu echoed (probably unwittingly) the words of St Augustine, who said it was “for the sake of peace that men wage[d] wars”. For Netanyahu and his people, war has to be extended to Lebanon, Iran, Syria, parts of Turkey, Iraq, Egypt and South Arabia in order to have peace. This is the tragedy of Israel. The Israelis need more room to live, more Lebensraum. Hitler wanted to establish an historic mission, the Israelis are pursuing their biblical mission.

It is, in some ways, the quintessential Greek tragedy, in that Israeli politicians, settlers, the military and intellectuals are organically linked to Zionism (they had built and now maintain hegemony around the idea of the Israeli state) based on a biblical injunction, which turns them into compliant bodies and against deviance. They, and the Israeli state, have to exist because if they do not then god is dead. They are helpless, against the raging machine of Zionism; their choices are stark. Fight for Israel, or die because of Israel.

Transitions to peace

With war as a necessary path to peace, and with expansion an objective of war, never mind who or what may stand in the way, a transition to peace (a peace beyond the mere presence of violence) seems unattainable. Israel, by its own stated ideals, will not cease expanding, and eliminate anyone or destroy everything that threatens that expansion. Consider this accurate description of Israel’s ambitions, by Egyptian academic Dr. Marwa El-Shinawy, after Benjamin Netanyahu presented a map of greater Israel on September 27:

What is occurring today is not merely a transient military escalation; rather, it constitutes a component of a profound ideological project rooted in the myths of the so-called ‘Greater Israel’... The Jewish faith, Zionist ideology, or the concept of Greater Israel, is fundamentally based on a distorted interpretation of the Torah. This interpretation asserts that the borders of the Israeli state extend from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Syria and Iraq. This notion is inscribed at the entrance of the Knesset: “And when the Lord appeared to Abraham, He granted him the Holy Land from the Nile to the Euphrates.” It is also prevalent in educational curricula: “On that day, God made a covenant with Abram, saying: I will give your descendants this land, from the valley of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.

It is virtually impossible, then, to see Israel stopping anytime soon, at least not until it eventually loses the chess game with Death, which means that a ceasefire (beyond the silence of guns and bombs, and more than the mere cessation of killing anyone, and destroying everything in the way of Israeli expansion) remains hollow. I should add that my personal view is that Israel will continue until it either runs out of human and material resources; soldiers as well as funding and its domestic institutions and material infrastructure. It’s hard to believe that the U.S. and Europe would allow anyone to stop Israel.

Even in the most optimistic scenario, if we reflect, for instance, on the end of World War 1, the formal end of armed conflict through a negotiated settlement is rarely a clean and complete break with violence, structural or somatic, nor does it mean that original grievances and the objectives that gave rise to conflict in the first instance have suddenly disappeared. Right now the Palestinians and the Lebanese have their backs against the wall, Israel is on the offensive (with God, the European Union and the U.S. watching its back), and the Iranians may be next.

There is, already, a move under way in the U.S. to prepare a “crown prince” Reza Pahlavi, a close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, for regime change in Tehran. The Israeli war-machine will roll on, until there is no more land to conquer, and places and people to “purify”.

The rest of us who still believe in pacifism, peace and non-violence as necessary conditions for justice – utopian, it seems, yes – are mere spectators.

Walter Benjamin may have said that the Israelis have destroyed “the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence”… Where does violence start and end in its reach for legitimacy? It depends, Benjamin may have added, on whether there is an acknowledgement of constraints (on the use of organised violence), “and declaring ‘What pleases is permitted’.”

Just how one can even speak of a ceasefire amid all of this, is impossible to conceive.

VWB


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