Our Coverage and Re-launch
Dear Readers,
We thank you for your patience as the Palestine Chronicle undergoes major renovations - a new website with new interactive features, greater coverage and more content. Our re-launch is scheduled for November 20. In the meantime, and due to the ongoing war on Gaza, we will be providing you with latest news and commentary using our newsletter.
Please don't forget to visit the website on Nov 20, and thank you again for your understanding.
The Team at the Palestine Chronicle
|
| REPORT FROM GAZA |
Gaza, Now: Future is Uncertain
By Adie Mormech - Gaza City
I'm writing this from near the Gaza seaport from where I can see smoke rising around me from the bombs that fall down on the Gaza Strip from the Israeli planes above. Words fail me. Despite the limits to life from Israel's five-year siege on Gaza some kind of normality is attempted in Gaza. How could it be any other way when the majority of the population are children, do parents and older siblings have any other option?
Yet this civilian population, most now holed out in the dense, tight refugee camp buildings and urban centres of Gaza are facing the wrath of some of the most powerful aerial warfare available to humankind. As I write the constant bombardments consume your senses and shake the entirety of your surroundings. For the over 300 people injured or killed so far by the Israeli F16s, drones and Gunboat shellings the loss for them and their families will never relent.
I can barely write a sentence and more news, "six injuries from a bombing in Sheikh Radwan, children among them, including a 4-year old child who was playing in the street.", "Elderly man just killed in Zaytoun neighbourhood, with 4 injuries". Friends have received text messages from the Israeli Occupation Forces saying in Arabic, "Stay away from Hamas the second phase is coming."
Twelve year old Abdullah Samouni, who I teach English to in Zeitoun camp called me a little while ago. "We're really scared", he said. We moved to get away to Zeitoun and went to our grandmother's house. Take care of yourself, there are so many bombs." Abdullah lost his father and four year old brother shot by Israeli soldiers entering their house in the land offensive of Israel's Cast Lead attacks on Gaza over the new year of 2009. In three days, he was injured and lost 29 members of his extended family. His mother Zeinat has moved her seven remaining children to a town further north, but bombs are raining down all over the Gaza Strip.
"We moved everyone out but bombing is so bad here. All of the kids are screaming. Whenever an attack happens they come and hold me. The children remembered what happened before, they think only the worst." said Zeinat who like so many has had to put aside her own fears and tragedy to show strength for her children.
Seeing Western media continue to distort the picture of what is happening here, just as they did during the massacres that took place during Israel's Cast Lead attacks, and any other offensive described as "retaliation" made my call with Abdullah all the more angry. This year from January 1st until November 6th this year 71 Palestinians were killed and 291 injured in Gaza, while no Israelis were killed and 19 were injured according to the United Nations. How many Western media outlets offer proportionate time to Palestinian victims as to Israeli victims?
Just as the Israeli forces initiated the pretence for the Cast Lead attacks, this time the Israeli army's initial attack took place on Thursday 8th November with an Israeli incursion into Gaza, in Abassan village. They opened fire indiscriminately and leveled areas of Palestinian land. The shooting from Israeli military vehicles seriously wounded 13-year-old Ahmed Younis Khader Abu Daqqa while he was playing football with friends, and he died the next day of his injuries.
On the 10th November, Palestinian resistance fighters attacked an Israeli army jeep patrolling the border with Gaza, injuring 4 Israeli occupation soldiers.
Israeli forces then targeted civilian areas, killing two more teenagers playing football, then bombed the gathering that was mourning their deaths, killing two more. Five civilians were killed and two resistance fighters, including three children. Fifty-two others, including six women and twelve children were wounded. For Gaza to be under such attack, could anyone doubt that resistance forces would fire back? Once Israeli forces had carried out further bombardments, one of which was the extra-judicial killing of the Hamas military commander Ahmed Jabari, the circle was complete.
Since then during the last three days 29 Palestinians have been killed and three Israelis. The majority of Palestinian victims were civilians of which six were children. More than 270 have been injured of whom 134 are children and women. The vast majority are civilians. The number is rapidly rising.
Even this comparison is detached from the context that Gaza is under Israeli military occupation, illegal according to United Nations Resolutions and a five-year blockade, deemed collective punishment by all major human rights organisations, violating article 33 of the Geneva Conventions. The right to resist enforced military occupation by a foreign force is also enshrined in international law, a right that should be self-evident.
Which explained the jubilance from Palestinians in Gaza when rumours spread that one of the rockets which usually hit open land, this time brought down an Israeli F16 fighter jet, the likes of which had carried out over 600 airstrikes all over the Gaza Strip these last three days.
Indeed, our visits to hospitals didn't take long to convince us that these Israeli aerial attacks and shelling from gunships have hit many civilian areas.
At the main Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza City, every ten minutes more people arrived in ambulances; an elderly man, a young man, a child, two more children. Once leaving the injured, the stretcher gets a new towel and is sprinted back out for the courageous paramedics of the Palestinian Red Crescent to go back out into the danger zones, to find the latest victims of attacks.
There weren't many beds free in the intensive care unit where some had brain injuries from embedded shrapnel. While we were there, rushing in came a tiny child, ten month old girl, Haneen Tafesh. She had very little colour or life in her and was rolled on to the hospital bed. She had suffered a brain haemorrhage and a fractured skull. Later that evening we learned that she hadn't survived.
Talking to the Director General of Al-Shifa, Dr Mithad Abbas he asked, "We know Israel has the most precision and advanced weaponry. So why are all these children coming in?" He stated that if casualties increased there would be a severe lack basic medicines and supplies, such as antibiotics, IV fluid, anaesthesia, gloves, catheters, external fixators, Heparin, sutures, detergents and spare parts for medical equipment. What's more electricity blackouts would hit hard, without enough finance for suitable fuel for generators.
Once again as I write five huge blasts from nearby shake our building and our senses. The bombings have progressively escalated, especially once night falls. Jabaliya refugee camp, Shejaiya, Rafah and Meghazi I learned had been under a continuous barrage. One blast came down during an interview with a Canadian radio station which helped the audience to understand more than I could.
A 13 year old girl, Duaa Hejazi was hit in Sabra neighbourhood as she walked back home with family. Shrapnel was embedded all over her upper body. "I say, we are children. There is nothing that is our fault to have to face this." She told us. "They are occupying us and I will say, as Abu Omar said, "If you're a mountain, the wind won't shake you". We're not afraid, we'll stay strong."
And so the night goes on. The near future of Gaza is uncertain. The fates of everyone here is uncertain. Which people now preparing to go to their beds, will have their lives turned upside down by the loss of a loved one these next few days. I know some of the warmest people here that I feel strongly attached to, that you would instantly care for if you met them. The complete madness of this violence makes me wonder what we have done to ourselves, how do we allow humanity to manifest itself in this way.
Outside you can make a difference. I'm asking you, because the Israeli army will not empathise with the people they are looking down on through their cockpit windows. Nor will their politicians. But you can empathise and you can act. The normal ways but multiplied by ten. Small and big efforts to create massive international mobilisation are the only way to reduce the extent of the horror and loss facing the Palestinians of Gaza.
The Israeli cabinet has approved the call-up of 75,000 reservists compared to the 10,000 reservists called up for the massacres during Israel's air and land offensive in Cast Lead. There is not much time.
|
| WHY GAZA? |
For Israel, Imperialism Isn't Enough
By Dan Freeman-Maloy
"What I am trying to say to you, my friends, comrades, brothers and sisters, is that what we are facing with Israel is a two-headed monster: it is both an imperialist monster, a colonialist monster; but it is also an extremists state." - Eqbal Ahmad, speaking on the occasion of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
Things in Palestine have developed far beyond the point where any given "flare-up" in the constant violence that defines Israeli rule can be addressed in isolation. The significance of the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza has absolutely nothing to do with the tired, dull hasbara talking points being peddled by Israeli diplomats - less still with their enterprising "twitter offensive". But nor is it simply reflected in the destructive impact of this wave of Israeli state killings. As Eqbal Ahmad put it in a 1982 speech that today rings very true, "What matters is the goal, the actuality, of what the Israelis want."
Israel, of course, has no monopoly on the politics of violent domination. But if, as the late Eric Hobsbawm wrote, "most historic empires have ruled indirectly, through native elites often operating native institutions," in its rule over the Palestinians Israel does not easily fit into this imperial mainstream. As a result, the threat posed by Israeli politics involves dangers much more severe than external dominance and the suppression of genuine independence.
The false promise of conventional imperial rule in Palestine has gotten much public play in recent years. A decade ago, endorsing Israel's renewed onslaught throughout the occupied territories, President Bush declared (June 2002) that what needed was "a new and different Palestinian leadership so that a Palestinian state can be born". A Palestinian "state"!
Of course, if this were the case, some obvious questions arose. Like, why not in the '90s? The Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat had already been caught in a system of extreme financial dependence on Israel and its superpower sponsor, thanks in no small part to conditional funding from a willing Europe. As it rubbed shoulders with donors, the PA leadership had increasingly demobilized and sidelined the organized mass base of the Palestine Liberation Organization. And by decade's end, it was clamoring to overcome Israeli objections to the increased involvement of CIA operatives and their close associates in PA affairs. If the objective was a viable client state, what was the problem?
Full Israeli re-invasion of this budding client state, the occupied West Bank and Gaza, thus raised some eyebrows. When Israel moved beyond prisons and bullets to deploy U.S.-supplied F16 fighter jets against the occupied Palestinian population (spring 2001) - the first deployment of warplanes within Palestine since 1967 - no less a dove than Dick Cheney publicly objected. Even after September 11 2001, it took some time for official Western acceptance of this escalation to sink in. With Binyamin Netanyahu, for example, declaring that 9/11 demonstrated the need to "destroy terrorist regimes, starting with the Palestinian Authority," George W. Bush countered that "the world ought to applaud" Arafat for deploying PA security forces against "radical elements" (October 2001). To the end, CIA director George Tenet objected to the application of "regime change" politics against Arafat's PA.
Yet there were limits to the Arafat leadership's indulgence of foreign sponsors - limits to the diplomatic concessions it would make, limits to its willingness to deploy PA forces against Palestinians when they would all be attacked by Israeli military power, regardless. And the days of U.S. (and hence international Western) cooperation with Arafat were numbered.
Karma Nabulsi, speaking on a panel in Boston just after Israel's 2008-9 assault on Gaza, recalls the ensuing transition to Bush's "new and different Palestinian leadership":
"[In] 2005, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) ran for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority - this was after the death of Arafat. And if you remember, Arafat had been under a two-and-a-half year siege in his headquarters in Ramallah for very much the same kind of issues that are facing Hamas today. Mahmoud Abbas was elected on a vast popular landslide. And his position was much different from Arafat's. His position was that we are going to - as Fateh, as a political party, as a president who will lead the negotiations - we are going to entirely rely upon the goodwill of the Israeli government and of the U.S. administration in order to achieve our rights, in order to raise the issues that concern us, and in order to get a peaceful settlement. If any of you remember what happened during that year, Sharon was in power, and Mahmoud Abbas received absolutely nothing. And not only that, was humiliated, and treated with contempt, by the Israeli administration."
The election of a Hamas majority in the parliamentary votes of early 2006 occurred against this backdrop. The outcome, Nabulsi emphasizes, reflected not the bare popularity of Hamas, but the presence within its electoral platform of the consensual Palestinian positions (on prisoners, on refugees) that the Abbas presidency had set aside under the pressure of external threats and demands.
Under the pressure of a suffocating destabilization campaign jointly pursued by Israel, U.S.-allied donor states, and foreign security personnel, the politics of the occupied West Bank and Gaza were further fragmented in June 2007 - the elected Hamas government effectively confined to Gaza, control of the fragmented PA authority within the West Bank returned to those Palestinian leaders favoured by Israel and the West.
But even as those Palestinians resisting have been punished, the politics of compliance have themselves been allowed to develop only within the narrowest of cages.
To be sure, development of something like a genuine Western protectorate in parts of Palestine has had its prominent advocates. "I firmly believe," explained the ranking U.S. military commander responsible for the Palestinian file in 2007, "that you make changes in this world the way the Romans did - by being on the ground, by getting your feet dirty in the mud and working with the people on the scene." And partnered with a compliant West Bank administration, why not? After summer 2007 the influence in the West Bank of the 2006 election results had been nullified; or in other words (those of then Secretary of State Rice), "you now have in the Palestinian territories a democratic leadership".
Armed with the "Roman option," the likes of Dayton thus pitched the politics of sustained imperial cooptation to Israeli officialdom. Compliant Palestinian security forces could be developed, brought into the orbit of U.S.-allied protectorate networks in the region, and clear the way for limited Israeli withdrawals that addressed Israel's stated security concerns. "For the first time," Dayton kvelled in 2009, "I think it's fair to say that the Palestinian security forces feel they are on a winning team."
This message, however, does not resonate all that strongly in predominant Israeli political circles. Leaders considering the Palestine question are much more inclined to play New England Puritans and Pequots than to merely dispatch imperial proconsuls.
When the Obama administration took over, neocolonial dictates were predictable and quick in coming. "The new U.S. Administration," PA officials were told before Obama even assumed office, "expects to see the same Palestinian faces (Abu Mazen and Salaam Fayyad) if it is to continue funding the Palestinian Authority." But a question remained: Might a middle path be developed between conventional imperialism and Israel's settler colonial zeal? Might Israel be seriously pressed to reserve some stable fragments of Palestinian land, and some position of plausible diplomatic dignity, for some kind of Palestinian polity?
Until autumn 2010, it seemed possible. Since, the illusion has faded. Political manipulation by Western donor states continues - but fewer and fewer are taking development of a viable Palestinian protectorate seriously. The vaunted Palestinian-Israeli "bilateral track" stands exposed as the relationship between an occupied population and a pioneering military power intent on brutalizing and suppressing it (at best). And the U.S., true to form, stands vigilant in defense of the sanctity of this fine "bilateral process" against any who would interfere.
* * *
So what of Gaza? What does it mean when Israel threatens, bombs, and kills to ensure its compliance? Its compliance with what?
Note that the territorial and demographic reality that is the Gaza Strip is itself, to begin, an ominous reflection of Israeli colonial strategy to date: "When transfer doesn't work, concentration is tried."
In 1948, the greater part of Palestine's population was forcefully displaced beyond Israel's pre-1967 sphere of control to clear the way for Israel's anachronistic pioneering. A great number of the "transferred" ended up in the Gaza Strip. Their nearby existence quickly gave rise to an abiding Israeli wish: "If I believed in miracles," declared David Ben-Gurion in an October 1956 Knesset speech, "I would pray that Gaza would be washed down into the sea." After 1967, Gaza's inhabitants not only remained above water but came under direct Israeli rule.
Several decades later, they surely aren't taking up very much room. "Taken in isolation," Darryl Li wrote in 2006, "the Gaza Strip is often described as one of the most densely populated places on earth: 1.4 million Palestinians crowded into 365 square kilometers. But in the broader Zionist calculus of minima and maxima, this fact can be redescribed as follows: some 25 percent of all Palestinians living under Israeli control have been confined to 1.4 percent of the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine."
Still, they exist, they take part in Palestinian politics, they resist with all the means at their disposal. And Israeli officialdom continues to look wistfully at the water.
But how simultaneously to exclude and control these people while clearing safe space to pioneer? "It will be a difficult struggle," explained Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Sunday. "Gaza's residents are not about to jump into the sea". Until the likes of Barak can be so lucky, however, they do see ways to proceed. Fabricating pretexts for aggression on the southern front is, after all, a vibrant tradition, as old as the state itself.
Hence Wednesday's dramatic demonstration killing - an old-fashioned public political execution, carried out with the latest technology. It is worth quoting this Wednesday's report by Aluf Benn, editor-in-chief of the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, at some length:
"Israel demanded of Hamas that it observe the truce in the south and enforce it on the multiplicity of armed organizations in the Gaza Strip. The man responsible for carrying out this policy was Ahmed Jabari . . . Now Israel is saying that its subcontrator did not do his part and did not maintain the promised quiet on the southern border. The repeated complaint against him was that Hamas did not succeed in controlling the other organizations, even though it is not interested in escalation. After Jabari was warned openly ..., he was executed on Wednesday in a public assassination action, for which Israel hastened to take responsibility. The message was simple and clear: You failed - you're dead."
Now - the principal line of actual communication between Israel and Hamas having being violently severed in the most spectacular way possible - hundreds of air strikes on Gaza form the backdrop to Israeli explanations that it will need to move in hard with ground forces if complete quiet in the south is not immediately forthcoming. During last year's spring wave of aerial killings in Gaza, Israeli cabinet minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch declared that there "is no immunity for anyone in Gaza". Until Israeli wishes are fulfilled, the state reserves the right to kill at a pace of its choosing.
* * *
Not long after giving the speech cited at the outset of this article, Eqbal Ahmad wrote that "the PLO has been saddled with a heavier burden than any other liberation movement in contemporary history except one" (that of the Vietnamese after the Korean war). How this challenge still facing Palestinians can be met by those facing ruthless exclusion on the one hand and, on the other, a proudly declared "continuum of assassinations" executed with overwhelming military force, is well beyond me. It is also, I hasten to add, very much beyond most people who often speak to it from the West with undue confidence. The very resilience of Palestinian challenges, locally and around the world, is in any event extremely impressive.
But the issue here is absolutely not Palestinian conduct in the south. And to consider the ongoing attacks on Gaza as part of a disproportionate back-and-forth is to miss the point. These killings, which are startling far beyond their body count, must instead be taken as confirmation of the grievous threat posed by the Israeli political system and its current place in the region's politics for the coming period- irrespective of how this particular surge in violence develops. Recall that as Palestinians face mass imprisonment and aerial political killings, there also remain on the record the threats, issued via quasi-official Israeli documents, to reduce the main population centres across the Middle East to "vapour and ash" should any state in the region pose too serious a challenge.
Perhaps Israeli killings will continue to rage with impunity, checked only by the armed responses others in the region can muster. But this may well be catastrophic for everyone concerned. Those of us observing these developments from the West, and identifying with the kind of politics that avoid bloodshed, should take very seriously the question of what forms of political deterrence can be developed to check this threat.
- Dan Freeman-Maloy is an activist, a writer and a research student at the University of Exeter's Centre for Palestine Studies. He hosts a writings site at notesonhypocrisy.com. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. |
| INTERVIEW |
The Ideology of Hatred - Interview with Niza Yanay
Interviewed by Neve Gordon
(Niza Yanay is the author of The Ideology of Hatred: The Psychic Power of Discourse.)
After 9/11, hate began colonizing new spheres, operating as a social and political force that manipulates and mobilizes entire publics in very specific ways. In order to understand the recent events in Gaza you should read Niza Yanay's new book The Ideology of Hatred: The Psychic Power of Discourse which may very well change the way we think about hatred and its role in politics. A few days before the war on Gaza interviewed her in New York City in an effort to better understand her arguments.
NG: When thinking of hatred, we usually think of a very strong personal feeling or emotion. What do you mean by the ideology of hatred? Can hatred be an ideology?
NY: Let's begin with the concept hatred. Before 9/11, the words hate and hatred were mostly used to describe an emotional reaction or by-product of racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia and the like. One would say that white supremacists, for example, hate blacks, or alternatively if someone hates blacks, we would say he was a white supremacist. After 9/11, the word hate began colonizing new spheres, operating as a social and political force that can both manipulate and mobilize entire publics in very specific ways.
People began using the word hatred in the context of terrorism, particularly referring to Islamic groups who had expressed anger and criticism towards the West and the ravages of capitalism. The word hatred was thus transformed, becoming a signifier for danger, mostly the danger of Islam. In President Bush's rhetoric, the world was schematically divided between Muslims who hate on the one hand, and the West which had become the target of irrational hate on the other hand. I found it interesting that the West does not hate.
This distinction between hatred as an experience and hatred as ideology underscored the need to ask new questions about the relation between politics and hatred. And these new questions, I believe, need to focus on power relations between different groups, such as colonizer and colonized, ruler and subject, and not so much on the personal experience of specific individuals who experience hatred (though such questions are still important too).
NG: Can you give me a concrete example of this ideology at work?
NY: Most people consider "suicide bombings" as motivated by hate, while very few people consider air strikes on populated areas to be hate crimes. The media often describes the suicide attack as a hate crime, but I have never come across a report describing the US drone attacks in Pakistan -- that have killed over 3,500 people -- as hate crimes. This suggests that hatred as ideology is at work. And this ideology helps determine who is blamed for being the initiators of hate, who becomes the target of hatred, and, in fact, when hatred counts as hatred at all.
NG: I see the a-symmetrical relationship and the fact that hatred as a causal factor has become associated with certain groups and not others, but what exactly is this ideology of hatred?
NY: Let me give you an example to help clarify my claim. Think about a young adolescent Jewish girl in Israel who leads a comfortable life and has never interacted face-to-face with Palestinians. This is a very reasonable assumption, since Israel is a totally segregated society. Why, it is interesting to ask, would a girl who has never met a Palestinian speak with such vehemence and personal hatred against Palestinians and Arabs in general? Why do so many Jewish citizens of Israel, who have never been hurt by Palestinians, openly admit to intense hatred? This articulates a national ideology of hatred and not merely a personal hatred.
Of course, you can immediately claim that there is a real danger. Many Israeli Jews know someone who has been injured by terrorism. You might also say that since the Palestinians hate us, therefore we hate them.
All of these automatic answers demonstrate the effectiveness and the power of state ideologies of hatred. In the book, I try to go beyond these kinds of normative responses by paying attention to the difference between hatred as a response to power and hatred as the operation of power.
It is not surprising that people react with hatred toward those who humiliate them, control their movement, or deny their rights. There is nothing theoretically interesting in the individual or collective experience of anger and hate as a reaction to power that imposes helplessness on us or denies our very being. This is hatred as a response to power.
But there is also hatred as an operation of power. Israel's persistent claim that it has no partner for peace is, I would claim, part of an ideology of hatred. The role of Israel's no-partner myth is to portray the Palestinians as primitive and warmongering and in this way it hopes to circumvent and conceal its own desire to receive moral approval from the Palestinians.
Once we understand how hatred operates as an apparatus of power relations, and particularly how the discourse of hatred is motivated and mobilized in national conflicts, serious questions about misrecognition, veiled desires and symptomatic expressions arise. These questions have, to a large extent, been left unaddressed in studies of hatred between groups in conflict.
NG: I am not sure I follow.
NY: Sometimes when we desire something that is unthinkable (for example, the love of someone who is forbidden) and we repress our desire, it ends up surfacing in different ways. In the book, I examine language, laws, and practices that hide that which is repressed; namely, the desires we either fear or refuse to admit to ourselves.
We know that when a child tells his father "I hate you," it could mean "I don't receive the love I want from you." Hate speech often represents such veiled desires and fears. The disavowal of our desires and the misrecognition of our fears are defense mechanisms, and these mechanisms, I claim, can have extremely dangerous effects.
So, for me, this intense ideology of hatred signifies the return of the repressed; the return of that which is denied and reappears as a symptom in "hate" speech and practice. I therefore consider the cultivation of hatred in national discourse to be a psychic political defense strategy. Of course on the individual level hate can be accompanied by a visceral experience, but as a political concept and as part of the national discourse hatred is a word that serves more to conceal than to reveal.
NG: So you are saying that there is something new going on here? How is today's ideology of hatred different from other forms of hatred we witnessed during the 20th century?
NY: I am not saying there is something necessarily new, but rather that we need to broaden our understanding of the ideology of hatred, its motivations and the way it operates.
Anti-Semitism is an ideology of hatred, and so are racism and homophobia. But studies of anti-Semitism have taken hatred as an obvious emotion of separation and exclusion. What I am saying is that that the concept of hatred is much more ambivalent than we tend to acknowledge, and that without understanding the attachment and intimate relations between the Jews and non-Jews in Germany we cannot really understand the hatred.
The fear of 'Judaization' (Verjudung) or 'Jewification' of German culture, the fear of the 'Jewish spirit' overtaking the German nation, was not only a fear of contamination and contagion, as many scholars have remarked. These concepts allude to a deeper anxiety regarding the invasion of the German body, in spirit and mind, from within. Thus, this anxiety signifies a deep sense of intimacy and perhaps a desire to mimic the Jew. Psychoanalytically speaking, such prohibited thought often transforms itself into a symptomatic form of speech and behavior. This approach to the concept of hatred leads me to ask what, for example, the relation is between intimacy and genocide.
NG: Am I correct then to say that you are using the term ideology not in the Marxist or liberal way, but rather in a way that is more attuned to psychoanalysis?
NY: To a certain extent, yes. The point I want to make is that we need to start thinking about the ideology of hatred as a symptom of desire. This might sound contradictory to many people, but actually hatred is always constructed within an already inevitable bond between two unequal groups or sides of rival power. Intense hatred assumes a prior and intense relationship.
Consider the famous speeches of president Habyarimana of Rwanda between 1973 and 1994. He continuously attacked the Tutsi for being counter revolutionary bourgeoisie traitors; but at the same time he constantly referred to them as brothers. This, I argue, is typical and symptomatic.
The use of intimate familial language to characterize the so-called traitor is a common practice in many ideologies of hatred. So, when we hear, speak of, or examine hatred we must pay particular attention to issues of proximity, attachment, intimacy, desire and even love. Of course, these forces are not obvious when we think of hatred. But, if we want to understand how people become our hated enemy we must study the conditions of closeness and proximity.
NG: Someone might say that this is counterintuitive. Don't we commonly understand hatred in terms of distance, difference, and enmity?
NY: You are right to say that the ideology of hatred produces and means to produce separation and estrangement. But this is exactly my point. The paradox of hatred is that hatred aims to produce distance precisely because the two rivals are considered to be too close, too intertwined.
Think about the Hutu and the Tutsi, the Serbs and the Croats, the Turks and the Armenians, the Israelis and the Palestinians, and so on. I am not simply saying that love can turn into hatred or vice versa, but that hatred is always an ambivalent experience and a hyperbolic concept. One cannot hate an individual or a group without attachment and closeness, without love. Lack of attachment tends to produce indifference, not hatred.
NG: What then is the relation between the psyche and politics?
NY: First of all, the psyche and politics are not separate spheres. They operate together, although the mechanisms they deploy and their forms of visibility differ.
I am certainly not the first to highlight the absent, repressed, or the hidden in the political; how what is said often conceals what is left unsaid or how the visible veils what goes unrepresented. In a world characterized by a multitude of conflicts and hatreds, it would be misguided to continue overlooking the forces of the political unconscious.
Yet, my contribution has to do with my examination of the ideology of hatred. I believe that by excavating the ideology of hatred we can reveal how the political unconscious operates in the current political climate-through desire and its repression, through love and its disavowal, and through attachment and its elision. Once the unconscious workings of the ideology of hatred are laid bare then other future discourses, which recognize their ambivalence towards the other, suddenly become possible.
Let me give another example. The Israeli government forces the Palestinians to declare loyalty to the state of Israel as the condition for entering dialogue. No matter how many times Palestinians in Israel declare loyalty to the state or denounce terrorism, their words will not be heard and accepted because for Jewish Israelis this is not enough; they want the Palestinians to love them. Without love it is difficult for them to maintain their moral superiority. But at the same time the Jews in Israel will never ever admit to this.
So for me the discourse of loyalty and betrayal, and particularly the repetitious demand that the Palestinians be loyal signifies that something else is going on here. It is about something the Jews want and will not get, or want and will never acknowledge. The repetition suggests that unconscious forces are at work here and in this case they are not individual but political.
NG: This brings us to the second part of the title of your book, The Psychic Power of Discourse. When you say that to understand hatred we should focus on unconscious mechanisms, you obviously allude to a political unconscious. What do you mean by political unconscious? Are you saying that political discourse has an unconscious?
NY: I know that for most political scientists or sociologists, theorizing the psyche within the political and the social is irrelevant to practice and to questions of war and peace. But I believe that this pervasive perspective will lead us nowhere in terms of changing the conditions of conflicts rooted in hatred.
Just think of the repeated, obsessive notice in the NYC subways: "If you see something, say something."
Such an utterance not only speaks of suspicious objects, but creates relational mistrust that paradoxically bonds people of all walks of life together through a fearful gaze, suspicion and prejudice. So, hatred has become a political apparatus that creates a community through the horror of the strange and the different.
The pervasive refusal to raise the question of the unconscious, dismissing it as irrelevant to politics, engenders all kinds of theoretical blind spots. This is not to say that hatred is only unconscious or invisible. On the contrary, hatred is a forceful experience with devastating and injurious consequences. But in sharp contrast to its manifestation, the mechanisms of its production remain obscure.
For me, the most urgent task is to explore these blind spots, which I believe can shed light on how the ideology of hatred is manufactured. This, in my mind, is the key problem of the ideology of hatred.
NG: This appears to be connected to the relation you mention between the ideology of hatred and humanitarianism. Can you say something about this?
NY: Often the ideology of hatred operates side by side and in tandem with humanitarianism. The American initiative to build secular schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan is one example, while Israeli food and medical aid to Gaza in the midst of Israel's military attacks on the Strip is another.
Such humanitarian acts allow the Americans and Israelis to think of themselves as decent and righteous people. But in effect these humanitarian interventions are the continuation of war and violence in a language of "love full of hatred" or "hatred full of love." It is precisely this language that sheds light on the political unconscious and the psychic power of discourse.
NG: Could you further elaborate on the phrase "hatred full of love"?
NY: I would begin by responding with a rhetorical question: you intuitively seem to understand the notion of "hatred full of love", and yet doesn't this notion depend on a politics of the unconscious?
But, your question is well taken, because "hatred full of love" (and also its reversal) depicts concrete situations and relations. These phrases are not a metaphor for conflict relations. The prohibition to love the other, at work within national politics, is perhaps the core paradoxical symptom of nationalism and its defense mechanisms.
Albert Memmi provides a poignant example of how this works in the colonial context, when he describes how the colonial experience is informed by the paradox of love and hate. On the one hand, the colonialist wishes to dismiss the colonial subject from thought and to imagine the colony clean of its natives, but, on the other hand, the colonizer knows that without its colonial subjects the colony and his domination has no meaning.
The colonizer's desire of the colonized signifies an unconscious politics according to which the colonizer must keep the colonized subject alive. Only when the colonizer becomes indifferent to the life of the other does genocide or ethnic cleansing may occur. This leads me to maintain that acknowledging intimacy may actually prevent the genocidal impulse.
NG: I understand that hatred is constituted through the repression of love, denial of attachment, and fears of dependency. What will happen if we do come to recognize our state of dependency on the despised other, or our desire of the hated other? Are you saying that hatred can ipso facto form the possibility of love in spite of a history of hatred? That appears to be a very optimistic theory!
NY. Absolutely. In hate, love is never lost. And under the right circumstances it can always be remembered.
This is precisely why I conclude the book with the idea of political friendship. I believe that the politics of hatred can change because the enemy is forever the lost friend. Political friendship calls for peace without any a priori conditions. It means a certain way of coming together with those who are not "one of us."
When Anwar Sadat declared in public that he was willing to visit Jerusalem, he was taking a risk that Egypt might "lose face." He sent out his call for friendship and peace presumably without knowing whether and how Israel would respond. In that particular case, Menachem Begin returned the call by inviting Sadat to Jerusalem; a year later that visit was followed by a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Someone must offer friendship, and it cannot be the one who has no power to lose.
You might, of course, ask, what happens if the other refuses the request for friendship.
In this case, one must follow the footsteps of Sadat; the risk must be taken in the face of a possible refusal. It is important to keep in mind that no friendship is devoid of disputes, injury, pain, betrayal, tensions, and hate, but friendship, for the sake of peace, can embrace hatred and indeed diffuse it. This new demarcation of relations gives rise to a radically new discourse of peace. I am not talking about "true peace," "perpetual peace," or "absolute peace." All these terms have only served to sustain war. I truly believe that by forcing ourselves to choose friendship, the unthinkable peace becomes thinkable. The attachment, which was disavowed, becomes possible to reclaim.
|
| COMMENTARY |
Hague Needs a Good Grilling
But don't ask the BBC to do it
By Stuart Littlewood
After yesterday's dismal performance by the BBC's flagship 'Today' news programme in quizzing the Israeli ambassador over the latest bloody assault on Gaza, this morning's effort was a little better but still well short of what's required in order to paint a truthful, balanced picture.
We had Sarah Montague interviewing our foreign secretary and long-time Friend of Israel, William Hague.
He started by announcing: "There has been a spike in rocket attacks over recent days and a very large number over recent weeks. What Israel has done is obviously the Israeli response to that."
This doesn't tally with the actual sequence of events. And once again, the number of Gaza rockets means nothing unless compared with the number of Israeli bombs, rockets, tank-shells, air-strikes and other armed incursions - which we're never told about and news programmes never ask.
"The thing that would bring this to an end would be for Hamas to stop launching rockets at Israel," he continued, and urged Israel to reduce tension and de-escalate the situation, observe international and humanitarian laws and avoid civilian casualties.
He surely knows that no amount of urging over the years has persuaded Israel to show the slightest respect for laws, rights and civilian casualties. And why wasn't he pressed on the endless occupation of the West Bank, from which no rockets are fired, and the legality of the blockade on Gaza?
However, Sarah Montague did ask about the lull in hostilities followed by a sharp escalation by Israel with the slaying of the Hamas military leader, Hague deflected the question by trying to focus on the "wider point" of getting the Middle East peace process going again, as if this discredited policy had any hope of succeeding while one party was being systematically strangled by the other's illegal military occupation. He said "the onus in now on the Palestinians to reconcile with each other and Hamas to commit to a deal instead of terrorism..." when, actually, the onus is squarely on the international community to enforce international law and the many UN resolutions relating to Palestine. But the BBC didn't pursue this line either.
Sarah Montague then suggested that calling up 30,000 Israeli reservists and sending tanks and troops to the Gaza border looked like ramping-up the tension not de-escalating. Hague referred to how previous ground invasions lost Israel international support, avoiding any mention of the illegality and war crimes aspects. Asked if Britain would support a ground offensive now, he continued to duck and weave. "I've been clear where the principal responsibility lies. We want Hamas to end its terrorism and violence and Israel to take every opportunity to de-escalate."
His bias is blatant. Shouldn't he be calling for Israel to end its terrorism and violence and Hamas to de-escalate?
Finally, would he be supporting the Palestinians' bid for modest observer status at the UN? "We don't think it is a good idea to be putting that resolution to the UN General Assembly - we've made that clear to president Abbas... there is a danger that it would make the situation worse and make the peace process harder to sustain."
He's living in fairy-land. What peace process?
Hague Has 'Form'
It's high time serious broadcasters established where the interviewee is coming from. In the case of Hague this is vitally important. Like it or not, he is our top international representative. He has the power to influence whether Britain makes war or peace, whether we make friends or enemies, and whether our soldiers live or needlessly die. Yet he seems to have trouble interpreting intelligence.
He voted enthusiastically to get us mired in the shameful Iraq war. And did anyone hear him speak out against the folly of invading Afghanistan when it was his duty, as a leading Opposition figure at the time, to hold our lunatic Labour government to account?
When he came to his present job Hague played a key part in turning Britain into a safe haven for Israel's war criminals. He told guests at a reception held by Conservative Friends of Israel that "the last government left us with an appalling situation where a politician like Mrs Livni could be threatened with arrest on coming to the UK... We will put it right through legislation... I phoned Mrs Livni amongst others to tell her about that and received a very warm welcome for our proposals".
Tzipi Livni, Israel's former foreign minister, was largely responsible for the terror operation that brought unspeakable death and destruction to Gaza's civilians nearly 4 years ago. She has shown no remorse for the blood of 1,400 dead Gazans (including 320 children and 109 women) and thousands horribly maimed.
Who'd have believed a British government minister would tamper with the laws of jurisdiction and undermine our justice system so that the likes of her can safely go shopping in London?
Hague misled us on Operation Cast Lead by claiming, as reported on the CFI website, that "the immediate trigger for this crisis was the barrage of hundreds of rocket attacks against Israel on the expiry of the ceasefire or truce." The truth is that the ceasefire was deliberately breached by an Israeli raid into Gaza that killed several Palestinians with the intention of provoking a response that would re-ignite the violence and provide an excuse to launch Operation Cast Lead, which the Israelis had been preparing for months.
Are we not seeing history repeat itself?
William Hague was recruited into the Conservative Friends of Israel at the worryingly tender age of 15. In 2007, while shadow foreign secretary, he said: "We will always have strong economic and political ties with Israel. We will always be a friend of Israel."
In 2008 he declared: "The unbroken thread of Conservative Party support for Israel that has run for nearly a century from the Balfour Declaration to the present day will continue. Although it will no doubt often be tested in the years ahead, it will remain constant, unbroken, and undiminished by the passage of time."
Hague told the Jewish Chronicle in an interview: "We don't approve of expanding settlements on the West Bank and East Jerusalem because it makes the two-state solution more difficult." Not, mark you, because it's a barbaric crime to dispossess Arabs of their lands, homes and livelihoods... he doesn't approve because it's a bit awkward politically.
"I've traveled across the country," he continued. "I've stood on the Golan Heights and swam in the Sea of Galilee. I've stood on the part of the West Bank where you can see the Mediterranean, where you really understand Israel's strategic fragility."
Hague's Zionist sympathies ooze from every pore. All things considered the guy is a big worry.
Now he rattles his sabre at Iran and turns the screw of economic sanctions with relish... for no good reason that anyone (except the pro-Israel lobby) can see.
Speaking of which, the 'Today' programme perked up after the Chief Rabbi finished his 'Thought for the Day' spot lecturing us on how Judaism and Christianity regarded the birth of every child as precious (tell that to Gaza's moms and dads). He was asked by presenter Evan Davis for his reaction to the situation in Gaza. "I think it's got to do with Iran, actually," he replied, then quickly called for prayers.
The BBC in familiar grovelling mode apologised.
|
| BREAKING NEWS |
Death Toll at 33
More Deaths as Israel Expands Air Assaults in Gaza
An Israeli air strike killed three Palestinians in the central Gaza Strip, medics said, with Palestinian security sources confirming they were Hamas fighters.
Saturday's deaths raised the overall death toll in Gaza to 33 as a relentless Israeli air campaign against Gaza entered its fourth straight day.
"Three men died in an Israeli air strike on Maghazi camp in central Gaza," said emergency services spokesman Adham Abu Selmiya.
A Palestinian security source told AFP that all three were from the armed wing of the Hamas movement, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades.
Israel expanded its fierce air assault on rocket operations in the Gaza Strip, striking Hamas government and security compounds, tunnels and electricity sources after an unprecedented rocket attack aimed at the of Jerusalem raised the stakes in its violent confrontation with armed Palestinians.
Israeli aircraft on Saturday also kept pounding their initial targets, weapons-storage facilities and underground rocket-launching sites.
The Israeli military called up thousands of reservists and massed troops, tanks and armoured vehicles along the border with Gaza, signaling a ground invasion of the densely populated seaside strip could be imminent.
Israel launched its military campaign on Wednesday and has carried out some 700 airstrikes since, the military said.
The Palestinian fighters, undaunted by the heavy damage the air attacks have inflicted, have unleashed some 500 rockets against Israel, including new, longer-range weapons turned for the first time this week against Jerusalem and Israel's Tel Aviv heartland.
Israel has expanded its operation beyond military targets and before dawn on Saturday, the Gaza Interior Ministry reported, missiles smashed into two small Hamas security facilities as well as the massive Hamas police headquarters in Gaza City, setting off a huge blaze that engulfed nearby houses and civilian cars parked outside. No one was inside the buildings at the time.
The Interior Ministry said a government compound was also hit as devout Muslims streamed to the area for early morning prayers. So, too, was a Cabinet building where the Hamas prime minister received the prime minister of Egypt on Friday.
In southern Gaza, Israeli aircraft went after the hundreds of underground tunnels used to smuggle in weapons and other contraband from Egypt, people in the area reported.
A huge explosion in the area sent buildings shuddering in the Egyptian city of El-Arish, 45 kilometres away, an Associate Press news agency correspondent there reported. The tunnels have also been a lifeline for residents of the area during the recent fighting, providing a conduit for food, fuel and other goods after supplies stopped coming in from Israel days before the military operation began.
Missiles also knocked out five electricity transformers, plunging more than 400,000 people into darkness, according to the Gaza electricity distribution company.
A separate airstrike leveled a mosque in central Gaza, damaging nearby houses, Gaza security officials and residents said. The military had no comment on that attack.
One person was killed and three dozen people were wounded in the various attacks, Gaza health official Ashraf al-Kidra said. In all, 30 Palestinians and three Israelis have been killed since the Israeli operation began.
The Israeli military said it did not immediately had an accounting of its various overnight targets.
The widened scope of targets brings the two sides closer to the kind of all-out war they waged four years ago.
Hamas was badly bruised during that confrontation, but has since restocked its arsenal with more and better weapons, and has been under pressure from smaller, more fighters to prove its commitment to armed struggle against Israel.
The attack aimed at Jerusalem on Friday and strikes on the Tel Aviv area twice this week dramatically showcased the fighters' new capabilities, including a locally made rocket that appears to have taken Israeli defence officials by surprise.
(Al Jazeera and Agencies)
|
| NEWS |
Two More Palestinian Killed, 2 Hurt in Israeli Airstrike on Rafah
An Israeli airstrike on Rafah has killed one Palestinian and seriously injured two others, bringing the death toll to 29 in the Gaza Strip.
The strike hit three men riding a motorcycle, killing Khalid Khalil al-Shayer, 28, and seriously injuring two others.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said al-Shayer was a militant involved in anti-tank operations.
Earlier, Israel bombed the al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip killing Hamas military leader Ahmad Abu Jalal, 43, his brother Majd Abu Jalal, 33, Ziad Farhan Abu Jalal, 23, and Hasan Salim al-Hulei, 27.
The attack followed airstrikes across the Gaza Strip that killed three Palestinians in the third day of bombardments.
Witnesses reported continuous raids throughout the Gaza Strip. Medical officials say 29 Palestinians have been killed since Wednesday.
Around 388 rockets have hit Israel and an additional 197 have been intercepted by the Iron Dome defense shield, the Israeli military says.
Rockets landed far north inside Israel and the occupied West Bank on Friday. One struck the Tel Aviv area and another in a bloc of illegal settlements near Bethlehem.
Israel's cabinet authorized on Friday mobilization of up to 75,000 reserve troops for a Gaza campaign, more than doubling the number of potential call-ups approved after the offensive began, political sources said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a four-hour strategy session with a clutch of senior ministers in Tel Aviv, while other cabinet members were polled by telephone on raising the mobilization level. The decision did not mean all 75,000 reservists would be called into action, but gave the military the go-ahead to enlist them if needed.
Israel's military has indicated it is gearing up for a prolonged operation in Gaza.
"The (Israeli army) is gathering forces ... according to pre-determined operational plans. The forces have been briefed and trained according to specific guidelines of the plan, and will operate until the mission has been completed," a military statement said.
Hamas, too, says it is not preparing to scale down its response to the assassination of Ahmad al-Jaabari on Wednesday. Al-Jaabari commanded Hamas' military wing.
"Things are different this time," Hamas leader Ahmad Yousef told Ma'an. "The rules of the game have changed."
(Ma'an)
|
| NEWS |
Rocket Fired from Gaza Lands near Jerusalem
A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip has struck an uninhabited area outside of Jerusalem, causing no damage or injuries, the Israeli army has said, shortly after air raid sirens wailed across the city.
Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the rocket landed on Friday in an open area near Gush Ezion, which includes several Jewish settlements and Arab villages in the occupied West Bank southeast of the city.
The unprecedented attack came as Israel pounded the Palestinian Gaza Strip for a third day in fighting that has killed 28 Palestinians and three Israelis.
The armed wing of the Palestinian Hamas movement confirmed it had fired a Qassam rocket towards Jerusalem.
An attack on Israel's self-declared capital marks a major escalation by Gaza fighters, both for its symbolism and its distance from the Palestinian territory.
Located roughly 75km away from the Gaza border, Jerusalem had been thought to be beyond the range of Gaza rocket squads.
Fighters had already launched rockets at Tel Aviv, another first, on Thursday and Friday.
The Israeli government on Friday night gave a green light to recruit up to 75,000 reservists, a possible sign that Israel was preparing for a ground offensive in Gaza.
The decision was taken during a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. It does not necessarily mean that all 75,000 will be called up, though.
Earlier on Friday, Palestinian demonstrators protested against Israel's military operations in Gaza at the Damascus gate in Old Jerusalem.
Several protesters were detained as clashes with police occurred. Protesters also burned tyres at the Qalandia checkpoint near the city of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, called Barack Obama, the US president, on Friday, with the two men discussing options for "de-escalating" the situation, the White House said.
Obama "reiterated US support for Israel's right to defend itself, and expressed regret over the loss of Israeli and Palestinian civilian lives," according to a US statement on the call.
Three days of fighting between Israel and Gaza fighters continued on Friday with numerous Israeli air strikes hitting the tiny Palestinian territory.
The operation began on Wednesday with the assassination of Hamas' military chief Ahmad Jabari and dozens of air strikes on rocket launching sites.
At least 28 Palestinians and three Israelis have been killed, according to medical officials on both sides. Approximately 150 Palestinians have been wounded.
After days of battering targets with air strikes in Gaza, Israeli forces were massing along the border in preparation for a possible ground invasion.
Al Jazeera's Jacky Rowland, reporting from Gaza, said: "We have seen an intensification of firing from both sides.
"If the Israeli army is seeking to kill those firing rockets, the fighters are not in those locations. We are seeing the fighters have far more sophisticated weapons now, especially in the actual launching systems.
"They are able to operate them via remote control. They have been buried in the ground either days or weeks ago, so trying to target these locations is rather futile."
(Al Jazeera and Agencies)
|
|
The Palestine Chronicle is an independent online newspaper that provides daily news, commentary, features, book reviews, photos, art, etc, on a variety of subjects. However, it's largely focused on Palestine, Israel, and the Middle East region. To contact the editor, submit an article or any other material, please write to: editor@palestinechronicle.com. For other inquiries write to: info@palestinechronicle.com.
|
|
|
|
|
Ziehier Yoeri Albrecht, die door een jonge journalist van het mediakanaal Left Laser betrapt werd tijdens een privé-onderonsje met twee ...
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten