homo sacer palestinicos

Q: How can a people armed with home-made rockets be besieged, bombed, and slaughtered by a state actor — an appendix of Western civilization and one of the world’s best equipped armies — civilians be obviously targeted, UN food supplies burnt to the ground, and this have no political impact? Is it not a paradox of so-called Western civilization?

A: No. In Roman law, a homo sacer was a position conferred upon a person who could not be sacrificed according to ritual (because they were outside divine law) but may be killed by anybody (since they were outside juridical law). His/her death is, in both cases, of no value. The Italian philosopher Giorgoi Agamben picks up on the idea of homo sacer as a political category in modern times to apply it to people deemed outcasts through the operations of sovereign power. Because they fall outside the law — in modern times of the nation state — his/her biological life carries no political significance. For Agamben, political refugees as well as victims of the Holocaust fall into the category of homo sacer.

Agamben follows Hannah Arendt in her critique of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”. Arendt had two problems with the Declaration. First, that it rendered rights indistinguishable from the will of the nation-state and, following that, that it did not allow for the rights of those who fell outside this will. In other words, it did not grant any right to those who fell outside “the law.” The homo sacer. Or, what she elegantly calls, “human being in general.”

It is only through this logic that Palestinians can be turned into the objects of Israeli “techniques” for educating terrorists; that the death of more than 1300 Palestinians can be so swiftly swept off the news; that members of an elected government can fall outside the law and become (along with their families) normal targets to be eliminated, no questions asked; that even as images of dying Gazans move individuals of all religions and nationalities to tears, their deaths fail to acquire any political significance. Reducing it to racism alone is a reduction of the political position (or, “non-position”, as the case is) that the Palestinians find themselves in.

Those who compare the treatment of Palestinians today to the Nazi Holocaust err on some respects. The measure of hands-on cruelty and the numbers are not up for comparison. But on another, more instinctive level, the comparison holds. Palestinians, like the victims of the Holocaust, were subject to the same political operation that turned them into non-citizens, the rightful inhabitants of the sub-human conditions of the ghetto, objects of educational experiments. In short, Palestinians too are homo sacer.

 

map of Gaza bombing

From the same people who brought you the map of the “Israeli Assault on Lebanon”, comes the map of the “Israeli Assault on Gaza“. I have a problem with the category “Women & Children” — rather than “Civilian” — dead because it buys into the Israeli assumption that every man is a militant until proven otherwise. Perhaps, in light (rather dark) of information coming out of Gaza it is difficult to guage the latter. Anyway, the mapmakers have again done a good job graphically presenting the Israeli assault.

 

educating the terrorists by bombing civilians

We are clearly moving from the era of “Israel bombs civilians and civilian infrastructure by mistake” to the Machiavellan era of “the end justifies the means” — Israel’s “educational” methods justifies its “counterstrategy,” all very logical and Enlightened, of course. Consider Thomas Friedman’s latest Op-Ed commenting on Israel’s method against Hizballah in 2006 and against Hamas today:

Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future.

Then further down:

In Gaza, I still can’t tell if Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to “educate” Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population. If it is out to destroy Hamas, casualties will be horrific and the aftermath could be Somalia-like chaos. If it is out to educate Hamas, Israel may have achieved its aims.

[read the whole frigging thing here if you want]

This is not news to those at the receiving end of Israel’s educational methods. What is news is Friedman’s honest assessment of these methods. Apart from the absolute stupidity of the notion that targeting civilians will restrain the “terrorists”, the reasoning is also chilling. It is a small step from justifying intentional “collateral damage” — even the paradox of “intentional collateral” is “logical”, of course, since Israel is a member of the Enlightened Western world — to justifying much more.

The bombing of schools and hospitals housing refugees? Logical. The bombing of UN’s HQ and its medicine and food supply? Logical. The bombing of Red Cross facilities? Logical. The psychological torture of imprisoning a population and insuring that they feel there is absolutely no place to hide? Perfectly logical. If “the banality of evil” ever seemed like too strange a concept, Thomas Friedman is its personification. In fact, if it were not for his “logical” justification of the targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure, he would be just… banal.

In other news, Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jonas Gahr-Støre, was in Cairo today where he uttered the following sentence — illogical, no doubt:

What we see in Gaza, with disproportional use of power, with lack of distinction between civilian and military targets, with obstruction to humanitarian help to victims and civilians, are clear breaches of international humanitarian law.

 

Israel’s finest hour

As the number of Palestinian dead passes the 1000 mark, Israel’s logic behind Cast Lead sheds its ornamentation. Shimon Peres, president of Israel and Nobel peace prize winner, has let the cat out of the bag (“baqq al-bahsah”). He said many things today that are consistent with the logic of the rapist. The logic of “It is Hamas’s fault. They tempted us.” Plus a whole lot of philosophical issues. Commenting on the difficult images of Gaza on TV, for example, he said he understood that coverage cannot be balanced because the nervousness of one million Israelis cannot be shown on TV. Deep stuff. But the most relevant thing he said was this:

Our goal is to provide a strong blow to the people in Gaza so that they lose their appetite to continue to shoot at us. That’s it.

Cannot be any clearer. I first heard it on Norwegian TV, immediately followed by the reporter’s comment: “There is no doubt that the Palestinian inhabitants have received a strong blow.”

Norwegian TV is not mincing its words anymore. Oslo has already witnessed two protests that ended in violence and attempts to get at the Israeli embassy. Angry youth attacked the police with stones and fireworks and smashed shop windows in the center. Palestinian groups had to cancel all demonstrations until further notice. But more is expected at this Saturday’s demonstration, this time by the anti-racist, anarchist group Blitz. The few hundred pro-Israel supporters that turned up in front of parliament last week to wave their Israeli flags and sing romantically dare not hold another event in support of Israel.

 

the most recent version of the IDF school bombing

Israel’s carte blanche with the Palestinians is so effective that the IDF need not be consistent with its lies anymore. Even Mark Regev, that paragon of civilized lies and diplomacy, seems to be losing confidence in his own utterances. Apparently, there is a recent version of the bombing on the UNRWA school in Jabalya Camp which took the lives of more than 40 of the refugees taking shelter there.

First, the IDF claimed that Hamas militants fired from within the school. When the UN disclosed that the IDF had the coordinates and knew there were civilians taking refuge there, the IDF produced a video to prove its claim. The video turned out to be from 2007.

Now there is a new, improved, and more elaborate version. The IDF claims that a mortar veered 30 meters off target, causing the carnage at the Fakhurah school. So much for “surgical strikes”.

Regev called this “a very extreme example of how Khamas operate.” The irony of this pronouncement is that it says more about how the IDF operate. But it is an interesting phenomenon when offenders, unwittingly, pronounce their own sentence.

 

no comment

The UN was particularly incensed over targeting of the schools, because Israeli forces knew they were packed with families as they had ordered them to get out of their homes with leaflet drops and loudspeakers. It said it had identified the schools as refugee centres to the Israeli military and provided GPS coordinates.

Addendum: The IDF claimed there were militants firing mortars from the school and released a video to prove it. One glitch: the video was shot in 2007.

 

the myth of the humane army

It is remarkable how some media sources have been lapping up the myth of the humane Israeli army, always taking pains to spare civilian lives. In an effort to portray itself as a member of the civilized world, adhering to the ideals of the Enlightenment, Israel’s propaganda machine has been spreading far and wide news about how it warns the people of Gaza that it is going to strike before it strikes.

Do the journalists spreading this crap pose for thought? Pamphlets dropped from on high carry the standard text warning civilians to leave areas terrorists are operating from. What stops “the teghoghists” from leaving too? If the pamphlets are carried by the wind, do they fall in the place people are supposed to flee from or flee to? And finally, flee where if mosques, schools, ambulances, and homes are “teghoghist” hideouts? Flee where when one of the densest areas in the world is besieged by land, air, and sea?

But actions speak louder than words. Here is a family that decided to flee after the IDF kindly knocked on their door and told them to. They took refuge at their relatives’ home. An Israeli missile struck the relatives’ house killing 11 (including 5 children) and wounding 26 of the extended Samouni family (the total of dead children yesterday was 20, by the way). Here is another story about hundreds of people who decided to take refuge in a UN school. Perhaps like the Lebanese who died in Qana, they thought the UN had some sanctity. Boom. 42 of them, gone.

Bodies lay scattered on the ground in pools of blood amid shredded clothing and shoes after the attack, in which several dozen people were also wounded.

This scene is anything but new. It is the only scene indelibly etched in the minds of the millions who have been at the receiving end of this civilized, Enlightened entity. And as those scenes keep screaming out, periodically, for the whole world to see, the myth of the humane army continues to speak more of the ingrained racism of those who believe it than it does of the IDF itself.

While waiting for more Enlightenment to drop form the sky, here is a BBC clip from inside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. Mads Gilbert of the previous post is interviewed here, explaining how much Israel cares about civilian life in Gaza. He speaks “as a foreigner.” Because if you are a Palestinian journalist asking a Palestinian doctor, no one is going to believe a word of it. Even as the scenes continue to scream out what words have no power to say.

 

carnage in gaza marketplace

I just received this SMS from Norway, originating from a Norwegian doctor working in Gaza:

Takk for all støtte.. De bombet det sentrale grønnsakmarkedet i Gaza by for to timer siden. 80 skadde, 20 drept, alt kom hit til Shifa. Hades! Vi vasser i død, blod og amputater. Masse barn. Gravid kvinne. Jeg har aldri opplevd noe så fryktelig. Nå hører vi tanks. Fortell videre, send videre, rop det videre. Alt. GJØR NOE! GJØR MER! Vi lever i historieboka nå, alle. Mads G. 3.1.09 1350, Gaza, Pal.

Thanks for all the support. They bombed the central vegetable market in Gaza City two hours ago. 80 wounded, 20 killed, all came here to Shifa. Hades! We are wading in death, blood, and amputees. Many children. Pregnant woman. I have never experienced anything so terrible. Now we hear tanks. Pass it on, send it on, shout it on. Everything. DO SOMETHING! DO MORE! We are living in history books now, all of us. Mads G. 3.1.09 1:50PM, Gaza, Pal.

Mads Gilbert is Professor of Emergency Medicine at Tromsø University Hospital, Norway. He has been allowed into Gaza with his colleague Erik Fosse on New Year’s Eve to provide medical help at Shifa Hospital.  Gilbert has been working in beleaguered areas since the 1970’s, including Lebanon, Afghanistan, Burma, Kambodsja, Kurdistan, Angola, and Nepal. He has appeared on Norwegian TV regularly the past week commenting on the situation in Gaza.

 

who is afraid of the truce?

According to Haaretz, foreign leaders called Ehud Olmert about the rejected truce. He told them that there are Arab leaders who are asking him not to stop striking Hamas (via al-Akhbar). If you run into the original Haaretz article, which seems to be in English, I would appreciate the link.

 

israelis who get it

Israeli state/military propaganda is so successful that while there is continuous talk about how Hamas uses the people of Gaza as a human shield, there is absolute silence on how the Israeli government and military have been cynically using the towns around Gaza to perpetuate an untenable situation that requires continual military intervention. The result is that over the past eight years, Gaza has become a safety valve for the Israeli carrot-and-stick approach that Tom Segev discusses in Haaretz.

As the noose around Gaza tightens and loosens, most Israelis continue to buy into the sham of self-defense and lack of other options. But all this policy does in the long run is perpetuate the conflict so that the Israeli government can throw up its hands in the air and say: see, it is impossible to have peace with the Palestinians. The license to violence this gives Israel is a necessary part of what Jeff Halper calls the Israeli “matrix of control” — an obfuscatory mechanism that allows the occupation to continue through bureaucratic and legal measures even when land is given up.

But there are Israelis who get it. Particularly those in Hamas’s range of fire which, as feeble as it is compared to Israeli fire power, still does its share of damage. Along with a group of Palestinians, residents of Sderot have signed a petition calling for an end to the IDF operation in Gaza and a renewal of the truce with Hamas. The mayor of Netivot, one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s most important supporters in the Negev, is similarly calling for negotiations with Hamas. (Addendum: A resident of the Najaf has an op-ed in the Washington Post along the same lines)

These are the very people the Israeli military is supposedly going to war for. They have come to realize that military conflict will only deepen the rift and make a peaceful, long-term resolution impossible. They realize that this will end in yet another truce that will be broken yet again only to be followed by another truce, etc… and that all this form of “self defense” has ever done for them is to make them more susceptible to a growing number and an expanding range of home-made missiles.

And if only to complicate the picture further, David over at Remarkz has a very interesting article on the people who live in Sderot.