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David
Bromwich


Professor of Literature at Yale

Posted January
 16, 2009?



Self-Deception and the Assault on Gaza



What prompts the fantasy that you can "kill all the terrorists"
without sowing the seeds of new terrorism? Partly, the fantasy comes from the
idea that any civilian deaths you cause will be forgiven; but, much more, it derives
from the secondary fantasy that civilian deaths will go mainly unwitnessed.
They will be recorded as numbers, perhaps, but they will pass out of the
awareness of the world. That is not the way things work, of course. There are
people in the world -- not hundreds, not thousands, but hundreds of millions --
who feel more closely allied to the killed than they do to the killers.



"Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return." In every culture
and every civilization, to kill the innocent is evil. Fifty civilians who live
in a neighborhood where one terrorist has built a hidden sniper's nest are
understood to be innocent. If you kill the fifty, you have done something worse
than not killing the one.



Yet to put it like that brings up the revaluation of state terror that
entered our language with the Sharon-Bush doctrine, first propounded in
2001-02. According to the Sharon-Bush doctrine, if you harbor a terrorist --
that is, if you live anywhere in the vicinity of a terrorist -- you are
yourself as blamable as the terrorist and are as appropriate a target of
destruction. This, no matter what the impediments on your freedom of movement,
no matter how unconscious you may be of the existence of the terrorist, no
matter how much your toleration of him may have been driven by fear.



On this reasoning, a two-ton bomb that kills a Hamas leader in an apartment
complex and kills twelve other persons, half of them children -- that bomb is
not guilty of the deaths of the other victims. If, because of that bomb and
those deaths, a certain number of Arab teenagers in Palestine and elsewhere
resolve to become suicide bombers, that is not the fault of the country that
dropped the bomb. The new terrorists whom the destruction brought forth, like
the old ones it disposed of, worked with too narrow a conception of necessity.
The world itself is wrong, according to the Sharon-Bush doctrine, when it says
that you can't literally kill all the terrorists without killing an unendurable
number of others in the process. If that is the way the world thinks, Sharon
and Bush and their followers maintain, there is nothing to be done about it.
What if the world is full of raving anti-Semites and anti-Americans? We must
get on with our work in spite of them. Strength lies in keeping to the plan
with supreme resoluteness.



Such are the tracks in which the United
  States and Israel
are trapped together when we think about Gaza.
The world doesn't understand (or so we think) how wrong is the idea of
proportionality. It is true, fewer Israelis have been killed by Hamas missiles
than by other Israelis in friendly fire. And true, by January 15 more than a
thousand Palestinians had died, half of them civilians, and thirteen Israelis
had died, most of them soldiers. All that is beside the point. Despite appearances,
the doctrine tells us, Israel
is fighting for its life. How can you speak of "proportion" and
compare the intolerable harassment of missiles coming in, endlessly, with the
very temporary Palestinian burden of a counter-insurgency war that will have a
clearly marked end. For Israel
not to respond now and definitively --this is the trump card of
Sharon-Bush--would have been to acquiesce in moral and psychological defeat.
There can be only one victor in a war; the only alternative to complete resignation
was to do what Israel
is doing. And what is that? It is assuring that the Palestianians (in the words
of Moshe Yaalon, Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces in 2002) "are
made to understand, in the deepest recesses of their consciousness, that they
are a defeated people." The more relentless the assault, and indeed the
more civilians you legitimately kill, the deeper the recesses of consciousness
that you are able to penetrate.



Such is the wisdom from A to Z of the Sharon-Bush doctrine.



And indeed, if nobody existed on earth except Israel
and the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, the way would lie open now for the
fulfillment of the doctrine. Israel,
in the words of another pragmatist, Benny Morris, could finish the job begun in
1948: the job of expulsion, the forced transportation elsewhere of the
Palestinian people as a whole. But again, the problem recurs: the world is
larger than Israel
and Gaza.
There are witnesses. It is harder for conscience to abolish itself quietly when
those witnesses are sometimes in mind and sometimes actually on the scene. What
if you arrange to have the war not covered by journalists? The UN medical
compound remains; will you bomb that, too? (On January 15 this was done in
fact; there was a terrorist there, Ehud Olmert said with perfunctory regret.)



Probably no people are so prone as Americans and Israelis are to think
admiringly of our own good intentions. We hew to a rarer and higher standard
than other people, we believe. We are generous beyond all expectation; and still,
other people continue to criticize and demand more of us. The trouble with such
an innocent self-image is that we read the pattern of our actions forward from
our supposed intentions to their effects in the world; we forgive the
imperfection of the result from our certainty of the purpose. But that is not
the way to interpret the character of a person, or the character of a people,
accurately. The error is easy enough to recognize when we look at persons who
are not ourselves. The way to make a judgment that is in some measure accurate
is to read backward from the total drift and pattern of the actions to the
intentions that are likely to have yielded such effects.



Thus, if Israel
in 2006 destroyed large parts of Lebanon,
there is a strong chance that this happened because Israel
intended to reduce to rubble large parts of Lebanon;
even if the Israeli claim at the time was that it sought nothing more than to
weaken Hezbollah and destroy its hiding places. Again, if Israel
in 2009 reduces to rubble a large portion of the Gaza Strip and leaves tens of
thousands homeless, there is a strong chance that this was what it intended to
do; even if the Israeli claim is merely that it wished to stop the rockets at
their source.



It is the same with the good intentions of the United
  States.
Listen to the neoconservative apologists for the Bush-Cheney policy, and you
would think that America
intended to liberate the enslaved people of Iraq,
and in doing so, to confer an incidental benefit by planting a democracy in the
region. But then read backward from the actions of the U.S. -- a country
destroyed, half a million killed, four and a half million refugees, American
contractors and companies and oil men prospering on the scene, and several
superbases built and manned--and you would conclude the U.S. intended to plant
a military force in the region and to make a solid claim to the dome of oil
that covers Iraq and Iran and East Africa, while also asserting its rivalry
with Russia and China for control of West Asia. Notice that the second surmise
has one advantage as an explanation. It bears some relation to the things that
were actually accomplished.



In the case of Israel,
the self-image of its leading politicians is far more crazed and split than such
common-sense reminders can hope to remedy. Tzipi Livni says in 2009 that the
assault was necessary, that it is going according to design, that there is no
humanitarian crisis, and that the invasion will be good for the Palestinians.
Yet Ehud Barak in 1999, in answer to a question from the reporter Gideon Levy
about what he would have done if he had been born Palestinian, replied without
pause: "Joined a fighting organization." Ehud Olmert says in a daring
interview in his penultimate season in office that there will have to be a
two-state solution and that Israel
will have to give up a large part of the settlements it now holds. Yet Olmert
devotes his final weeks in power to the merciless waging of this war, and
refuses to convene his cabinet to take up the encouragement of a cease-fire
that is coming at last from both Livni and Barak. The contradictions and the
almost open flaunting of fantasies are themselves a kind of madness.



This deadlock in the middle of apparent victory was inevitable. You cannot bomb
a people into partnership. You cannot obliterate a people into a just and
lasting peace. You cannot drive deep into their consciousness the knowledge
that they are a defeated people and, when you have finished your education
through violence, come to treat them as moral and political equals with
yourself. So Israel
is now at a loss. It cannot see its beginnings in this vision of its triumph.



The creation of a Palestinian state has been postponed now for more than 40
years while the Israeli settlements have expanded. Why should any witness of
the pattern be expected to follow the Israeli reasoning from good intentions to
misfired actions, when the pattern of the actions, reading backward to the
intentions, so plainly seems to indicate that annexation was always the
stronger motive? Read backward from result to probable purpose and the assault
on Gaza
looks like the last postponement, the one after which nothing further need be
said or done. Yet, when it is carried off in so confused a state of fevered imagining,
with a queasy mixture of paternalism, perverted compassion and baffled
nostalgia for resistance and solidarity, such as are audible in the above
statements by Livni, Olmert, and Barak--one realizes that nothing after all has
been resolved by this war.



Is it possible to look forward without illusion? For we do know what actions
like Israel's
lead to; we, Americans as well as Israelis, know from our recent history. From
the imposition of state terror in one generation spring the soldiers of
guerrilla terror in the next generation. Those to whom evil is done, do evil in
return. Just as the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza brought on
the Second Intifada, and just as both of these, together with the American
footprint in Saudi Arabia, were a substantial motive in the making of the
September 11 attacks, so the present attacks in Gaza, backed by America's
financial and political support and America's F-16s and Apache helicopters, are
nursing hatreds for a new round of terrorism to come. The assault on Gaza
endangers the security of Israel,
and it endangers the security of the United
  States.



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