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Hands up those who knew the name of Fallujah on 11 September 2001. Or Samarra. Or Ramadi. Or Anbar province. Or Amarah. Or Tel Afar, the latest target in our “war on terror’’ although most of us would find it hard to locate on a map (look at northern Iraq, find Mosul and go one inch to the left). Three years ago, it was all about Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’ida; then, at about the time of the Enron scandal and I have a New York professor to thank for spotting the switching point it was Saddam and weapons of mass destruction and 45 minutes and human rights abuses in Iraq and, well, the rest is history. And now, at last, the Americans admit that vast areas of Iraq are outside government control. We are going to have to “liberate” them, all over again.
Like many, I long favored a two-state solution. It seemed to me the best of a set of bad solutions to the problem of two peoples living side by side on a small parcel of land. I believe now that I was wrong. The two-state solution is neither moral nor realistic. The only politically and ethically viable approach to the problem of Israel and Palestine is to support a single democratic secular state that provides equal rights for all of its citizens. Furthermore, the failure to recognize this has, I believe, helped underwrite some of the most egregious of Israel’s policies. The most important reason for this has not, to my knowledge, yet been sufficiently addressed. I would like to do so here.
Three years after al Qaeda-commandeered planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon, the leaked ruminations of U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seem more pertinent than ever. ”Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror,” he wrote in a memo to his top staff 11 months ago. ”Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” If that is how success in the Bush administration’s ”war on terrorism” is to be measured, then Rumsfeld would have to conclude that he is failing badly.
Those who favor the “lesser evil” of USA “interrogation” techniques in Iraq and elsewhere ignore its problematic history in America, & seem ignorant of a perverse pathology that allows the practice of torture, once begun, to spread uncontrollably, destroying the legitimacy of the perpetrator nation. In April 2004, the USA was stunned by photographs from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked, posed in contorted positions, and visibly suffering humiliating abuse while U.S. soldiers stood by smiling. Donald Rumsfeld quickly assured Congress that the abuses were “perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military”. These photos, however, are snapshots not of simple brutality or even evidence of a breakdown in “military discipline.” What they record are CIA torture techniques that have metastasized like an undetected cancer inside the U.S. intelligence community over the past half century.
The danger we face is to assume that Americans could never be like Nazis, yet human beings are human beings and evil tends to be situational and conditional. It is foolish then, to think that Germans are a different species from the rest of us. Americans tend to think that totalitarianism, state directed murder, genocide and terror are things that only lie within the breast of those who live on the other side of a line drawn on a map. Children learn about those lines in school (or used to) and seem to think that they are set. Yet, anyone who ever looked at an historical atlas knows that these lines are never final. They are like the lines on one’s face. One may not notice them changing, but they are - daily - and like individuals, societies grow, mature, fade and die.
Do those who think that Islamists attacked the USA because they hate our freedoms, think that they would scrap their terrorist campaign if the USA turns into a fascist state or - try to imagine this - if America’s elites convert to Islam, but continue their present policies towards the Islamic world? Would the course of Palestinian resistance be any different if we could replace the colonial-settler Jews with colonial-settler Germans, colonial-settler Chinese or even colonial-settler Pakistanis? The Islamist resistance does not stem from differences of race or religion that divide Muslims from Americans or Jews. It is a response to US-Israeli violence, systematic and longstanding, that seeks to divide, undermine, control and humiliate Islamic societies.
For those who believe AIPAC and Israel are at the root of propelling the United States into the misguided Iraq War and subsequent occupation, the Israel spy case involving classified information on Iran is serving as the proverbial string entwining the various conflicts in the Middle East. Once pulled, the garment comes unraveled providing a revealing glimpse into Zionist/Israeli espionage and influence in America and far beyond US borders. AIPAC has its hands in many lands, or so it seems. If the results elsewhere are as catastrophic as they have been to the American political life, its economy and world standing, (as we preemptively strike our way into a moral abyss) God help us all.
In 20 years of studying and teaching philosophy, I have learned to appreciate the inherent difficulty in defining the truth. Descartes put it simply: “A clear and distinct idea is true,” while Kant aptly added the needed word “consistency.” Over the years, I have also learned that in the world of the mass media, truth is not based on clarity but on frequency. Repeated suspicions become a truth; an assumption said three times imperceptibly becomes a fact. There is no need to check because “it is obvious” - after all, “it is being said everywhere.” I was reminded of this lesson during the past few weeks, when, after having been granted a visa to teach at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, by the U.S. government, it was revoked without explanation at the last minute, causing grief for my family and me.
In past hunger strikes, Palestinian political prisoners called for freedom, or at least for their plight to be recognized by Israeli and Palestinian officials. Today they are merely demanding that Israel abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention. But since these captive men and women (including many children) have no other choice but to keep their demands to a minimum, I don’t see why I should. I am not in Israeli custody; nor do I live at the mercy of Naveh and Hanegbi who would let me starve to death before they fix the sewer in my solitary confinement. Because I am not under the thumb of the Likud Party and its repressive regime, I decided to go to the extreme with my hunger strike demands list.
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