One reason that Israel persists in its harsh policies of decimation and destruction against the Palestinians is that such methods very often work: you can dispossess another people, destroy all but an ineffective remnant of their society and colonize their land to your own lasting profit and advantage. And you can do it in such a thoroughgoing manner that there will be no realistic possibility of the conquered people ever rising again to take back what was theirs. This is the example that the United States has set for Israel. It is unlikely to work in the same way or with the same degree of success for Israel in 21st century, for a number of reasons. In fact, it can -- and probably will -- end in disaster. But it is not an irrational policy; it does have many successful historical precedents -- including the history of Israel's chief benefactor.

Of course, in our more enlightened modern world, one must always cloak naked imperialism with stylish, sophisticated robes of euphemism. And as Siegman notes, one of the most ingenious of these has been Israel's on-going PR success in re-labeling a deliberate, long-term policy of confiscaton and oppression as a "peace process." From the LRB:

    The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’...

    Anyone familiar with Israel’s relentless confiscations of Palestinian territory – based on a plan devised, overseen and implemented by Ariel Sharon – knows that the objective of its settlement enterprise in the West Bank has been largely achieved. Gaza, the evacuation of whose settlements was so naively hailed by the international community as the heroic achievement of a man newly committed to an honourable peace with the Palestinians, was intended to serve as the first in a series of Palestinian bantustans. Gaza’s situation shows us what these bantustans will look like if their residents do not behave as Israel wants....

    In an interview in Ha’aretz in 2004, Dov Weissglas, chef de cabinet to the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, described the strategic goal of Sharon’s diplomacy as being to secure the support of the White House and Congress for Israeli measures that would place the peace process and Palestinian statehood in ‘formaldehyde’. It is a fiendishly appropriate metaphor: formaldehyde uniquely prevents the deterioration of dead bodies, and sometimes creates the illusion that they are still alive. Weissglas explains that the purpose of Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and the dismantling of several isolated settlements in the West Bank, was to gain US acceptance of Israel’s unilateralism, not to set a precedent for an eventual withdrawal from the West Bank. The limited withdrawals were intended to provide Israel with the political room to deepen and widen its presence in the West Bank, and that is what they achieved....

    In a recent interview in Ha’aretz, James Wolfensohn, who was the Quartet’s representative at the time of the Gaza disengagement, said that Israel and the US had systematically undermined the agreement he helped forge in 2005 between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and had instead turned Gaza into a vast prison. The official behind this, he told Ha’aretz, was Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser. ‘Every aspect’ of the agreement Wolfensohn had brokered ‘was abrogated’.

    Another recent interview in Ha’aretz, with Haggai Alon, who was a senior adviser to Amir Peretz at the Ministry of Defence, is even more revealing. Alon accuses the IDF (whose most senior officers increasingly are themselves settlers) of working clandestinely to further the settlers’ interests. The IDF, Alon says, ignores the Supreme Court’s instructions about the path the so-called security fence should follow, instead ‘setting a route that will not enable the establishment of a Palestinian state’. Alon told Ha’aretz that when in 2005 politicians signed an agreement with the Palestinians to ease restrictions on Palestinians travelling in the territories (part of the deal that Wolfensohn had worked on), the IDF eased them for settlers instead. For Palestinians, the number of checkpoints doubled.

    These are the realities on the ground that the uninformed and/or cynical blather in Jerusalem, Washington and Brussels – about waiting for Palestinians to reform their institutions, democratise their culture, dismantle the ‘infrastructures of terror’ and halt all violence and incitement before peace negotiations can begin – seeks to drown out. Given the vast power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians – not to mention the vast preponderance of diplomatic support enjoyed by Israel from precisely those countries that one would have expected to compensate diplomatically for the military imbalance – nothing will change for the better without the US, the EU and other international actors finally facing up to what have long been the fundamental impediments to peace.

Again, Siegman was writing in 2007. We have now seen, in these past few weeks, exactly how firmly and wisely the US, the EU and other international actors have faced up to the "fundamental impediments to peace": by backing Israel's bloody aggression to the hilt, they have bolstered those impediments immeasurably, and heaped up new ones that will ensure many more decades of blood, suffering and ruin.

 

   

I assume that most people who read this blog also read Arthur Silber. If not, you should. Over the years, Silber has created -- and is still creating -- a body of work that is unsurpassed in the blogosphere...or in any other venue where our political realities are addressed, and assessed, with words. He has done this -- and is doing this -- in the face of chronic and often catastrophic ill health, and in the face of the ravaging poverty that is the lot of any writer who tells the unpalatable, unpleasant yet penetrating truths that Silber does. It is a kind of heroism rare indeed in our increasingly conformist and fearful society.

And it goes beyond the insightful -- and often slashing -- criticisms that Silber offers of the vast herd of sacred cows that trundle back and forth across America's political discourse, dribbling their endless slurry of cud over the truth. For what ultimately animates Silber's work, I believe, is not the kind of nasty, gleeful nihilism that so often passes as "dissidence" these days -- and certainly not the careful careerism or factional blinders sported by many if not most of our leading "progressives." No, what underlies Silber's work (again, as I see it) is a rich, compelling vision of human possibility: the enlightening, ennobling and liberating possibility that life could be different, that greed and cruelty need not rule human affairs, that we have a chance -- at least a chance -- to work toward a more evolved, engaged and compassionate understanding of ourselves, our species and our societies. Yet to see such a vision tarnished and mocked day after day after day after day; to see us hurtling headlong in the opposite direction, into a world ruled ever more brazenly by greed and cruelty, a world reveling in deliberate ignorance and comforting delusion; to see the very concepts of hope and change transmuted into nothing more than blue smoke masking the same old machinations of the same old brutal systems -- it is a galling thing, it rightly provokes outrage, and the most stringent skepticism (called "cynicism" by the comfortable), and a purging scorn. All of this you will also find, in abundance, in Silber's work. But it is the furthest thing from nihilism or contrarism; it is, quite simply -- and most complexly -- what is best in us crying out against what is worst.

Anyway, I often fear it is redundant for me to excerpt pieces by Silber here, because of the aforementioned assumption that most anyone simpatico with this website will already be wired in over there. But of course that can't true in the case of every reader who runs across this site. And more importantly, there are many times when I simply want to associate myself with something Silber has written, especially if it's something that I feel but which he has already expressed far better, and at greater depth, than I can.

His latest major essay, "You Aren't Going to Beat the System, Baby," is a case in point. I'm offering a few excerpts below, but I'm leaving out whole sections of very important material, and the many links that give Silber's pieces their rewarding depth. So you should read the original in full. But as we approach the overheated hokum that will surround the inauguration -- where the baton of imperial management is passed from one faction of militarist courtiers to the other -- I think it is important to give Silber's views the widest possibly play. So here are a few choice samplings:

    As I am often compelled to do these days, I must begin with a principle which few seem to grasp, and even fewer are prepared to accept:

        Any individual who rises to the national political level is, of necessity and by definition, committed to the authoritarian-corporatist state. The current system will not allow anyone to be elected from either of the two major parties who is determined to dismantle even one part of that system.


    This principle applies to Barack Obama with regard to every policy of significance pursued by the United States government... Obama fully accepts and agrees with the U.S. policy in pursuit of American global hegemony, to be maintained by a worldwide empire of bases and foreign intervention (covert or overt, depending on circumstances) and criminal, aggressive war as required.

    In many essays, I have analyzed one of the primary delusions that afflicts many Democratic supporters and apologists. I say "afflicts," as if the problem is one forced upon innocent victims who unwillingly succumb to its symptoms. But such a characterization is frequently far too generous, especially when one considers the alacrity and enthusiasm with which prominent liberal and progressive writers and bloggers peddle obvious falsehoods. The specific delusion to which I refer is the utterly unfounded belief that "better" Democrats generally and Obama more particularly, via helpfully unidentified, mysterious, miraculous means, will "transform" the very nature of the United States as a political entity. (Obama, we are told with apparent seriousness, will change "the very nature of politics.") Let it be noted that "hope" of this kind -- hope which disregards history, even very recent history, and which eagerly discards genuinely serious political analysis as "cynical" or "irresponsible" -- is an exceedingly dangerous gateway drug, which may in time lead its users and countless truly innocent victims into a hell on earth beyond our worst imaginings.

    Over three years ago, in December 2005, Naomi Klein wrote about what she called Bush's "infamous 'We do not torture' declaration." Klein noted the location of Bush's viciously dishonest pronouncement, Panama City, and further noted that it is but a short drive from there to the location of the School of the Americas from 1946 to 1984. She discusses the history of the evil taught at SOA, and some of the effects of that evil around the world. Klein then writes:

        Suffice it to say that choosing Panama to declare "We do not torture" is a little like dropping by a slaughterhouse to pronounce the United States a nation of vegetarians.

        And yet when covering the Bush announcement, not a single mainstream news outlet mentioned the sordid history of its location. How could they? To do so would require something totally absent from the current debate: an admission that the embrace of torture by US officials long predates the Bush Administration and has in fact been integral to US foreign policy since the Vietnam War.


    Here, Klein herself is far too generous, and her truncated history is dangerously misleading. The U.S. government's embrace of torture unquestionably goes back to the monstrously inhumane occupation of the Philippines at the very beginning of the twentieth century. Moreover, when one considers the genocide of Native Americans and the centuries-long practice of slavery, one appreciates that systematized, institutional torture is as American as sickeningly rancid, fatally poisoned apple pie. If one views the American government as a brutally dysfunctional family, then, my friend, Mom and Pop are the torturers-in-chief.....

        [Here Silber quotes from a past essay]: [A]s I have continued to reflect on these issues, I realize that I must strongly disagree with [William] Pfaff's assessment that "the influence of the national myth of divine election and mission was generally harmless" during the first period of this nation's history, when our actions were largely confined to the continental U.S. For it was precisely during that period when the complex mechanisms of national self-delusion and lethal mythmaking became firmly entrenched in America's conception of itself. Consider two of the most momentous aspects of those first years for America: the continuing genocide of the Native Americans, until finally almost all of them were slaughtered -- and the monstrous evil of slavery, the importation and brutal enslavement of millions of human beings, accompanied by an endless train of horrors that almost forbid contemplation.

        Consider those two facts in all their horror -- and then ask yourself what would be required culturally and psychologically to maintain a belief in a "national myth of divine election and mission" in the face of them. I have formulated that so as to underscore the problem: you cannot recognize these facts and simultaneously maintain a belief in the notion that the United States is a divinely "chosen" nation, a nation superior to all others, a nation of spotless moral glory. The myth can be maintained only by denying the greatest part of the truth -- denying the full nature of the genocide systematically committed over a long period of time, and denying the full implications of the institution of slavery, which similarly lasted for several hundred years. As the United States consolidated its grip on the North American continent, it consolidated and made impregnable its view of itself: the United States conquered territory, displaced huge populations, murdered, enslaved and slaughtered for God, for "national greatness," for "Manifest Destiny," for "freedom."


    ...It now appears that the response of the Obama administration (and of most of its already dedicated defenders) to the horrors of the past eight years will be what I have predicted all along -- the response that is, in fact, necessitated by our corporatist-authoritarian-militarist form of government: a return to "camouflage" and better public relations, and a return to "plausible deniability." And the torture will go on, as will the wars of aggression.