Daniel Martin Varisco: Bombs Away
Today is a day that lives in infamy. I am referring to a defining event of World War II, but I am not thinking of the bombing of Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941). On August 6, 1945, a single American B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. An estimated 70,000 of the 300,000 civilian population and 43,000 military died immediately from the blast and radiated heat. In five years the death toll may have reached 200,000 from the impact of the radiation on cancer and other life-threatening health issues. At the time it might have seemed that such a devastating attack would have made the Japanese eternal enemies of the United States. After all, the war was basically over. Hiroshima and then Nagasaki were destroyed not for a specific military battle, but to send a message. It was a message that terrorized the world during the entire Cold War when at any moment either the United States or the Soviet Union could have plunged the world into a nuclear holocaust.
The latest wave of bombings by Israel and Hizballah are minor irritations compared to the atomic option, which Israel no longer makes a secret of having. A political realist must acknowledge that Israel is in no danger of being destroyed militarily. First, they have the strongest and best prepared military in the entire Middle East and all the surrounding countries know this. Israel is an arms exporter, not a country dependent on largesse (apart from that from the no-strings-attached superpower United States aid). You will not see tanks rolling into Israeli territory from Egypt, Jordan or Syria and certainly not from far-off Iran. Israel also controls the air and nearby sea, as the humiliation of Lebanon in the past three weeks amply demonstrates. Second, Israel has the United States as its main backer; this is an alliance not likely to erode in the near future. No U.N. resolution can be passed that would harm Israel as long as the United States has veto power in the Security Council. Third, the leaders in Israel, if backed up against a wall, have a final solution of their own: a nuclear arsenal aimed and ready.
The current invasion and pummeling of Lebanon, as well as the continued attacks on Hamas, are not about the survival of Israel as a nation state. Ahmadenijad of Iran can shout his lungs out crying “Death to the Zionist Entity,” but slogans (even blatantly offensive ones) are cheap shots. I suspect that the last thing in the world ordinary Iranians would want is another war, after the tragic loss of life in the earlier Gulf War with Saddam’s Iraq. And Iran, despite all the hooplah in the media, is nowhere near having nuclear weapons (unlike, for example, the far more politically unstable North Korea). And Hizballah can randomly fire two hundred rockets a day, but the damage is minimal and the IDF has been successful in the present engagement in finding and destroying many of the finite number of rocket launchers.
So what is the latest phase of a seemingly everlasting war really about? Historians and political scientists will hash this out for at least another century, if no rogue in the nuclear club makes life impossible for just about everybody. My own take, certainly not unique and probably not very earth-shattering, is that those defining foreign policy (including domestic control of Palestinians in the occupied or at least occupiable at will territories) have chosen selective isolationism as their policy. Israel, with back-up support from the United States, has chosen to go it alone. Masada, not Granada, defines the mentality of the current government.
Starting with the premise that there can never be peace with their neighbors, the current agenda takes on the classic role of master and slave, as cogently articulated by the philosopher Hegel. Excuse me for returning to philosophy, but old ideas can still help us understand newly created problems. Here is what Hegel had to say about self-consciousness in his The Phenomenology of Mind:
“Self-consciousness has before it another self-consciousness; it has come outside itself. This has a double significance. First it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as an other being; secondly, it has thereby sublated that other, for it does not regard the other as essentially real, but sees its own self in the other.”
In this political scenario the master, the role Israeli policy is playing to the hilt with virtual impunity, exists by abandoning its reflective moral self (the role the Israelite prophets played against the political rulers of their times) and redefining itself only in relation to the “slave/terrorist” which is metaphorically how the Palestinians and Hizballah are treated. Ironically, the master uses the idea of the slave or terrorist in order to legitimate his comparative privilege. The Israel we see day in and day out on the news becomes an ideological reduction of otherness. The “other” is allowed to exist only as an enemy and opponent, never as a possible friend or ally. The irony is that for centuries Jews were forced to be a separate people and punished for being different and now the process is perpetuated in reclaimed Zion, only with Israel having the upper hand.
But why must enemies remain enemies forever? Why must the sins of the fathers, especially in a context where both sets of forefathers have blood on their hands, be visited upon the children? Bombing is the bully’s way out. Israel has the means to inflict massive damage and it takes the impotence of its neighbors and tacit complicity of Western powers as a green light. But winning the battle, as the IDF assuredly will (just as the U.S. beat up the Taliban and the Republican Guard) does not end the ongoing war. Hizballah did not evolve just to be terrorists. Given no choice but to be enemies, loose-knit organizations like Hizballah and Hamas give flesh to deeply wounded souls. Unless genocide is committed against the Palestinians and now the shi’a Lebanese, they will do what slaves always do: rebel.
Here’s the real bombshell: if you want peace, you need to make peace. Dropping bombs on civilians and calling that collateral damage, building walls to keep unwanted others out, claiming tenure as God-given in territory that has had more blood spilled over ownership than any other part of the planet, and failing to uphold the spirit of a powerful moral tradition: these make slaves not friends. So is it really the case that the “Arabs” (and now the “Iranians”) will hate the “Israelis” and the “Muslims” hate the “Jews” until the end of the world? Then why is it safe today for an American to walk the streets of Hiroshima?
Read entire article at Tabsir
The latest wave of bombings by Israel and Hizballah are minor irritations compared to the atomic option, which Israel no longer makes a secret of having. A political realist must acknowledge that Israel is in no danger of being destroyed militarily. First, they have the strongest and best prepared military in the entire Middle East and all the surrounding countries know this. Israel is an arms exporter, not a country dependent on largesse (apart from that from the no-strings-attached superpower United States aid). You will not see tanks rolling into Israeli territory from Egypt, Jordan or Syria and certainly not from far-off Iran. Israel also controls the air and nearby sea, as the humiliation of Lebanon in the past three weeks amply demonstrates. Second, Israel has the United States as its main backer; this is an alliance not likely to erode in the near future. No U.N. resolution can be passed that would harm Israel as long as the United States has veto power in the Security Council. Third, the leaders in Israel, if backed up against a wall, have a final solution of their own: a nuclear arsenal aimed and ready.
The current invasion and pummeling of Lebanon, as well as the continued attacks on Hamas, are not about the survival of Israel as a nation state. Ahmadenijad of Iran can shout his lungs out crying “Death to the Zionist Entity,” but slogans (even blatantly offensive ones) are cheap shots. I suspect that the last thing in the world ordinary Iranians would want is another war, after the tragic loss of life in the earlier Gulf War with Saddam’s Iraq. And Iran, despite all the hooplah in the media, is nowhere near having nuclear weapons (unlike, for example, the far more politically unstable North Korea). And Hizballah can randomly fire two hundred rockets a day, but the damage is minimal and the IDF has been successful in the present engagement in finding and destroying many of the finite number of rocket launchers.
So what is the latest phase of a seemingly everlasting war really about? Historians and political scientists will hash this out for at least another century, if no rogue in the nuclear club makes life impossible for just about everybody. My own take, certainly not unique and probably not very earth-shattering, is that those defining foreign policy (including domestic control of Palestinians in the occupied or at least occupiable at will territories) have chosen selective isolationism as their policy. Israel, with back-up support from the United States, has chosen to go it alone. Masada, not Granada, defines the mentality of the current government.
Starting with the premise that there can never be peace with their neighbors, the current agenda takes on the classic role of master and slave, as cogently articulated by the philosopher Hegel. Excuse me for returning to philosophy, but old ideas can still help us understand newly created problems. Here is what Hegel had to say about self-consciousness in his The Phenomenology of Mind:
“Self-consciousness has before it another self-consciousness; it has come outside itself. This has a double significance. First it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as an other being; secondly, it has thereby sublated that other, for it does not regard the other as essentially real, but sees its own self in the other.”
In this political scenario the master, the role Israeli policy is playing to the hilt with virtual impunity, exists by abandoning its reflective moral self (the role the Israelite prophets played against the political rulers of their times) and redefining itself only in relation to the “slave/terrorist” which is metaphorically how the Palestinians and Hizballah are treated. Ironically, the master uses the idea of the slave or terrorist in order to legitimate his comparative privilege. The Israel we see day in and day out on the news becomes an ideological reduction of otherness. The “other” is allowed to exist only as an enemy and opponent, never as a possible friend or ally. The irony is that for centuries Jews were forced to be a separate people and punished for being different and now the process is perpetuated in reclaimed Zion, only with Israel having the upper hand.
But why must enemies remain enemies forever? Why must the sins of the fathers, especially in a context where both sets of forefathers have blood on their hands, be visited upon the children? Bombing is the bully’s way out. Israel has the means to inflict massive damage and it takes the impotence of its neighbors and tacit complicity of Western powers as a green light. But winning the battle, as the IDF assuredly will (just as the U.S. beat up the Taliban and the Republican Guard) does not end the ongoing war. Hizballah did not evolve just to be terrorists. Given no choice but to be enemies, loose-knit organizations like Hizballah and Hamas give flesh to deeply wounded souls. Unless genocide is committed against the Palestinians and now the shi’a Lebanese, they will do what slaves always do: rebel.
Here’s the real bombshell: if you want peace, you need to make peace. Dropping bombs on civilians and calling that collateral damage, building walls to keep unwanted others out, claiming tenure as God-given in territory that has had more blood spilled over ownership than any other part of the planet, and failing to uphold the spirit of a powerful moral tradition: these make slaves not friends. So is it really the case that the “Arabs” (and now the “Iranians”) will hate the “Israelis” and the “Muslims” hate the “Jews” until the end of the world? Then why is it safe today for an American to walk the streets of Hiroshima?