Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

A Million Mutinies Now

It’s Time to Say ’No!’ to the Bullies in the Middle East Playground

Selves and Others Wednesday 9 August 2006, by Anonymous

 

The Canadian economist and US Presidential advisor, John Kenneth Galbraith, once famously wrote, “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

As the Israelis seek to justify their preoccupation with violence in the name of peace, Hezbollah continues to fire rockets. As the television screens show Israeli air raids in Beirut, a few minutes later the UN planes land in the distance on the dilapidated runway with emergency supplies. It makes for a rather metaphoric visual of the power structures and human ingenuity involved in sanctioning a killing spree of innocent civilians. It has now been absolutely confirmed that the international system is rife with bullshit just as it was in the case of Rwanda, Sudan and the Balkans.

The UN is desperately in need of a backbone. This is what our civilization has come to after all these years.

The bureaucratic intransigence and diplomatic foot dragging of Western powers in their inability to call for a ceasefire when it matters, will no doubt have violent implications in the future. In the current power dynamic, the lesson that was learned was that Israeli strategic interests supercede the lives of innocent civilians that were in the line of fire. Saving the lives of a few kidnapped soldiers somehow justified bombing a country in to oblivion and displacing close to a million people. Hezbollah’s firing of rockets was just as indiscriminate and irresponsible in their failure to protect civilians.

It has become abundantly clear that human beings and the societies and institutions we have created to govern ourselves are woefully inadequate to address our collective divisions. As media stalwarts like Anderson Cooper of CNN sit at the Lebanese border playing to their television crowd, it merely perpetuates an erroneous context to the conflict.

The right wing playbook is getting back to basics: the ‘War on Terror’ rhetoric superimposed on the present conflict to meet Israeli and US interests in the region. Equally divisive, most of the Arab satellite television stations send out a distorted view of the conflict to its audiences as well.

The present conflict is not only opening new wounds in the Middle East, it is openly laying to rest old assumptions and hierarchies; it is exposing a pandora’s box of hypocrisies virtually every day. What is happening in Israel, southern Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank is building broad and long-term movements that can only lead to fundamental changes in the coming years if an all out war is to be averted – rather, if it can be. No one in Israel seems ready to bear the immense social and political burden of standing up to the IDF and the elite who really run the country.

Unfortunately, most institutions of power in the West are incapable of seeing this happen due to the historical biases they have engaged in. Recently, the Canadian right wing national newspaper, the National Post, ran a commentary comparing the appeasement of Hezbollah to Neville Chamberlain. It ran a large black and white picture of the former British Prime Minister to show why the ‘Arab terrorists’ had to be done in. Nasrallah was Hitler in this paradigm while Israel represented the best of Western civilization that needed to be protected. Were life and politics as simple as the mainstream news constructed it, this conflict would not have carried on for so long. This construction of the conflict virtually negates the value of innocent civilians affected by the conflict.

In a recent interview in Haifa, Abir Kopty, a spokesperson with the Mossawa Center said, “Israel is still engaging in a racist system, not only economically but by building walls and fences. The problem is also psychological – they are putting the fences and walls in people’s minds.”

Kopty says that women are leading most of the resistance activities during the war. “This a men’s war. That is why it’s important that women lead the peace movement.”

In her view, there is an unfairness in the world system and the way in which the US is engaging in the world. Kopty says that the US will not be taken seriously in the region while most view their presence as one which involved hundreds of American leaders cooperating with an occupation. She says, “Peace is a nice word, but I’m talking about justice – historical justice. When one side is strong and the other is weak, it is not peace, it is coercion.”

In the past weeks, Kopty has been arrested, beaten and briefly placed under house arrest as have many other peace protesters in Israel. As Palestinian Arab Israelis protested in Haifa about Israel’s military response in Lebanon, right wing Israelis taunted the crowd by chanting, “Death to the Arabs.” In Kopty’s view, Israeli society is misled by the government and the media to the extent that it has distorted the political culture of the land and has affected the reality of the people. Referring to the latest escalation, Kopty says, “This state is now on its way to a kind of neo-fascism. Israelis only think of their own interests.”

She adds, “People who are pretending to be left are supporting the war. This is not an atmosphere where we can live together and make change unless this political culture changes.”

Kopty says that, “What Israel and the US is doing is making enemies. They are every day making new enemies amongst the Arab people. What people are seeing on TV and all this violence, they can see through this – it will not end. Israel has no right to portray itself as the victim. Each one is responsible for the dehumanization of innocent civilians that is going on right now as part of normal state activities…Israel is following a ghetto policy.”

Social activist Leila Mosenzon who will be spending 3 months in jail beginning in September for protest activities attempting to stop the construction of the Separation Wall in East Jerusalem, in a recent interview in Jerusalem said, “Peace has lost its meaning. We need to move to a campaign of divestment and sanctions to push Israel to change its policies. The privileges of Israeli society are built upon a foundation of violence that is unjust.” Monsour has had as many as 11 cases against her and was recently arrested after refusing to move on the orders of a security officer in Jerusalem. She has also been detained by the Shabbak, interrogated, been physically threatened and called a threat to state security.

“In this society, I am made in to a criminal and told that I’m violent even though I’m a pacifist. It is my life’s obligation to break the will of the occupation,” she says. “There is a matrix of control in practice here. It is a war of control and power. In their heart, in these close surroundings, people understand what is going on. But we fall in to that trap of not getting anywhere.”

Mosenzon says that the construction of the national narrative is racist. “Until we get in to a common conversation which can incorporate the need for co-existence and social change, the situation on the ground will not shift very far. Activists have thus far been willing to get beaten, arrested and even killed. Many people play a part in this war without asking questions. Basic humanitarian aid like food and water doesn’t even get to where it needs to…this is not justice. We have no right to live off the privileges of violence.”

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC News Middle East editor recently wrote that for peace to happen in this region, “dreams must die.” Absolutely – let them die.

The old narrative is dead and may the mutinies in the Middle East and the rotten power structures rip open a new way to look at the problem. The entire Middle East has a human rights crisis and Western meddling in the region is doing little to change the situation on the ground. The world would be a better place without the demagoguery, grandstanding and posturing of George W. Bush, Ehud Olmert and Hassan Nasrallah. Let it also be very clear, that no one has the right to live in a bubble or live in a kind of sanitized freedom created by inflicting brute force upon others without taking a level of personal responsibility for it.

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Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


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