A
Million Mutinies Now: It's Time
To Say 'No!" To The Bullies
In The Middle East Playground
By Am Johal
10 August, 2006
Countercurrents.org
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.