Honoring
Peace And Justice
By
Susan Sontag
April 28, 2003
Allow me to
invoke not one but two, only two, who were heroes --- among millions
of heroes. Who were victims --- among tens of millions of victims.
The first: Oscar
Arnulfo Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, murdered in his vestments,
while saying mass in the cathedral on March 24, 1980 --- twenty-three
years ago --- because he had become "a vocal advocate of a just
peace, and had openly opposed the forces of violence and oppression."
(I am quoting from the description of the Oscar Romero Award, being
given today to Ishai Menuchin.)
The second:
Rachel Corrie, a twenty-three-year-old college student from Olympia,
Washington, murdered in the bright neon-orange jacket with Day-Glo striping
that "human shields" wear to make themselves quite visible,
and possibly safer, while trying to stop one of the almost daily house
demolitions by Israeli forces in Rafah, a town in the southern Gaza
Strip (where Gaza abuts the Egyptian border), on March 16, 2003 ---
two weeks ago. Standing in front of a Palestinian physician's house
that had been targeted for demolition, Corrie, one of eight young American
and British human-shield volunteers in Rafah, had been waving and shouting
at the driver of an oncoming armored D-9 bulldozer through her megaphone,
then dropped to her knees in the path of the super-sized bulldozer ...
which did not slow down.
Two emblematic
figures of sacrifice, killed by the forces of violence and oppression
to which they were offering non-violent, principled, dangerous opposition.
***
Let's start
with risk. The risk of being punished. The risk of being isolated. The
risk of being injured or killed. The risk of being scorned.
We are all conscripts
in one sense or another. For all of us, it is hard to break ranks; to
incur the disapproval, the censure, the violence of an offended majority
with a different idea of loyalty. We shelter under banner-words like
justice, peace, reconciliation that enroll us in new, if much smaller
and relatively powerless communities of the like-minded. That mobilize
us for the demonstration, the protest, the public performance of acts
of civil disobedience --- not for the parade ground and the battlefield.
To fall out
of step with one's tribe; to step beyond one's tribe into a world that
is larger mentally but smaller numerically --- if alienation or dissidence
is not your habitual or gratifying posture, this is a complex, difficult
process.
It is hard to
defy the wisdom of the tribe: the wisdom that values the lives of members
of the tribe above all others. It will always be unpopular --- it will
always be deemed unpatriotic --- to say that the lives of the members
of the other tribe are as valuable as one's own.
It is easier
to give one's allegiance to those we know, to those we see, to those
with whom we are embedded, to those with whom we share --- as we may
--- a community of fear.
Let's not underestimate
the force of what we oppose. Let's not underestimate the retaliation
that may be visited on those who dare to dissent from the brutalities
and repressions thought justified by the fears of the majority.
We are flesh.
We can be punctured by a bayonet, torn apart by a suicide bomber. We
can be crushed by a bulldozer, gunned down in a cathedral.
Fear binds people
together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the
courage of an example -- for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage,
certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave.
The perennial
destiny of principles: while everyone professes to have them, they are
likely to be sacrificed when they become inconveniencing. Generally
a moral principle is something that puts one at variance with accepted
practice. And that variance has consequences, sometimes unpleasant consequences,
as the community takes its revenge on those who challenge its contradictions
--- who want a society actually to uphold the principles it professes
to defend.
The standard
that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is
a utopian one, in the sense that moral principles contradict the way
things really are --- and always will be. How things really are ---
and always will be --- is neither all-evil nor all-good but deficient,
inconsistent, inferior. Principles invite us to do something about the
morass of contradictions in which we function morally. Principles invite
us to clean up our act; to become intolerant of moral laxity and compromise
and cowardice and the turning away from what is upsetting: that secret
gnawing of the heart that tells us that what we are doing is not right,
and so counsels us that we'd be better off just not thinking about it.
The cry of the
anti-principled: "I'm doing the best I can." The best given
the circumstances, of course.
***
Let's say, the
principle is: it's wrong to oppress and humiliate a whole people. To
deprive them systematically of lodging and proper nutrition; to destroy
their habitations, means of livelihood, access to education and medical
care, and ability to consort with one another.
That these practices
are wrong, whatever the provocation.
And there is
provocation. That, too, should not be denied.
***
At the center
of our moral life and our moral imagination are the great models of
resistance: the great stories of those who have said No. No, I will
not serve.
What models,
what stories? A Mormon may resist the outlawing of polygamy. An anti-abortion
militant may resist the law that has made abortion legal. They, too,
will invoke the claims of religion (or faith) and morality --- against
the edicts of civil society. Appeal to the existence of a higher law
that authorizes us to defy the laws of the state can be used to justify
criminal transgression as well as the noblest struggle for justice.
Courage has
no moral value in itself, for courage is not, in itself, a moral virtue.
Vicious scoundrels, murderers, terrorists may be brave. To describe
courage as a virtue, we need an adjective: we speak of "moral courage"
--- because there is such a thing as amoral courage, too.
And resistance
has no value in itself. It is the content of the resistance that determines
its merit, its moral necessity.
Let's say: resistance
to a criminal war. Let's say: resistance to the occupation and annexation
of another people's land.
Again: there
is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for
the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that
the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of
the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of
those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth
of a description of a state of affairs which is, truly, unjust and unnecessary.
***
Here is what
I believe to be a truthful description of a state of affairs that has
taken me many years of uncertainty, ignorance, and anguish, to acknowledge.
A wounded and
fearful country, Israel is going through the greatest crisis of its
turbulent history, brought about by the policy of steadily increasing
and reinforcing settlements on the territories won after its victory
in the Arab war on Israel in 1967. The decision of successive Israeli
governments to retain control over the West Bank and Gaza, thereby denying
their Palestinian neighbors a state of their own, is a catastrophe ---
moral, human, and political --- for both peoples. The Palestinians need
a sovereign state. Israel needs a sovereign Palestinian state. Those
of us abroad who wish for Israel to survive cannot, should not, wish
it to survive no matter what, no matter how. We owe a particular debt
of gratitude to courageous Israeli Jewish witnesses, journalists, architects,
poets, novelists, professors ---among others --- who have described
and documented and protested and militated against the sufferings of
the Palestinians living under the increasingly cruel terms of Israeli
military subjugation and settler annexation.
Our greatest
admiration must go to the brave Israeli soldiers, represented here by
Ishai Menuchin, who refuse to serve beyond the 1967 borders. These soldiers
know that all settlements are bound to be evacuated in the end. These
soldiers, who are Jews, take seriously the principle put forward at
the Nuremberg trials in 1946: namely, that a soldier is not obliged
to obey unjust orders, orders which contravene the laws of war --- indeed,
one has an obligation to disobey them.
The Israeli
soldiers who are resisting service in the Occupied Territories are not
refusing a particular order. They are refusing to enter the space where
illegitimate orders are bound to be given --- that is, where it is more
than probable that they will be ordered to perform actions that continue
the oppression and humiliation of Palestinian civilians. Houses are
demolished, groves are uprooted, the stalls of a village market are
bulldozed, a cultural center is looted; and now, nearly every day, civilians
of all ages are fired on and killed. There can be no disputing the mounting
cruelty of the Israeli occupation of the 22 percent of the former territory
of British Palestine on which a Palestinian state will be erected. These
soldiers believe, as I do, that there should be an unconditional withdrawal
from the Occupied Territories. They have declared collectively that
they will not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders "in order
to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people."
What the refuseniks
have done (there are now around eleven hundred of them, more than two
hundred and fifty of whom have gone to prison) does not contribute to
tell us how the Israelis and Palestinians can make peace --- beyond
the irrevocable demand that the settlements be disbanded. The actions
of this heroic minority cannot contribute to the much needed reform
and democratization of the Palestinian Authority. Their stand will not
lessen the grip of religious bigotry and racism in Israeli society or
reduce the dissemination of virulent anti-Semitic propaganda in the
aggrieved Arab world. It will not stop the suicide bombers.
It simply declares:
enough. Or: there is a limit. Yesh gvul.
It provides
a model of resistance. Of disobedience. For which there will always
be penalties.
None of us has
yet to endure anything like what these brave conscripts are enduring,
many of whom have gone to jail.
To speak for
peace at this moment in this country is merely to be jeered (as in the
recent Academy Awards ceremony), harassed, blacklisted (the banning
by the most powerful chain of radio stations of the Dixie Chicks); in
short, to be reviled as unpatriotic.
Our "United
We Stand" or "Winner Takes All" ethos ... the United
States is a country which has made patriotism equivalent to consensus.
Tocqueville, still the greatest observer of the United States, remarked
on a unprecedented degree of conformity in the then new country, and
a hundred and sixty-eight more years have only confirmed his observation.
Sometimes, given
the new, radical turn in American foreign policy, it seems as if it
was inevitable that the national consensus on the greatness of America,
which may be activated to an extraordinary pitch of triumphalist national
self-regard, was bound eventually to find expression in wars like the
present one, which are assented to by a majority of the population,
who have been persuaded that America has the right --- even the duty
--- to dominate the world.
***
The usual way
of heralding people who act on principle, is to say that they are the
vanguard of an eventually triumphant revolt against injustice.
But what if
they're not?
What if the
evil is really unstoppable? At least in the short run. And that short
run may be, is going to be, very long indeed.
My admiration
for the soldiers who are resisting service in the Occupied Territories
is as fierce as my belief that it will be a long time before their view
prevails.
But what haunts
me at this moment --- for the obvious reason --- is acting on principle
when it isn't going to alter the obvious distribution of force, the
rank injustice and murderousness of a government's policy that claims
to be acting in the name not of peace but of ... security.
The force of
arms has its own logic. If you commit an aggression and others resist,
it is easy to convince the home front that the fighting must continue.
Once the troops are there, they must be supported. It becomes irrelevant
to question why the troops are there in the first place.
The soldiers
are there because "we" are being attacked; or menaced. Never
mind that we may have attacked them first. They are now attacking back,
causing casualties. Behaving in ways that defy the "proper"
conduct of war. Behaving like "savages," as people in our
part of the world like to call people in that part of the world. And
their "savage" or "unlawful" actions give new justification
to new aggressions. And new impetus to repress or censor or persecute
citizens who oppose the aggression which the government has undertaken.
***
Let's not underestimate
the force of what we are opposing.
The world is,
for almost everyone, that over which we have virtually no control. Common
sense and the sense of self-protectiveness tell us to accommodate to
what we cannot change.
It's not hard
to see how some of us might be persuaded of the justice, the necessity
of a war. Especially of a war that is formulated as a small, limited
military action which will actually contribute to peace or improved
security; of an aggression which announces itself as a campaign of disarmament
--- admittedly, disarmament of the enemy; and, regrettably, requiring
the application of overpowering force. An invasion which calls itself,
officially, a liberation.
Every violence
in war has been justified as a retaliation. We are threatened. We are
defending ourselves. The others, they want to kill us. We must stop
them.
And from there:
we must stop them before they have a chance to carry out their plans.
And since those who would attack us are sheltering behind non-combatants,
no aspect of civil life can be immune to our depredations.
Never mind the
disparity of forces, of wealth, of firepower --- or simply of population.
How many Americans know that the population of the Iraq is 24 million,
half of whom are children? (The population of the United States, as
you will remember, is 290 million.) Not to support those who are coming
under fire from the enemy seems like treason.
It may be that,
in some cases, the threat is real.
In such circumstances,
the bearer of the moral principle seems like someone running alongside
a moving rain, yelling "Stop! Stop!"
Can the train
be stopped? No, it can't. At least, not now.
Will other people
on the train be moved to jump off and join those on the ground? Maybe
some will, but most won't. (At least, not until they have a whole new
panoply of fears.)
The dramaturgy
of "acting on principle" tells us that we don't have to think
about whether acting on principle is expedient, or whether we can count
on the eventual success of the actions we have undertaken.
Acting on principle
is, we're told, a good in itself.
But it is still
a political act, in the sense that you're not doing it for yourself.
You don't do it just to be in the right, or to appease your own conscience;
much less because you are confident your action will achieve its aim.
You resist as an act of solidarity. With communities of the principled
and the disobedient: here, elsewhere. In the present. In the future.
Thoreau's going
to prison in 1846 for refusing to pay the poll tax in protest against
the American war on Mexico hardly stopped the war. But the resonance
of that most unpunishing and briefest spell of imprisonment (famously,
a single night in jail) has not ceased to inspire principled resistance
to injustice through the second half of the twentieth century and into
our new era. The movement in the late 1980s to shut down the Nevada
Test Site, a key location for the nuclear arms race, failed in its goal;
the operations of the test site were unaffected by the protests. But
it directly inspire the formation of a movement of protesters in far
away Alma Ata, who eventually succeeded in shutting down the main Soviet
test site in Kazakhstan, citing the Nevada antinuclear activists as
their inspiration and expressing solidarity with the Native Americans
on whose land the Nevada Test Site had been located.
The likelihood
that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt
you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the
best interests of your community.
Thus: It is
not in the best interests of Israel to be an oppressor.
Thus: it is
not in the best interests of the United States to be a hyperpower, capable
of imposing its will on any country in the world, as it chooses.
What is in the
true interests of a modern community is justice.
It cannot be
right to systematically oppress and confine a neighboring people. It
is surely false to think that murder, expulsion, annexations, the building
of walls --- all that has contributed to the reducing of a whole people
to dependence, penury, and despair --- will bring security and peace
to the oppressors.
It cannot be
right that a president of the United States seems to believe that he
has a mandate to be president of the planet --- and announces that those
who are not with America are with "the terrorists."
Those brave
Israeli Jews who, in fervent and active opposition to the policies of
the present government of their country, have spoken up on behalf of
the plight and the rights of Palestinians, are defending the true interests
of Israel. Those of us who are opposed to the plans of the present government
of the United States for global hegemony are patriots speaking for the
best interests of the United States.
Beyond these
struggles, which are worthy of our passionate adherence, it is important
to remember that in programs of political resistance the relation of
cause and effect is convoluted, and often indirect. All struggle, all
resistance is --- must be --- concrete. And all struggle has a global
resonance.
If not here,
then there. If not now, then soon: elsewhere as well as here.
To Archbishop
Oscar Arnulfo Romero. To Rachel Corrie. And to Ishai Menuchin and his
comrades.