My mother grew up, during the Second World War, in downtown London. She was eight or nine when the war started, fifteen when it ended. Apart from a couple of evacuations, she lived in the downtown, blocks from Victoria Station, and from Buckingham Palace, both prime targets. She remembers the dogfights of the Battle of Britain, parachutes and planes falling from the sky above her, the sound of machineguns thousands of feet above her head. She remembers the raids, sleeping in an Anderson Shelter behind the house. She remembers, too, the V-1 buzzbombs, with their loud, motorcycle engine sound, followed by silence, and then an explosion. And she remembers the V-2s, a deafening explosion without warning, and a building suddenly gone, and then the sound of the incoming rocket, after, because the rockets were faster than their own sound of entry.
Those rockets were fired from Holland. According to the logic of the Israelis, the Allies had, under the circumstances, the right to utterly destroy and flatten the cities and towns of Holland. Like Hezbollah’s Katushas, the V-2s were mobile, and they could certainly have been launched from population centers. Despite all this, I doubt very much that my mother would have felt that such an action was justified. Perhaps she understood, as the Israelis, the Americans and the National Post don’t that those who abandon proportionality, and who forget that their children will have to meet the children of those that they dealt with, are the ones who lose the real war.
Around the world, hundreds, if not thousands of people sit at their computers, trying to find a way to say something about the atrocity at Qana, Lebanon.
The mental image of 37 children being pulled from the basement that an Israeli shell turned into their tomb in an instant defeats me. Defeats me as a parent, who can’t but think of my own children. Defeats me as someone who can imagine the terrible choices that the people must have had to make in the face of the threat by an enemy that had already killed 100 civilians in a single stroke during a previous agression. Defeats me as someone who has struggled to reconcile my sympathy for the notion of an Israeli state with the increasingly repulsive inhuman form that that state has taken.
As terrible as it is to struggle with this, it is worse to see that there are those who will forever excuse, dismiss or minimize these crimes. The awfulness of Qana includes the awareness that here, in Canada, there are those for whom even the corpses of 37 children, bodies crushed by the shock of a shell deliberately aimed at them, cannot elicit the natural human moral revulsion that is all that can save us from monstrous acts done in our name.
The worshippers of power at the National Post have this to say:
Some are calling this a war crime, and they’re right. But the culpable party is Hezbollah, not Israel.
While it was Israeli planes that launched the missiles, these attacks did not materialize out of thin air. Since this conflict began on July 12, about 150 rockets have been fired from the vicinity of Qana, with the launchers hidden among civilian targets in the town itself.
Never mind that in the selfsame Post, towards the end of an article about Qana, on the same day as the editorial quoted above we read
Qana, they said, was being used as a launch site by Hezbollah to fire rockets into Israel, a charge residents categorically deny.
And that is all the time that the Post will spend on considering that the story of Qana is more complex, more human than the oversimplifying irresponsibility of an IDF spokesman.
Meantime, at the Huffington Post, Alan Dershowitz:
The real victory for Hezbollah is that it has caused grief and dissent in Israel over the death of the children. This will cause Israel to show more “restraint”, as it has already done by declaring a 48 hour cessation of air attacks. This will give the terrorists a freer hand at launching rockets. The end result will be more Israel civilian casualties. The sad truth is that the Israelis care more about the lives of innocent Lebanese children than Hezbollah does.
It’s hard to imagine the callousness of a statement like this, right down to the quotation marks around the word restraint. Mr. Dershowitz worries about more Israeli casualties: the total number of Israeli casualties for the entire three weeks of conflict is fewer than the deaths at Qana with one bomb. Not many more than the number of children at Qana, for god’s sake. Perhaps the reason that Israelis care about the children of their designated enemies so much is because they kill so many more of them.
As others have pointed out, to lose a war like this is not measured by territory lost. Even after 40 years, it is clear that Israel will never sleep peacefully until the territory taken in Gaza and the West Bank is dealt with without walls and bantustans. In a hothouse like the middle east, which measures time in centuries and even millenia, unless you are committed to genocide, any future is a future where you will face those you fought, face the parents and the spouses and the children of those you killed, whether by bus bomb or by cluster bomb.
It takes a while to realize that Qana has revealed that today, in Canada, a country without a natural committment to either side over the other in the conflict, (but with 50,000 Canadian citizens in Lebanon), a major national newspaper like the Post can, in effect, propose that Israel’s actions should not be condemned, precisely because they aren’t genocidal:
no reasonable observer can accuse the Israelis of deliberately targeting civilians (as Hezbollah has been doing for three weeks now). If Israel really were seeking to exterminate Lebanese civilians, the body count would be well into five figures.
Here’s what I think: I think that once you admit that the natural alternate option to your actions is genocide, then you are, in fact, a fascist.
It is difficult to define what constitutes fascism. One distorting factor has been precisely the disinclination to see the period 1932-1945 for what it was: a transformative period, where a range of ideas and positions emerged in places like Germany and Italy, and transformed the conduct of states and, ultimately, war. The dominant myth has been that the Second World War was a war to defeat a movement to which we were opposed.
Because of the specific and global character of the Cold War, popular myth didn’t incorporate the notion that well before the threat from fascism was understood, its successes as a system for managing many of the problems of the modern state had been admired and absorbed by states not explicitly fascist. The present day parallel might be capitalism and China: undeniably, China has absorbed, and been utterly transformed by capitalism. But it remains nominally, in in many important aspects of its existence fundamentally communist. The lesson should be that allegedly opposite systems are in fact, fully capable of integrating many of, if not all of the essential aspects of the opposing system without unmanageable contradictions emerging. In the same way, the modern state, and particularly the modern state at war can be essentially fascist without relinquishing its conventional character as, for example, a democracy.
A state proposes that in a given region, they are the state that others outside the region can most easily recognize themselves in. In the current conflict, Israel has been explicit in doing this, although the usual claim, heard frequently in the right wing that Israel is “the only democracy in the middle east” has been made less easy to foist, given that Lebanon, too, is a democracy. Still, the myth that Israel and the sympathetic media have perpetuated is that our natural sympathies lie with Israel, which is most like us.
What is problematic is that once subscribed to by the press, anything that brings the assertion into doubt, as with Israel’s conduct in the area of human rights, tends to be diminished. The same crimes, committed by Israel’s opponents are attacked, as they should be. The problem is that the discourse, proposing an a priori good – Israel’s existence – begins to erode our ability to assert our moral judgement impartially. In effect, the prior claim of a state to exist pre-empts the personal moral and ethical judgement and rights of individuals. This is fascism.
In the case of atrocities in a war, this becomes the basis for the assertion that since we are so like the state committing the atrocties, we should understand that we would do what they are doing, in their place.
When the state itself that appeals to us is, as Israel is, one that regularizes the diminishment or elimination of avenues of justice or appeal that would be unacceptable to us, we are dealing with a characteristic of the modern fascist state. And this requires the participation of a non-critical, supportive press.
The relation of the state to the media is another example, and it is impossible not to see in the modern, spin heavy and tamed press conference a replacement of the disordered demands of the press, and the regularization of fascist ideas of power and information. In the National Post and Alan Dershowitz, the utter acceptance of statements ludicrously at variance with reality, facts on the ground, and ultimately, morality demonstrates one of the profoundly toxic aspects of this fascist relationship.
The problem is that while this can work for a long while, given a press whose interests are also entirely devoted to power, an event like Qana becomes the point where the premise fails, and fails catastrophically.
Israel, to those not devoted to the pursuit of power, looks precisely not like us. And the reason is that no reasonable person with a respect for humanity can imagine that a conflict that began with the kidnapping of two soldiers could possibly ever force us into the deliberate murder of 37 children. The Viet Cong may have been in My Lai, but nothing but William Calley and his superiors caused William Calley to do what he did. Hezbollah may have been in Qana, but it was the Israeli’s preference for air war, for indiscriminate use of weapons in civilian areas with the expectation that no consequences would follow that was the sole cause of the deaths of those children. The notion of responsibility, from the top of the command to the foot soldier is what the Nuremberg Trials definitively asserted. Responsibility is precisely what those in the dock at Nuremberg, along with Dershowitz and the National Post deny and refuse.
More precisely, even if we can imagine being the one who sent the missile into that building that seemed the safest option to the families who otherwise would have had to set out on a dangerous, destroyed road to an unknown destination, perhaps to be killed on the road by some other Israeli unit, we know – those of us who have not sacrificed our humanity to our worship of power – that if that was not the limit, the place where our humanity trumped our power-worship, then we had no humanity, and so no claim to sympathy from anyone.
Qana is one of those incidents that, like Auschwitz, My Lai and Hiroshima prove to be a step too far for others to follow. In the case of Israel, I think that Qana will be the point that Israel’s get out of jail free pass with regards to the inherent fascism of the Israeli state will expire. It will, for the same reasons, be the point where the anti-semitic label that people like Dershowitz fling at even the mildest critics of Israel will be seen for what it is: blackshirt bullying that takes the forms of civil discourse and turns them on their ear to serve incivility.
Israel has, definitively, lost this war, and lost it in the worst way: lashing out, blaming those that they kill for their own deaths, murdering indiscriminately. Everywhere, there are people turning forever away from Israel, people who, like me, have struggled to find a way to support a state whose existence seems necessary but whose prerogatives cannot require that we will apologize or dismiss the kind of monstrous crimes that are our original reason for our support, support that is now forever gone.
