Tuesday 30 December 2008
by: Norman Solomon, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Israelis and Arabs "feel that only force can assure justice," I. F. Stone noted soon after the Six-Day War in 1967. And
he wrote, "A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human,
and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy
them."
The closing days of 2008 have heightened the Israeli government's stature as a mighty practitioner of the moral
imbecility that Stone described.
Israel's airstrikes "have killed at least 270 people so far, injured more than 1,000, many of them seriously, and many
remain buried under the rubble so the death toll will likely rise," Phyllis Bennis, of the Institute for Policy Studies,
pointed out on Sunday, two days into Israel's attack. "This catastrophic impact was known and inevitable, and far
outweighs any claim of self-defense or protection of Israeli civilians." She mentioned "the one Israeli killed by a
Palestinian rocket attack on Saturday after the Israeli assault began was the first such casualty in more than a year."
Even if you set aside the magnitude of Israel's violations of the Geneva conventions and the long terrible history of
its methodical collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, consider the vastly disproportionate carnage
in the conflict.
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," Gandhi said.
What about a hundred eyes for an eye?
It makes some of the world ill with rage. And it turns much of the United States numb with silence. Routinely, the
politicians and pundits of Washington can't summon minimal decency in themselves or each other on the subject of Israel
and Palestinians.
While officialdom inside the Beltway seems frozen in fear of risking "anti-Semitism" charges by actually standing up for
the human rights of Palestinian people, some progress at the grassroots level has been noticeable. It includes the
growth of groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Tikkun and The Shalom Center, where activists have worked to refute the
false claims that American Jews are united behind Israeli policies.
At the epicenters of the conflict - where the belief that "only force can assure justice" seems to be even stronger than
when I. F. Stone wrote about it 41 years ago - the conclusion has been drawn and redrawn so many times that deadly
repetition has become paralytic. While some Palestinian "militants" have terrorized and murdered, the Israeli government
has terrorized and murdered on a much bigger scale, using a vast arsenal largely financed by US taxpayers.
From afar, in the United States, it's too easy to shake our heads at the lethal loss of moral vision. Don't they know
that "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"? But the cycle of violence is extremely asymmetrical - while the US
government provides Israel with billions of dollars and invaluable "diplomatic" support.
What's going on in Gaza right now is not just an eye for an eye. It's a hundred eyes for an eye. And the current
slaughter is not only an ongoing Israeli war crime. It has an accomplice named Uncle Sam.
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Norman Solomon is the author of "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." To watch video
of his recent appearance on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal," click here.