The Power of Principle - Tribute to heroes
Friends, The ISM was nominated, by our friend Beverley Britton, and was a finalist for this, the Oscar Romero Award. The
award deservingly went to Ishai Menuchin, Chairman of Yesh Gvul - an organization of soldiers who refuse to serve in the
Occupied Territories. Below, Susan Sontag, in presenting the award to Ishai, pays tribute to our friends, Rachel Corrie
and Tom Hurndall who gave their lives in the struggle for justice. This is a must read for all activists out there.
The power of principle
It is hard to defy the wisdom of the tribe, but resistance to injustice has never been more necessary. Susan Sontag pays
tribute to the heroes of past struggles and to the moral courage of Rachel Corrie and the Israeli soldiers who refuse to
serve in the Occupied Territories
Saturday April 26, 2003 The Guardian
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 mobilise 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 it into a world that
is larger mentally but smaller numerically - if alienation or dissidence is not your habitual or gratifying posture - is
a complex, difficult process. It is hard to defy the wisdom of the tribe, the wisdom that values the lives of its
members 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, or 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.
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 - 23 years ago - because he had become, according to the citation for the Oscar Romero Award
presented annually in his memory, "a vocal advocate of a just peace, and had openly opposed the forces of violence and
oppression". The second: Rachel Corrie, a 23-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. 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 armoured D-9 bulldozer through her megaphone, then dropped to
her knees in the path of the super-sized bulldozer . . . which did not slow down. (Three weeks later, on April 11, Tom
Hurndall, a British peace activist, was shot in the head as he tried to help a Palestinian woman and her children flee
Israeli gunfire in Rafah.) Emblematic figures of sacrifice, killed by the forces of violence and oppression to which
they were offering non-violent, principled, dangerous opposition.
Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example - for
courage is as contagious as fear. But 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.
That a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian standard, 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 is "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 provo cation - and there is
provocation - that, too, should not be denied.
At the centre 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. An appeal to the existence of a higher law that authorises 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 resistors 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 neighbours 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 by Ishai Menuchin, chairman of Yesh Gvul, 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 1945-46: namely, that
a soldier is not obliged to obey unjust orders, orders that 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 centre 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% 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 these soldiers have done - there are now about 1,100 of them, more than 250 of whom have gone to prison - does not
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 democratisation of the
Palestinian Authority. Their stand will not lessen the grip of religious bigotry and racism on 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 [(There is a Limit), the Israeli soldiers' movement for
selective refusal].
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 America 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.
With our "United We Stand" or "Winner Takes All" ethos the United States is a country that has made patriotism
equivalent to consensus. Tocqueville, still the greatest observer of the United States, remarked on an unprecedented
degree of conformity in the then new country, and 175 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 such as the war in Iraq, 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 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 adapt 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 that will actually contribute to peace or improved security; of an
aggression that announces itself as a campaign of disarmament - admittedly, disarmament of the enemy; and, regrettably,
requiring the application of overpowering force. An invasion that 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 Iraq is 25 million, half of whom are children? (The population of the United States 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 train, 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 20th 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 site were unaffected by the protests. But it led directly to 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 anti-nuclear 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 neighbouring people. It is surely false to think that murder,
expulsion, annexations, the building of walls - all that has contributed to reducing 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 oppose 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 programmes 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. To Tom Hurndall. And to Ishai Menuchin and his
comrades.
Susan Sontag. Adapted from Susan Sontag's speech on March 30 at the presentation of the Rothko Chapel Oscar Romero
Award to Ishai Menuchin, chairman of Yesh Gvul .