Lynda Brayer
By using the “War on Terror” and “security” to justify a broad range of initiatives that compromise civil rights and liberties, the Bush administration is relying on the oldest and least rational argument -- fear. The government asserts that it can’t guarantee our safety and our survival without tightening security. The promise is held out that with the help of these controls, it can eventually eliminate terrorists.
Ironically, as it wavers between fear-mongering and militarism, the United States is now seen by a good part of the world as the greatest terrorist of all. Americans joke about the ways in which Big Brother is watching us… but the opening for these intrusions on our rights was created when the American people, traumatized by the September 11 attacks and their aftermath, were successfully manipulated by the Bush administration.
Israel’s experience with terrorism -- and the Israeli government’s longtime exploitation of fear for political ends -- helps shed some light on our own government’s deceptions and their troubling implications.
Histories of Fear
Few nations have felt as estranged from real security as the State of Israel. The Jewish people have experienced millennia in exile, centuries of anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust, with little support from the world. Few other peoples have been so persecuted, so denigrated -- so terrorized. Convinced that no other state would or could assure their survival, many Jews yearned to be “a people like any other people,” living safely in a state of their own.
Yet violence and threat have marked the existence of modern Israel from its inception, and by the 1970s, a new form of decentralized, civilian-focused terrorism had emerged. Michael Walzer, a political theorist and editor of Dissent, defines terrorism as the killing of innocent people for political ends. In those days, for Israel, the Arab world came to exemplify terrorism. “Security” is now the dominant concern of Israeli society. Contemplating the continued dominance of this concern even as Israel has become a major military power, scholar Tony Judt remarks (in Haaretz, May 5, 2006):
But today the country’s national narrative of macho victimhood appears to the rest of the world as simply bizarre: evidence of a sort of collective cognitive dysfunction that has gripped Israel’s political culture. And the long cultivated persecution mania -- “everyone is out to get us” -- no longer elicits sympathy.
Yet, 58 years after independence, despite its military and nuclear might, despite its army and a $2 billion wall, Israeli society remains profoundly insecure. Military expenditures and funds for the settlements reduce funding for social programs, and 40% of Israeli society now lives below the poverty line. This shortfall has been partly offset by a growing arms trade, further deepening a reliance on militarism. This concern has been taken up by many Israelis, including several ex-generals.
“The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or anti-missile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed. It turns out that the 2000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawmakers, who are deaf to both their citizens and their enemies.” --Former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg (Haaretz, May 21, 2006)
Palestinians, too, have inherited a culture increasingly defined by their experience of persecution and oppression, with more and more Palestinians driven by fear to dehumanize Israelis and to approve of violent “solutions” to the occupation. (See Benny Morris’s book Righteous Victims on these intertwined histories.)
When “Security” Dominates Democracy
In the absence of a constitution or a bill of rights, “security” is a priority determinant for decisions by the High Court. When early settlements were placed in the West Bank, “security” was held to prevail in court rulings. As a general rule, any decisions that fall within the rubric of “security” are upheld.
The quest for security has gradually been internalized within Israeli society. Censorship, confiscation of land, the demolition of homes, targeted assassinations, and a myriad of practices that are illegal in the United States are considered to be requirements of survival in Israel. Many human rights organizations have exposed disturbing abuses and taken challenges to court.
Hundreds of Israeli army officers have become “refuseniks,” refusing to fight in the occupied territories, sometimes going to prison. For young Israelis of earlier generations it was almost unthinkable to refuse military duty. Now it is estimated that around 40% of Israelis eligible for military service do not serve. Last year Combatants for Peace was formed, the first group of Palestinians and Israelis who have fought each other and now vow to make a lasting peace with each other. They conducted a Passover seder earlier this spring in the Arab town of Anata, in the shadow of the Wall.
In many respects the Israeli and US approaches to security are similar or intertwined. Each has a strong intelligence apparatus which relies heavily on information garnered from paid informers, spies, and provocateurs. Israel has relied on the infamous British Emergency Regulations to place Palestinians in preventive detention for 18 months and more, foreshadowing Guantánamo and secret US prisons. While the Israeli High Court has ruled against the use of “moderate torture,” the military has worked to legitimize exceptions and is reported still to torture secretly.
As strategic allies, Israel and the US have collaborated for many years through intelligence, trainings, and work in the field. Israeli intelligence “confirmed” that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The American Jewish community has been uneasy with US policy in Iraq, but practices deemed unacceptable in Iraq are too often overlooked when they are inflicted on the Palestinians.
The US and Israeli governments have both been active in trying to subvert and censor the press. The Israeli government has influenced the national discourse by using the terms “terrorism” to apply to a wide range of Palestinian acts, “liberated” territory to talk about occupied territory, and “convergence” to denote the confiscation of critical segments of Palestinian land. It is hard to miss the parallel with US pronouncements about its war for “democracy” and “liberty” in Iraq.
For most Israelis, the Palestinians are perceived to be an unfortunate presence, incompatible with a secure Jewish state. The Palestinian population is regarded as terrorists who can be controlled only by perpetual war or a final defeat. Despite several polls showing that Israelis (like Palestinians) overwhelmingly support the continuation of a peace process, the Israeli public strongly favors reducing the Arab presence. According to a poll published in May, 62 percent of Israelis support “government-backed emigration.”
Israel’s fear has turned it into a high-tech, militaristic state, in constant conflict. In many respects, Israel has become both precedent and model for the US and the Bush administration. Elections are a case in point. The US government asserts that a US-influenced election with American military backing in Iraq is democratic, while denying the legitimacy of Palestinian elections held quite democratically and at the insistence of the US.
Security has proven illusory for Israel: its burden is gradually, effectively subverting its democracy, withering its economy, and widening the chasm between two peoples. “The Wall” is the most powerful metaphor for what has transpired. Even some Israelis with no commitment to nonviolence for its own sake are naming out loud the possibility that there must be a better way to peace than endless war.
Haaretz is wrong. The separation fence should not be completed. It should be abandoned, and those sections already built should be torn down. Israel can re-occupy the territories and send the IDF into every alley and building there to bring terrorism to a stop, or, alternatively, it can sit down and talk to the Palestinians -- to Abu Mazen, to Hamas, to everybody. --Daniel Gavron (Haaretz, May 21, 2006)
Inevitably, Israel’s concern to keep out those it fears has led to an awkward and racist status quo. The Israeli government has worked hard to discourage not only any increase in the Arab population but any movement of Palestinians within Israel that might “dilute” Jewish population centers. Thus, in East (read Palestinian) Jerusalem there is a population race going on between the two communities.
The demographics of security have led Israel to enact numerous race-measures that would be profoundly offensive and anti-Semitic, were they imposed on most Jews. An increasing number of Israeli journalists and intellectuals have made comparisons with Nazi restrictions on Europe’s Jews.
Confronting the Illusion
Israel, Iraq, and the West Bank are examples of the danger inherent when democracies turn to “security” as an expedient to greater freedom. This is a dangerous illusion, and we in the peace community must recognize it in all our work. When we organize against the Iraq war or the Israeli occupation and make no mention of the broader militarism that underlies them, we lose the opportunity to educate on illusions that must be dissolved. “Collateral damage” in military strikes is terrorism. American air strikes that kill civilians in Iraq are terrorism, just as Israeli bombs dropped in Gaza and Palestinian missiles aimed at Israel are terrorism. It is terrorism when one country occupies another, controlling the most intimate aspects of people’s lives.
Terrorism is that which terrorizes others. Terrorism is far more than killing the innocent. To control peoples, to deny their identity and deprive them of hope, to reduce their lives to bare existence, is terrorism.
For Palestinians, to hear the words of peace extended to them and then confront the existential process of Israel’s extending the settlements and their infrastructure in a pattern that will render any new state a series of gerrymandered cantons, is terror. On May 21, 2006 Haaretz reported that Defense Minister Amir Peretz has approved expansion of four West Bank settlements -- Ginat Ze’ev, Oranit, Maskivot, and Beitar Ilit. The Israeli government also reports that it will tear down ten “outposts” (illegal settlements).
Both Palestine and Israel are now passing into a new generation of leadership. The Arafat generation is on its way out. The Sharon generation has also been replaced. Gone are the leaders who were mired in defending their decisions of the 1930s and 1940s. The refuseniks in Israel bring an invaluable new voice to the anti-occupation movement; jailed Palestinian leaders have joined together to pull the Palestinians toward peace; the US anti-war movement, strengthened by the witness of Iraq veterans and soldiers’ families, has a new momentum.
The threat is not al Qaeda, or the Palestinians, or even nuclear proliferation. If all of these disappear, our challenge remains. The threat we face is militarism, the thinking that we can end violence by better violence. Real safety can only come from having faith and patience in forging a future together. As long as Israel and the US have vast power, there is only scant hope. But their downfall may be that they have trapped themselves in the illusory rhetoric of “security” while simultaneously escalating the violence.
Allan Solomonow is Director of the Middle East Peace Program in the Pacific Mountain Region of the American Friends Service Committee
