Open Thread: A Commentary on Iyad’s Memory

By
Greg Diamond
– December 13, 2023Posted in: "The OC", Fresh Juice, Israel, Palestine, War, war crimes

Iyad Ifalqa’s memory of suffering humiliation by the Israeli Defense Forces as a means of control prompt me to comment from my position as a Jewish man deeply distressed by the carnage occurring in Gaza.

I think that many American Jews have a difficult time thinking of the Israelis as bullies. We’re raised on tales of the Holocaust and the struggles to regain and protect our homeland, so we tend to reject talk of colonialism, settler acts, and apartheid conditions. I understand why we want none of that to be true. But at some point one has to accept that, regardless of whatever right and nobility may exist in our purposes, they still have to translate into actions — and that is what Iyad illustrates so movingly. This is what goes on. We know, at some level, that this is what goes on. South Africans knew about the sins of apartheid; Southerners knew about the rejection of equal status attending both slavery and Jim Crow and now again police violence and voting rights; Colonial and Manifest Destiny Americans knew, even if they made up stories to justify it, that we were taking land from people and it did not make sense that they had no real stake in it and so were giving it up freely. We may not have wanted to know. but we know.

When we know what we don’t want to know, we have two reactions: we may want to justify our way out of the dissonance between our self-perceptions as just and moral beings, but at a more visceral level we think that it really doesn’t matter. We will never be safe around those we have subjugated.

All of the above have in common that the problem is that the subjugated won’t just accept the current social order — that is the problem! The Native American we have stolen from will always hate us and will someday take revenge. The Blacks who we enslaved, then lynched, then redlined away from prosperity, then kept from voting, and always murdered — they would of course grow up hating us, so what else could we do but continue to keep powers out of the hands of the resentful? So we have to keep them down. Once you ride the tiger, you can never safely get off. And so it is for Israelis with Palestinians. How could teenage Iyad grow up without overweening, implacable, violent hatred towards his oppressors? (And yet he did make a point of learning about Jewish culture and fighting for a just peace.) Yet, even now, he finds himself kept down by those who thinks that he endangers us because he gets in the way of inculturation. And others of us, Palestinian or otherwise, are also attacked if we stand against attempts to obliterate Palestinian hope.

Our own subjugation of others justifies subjugation forever — unless their spirits and forever and implacably broken. Giving them hope is literally dangerous, because without loss of power and self-respect they may someday stand up and destroy us. The slave revolt was Thomas Jefferson’s greatest fear. It was why the father of American democracy quailed at the existence of a revolution similar to ours in Haiti.

Americans do not by and large understand that much of the rest of the world sees Israel as bullies, because they can see clearly that Israel evinces these same views that only humiliating and terrorizing the children of Gaza can offer them protection against what their grown-up selves might do. That is why people speak of Gaza as a genocide — because it is a declaration that such people cannot be allowed to live unless they do so without pride or potency. For some people, hatred of Jews based on ancient conspiracy theories may be a motivating factor. The rest are just seeing what’s happening and following the curve to its horrific end.

ADDENDUM

I went to bed realizing that Iyad’s story ought to be broken into two parts. I woke up to find that Vern had been very efficient in implementing the plan I set out last night to publish it as one part. I’m far more comfortable with this. Part of my New York Times subscription is that I get the right to share 10 articles per month for free. So I’m going to share this one, Under Rules of War, ‘Proportionality’ in Gaza Is Not About Evening the Score, which challenges aspects of my position. I think that this gives a good sense of what the Israeli government, and its defense forces, are thinking in making the case that their attacks have been lawful.

Here’s what I think that it fails to recognize: that discarding the principle of proportionality so long as a given attack can be justified as taken in good faith to be the most restrictive way of reaching a valid military goal can, if abused, turn into a justification for genocide. The rule of proportionality does not exist in isolation. When Israel determines “Hamas” to be “the enemy” (and as I’ve noted in comments elsewhere, Hamas has both a political and a military branch, and the political branch is not a military “enemy” in the sense that the military branch is), it uses it as a means of justifying any behavior whatsoever — siege, starvation, deprivation of water, bombing a city to rubble — because those are considered instrumental to the goal of permanently disabling the military branch of Hamas. That itself is absurd, as any Palestinian fighting back against Israel’s security, whether it comes from Hamas or not, will inevitably be considered Hamas. What Israel is saying that attacks now may continue, at any level of damage and carnage, until anyone who would physically attacks Israel is dead.

The U.S. employed this notion in its Manifest Destiny days in accord with a slogan (that may have come later) saying that “The Only Good Indian is a Dead Indian.”) That became disallowed in the last century under various treaties including the Convention Against Genocide. Quibbling about the proportionality of a given attack is immaterial if the goal is eliminating anyone who might ever pose a threat. That overreaching goal is a crime against humanity. That is what the U.S. had better not fund.

This is your new open thread. Talk about that, or whatever else you’d like, with — this time — a specific emphasis on decorum in these trying times.

About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)