Indoctrinated citizens of empire can still be innocent

A while back, I took the following notes from the article ‘Innocent Israelis’ by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post). These comments are from an ordinarily lucid reporter writing on October 11th. We didn’t know then what we know now, but we did know that collective punishment is wrong, and that there is most certainly such a thing as the concept of a innocence. Lawrence in this article seems to be arguing for a pretty strict restriction of the definition of that word, as illustrated below.

“To assume the responsibilities that fall to us is to preserve some claim to innocence, it seems to me. To develop within ourselves a sense of empathy, or whatever is the opposite of indifference, is equally to retain or regain our innocence. Again, there is no defending the shootings at Re’im. But only those among the revelers who understood and assumed their responsibility for Israel’s conduct and all the Yoav Gallants running the apartheid state can fairly be counted innocent of what we must recognize as a criminal regime. There is an honorable movement of such people in Israel, let us not forget. It is hard to imagine any of its members partying on the Gaza border, but let us allow for the possibility. For the rest, they must be counted as complicit.”

So, if you’re a racist against Palestinians or Arabs, if you were aware of what the Israeli state was and is doing to Gaza, then you’re not innocent. So what? You’re still a civilian, right? You’re not innocent, but…what is he saying? That they deserved what they got? That seems pretty breathtakingly stupid. It is the argumentation of Osama bin Laden, it is the logic of Netanyahu and the Israeli state right now.

A callous indifference

“To consider the Re’im attack as an event in history, it seems to me there is something very off about a group of young and privileged Israelis having a carefree weekend in the sand hard by a land of daily, incessant suffering, a place where the innocence of its children and youth has been stolen by the state wherein the partiers do their partying. Something very off: By this I mean the revelers betrayed themselves as profoundly irresponsible, so it seems to me. Maybe unconsciously and maybe not, to me they displayed that indifference toward the lives of others for which many Israelis have unfortunately made themselves well-known.”

Ok, so that’s a slightly different thing that he’s saying in the last part. It is the least-generous interpretation possible, but it unfortunately has got more truth in it than we’d like to admit. I would just like to add that Israelis are hardly unique in this regard. This is what all kinds of people do. We become very accustomed to a situation, no matter how unethical, not matter how immoral, not matter how racist and eugenic.

The situation for Israel is that they have been taught that they are the chosen people, living in relative luxury, the world jealous of them. Perhaps I can empathize because this is the story that Americans are told as well.

When you benefit greatly from a situation, when your quality of life is good, you can easily look away from the giant heap of skulls and bones on which your so-called civilization is built.[1]

There are untold places in the “civilized world” where the rich live cheek-by-jowl with wildly impoverished neighborhoods, places of to-the-rich completely incomprehensible and unimaginable suffering and desperation. Gated communities. Favelas. Slums of all kinds.

Of course, of course, Palestine is, by all accounts, much, much worse than most places. It is, as Norman Finkelstein says, a “concentration camp”, an “open prison”. Nearly all residents were born into a concentration camp and have known nothing but prison their entire lives. The majority are younger than 18 years old. The majority never voted Hamas into power.

Most of us dance on a heap of skulls

Even if we don’t live cheek-by-jowl with the oppressed, we still benefit every day from them, casually, both in our own societies and in others.

• We know who makes our phones, don’t we?
• Is that a nice Nike running sweater you have on, made in a Bangladeshi sweatshop?
• Do you enjoy typing on your laptop, manufactured in China and/or Taiwan, under probably appalling conditions?
• Did you enjoy that Starbucks for which you paid an entire hour’s salary of the person who you completely ignored behind the counter, who will possibly sleep in their car that night?
• Was it made with beans that don’t grow within thousands of kilometers of you, harvested by excruciatingly poor people, ripped off mercilessly by giant multinationals that make obscene profits every year?
• Did you have some chocolate with it?

We are self-deluded pirates

We want desperately for Hamas and the Palestinians to be uniquely savage terrorists, alone in their ability to inflict unspeakable harm on innocents—so that we can help ourselves forget our complicity in these acts, done in our name, or for our ultimate benefit.

We need their attacks—and the attacks of all whom we deem enemies, but who are really just “other people who have stuff that we want to have for free”—to be “unprovoked”. We want to ignore all the evil that we’ve done, while highlighting the inhumanity of everyone else’s.

We can’t have done anything to have aroused anyone’s ire. We can’t be made to even consider changing anything about ourselves or our lifestyles that would prevent something like this from happening in the future. We are an unsullied people. There is nothing we have done that might be considered untoward that we should perhaps stop doing in order to prevent future attacks.

These are the only justifications for any change in our behavior: it’s getting too expensive—or difficult—(to steal stuff from others), or it’s getting too dangerous (to steal stuff from others). We never consider the path of “stop stealing stuff from others so much” because it would (A) possibly change our quality of life in a way that our lords and masters—who benefit even massively more from this whole situation—have told us would be detrimental and (B) would mean that we would have to admit that we had been doing bad things all along (i.e., stealing stuff from other people). The life of a pirate involves a lot of self-delusion.

We want the Israelis to be even worse deniers of their privilege, to be uniquely deluded hypocrites and racists, so that we can absolve ourselves of our own failings in this regard, were we to even admit them. And why admit such trifles about our excellent selves, when the others are so, so much worse?

Religion is a cheap excuse

And you can disabuse yourself of the notion that religion has anything to do with it, other than serving as a convenient and well-established reason for hating and othering. Religion is just one of many ways of justifying why it’s OK for you to steal somebody else’s stuff—be it land, food, water, physical goods, safety, or well-being. The U.S. doesn’t really declare classically religious wars—-like actually based on a holy book—-but what is the difference between Jihad and the blind, hate-filled fervor with which the U.S. pursues it’s interests, claiming to be anti-communist or whatever the flavor of the week is?

It’s not just Israelis. Not by far.

We should be careful not to let our anger and indignation get the better of us, to let our anger make us say things that are patently wrong, or wildly hyperbolic, that would threaten to distract us from the fact that we’re all hypocrites. It’s a spectrum. Some people lean hard into it, for sure. But Israelis are not unique in their hatred of the other, in their ability to dance while others suffer.

Young Israelis know nothing other than that there is a mysterious place on their border that their state has under control. They know that they’ve been told to live their best lives—because why not? It is what affluent, young people have always done. They are not unique in being wildly ignorant of or failing to be empathetic to those around them. Racism and discrimination doesn’t help. of course, but they’ve also never really known anything else. There is no advantage to be had by not being racist against Arabs. There is much to lose. It reminds me very much of the U.S. in the 50s and 60s.[2]

Israelis are heavily, heavily indoctrinated to believe that Palestinians—and Arabs in general—are sub-human animals, no more of consequence than a lizard or a goat, perhaps even less so, because animals can’t be terrorists.

Here’s a five-minute video that provides a bit of background.

Israel is a Racist, Supremacist State by Kei Pritsker (YouTube)

This is also not unique. Perhaps Israel is at the top of the list for racism, but the U.S.‘s foreign policy is also horrifically racist. Their soldiers used—perhaps still use—the epithet “sand niggers” for Arabs while deployed in the Middle East.

Again, having grown up in the U.S., I understand how stupid and evil propaganda can make you. You have to actively resist it the whole time. You will be ostracized from some places. You might lose your job. You will feel gaslighted. You will wonder why you stand alone so much. You will doubt yourself. You will wonder why you ruin your own life for a principle no-one else seems to believe in.

Ripping off Omelas

Imagine a town with a square in the center. In the center of that square, there is a pit. At the bottom of that pit lives another group. The group above knows about the group below. They keep them alive, but barely. They use the pit as a sewer. Every few decades, a piece of poo flies back out of the pit. Inconceivable. The villagers above cannot comprehend the effrontery. They are terrified that it will happen again. They drop boiling oil down the pit to root out the poo-flingers.

What would we think of the above-ground villagers? Would we think it possible for them to be unaware of the morality of the situation? What if they’d never known anything else? What if they’d been told every day that this is the only way for the world to work, for God to be satiated, for society to continue as it does?

Israelis and Americans: partners in delusion

What does the average Israeli know about their country? About their government? I don’t know. Do they vote? I don’t know. I come from a country where a lot of people don’t vote, they complain all the time about the government, but they don’t vote. The largest voting bloc in the U.S. is non-voters.

Most Americans think we won the Vietnam War. That’s if they even know what the Vietnam War was. Or is, for that matter. If they don’t know what it was, then they might just as well think that we’re still fighting it. We have bases everywhere. A lot of people know that. They know that their young go to Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Germany, South Korea, … everywhere. So why not Vietnam? Is there a war there? Maybe. There are wars in a lot of places. Just not the U.S.

And just not Israel, where things were pretty quiet, until recently.

So, maybe a lot of Israelis don’t read newspapers, or believe what they hear, and think things are just hunky-dory. That’s maybe how they can so easily be convinced that “those fuckers [Hamas] came out of NOWHERE.”

M.I.A. as an example

Most people in the U.S.—of those who know about it—think that we won the Vietnam War. They’re just waiting for Vietnam to apologize for having killed so many of our soldiers. You think I’m kidding. I’m not kidding.

There are still P.O.W./M.I.A (Prisoner Of War/Missing In Action) flags up everywhere. There are V.F.W.s everywhere (Veterans of Foreign Wars … what other kind are there? Oh, yeah, the Civil War). They’re still waiting for our boys to come home. I’m not kidding.

The life expectancy of a man in Laos was about 33 years in the 1970s, and that’s for a local who’s not in prison. None of “our boys” are alive anymore, not by any stretch of the imagination. And yet they wait.

And yet a bill passed in 2019 that requires every post office in the U.S. to fly an M.I.A. flag. Bipartisan. Co-sponsored by Elizabeth Warren.

So, no, I don’t make any assumptions about what the citizens of a country might know about what their country is up to.

Watching a country go mad

I watched my whole country go mad with revenge fantasies, then destroy two countries over two decades. For nothing. Nothing was gained. Much was lost.

I am familiar with all that sordid bullshit and the bullshit excuses we make to ourselves, of the horrible anti-humanistic things we say and do because we can’t contain our rage, our lust for revenge, because we are animals but want to be seen as good, but also still want to hate the other, to blame all ills on someone else.