August 1, 2006

So, since Israeli generals are pissed off at Olmert for being such a sissy, the Israeli cabinet has authorised a wider offensive. What sort of 'wider offensive'? They're still bombing inside Lebanon, destroying the infrastructure as before, but the big push is going to come on the ground in what Israel advertises as a two-week offensive involving thousands more troops. At the same time, they are reported to have been bombing heavily on the Lebanese-Syrian border, and the Syrian army has been instructed to "raise readiness", while it has been suggested that they are gathering forces in preparation for a potential invasion by Israel. Israel claims that a Syrian bomb was detonated next to an Israeli army post in the occupied Golan Heights. Bush has been threatening Iran and Syria again. The Israeli News Agency is agitating for war with both countries. It has been reported that US officials have been dropping messages in Israel's suggestion box, saying a war with Syria would be no bad thing. Meanwhile, Iran is warned again by the 'international community' about what it must do immediately, and what it must stop doing, and what it must never do and say again. It is tempting to consider the UN a wonderfully supine outfit, allowing itself to be used as the conduit for imperialism to be ditched when it doesn't prove useful and then dragged in to clear up the bloody mess afterwards. But this is to miss the point: the UN is a means by which powerful states regulate their dealings with one another and with weak states, and its laws and 'universal' principles are a byproduct of such negotiations. To put it another way: the UN is not an alternative to imperialism; it is imperialism.

If you only watched the television news, you might have the idea that Israel's motive in all of this is to disarm Hezbollah: they've given up on that idea. They'd be doing well to stop their warships getting rocketed by Hezbollah, never mind taking a few paltry villages or towns which they now seem anxious to do by flattening them first and then helicoptering troops into safe locations nearby. Practically every commentary one reads now is suggesting that Israel isn't able to beat Hezbollah, or at least has seriously underestimated them. Their frustration is showing. On Saturday, Haim Ramon, Justice Minister and former Labour leader, was reported by Haaretz as saying "We must reduce to dust the villages of the south [...] I don't understand why there is still electricity there." This murderous logic is daily carried to its conclusion in Lebanon and in Gaza. The feigned shock of the 'international community' is past being amusing, but when it comes from human rights groups it does remind one of St Augustine's dictum that ignorance is the mother of amazement. Past empires used scorched earth offensives, starvation, disease and ethnic cleansing to sieze territory, and Israel is after all an auxiliary of the American empire. The calculated murder of civilians is indispensable to it, as is the racism that legitimises such murder. As Michael Warschawski writes: "The Israeli war in Lebanon is the paradigm of war in the 21st century -- wars of world re-colonization and the subjugation of the peoples of the earth to Empire ... In ten years, we witnessed a gradual evolution of the dominant discourse: from terrorist groups, to terrorist states, to terrorist peoples. The ultimate logic of the global war is full ethnicization of the conflicts, in which one is not fighting a policy, a government, or specific targets, but a "threat" identified with a community."

Therefore to reduce this to a war between Hezbollah and Israel or - for shame - an over-reaction to something Hezbollah did is to so completely miss the point that one may as well sprout feathers and fully become an ostrich. It is a war on Lebanon and, by proxy, the Middle East as a whole. It is part of the war on Iraq, it is a scheduled war on Iran and Syria, it is the war daily waged on the people of Egypt and Saudi Arabia and all the victims of American oil dictatorships, whether Wahabbi or secular. One coopts here, bombs there, applies sanctions elsewhere, sabre-rattles everywhere, overthrows this or that government, buys another. One brings the leadership of Iraq's Kurds under tutelage while murdering the Kurds in Turkey - both the better to control or utilise their national aspirations. One promotes 'secularism' here, religion there, despotism when it suits, 'democracy' where it can be managed. The war is endless because the resistance has never been broken and yet has never entirely won. The unwillingness of people simply to be inexpensive labour or museum pieces or ornaments is expressed variously - as communism, nationalism, religiosity. All of these continually return in different configurations. And with the stupendous resources at their disposal, imperialist states find new ways to racialise and dehumanise the enemy, to make their obliteration a little more than glad and less than sad. The media supplies through its cliches, its reliance on orthodoxy and short-cuts, its automatic respect for power (partly a function its class bias), a phantasmatic screen through which one perceives the ongoing war as a fragmentary, chaotic morass. Over There, there is no history worth knowing about, no story that makes sense, nothing for us to empathise with except when a pro-Western crowd appears briefly in a landmark opening and is kind enough to re-enact the drama of democratic-national revolution without any of the attending risk that the wretched multitude might take the democracy business too seriously: people attack others inexplicably; 'gunmen' operate; 'hordes' 'surge' or 'swarm'; 'extremism' festers and always overpowers the soothing unction of 'moderation'; 'evil' percolates; sinister Iago-like conspiracies unfold; and the only explanation that avails itself to the best brains CNN can buy is that 'it's the Middle East'. As such, the ongoing war is depicted as a series of ad hoc responses, emergency missions, humanitarian flights, crisis management, the containment of evil, democracy promotion, the clash of civilisations and so on. Since the news cannot report context, cannot delve into even a month's worth of history, their reporting is leavened with racist narratives that provide the appearance of coherence.

So it is that the Lebanese people are metonymically reduced to Hezbollah, who are in turn studiously demonised. So it is that anyone who did not obey Israeli orders to flee their homes and evacuate the entire south of Lebanon is a 'terrorist' or a 'terrorist' sympathiser, and anyone flattened under rubble and Israeli shrapnel either houses rockets or sleeps with the evil-doers. So it is that the Lebanese people are fingered with the responsibility to, if you like, "root out" the evil within. So it is that Hezbollah started it and Israel is only defending itself. And that is how we come to such monstrous confections as 'disproportionality'.