05.11.2007 11:05
Letter From Israel
by Ran HaCohen
April 1, 2002
The Auschwitz Logic
Sorry to disappoint some of my readers: terrorists haven't got me yet. Yesterday (Saturday) in Tel-Aviv they were close, but no cigar. A minute ago, my parents called from Haifa saying they just survived another attack. "May they move next to your home", an American reader identifying himself as "Baba" recently wished me. Thank you, dear Baba. Inside every "anti-terrorist" there is always a little terrorist yearning to come out. One can only imagine what you would do with your destructive energies, had you been living in a besieged refugee camp in Palestine rather than in a cosy American domicile.
Jose Saramago, the great Portuguese writer and winner of Nobel Prize for literature, visited Ramallah last week (24.3), days before the present Israeli re-invasion. He came with a delegation of the International Parliament of Writers (IPW), together with Russell Banks (USA), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Breyten Breytenbach (South Africa), Bei Dao (China), Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Vincenzo Consolo (Italy), and Christian Salmon (IPW Executive Director). The IPW also runs an appeal for peace in Palestine, where "the entry points to villages have been walled over, civilian population movement is paralysed, ghettos and reservations are created, where only tanks patrol and helicopters over-fly the area on a permanent basis". While in Ramallah, Saramago took the ghettos-and-reservations analogy a step too far and compared it with Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the Nazi death camps. Later, IPW distanced itself from Saramago's words.
Saramago's comparison has done it: at last, Israel had its desired spin. No one asked what Saramago had seen to make him use such an appalling analogy. Ramallah was forgotten immediately, only Auschwitz was left. The entire liberal intellectual main-stream – from playwright Yehoshua Sobol to rhinocerised Ha'aretz journalist Ari Shavit – did its best to attack and discredit Saramago. How vociferous can one be when shouting consensus slogans.
And how quiet can one be when a critical word is required. Of Israel's countless writers and poets, of the entire glorious literary milieu, only six persons bothered to sign the IPW appeal, long before Saramago's words. One of the six is an Israeli Arab (translator and writer Mohamad Ghanayem), three are Israeli Jews of oriental origin (writer Shimon Ballas, children's books writer Ronit Chacham, poet Sami Shalom-Chetrit), and of European origin we have poet Yizchak Laor and playwright Matti Meged. Have you ever heard of them? Probably not. But you probably did hear of Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and their ilk. Now you know why. They did not sign the appeal. But they would be more than happy to attack Saramago, I am sure.
The Auschwitz Logic
So this is the Auschwitz logic in a nutshell. Ramallah is not Auschwitz. Israel is not the Third Reich. We have no death-camps and we haven't massacred one third of the Palestinian population in gas chambers. Therefore, everything we do is quite all right. We may fill the occupied territories with tear gas and blood, we may kill and injure and torture and blackmail and dispossess, we may surround millions by electric fences and tanks in tiny enclaves, we may hold them under siege and daily bombing, we may make pregnant women walk to hospitals, and we shoot ambulances too, don't we. But as long as we fall even an inch short of the atrocities of Nazi Germany, it's all fine and good, and don't you dare make the comparison.
People sometimes say that the Better is the greatest foe of the Good. Israel is now demonstrating how the Greater Evil is Evil's best friend.
And many thanks to Adolf Hitler, for setting such insurmountable standards.
The Save-Arafat Logic
A recent subset of the Auschwitz logic. Europe is warning Israel: don't kill Arafat. The United States is soothing: Israel has pledged not to kill Arafat. How magnanimous of Sharon. He can bomb ambulances and raid hospitals, shoot journalists and cut water supply to entire towns, but as long as he doesn't touch Arafat, it's all right. In return for Israel's pledge not to kill Arafat, the world has given him a carte blanche to kill all other Palestinians. Sharon couldn't ever ask for more.
So, We Are Not Nazis
But here is a minimal actual sample of what we are doing:
* March 30th. LAW (The Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment). This morning, five Palestinian officers (Khaled Awad (33), Ismail Zaid (56), Said Abdelrahman (60), Abdelrahman Abdallah (58), and Omar Musa (54)) have been found dead in an office building in Ramallah. Last night, Israeli forces had surrounded the building and prevented anyone from entering. The five bodies were found in one room, lying next to each other. They were injured in their faces and killed by gunshots in the head. LAW's assessment suggests that these five have been executed.
* March 30th. Excerpts from an Appeal for Help from Besieged Ramallah. "As we write this, there are US-made Apache attack helicopters overhead firing on the city. Israeli bulldozers are creating permanent positions for the tanks in and around private houses. Some of us have had experience in other sieges, in Sarajevo, Dili, and elsewhere. There is a familiar pattern of emergency rapidly developing. This is the beginning of a humanitarian crisis. Immediate intervention is required to prevent a disaster.
"No Movement Possible: Inhabitants of the city are under complete curfew. There is no medical access. Palestine Red Crescent medical relief workers have not been permitted to provide medical services to the local population. Israeli forces are firing on anyone walking out on the streets.
"On Thursday, based on fears of an Israeli re-invasion, more than 500 inhabitants lined up in the mud and rain at the Qalandiya checkpoint – the only exit point from the city allowed by Israel – begging Israeli soldiers to allow them to escape. In response, Israeli soldiers fired over their heads, exacerbating the panic and causing most to simply return to Ramallah.
"Israeli Forces Using Human Shields: Israeli soldiers are occupying an increasing number of private residences and detaining the residents collectively in single rooms. Meanwhile, Israeli occupation soldiers have taken up armed positions in the houses or apartments of these residents.
"Food Resources Limited: There is no food entering Ramallah and no one is allowed to restock. There will shortly be a food and drinking water crisis. Some parts of Ramallah are already without water altogether. Israeli soldiers are also eating the food of residents while taking up positions in their houses.
"Electricity Being Cut: Large parts of Ramallah are without electricity and heat. The lack of electricity also means that residents are without television and any news reporting of the situation outside their homes. Many residents of the city rely on cellular phones for communication and without electricity they are unable to recharge their phones. Therefore, the population is being held in isolation and there is increasing fear and confusion. Also, some telephone landlines have been cut.
"Prisoners Being Taken: Israeli troops are calling upon all male residents between the ages of 16 and 40 in some neighbourhoods to 'surrender'. The wounded are being treated roughly and being denied medical access. Now, their fate is unknown.
"Gratuitous Vandalism and Destruction: There are on-going spiteful acts of destruction. Most commonly, Israeli tanks are driving over and flattening cars whether on the streets or parked on pavements in front of residences. Personal property inside houses is being destroyed in house-to-house searches.
"Due to fear of retribution, the names and contact information of those authoring this appeal have not been included."
Searcher
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Gaza: Not Just a Prison, a Laboratory
05.11.2007 11:03
At a glance, things aren’t going well for Israel. But here’s a puzzle: why, in the midst of such chaos and carnage, is the Israeli economy booming like it’s 1999, with a roaring stock market and growth rates nearing China’s?
Thomas Friedman recently offered his theory in the New York Times. Israel “nurtures and rewards individual imagination,” and so its people are constantly spawning ingenious high-tech start-ups - no matter what messes their politicians are making. After perusing class projects by students in engineering and computer science at Ben Gurion University, Friedman made one of his famous fake-sense pronouncements: Israel “had discovered oil.” This oil, apparently, is located in the minds of Israel’s “young innovators and venture capitalists,” who are too busy making megadeals with Google to be held back by politics.
Here’s another theory: Israel’s economy isn’t booming despite the political chaos that devours the headlines, but because of it. This phase of development dates back to the mid-nineties, when Israel was in the vanguard of the information revolution - the most tech-dependent economy in the world. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated, facing its worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners.
Within three years, large parts of Israel’s tech economy had been radically repurposed. Put in Friedmanesque terms: Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the “flat world” to selling fences to an apartheid planet. Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom-a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world.
Discussions of Israel’s military trade usually focus on the flow of weapons into the country-US-made Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in the West Bank and British companies supplying parts for F-16s. Overlooked is Israel’s huge and expanding export business. Israel now sends $1.2 billion in “defense” products to the United States-up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. In 2006 Israel exported $3.4 billion in defense products-well over a billion more than it received in US military aid. That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.
Much of this growth has been in the so-called “homeland security” sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion-an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are high-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems - precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock-in the occupied territories.
And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the “global war on terror.”
It’s no coincidence that the class projects at Ben Gurion that so impressed Friedman have names like “Innovative Covariance Matrix for Point Target Detection in Hyperspectral Images” and “Algorithms for Obstacle Detection and Avoidance.” Thirty homeland security companies were launched in Israel in the past six months alone, thanks in large part to lavish government subsidies that have transformed the Israeli army and the country’s universities into incubators for security and weapons start-ups (something to keep in mind in the debates about the academic boycott).
Next week, the most established of these companies will travel to Europe for the Paris Air Show, the arms industry’s equivalent of Fashion Week. One of the Israeli companies exhibiting is Suspect Detection Systems (SDS), which will be showcasing its Cogito1002, a white, sci-fi-looking security kiosk that asks air travelers to answer a series of computer-generated questions, tailored to their country of origin, while they hold their hand on a “biofeedback” sensor. The device reads the body’s reactions to the questions and certain responses flag the passenger as “suspect.”
Like hundreds of other Israeli security start-ups, SDS boasts that it was founded by veterans of Israel’s secret police and that its products were road-tested on Palestinians. Not only has the company tried out the biofeedback terminals at a West Bank checkpoint, it claims the “concept is supported and enhanced by knowledge acquired and assimilated from the analysis of thousands of case studies related to suicide bombers in Israel.”
Another star of the Paris Air Show will be Israeli defense giant Elbit, which plans to showcase its Hermes 450 and 900 unmanned air vehicles. As recently as May, according to press reports, Israel used the drones on bombing missions in Gaza. Once tested in the territories, they are exported abroad: the Hermes has already been used at the Arizona-Mexico border; Cogito1002 terminals are being auditioned at an unnamed US airport; and Elbit, one of the companies behind Israel’s “security barrier,” has partnered with Boeing to construct the Department of Homeland Security’s $2.5 billion “virtual” border fence around the United States.
Since Israel began its policy of sealing off the occupied territories with checkpoints and walls, human rights activists have often compared Gaza and the West Bank to open-air prisons. But in researching the explosion of Israel’s homeland security sector, a topic I explore in greater detail in a forthcoming book (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism), it strikes me that they are something else too: laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested. Palestinians - whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling “Hamasistan” — are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs.
So in a way Friedman is right: Israel has struck oil. But the oil isn’t the imagination of its techie entrepreneurs. The oil is the war on terror, the state of constant fear that creates a bottomless global demand for devices that watch, listen, contain and target “suspects.” And fear, it turns out, is the ultimate renewable resource.
by Naomi Klein
Lab Rat
Homepage:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/15/1901/