Israel uses white phosphorus munitions in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead.
Norman Finkelstein published a book a number of years ago entitled Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom.
In it he looked at various major episodes in the long bloody onslaught on the people of Gaza, amongst them Operation Cast Lead and also the attack on the boat Mavi Marmara and the Goldstone Report, amongst other issues.
He could have written it yesterday about the current genocidal plans of the Israeli state.
The current Israeli offensive is just one more in a long line of massacres. This is not a review of Finkelstein’s book, though any book by him is worth reading and should be read. Rather I just want to use the book to show that what is happening now is not new, it is just more intense.
Israel has murdered before, it has lied, it has committed war crimes and it has always received the support of western states.
Above all we should be clear that we are where we are partly due to the Oslo Accord and also the role played by the Palestinian Authority and the PLO. They cannot wash their hands of the affair.
“One of the meanings of Oslo,” former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami observed, “was that the PLO was . . . Israel’s collaborator in the task of stifling the intifada and cutting short . . . an authentically democratic struggle for Palestinian independence.”
Rabin (left) and Arafat shake hands on the Oslo Accords under the management of then US President Clinton. (Photo sourced: Internet)
In particular, Israel contrived to reassign to Palestinian surrogates the sordid tasks of occupation. “The idea of Oslo,” former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky acknowledged, “was to find a strong dictator to . . . keep the Palestinians under control.”
“The Palestinians will be better at establishing internal security than we were,” Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin told skeptics in his ranks, “because they will not allow appeals to the Supreme Court and will prevent the Association for Civil Rights in Israel from criticizing the conditions there. . .
They will rule by their own methods, freeing, and this is most important, the Israeli soldiers from having to do what they will do.”(1)
In other words, Gaza has bled under the passive gaze of the bureaucrats of the Palestinian authorities and of course of the reactionary Arab regimes that have never lifted a finger to help their Palestinian brothers and sisters.
They have not even threatened to cut off the supply of oil to the West, something they could do right now, but won’t. It has also happened under the gaze of those on the Left who run around shouting Implement Oslo! Two State Solution!
They ignore the fact that Oslo represented an ideological, political and military defeat for the Palestinians. The PLO accepted its role as puppet, administrator of a small urban city-like council and as chief repressor of those who continued to fight for Palestinian freedom.
A look at the Oslo II Accord, signed in September 1995 and spelling out in detail the mutual rights and duties of the contracting parties to the 1993 agreement, suggests what loomed largest in the minds of Palestinian negotiators.
Whereas four full pages are devoted to “Passage of [Palestinian] VIPs” (the section is subdivided into “Category 1 VIPs,” “Category 2 VIPs,” “Category 3 VIPs,” and “Secondary VIPs”), less than one page—the very last—is devoted to “Release of Palestinian Prisoners and Detainees,” who numbered in the many thousands…
The barely disguised purpose of Oslo’s protracted interim period was not confidence building to facilitate an Israeli-Palestinian peace but collaboration building to facilitate a burden-free Israeli occupation.(2)
However, Israel is now militarily weak. Finkelstein points to a number of attacks where it has shown its weakness. Its predilection is for attacks on the civilian population that can’t fight back.
In 2006, it opted to bomb civilians in Lebanon rather than engage in a proper fight with Hezbollah “terrorizing Lebanese civilians appeared to be a low-cost method of “education.”(3)
In Gaza in Operation Cast Lead in 2008/9, it followed a similar path of aerial bombardments of civilians rather than land invasions, that would see its troops face the wrath of Hamas and other armed organisations. So first they relentlessly bombed Gaza before any troops went in.
When the troops went in, the civilian population was their preferred target then as it is now. The murder of civilians is not new. It is part of an Israeli strategy of claiming easy victories.
An Israelicombatant remembered a meeting with his brigade commander and others where the “rules of engagement” were “essentially” conveyed as, “if you see any signs of movement at all you shoot.”
Other soldiers recalled, “If the deputyBattalionCommander thought a house looked suspect, we’d blow it away. If the infantrymen didn’t like the looks of that house—we’d shoot” (unidentified soldier); “If you face an area that is hidden by a building—you take down the building.”
Questions such as ‘who lives in that building[?]’ are not asked” (soldier recalling hisBrigadeCommander’s order);
“As for rules of engagement, the army’s working assumption was that the whole area would be devoid of civilians … Anyone there, as far as the army was concerned, was to be killed” (unidentified soldier);
“We were told: ‘any sign of danger, open up with massive fire” (member of a reconnaissance company); “We shot at anything that moved” (Golani Brigade fighter); “Despite the fact that no one fired on us, the firing and demolitions continued incessantly” (gunner in a tank crew).
“Essentially, a person only need[ed] to be in a ‘problematic’ location,” a Haaretz reporter found, “in circumstances that can broadly be seen as suspicious, for him to be ‘incriminated’ and in effect sentenced to death.”(4)
In all around 1,400 Palestinians were murdered in Operation Cast Lead, with 80% of them being civilians including 350 children. Israeli casualties were risible in comparison, just 10 combatants were killed, four of whom were killed by friendly fire.(5)
Then as now, Israel wheeled out the old trope of “human shields”. Amnesty International found no evidence of that,(6) in fact, it found evidence of Israel using children as human shields.(7)
It also found that Israel used then, as it does now, white phosphorous against schools, hospitals and even the UNRWA.(8) Furthermore, 99% of the air attacks were accurate.(9) If they murdered civilians, it is because the civilians were the target.
Following the operation, the Goldstone Report was published. It surprised no-one when it found evidence of Israeli war crimes and to a lesser extent of Hamas. It is a salutary lesson for those who now place their confidence in the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Goldstone made various recommendations.
Individual states in the international community were exhorted to “start criminal investigations in national courts, using universal jurisdiction, where there is sufficient evidence of the commission of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.
“Where so warranted following investigation, alleged perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted in accordance with internationally recognized standards of justice.”(10)
We know that nothing of the sort happened. In fact, the western governments paid little heed to the report. Goldstone was forced to recant on the conclusions to his report.
Netanyahu for his part announced that he wanted to amend the rules of war leading to Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell asking “What is it that Israel wants … Permission to fearlessly attack defenseless population centers with planes, tanks and artillery?”(11)
Exactly.
And here we are today, with Israel unilaterally amending the rules of war, with the green light from the EU and the USA, amongst others. They murder civilians and no one proposes doing anything.
In Operation Cast Lead, the harshest sentence emitted by an Israeli court was seven and a half months to a soldier who had stolen a credit card!(12) Minor financial crimes are of greater concern than war crimes or crimes against humanity.
After this genocide in Gaza, we can’t expect much from the ICC.
Throughout its history the ICC has opened just 31 cases, including one for genocide. All of them against African leaders. This does not mean that those leaders did not deserve to be judged for their crimes, but that the ICC is just the legal arm of imperialism.
It has never attempted to put on trial the powerful in the West and despite everything even less so Israel. This year it issued a communiqué announcing that it would issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for war crimes and did so on its own initiative.(13)
In the case of Gaza, it will do nothing of the sort. Those who place their trust in the ICC or in the Palestinian Authority are fooling themselves. This situation is the result of turning a blind eye to Israel for many years whilst it commits all sorts of crimes.
It didn’t act before and it won’t do so now. Neither will the Arab regimes do much, unless their own populations force them. They fear the Palestinians and their own people as they know that the struggle against Zionism is also a struggle against them.
The more revolutionary Palestinian groups used to say that the path to Jerusalem went through Amman and Damascus. They were right, it does pass through those capital cities and also Beirut, Riyadh, Cairo and all the others and not through the ICC.
In fact, one day the judges and prosecutors of that body should be put on trial for their complicity in Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity through their inaction and omission.
It is beyond the scope of this article to deal with the role of Amnesty International in its own reports on Palestine.
They are what Finkelstein refers “as far from being the exception that proved the rule, Amnesty actually constituted a variant of the rule: instead of falling silent on Israeli crimes during Protective Edge, Amnesty whitewashed them.”(14)
I will leave it to the reader to look at the book for more information on that particular betrayal. Suffice to say, we can expect little from such organisations. At best they gather data we can sometimes use.
Notes
(1) Finkelstein, N. G. (2018) Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom. California. California University Press. pp 6 & 7
Norman Finkelstein has published a new book on cancel culture. It comes from a man who as he points out became a high-profile victim of one of the more modern iterations of cancel culture, that of Zionism.
The latter was unashamedly right wing and did not dress itself up in liberal or even bastardised Marxist tropes, peddled by people who should know better.
He is perhaps, one of those with a vantage point on the issue, who deserves to be listened to.
He opens the book with an epigraph from Bertrand Russell: “I feel a real and solid pleasure when anybody points out a fallacy in any of my views, because I care much less about my opinions than about their being true.”
A statement that should be basis of all discussion is now frowned upon in a world of unassailable truths, wicked witches who should be burned at the stake, dogmas that once enunciated can never be challenged.
And whether the statement is true, matters not as it is more important how many semi-literate university graduates are offended by it that counts. Of his own cancellation and the hypocrisy of some of those who signed the Harper’s Letter decrying cancellation he is not bothered.
This is because he contends that “Hypocrisy was rife, for sure. But the irrefragable fact remains that “woke” politics are intellectually vacuous and politically pernicious.” He forewarns us that the book is laced with vitriol… because so much of “woke” culture deserves contempt.”
But that “a large amount of space is devoted to dissecting this nonsense… because it’s not immediately obvious why it’s nonsense.” This Foreword alone entices the reader to delve deeper into its pages and the plea from Tariq Ali for him not to throw a tantrum makes it all the better.
Cancel culture as Finkelstein points out is not new.
He gives a short list of some of his heroes who were cancelled at one point or another, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, Lee Hayes and even Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and even Chomsky were cancelled and reviled in their day.
Pete Seeger, veteran folk singer, folk song collector and political activist, was among victims of cancel culture in his day. (Photo sourced: Internet)
Yes and by the same newspapers, journals and political quarters that are now to the fore in cancelling one and all and in some cases, those involved in the cancelling now decry the cancel culture that affects them.
He divides the book into two parts, one dealing with woke politics and the other with academic freedom, though they are not separate and there is some overlap, even in the book.
In the first part he looks at some of the figures of woke politics, those who make the case for identity politics in particular. Some of the people he looks at, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X Kendi, are well known in the US but not so much outside of it.
He eviscerates them rather well describing Kendi’s writing as being “as supple as a calcified femur and as subtle as an oversized mallet”. Obama is of course, well known, though his politics are modern in how they are sold.
Obama is all about style over substance, partly because the substance is not new, he represented no great change in US society, though that is not the image he sought to portray. His message was vacuous, Yes we can, and Finkelstein asks the question, can what?
And gives the very direct and truthful answer “Yes we can, elect me”. Obama is shredded in the book, his famed oratory derided for what it is, speeches that were written by an all-white team of writers, despite Obama’s identitarian claims.
A parsing of Obama’s public addresses reveals a relentless concatenation of the most vapid, sententious, shoeworn, fatuous, hollow, saccharine clichés—a cornucopia of the commonplace—without a single clever phrase, metaphor or aperçu to redeem or relieve them, interlarded with oleaginous homilies to humility before God.
That does not mean that his speeches and politics are devoid of consequences. Obama epitomises the reality of identity politics. It is another con job. For all his blackness Obama did very little for blacks in terms of socio-economic advancement.
Not even in terms of a relatively simple issue, police violence against blacks. In one of the first rows in his presidency on the issue, he backed down and instead of taking action invited the policeman and his victim for a beer.
Identity politics is waived about, not to solve any problems but to divide. Finkelstein asks whether it advances causes or provokes their retreat.
The objective of politics, Mao Tse-Tung famously exhorted, was to “unite the many to defeat the few.” Whereas, identity politics divides the many so as to, designedly or not, enable the few.
It conjures a hierarchy of oppressions, in which each group vies with the others for the position of most oppressed— Kimberlé Crenshaw says Black women are most oppressed, Angela Davis says it’s transgender people, Ibram X. Kendi says it’s poor transgender Black women.
The victors in this inverted Oppression Sweepstakes, where you win by being the biggest loser, get to leap to the head of the queue as most worthy of preferential treatment, while, simultaneously, fomenting new resentments among those shoved further and further behind…
This, in effect, performance politics has spawned a disgusting den of thieves who brand themselves with radical-sounding hashtags, churn out radical-sounding tweets, and insinuate themselves into positions of prominence, as they rake in corporate donations and cash corporate paychecks.
Theyhang out at the watering holes of the rich and famous, and thence can be safely relied upon not to bite the hand that feeds them. In a word, identity politics is a business—in the case of Black Lives Matter “leaders,” a most lucrative and dirty business.
Cancel culture is about silencing voices other than those sticking their snout in the trough and their grubby hands in the greasy till, a point he is right about, not just in the US but around the world.
Finkelstein found himself cancelled, though not silenced, as he points out, because his views go beyond the grimy quest for self-aggrandisement and enrichment. Identity politics is utterly reactionary.
He contrasts the fumbling for pennies and the endless categories of oppressions with an historical figure that our perpetually offended money grabbers in search of the latest shakedown could never match: Rosa Luxemburg.
My mind drifts back further still to Rosa Luxemburq, this exotic creation of a lost epoch: Polish, Jewish, bourgeois, handicapped, female—
Rosa didn’t wallow in or capitalize on her “intersectionality” but, on the contrary, triumphed over it as she became the brilliant, impassioned (and then martyred) revolutionary leader of the German workinq class;
A class which—be it noted as a robust class rejoinder to claustrophobic identity politics —fervently embraced this Polish-Jewish-bourgeois handicapped-female as one of their own.
And that is exactly the point. Luxemburg is a real hero, many of the heroes of the woke do not measure up to their own standards, not even Frederick Douglass, who had a very poor opinion of native Americans, a fact overlooked by modern day identitarians.
Though many don’t have a positive opinion of native American themselves. Douglass however, is despite this a towering admirable figure in history, not one that should be cancelled, a hobby now of every spoilt ignorant brat that mammy and daddy got into an overrated expensive university.
And though it is only a matter of time before some hippy in Berlin decides to reinvent Luxemburg as intersectional, she was not and had no time for the woke equivalents of the day.
Academic freedom is the other area of concern for Finkelstein, conformity, banal ideas and salivating over money is not limited to our woke warriors in the press, NGOs and politics but in academia. It is not new, but is more pronounced now than before.
Bertrand Russell summed it up nicely and Finkelstein agrees that “As a rule, by the time a man becomes a professor, he has been tamed, and has learnt the advantages of submission” the advantage being measured now in euros, dollars, yen and shekels, though many would deny this.
Again as he points out “For self-deception, you can hardly beat academics,”. There are of course exceptions, but in the current atmosphere, the younger new academics are bowed and beaten by those who went before them.
Given his own personal experience, he is obviously in favour of academic freedom which he describes as not just the freedom to teach but to enquire and travel the road less travelled.
He points out that in the US the idea went through various stages, freedom from churches, then from corporations and later the state (MacCarthy). Nowadays, all three encroach upon it, sometimes in unison and to the same end.
He goes again into some detail on the issue and chooses the thorny ground of Holocaust denial.
He is Jewish, so he is clearly not advocating that the Holocaust did not happen, but rather how it is dealt with on campus and links it up to other issues, giving examples when he himself has been uncomfortable teaching and the examples he relies on.
He makes an argument for challenging ideas. This section, like the Obama part is overly long and could also have done with a bit of editing. But he clearly comes out against censorship and new morality police that abound everywhere.
It’s easier to fight against codified speech restrictions than against “enlightened” campus opinion, which, in the name of its “special duty,” insinuates itself in campus life and throttles free speech with its asphyxiating pieties.
The situation now is that debate is being stifled on a whole range of issues, beyond the obvious ones and the high profile debates on Men’s Rights i.e. the right to id your way into women’s spaces. Due to his own experience, he does seem to think that it is more the case when an academic goes off campus that the trouble arises.
But actually, the baying mob throttling free speech are doing so on campus now to people who have never ventured off it, or at least have never been given much opportunity to do so. He cites a very interesting case, that of Bertrand Russell when he was appointed to City University.
His morals, his sex life and general outlook were brandished about as reasons for not hiring him. Russell defended himself, saying they were irrelevant, he was appointed as a lecturer in “modern concepts of logic,” “foundations of mathematics,” and “relations of pure to applied science.”
In the modern cancel culture that wouldn’t stand. People are sacked precisely because of their private lives or their opinions on matters wholly unrelated to the area in which they teach.
It didn’t stand back then either, Russell lost the case precisely because he argued in favour of homosexuality and premarital cohabitation, amongst other things. Our woke liberals on campus, those who hounded Kathleen Stock out of her job are as reactionary as the judge in the case.
He goes on to look at other cases before finishing off with the details of his own case and his unemployment and unemployability in academia.
The book is interesting, though far too long with too much detail about some cases and aspects which makes it difficult to see the wood from the trees at times. But it does offer arguments on issues that are current with reference to historical precedents and also to philosophy.
It is worth reading, as he is a rather high-profile victim of cancel culture. His book the Holocaust Industry was thrashed by the New York Times, which had positively reviewed the Bell Curve and even gave a better review of Mein Kampf than Finkelstein’s book.
They probably keep quiet about that aspect.
Cancel culture, identitarianism, intersectionalism are amongst the biggest intellectual challenges to the left.
They deny class and reduce politics to the acceptance of pre-ordained dogmas, that are espoused by the US Democratic Party, Facebook, Google and many major multinationals i.e. from the right of the political spectrum.
They are the wolf in sheep’s clothing, though the sheep is clearly showing the fangs for anyone who wants to see. History is unlikely to be kind to them.
Whilst Finkelstein has some illusions of his own in some liberals like Bernie Sanders, his point about freedom of speech, the search for the truth, discussion and debate are his main point in the book.
A point that cannot be overemphasised in its importance, nor of the need to persevere through the current darkness. As Finkelstein says.
Many of the heroes of my youth had been blacklisted, but also had, despite all, stayed true to their youthful convictions; not dogmatically, as almost all of them had left the Communist Party, but still unreconciled to the capitalist system, and committed, at any rate in theory, to its overthrow.
A picture of Robeson sits on my bookshelf beside a picture of Marxist economist Paul Sweezy.
The cancel culture advocates and wokerati have, unlike Finkelstein, reconciled themselves to fumbling in the till and harassing those who might speak out against the system in any meaningful way.
rebelbreeze 