Israel, Suicide Nation

The result of this most cynical ploy is that the Palestinians, dark-skinned victims of Israel's perpetual campaign of ethnic cleansing, torture, theft, and humiliation, are always grotesquely caricatured as mindless savages with a fetish for suicide attacks. There is, however, one major credibility problem with this racist rhetoric: Israel itself is in the process of committing suicide. 

The trouble hardly stems from any defect in Israel's elaborate propaganda campaign. To the contrary, its message has been widely accepted with fawning awe and reverence by all dominant presses, pundits, and politicians, whose necks and knees strain from displaying the proper respect accorded to the lies of the powerful. The Israeli narrative, preserved, polished, and peddled by the generously-funded pro-Israel lobby and various sycophants, has easily withstood the fleabites of facts and evidence presented by critical Jewish- Israeli scholars, historians, journalists and commentators, which go unnoticed in mainstream discourse. 

No, Israel's crisis has not emerged because its packaged lies have been unwrapped for the public by sentimental sectors of corporate capital moved by the plight of the oppressed, but rather because the oppressed themselves, viciously maligned and virtually alone in their struggle for survival, have refused to bow to the logic behind those packaged lies; that is to say, they refuse to be exterminated, disappeared, destroyed, or spirited away, as Zionism has been demanding of them for one hundred years. As one Palestinian recently wrote in response to Ben-Gurion's famous quip on expelling Arabs, ('The old will die and the young will forget,'): 'The old are dying, and the young are dying too, but no one is forgetting.' 

What is therefore falling to pieces is not Israel's 'smug self-portrait', but rather the cheap, crumbling edifice of arrogance on which it and all the other aspirations of Israeli colonialism are mounted. Propping up this arrogance in the past was the basic assumption among Israeli elites that after enough murder, rape, torture, bulldozing, looting, and expropriating, the Palestinians will break. This prognosis has failed miserably. Compounding the original crime of mass expulsion with more violence has not allowed Israel to escape its consequences. Zionism's 'original sin', as one Israeli historian calls his nation's original 1948 expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians and massacre of hundreds more, is the basis of both Israel's existence and the continued non-existence of the more than four million caged, dispossessed Palestinian victims who demand justice. 

This demand for justice expresses itself in continued endurance and resistance, separate forms of defiance with interdependent consequences – consequences that Israeli society cannot cope with and sees as its greatest threat. 

Endurance means, first and foremost, staying in place. Its greed for land and settlements partially hindered by Palestinian presence, Israel has responded by robbing the natives of any legal, political or human rights, and has constructed what Israeli anti-occupation activist Jeff Halper calls a 'matrix of control' to stifle their lives, including settlements, military checkpoints, roadblocks, curfews, embargoes, and detention centers. But merely living in this hellish scenario constitutes a victory against the root logic of Israeli colonialism, which is to 'purify' the land by removing its indigenous population. 

Resistance, on the other hand, refers to active measures against the occupation. In the first Intifada and in the beginning of the second Intifada this almost always took the form of unarmed protest or stone-throwing, but Israel responded by mowing down hundreds of Palestinians with machine guns and breaking their bones, bringing in bulldozers to demolish homes and tanks to enforce even harsher living conditions. Their restraint further rewarded with an atrocious death ratio of 25:1, Palestinians tired of digging rows of graves for their children and patriots just to be patted on the head by a few polite Western liberals, and turned to armed struggle, the most extreme form of which now manifests itself in suicide bombing. 

The remarkable reality of sustained Palestinian endurance and resistance in the face of overwhelming power has precipitated two crises for Israel so entwined that they are best referred to as a dual crisis: that of its political legitimacy and self-proclaimed moral purpose. 

Because Palestinian-Arab population growth in historical Palestine (Israel, Gaza, West Bank) greatly exceeds that of the Jewish population, Jewish majority status in the area – assiduously obtained through a century of mass murder and mass expulsion – will be imperiled and surpassed within a mere two decades. That these growing Arab millions stand stripped of elementary rights and suffer the deprivations of a racist military machine undermines Israel's claim to the mantle of democracy. Panicked Israeli protest to the effect that Palestinian growth is some sneaky maneuver to 'destroy' Israel only reinforces its status as an apartheid state, since a democracy that fears the democratic enfranchisement of half its population is no democracy at all. 

Furthermore, Israel's viciously disproportionate use of force against all forms of Palestinian resistance to the occupation has created a maximum escalation of violence in which any citizen of Israel is now a potential target of weaponized desperation – suicide bombing. Rocking Israeli cafes, discos, and streets at will, this tactic has narrowed the 25:1 death ratio to almost 3:1, and exploded Israel's basic founding ideal – that it is a safe haven for Jews. Indeed, Jews are now safer in almost any place in the world other than Israel.

In responding to this dual crisis, some in Israeli circles of power have expressed quite reasonable ideas. Last September, Israeli politician Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset, declared his country was resting 'on foundations of oppression and injustice' and advocated full withdrawal from the territories to create a Palestinian state. The same month 27 air force pilots, considered the military's elite, refused to implement assassinations, describing them in a letter as 'illegal and immoral attacks.' In November, four ex-chiefs of Israel's vaunted internal security service, Shin Bet, jointly declared themselves against Sharon, the apartheid wall, and their country's 'disgraceful' and 'patently immoral' behavior against Palestinians, prompted by concerns that 'Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for the Jewish people.' In December, 13 reservists (including three officers) of Israel's top commando unit joined hundreds of other Refuseniks in refusing to serve in the occupied territories, saying that they 'have long ago crossed the line between fighters fighting a just cause and oppressing another people.'