Brutality, it seems, has an infinitely long shelf life, writes Azmi Bishara We are living through heady days. Israelis and Palestinians are furiously exchanging nods and winks as they usher in the post-Arafat phase and they are trumpeting such "achievements" and "breakthroughs" as Israel's decision to allow the Arabs of Jerusalem -- whose land Israel wants to annex without granting its inhabitants the rights of citizenship -- to take part in the PA presidential elections. The Hebrew dailies are madly vying with one another in featuring horror stories from another world, the world of the occupier and the occupied in Gaza and the West Bank. It feels as though it is end-of-an-era inventory time in Gaza, and with the Israeli conscience in Gaza, as lurid details of heretofore unimaginable acts committed by their soldiers somehow fuse with postmodern consumerism. From the photos from Abu Ghraib we segue to those that Yediot Aharanot splashed in its edition of 14 November 2004 and around which it is planning a full supplement due out on 26 November. Apart from the horror, there was one thought I could not get out of my head: why would soldiers be obsessed with having their pictures taken, in the Israeli case, with Palestinian corpses? In Abu Ghraib the camera, and the desire of the perpetrators to document their perverse thrill in the course of committing torture, were concomitant factors in the crime. In Israel soldiers from a certain military unit gather to have their pictures taken around the severed head of a Palestinian fighter stuck on a bayonet with a cigarette planted in his mouth. The pictures were a kind of a good luck charm, the soldiers said. Soldiers from another unit had their pictures taken with the bullet-riddled body of a boy whom they thought was a "terrorist" but turned out to be innocent. They called him "Hafy", an abbreviation of the Hebrew for innocent, as though the dead boy's innocence was a subject of jest rather than remorse. They then tied his corpse to a car and paraded it round the camp. There is more involved here than the type of rabid racism that manifests itself in the jubilation over an Arab's death even if he was innocent. What we have here is the intersection between consumer society and the individualism of the democratic system with the power of the individual, as an occupier, to take the denigration of the other to its furthest limits and his ability to produce and record his own version of the "ultimate experience" as featured on "reality" and "extreme" cable television networks. Imagine the individualism of mass society devoid of the substance that distinguished the individualism of early modernism and what you get is a process of atomisation in which individuals are all clones of one another, wearing the same uniform and trying to do individual real things in uniform. It is a contradiction in terms. Add to this the condition of military occupation, the complete control this gives over others as "the other", and the intense "power rush" available to those seeking the ultimate experience. The image of the severed head brought to mind Oliver Stone's Platoon. Set in Vietnam, the film depicts how the hell of war and death had warped the minds of a group of American soldiers to the degree the platoon members considered it perfectly normal for one of their number to carry around the severed head of a Vietnamese victim in his backpack as a "mascot" until they could no longer stand the stench of the decay. Since the 1970s reality and fantasy have become so confused that reality can only become itself when recorded on film. But there is a vast difference between Vietnam and Gaza. No comparison can be made between what Israeli soldiers are experiencing in Gaza and the horrors American soldiers experienced in Vietnam. Israelis are facing resistance, true. But that is where all resemblance ends. In Gaza the evil resides in the element of control combined with consumerist lust -- the commodities consumed here being the degradation of the other and the experience of cruelty. But this is no Vietnam in which the mentality of both sides is being warped by the ravages of war. There is no parity here at all. The Palestinians have suffered immeasurably far greater violence. Some have had their normal humanitarian senses numbed by hatred fuelled by the thirst for revenge, to the extent that they paraded the bodies of four Israeli soldiers and an officer who died in a tank that exploded on 12 May 2004. We were all shocked by images that set off an alarm over what was happening to the Palestinian inhabitants there. Israelis at the time expressed their shock and outrage at the mauling of the bodies of Israeli soldiers taken from a tank whose every missile could have lacerated dozens of Palestinians. That the youths who were displaying the parts of the Israeli corpses to the television cameras were drawing attention to themselves rather than to the Israeli tank that exploded during the Israeli incursion into Gaza provoked a double horror at what they had done. Meanwhile, Israeli officers take a different approach to the behaviour of the kids in their units -- the latest example of which took place in October when an Israeli soldier emptied the cartridge of his machine gun onto the body of a young girl, Iman Al-Hims, and then boasted about it, although later he said that this was to confirm she was dead (a new term for compounding the crime of wounding an innocent child by finishing her off). Israeli officers deplore such behaviour, but reject punishment as a means of prevention. Having one's picture taken with a corpse is wrong, but it is only a picture and not an act of deliberate murder, one officer said. What is needed, according to Israeli officers, is to inculcate soldiers in the "moral purity" of their weapons and in maintaining their "humanitarian image" even in the midst of the war against terrorism. While their officers concoct new terms justifying nearly everything, Israeli soldiers have terms of their own: the Hebrew equivalent of "cool" being one of them. One soldier in the unit felt that the sport his cohorts made with the Palestinian corpse was a disgrace. It appears that his disgust was an exception to the rule, though it was enough to make him go to the press. However, after all the publicity, parliamentary committees will affirm that it was the act itself that was the exception to the rule. The rule they will cite exists only in Israeli propaganda, which markets the image of an army you can live with, an army that lives by the codes of "ethics in combat" and the "moral purity of the weapon" and other such mottos repeated time and time again since 1948 and which reality has constantly belied. One of the most illustrious examples of this ethical code of combat in practice is Unit 101, that terrorist paramilitary group under the command of Ariel Sharon whose mission it was to subjugate Arab society and culture, by brute military force through commando raids against peaceful villages. The week after the news broke about the pictures Israeli soldiers had taken of themselves with Palestinian corpses, Ma'arev (19 November 2004) featured a lengthy investigative report on a Russian sniper unit that had served in Afghanistan and Chechnya and that had volunteered its expertise in close-range combat -- "shooting when seeing the whites of Chechnyan eyes", as they put it -- to the Israeli army. The Russian snipers, who served nearly a year in Gaza (from September 2003 to July 2004) became mythical heroes to Israeli soldiers. It appears that they boasted of relying on their "gut feeling" to sniff out suspects, resulting in the death of dozens of innocent Palestinian youths. Again, another American war film comes to mind, this one commemorating the Russian defence of Stalingrad in WWII. I could not help but feel that those Russian sniper volunteers in Gaza had modelled themselves after the hero of the American- produced Enemy at the Gates, directed by Jean- Jacques Annaud. That is probably how the Israeli soldiers saw them, which is perhaps why these volunteers assumed such legendary proportions. Israeli soldiers who saw that film would have imagined the real-life Russian snipers tracking their prey for days, crouching in wait for long hours without budging an inch, summoning ultimate reserves of concentration until the moment comes to pounce, like a spider on a fly. But it seems even the Israeli army could not quite stomach the drinking of huge quantities of vodka to toast the health of the victim they had just killed, as their commander boasted to Ma'arev. But then those soldiers were not brought up on the values of the Israeli army, or so the newspaper claimed barely a week after the Israeli press blazoned images of these great values in practice, and in accordance with which the flagrant disrespect for enemy corpses, if distasteful, is an ordinary combat phenomenon that does not merit punishment. In all events, the issue extends beyond the question of the values of this army or that. The commodification of evil, and its consumption, is now globalised. The trading of brutality fills a moral vacuum in which meaning is found in pushing experience beyond the envelope, beyond mercy, compassion and other human feelings and values. Forms of this process have appeared in Palestine, a case of latter-day colonialism, on a tiny spot of land filled with people who have no idea why globalisation has chosen to spew in their direction the human garbage from Chechnya and even Hollywood. Meanwhile, in the space between the newly arrived Russian Jewish snipers whose minds were warped in Afghanistan and Chechnya and the ordinary young Israeli soldiers who are having a bit of sport with corpses without having to face a real war and whose families and friends think are all decent, good-natured boys the Palestinian people are being shoved into cages of assorted sizes. And in these cages they are being closely watched to see if they rebel, in which case they are branded dangerous, or if they remain subdued, in which case they are labelled tame and lovers of peace. In both cases, individuals from the occupying power are granted licence to take snap shots confirming their superiority and the inferiority of the other.
