The present massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza by the Israeli military proves that Israel is now not only morally bankrupt but also militarily clueless, argues Hamid Dabashi* Writing under circumstances in which Palestinian women and children are being slaughtered by the Israeli army in Gaza on a daily basis is an exceedingly difficult, for it seems utterly futile, task. But write one must. Writing by someone who has young children and who has been watching pictures of the maimed and murdered bodies of Palestinian children paraded in the world media (never in the US) is doubly difficult, for you see your own children, as you have and hold and care for them, in those lifeless little bodies, wasted in the bloom of their youth. But write one must. The Christmas massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza in 2008/2009 is a turning point in a long and arduous history of struggles against the European colonial settlement of the Palestinian homeland. The victory that they have just scored with their bare hands and with the corpses of their children against one of the deadliest military machines in human history marks a turning point in their long and noble struggle. The state of Israel was established in 1948 on the broken back, but defiant will, of the Palestinian people, and predicated on the moral depravity of a Europe responsible for Jewish sufferings from mediaeval pogroms to the genocidal Holocaust. Christian Europe paid the price for what it had done to the Jews for centuries and millennia and then during the Jewish Holocaust through taking the land and liberty of the Palestinians -- not unusual treachery for European colonial craftiness over the centuries. For years, as a result, Israel took full advantage of the moral depravity of European racism that had caused so much Jewish pain and suffering. But in due course -- and as the world learned more about the terror that Zionism has visited upon the Palestinians -- Israel lost the claim to the moral heritage of the Holocaust and relied exclusively on its military might to sustain its brutal position of power. By way of providing subsidiary military services to US imperialism in the region and beyond, Israel altogether abandoned its false posture of victimhood and thrived in flagrant displays of brutish force. As Israel lost any claim of moral authority to the legacy of the Jewish Holocaust, it built massively on its military might -- and it had a lot to show for it. In successive wars from its colonial inception in 1948 down to its territorial expansions in the aftermath of the 1967 war, Israel relied on conventional colonial warfare, expanded exponentially on its might, and effectively transmuted itself into a massive military camp with a thin veneer of civilian administration -- all fully aided and abetted by US imperial interests in the region. Despite its initial military setback during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Israeli invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and then again in 1982, and its subsequent occupation of Southern Lebanon (1984- 2000), established the Jewish state as by far the most powerful military regime in the region. Facing corrupt, incompetent, or even collaborating Arab regimes, Israel banked on European guilt and American regional interests and became the single most brutish power in its neighbourhood. By the mid-1980's, Israel had lost any moral claim over the Holocaust, while amassing a military wherewithal that was unparalleled in the region and beyond. Just to make sure that this exponential military superiority remained intact, the pro-Israeli Zionist lobby in the US invested heavily in infiltrating and in buying influence in all the major and minor corridors of power and changing the political discourse of Americans in such a way that Arab and Muslim meant terrorism and barbarity. On every Salute to Israel Parade in New York, American Zionists have flaunted their power in public for the whole world to see. It was not until the publication of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's groundbreaking essay and then book on "the Israel Lobby" (2002/2007) that this vulgar domination of American foreign policy became a subject of public debate, as it was not until the publication of former US president Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006), that the dreaded word aptly describing the Jewish apartheid state was even accepted in the public domain. Israel, however, could not care less and struck an effective alliance with the American Neoconservative movement. For eight dreadful years of George W. Bush's presidency it spent billions of American taxpayers' money on turning itself into a major military component of the American imperial machinery in the region. Its presumption of moral authority exposed as a hoax, Israeli military might was in full display until the First Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993), when a sustained course of urban uprising against the Israeli occupation of Palestine began to turn the tables and showed, for the whole world to see, the utter futility of a conventional army (commanding a massive stockpile of nuclear weaponry) acting against the will of a defiant people who refused to be ethnically cleansed from their own homeland. The Second "Al-Aqsa" Intifada (2000-2007) was a continuation of the selfsame manifestation of the incapacity of the Israeli military in the face of a sustained course of urban uprisings. The two successive Intifadas forever changed the face of the Palestinian national liberation movement, and diverted the course of events away from its own corrupt and incompetent leadership, or from that of the Arab and Muslim states, and towards grassroots civil disobedience and urban uprising. The impotence of the Israeli army in defeating either of the two Palestinian Intifadas came to a spectacular crescendo during the summer of 2006 when it suffered a resounding defeat in Lebanon at the hands of the Lebanese Shi'i guerilla organisation, Hezbollah. What the July 2006 war more than anything else demonstrated was the ineptitude of the Israeli army when acting against a guerrilla operation determined to protect its homeland. Israel pounded Lebanon from the air, the land and the sea for over a month. It gave all it had and borrowed more from the US to drop on the Lebanese, but it all meant nothing. Within minutes of the ceasefire, the Lebanese Shi'is were driving back to their destroyed homes in southern Lebanon to rebuild them and to celebrate their victory, while the Israeli warlords went back to the drawing board to wonder what had happened. The term "asymmetric warfare" now began to assume renewed significance. The July 2006 war ended with not only Hezbollah far stronger than it was, but also with the solid military lesson that asymmetric warfare, as this had been fought by the Palestinians and the Lebanese Shi'is, had entered a new phase in which a simple and purposeful combination of civil disobedience, urban uprising, global solidarity with the weak and the impoverished, and lightweight guerilla operations could effectively neutralize and dismantle the superior military might of the coloniser by effectively changing the nature of resistance and altogether abandoning conventional military operations, to which Hezbollah did not have access anyway. This kind of asymmetric warfare in effect hits two targets with one shot: (1) it renders the military superiority of the occupying forces effectively irrelevant and in fact even counter productive, and (2) it exposes the naked barbarism of the occupiers and thus dismantles their expensive propaganda machinery. One picture of a Palestinian child cold- bloodedly murdered by Israeli soldiers renders the combined obscenity of CNN and the New York Times (at the helm of a whole panoply of propaganda outlets) useless in hiding the ugly truth of the side they support. By the end of the two Intifadas and the Lebanon War of 2006, the Palestinians and Lebanese had appropriated the Biblical story of David for themselves and given the story of Goliath to Israel. Why would Israel, after what had happened to its military might in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 repeat its criminal folly in Gaza, with even more brazen disregard for the common denominator of human decency? The Israelis are running out of options, and they are clueless. Like in summer 2006 in the war against Hezbollah, the Christmas massacre of 2008-2009 is a final indication of the military meltdown of Israel -- that it has run out of military ideas, and that it is now not just morally bankrupt, but, far more crucially, also militarily clueless. Israel has already lost the Gaza invasion. The more the massive propaganda machinery of Israel tries to hide its barbarity against civilian targets, the more it has lost credibility in the eyes of global public opinion and the more its ugly militaristic disposition becomes nakedly evident. Everything that happened in Lebanon in 2006 advised against the Gaza operation, and yet Gaza happened. Gaza happened for, I believe, one very simple reason. The Israelis do not trust Barack Obama (no matter how much he has catered to their whims), and Obama will be at the helm of US domestic and foreign policy for as long as perhaps eight years, and eight years for an illegitimate colonial settler state is a very long time. However, more even than from Obama himself, the Israelis are afraid of the liberating and progressive movement that Obama has unleashed in the US -- the movement of a new generation of Americans who wish to enter the fold of humanity at large and stop being the principal sponsor of warmongering around the globe. No one knows what will happen to this movement: will Obama deliver on his promises of change; will this movement dissipate; or will a new generation of young and progressive Americans wrest the destiny of their homeland from the confounding pathologies of predatory imperialism, vicious Zionism and Christian fundamentalism? It is impossible to tell -- there is much cause for fear, and every reason for hope. In their rush to change the facts on the ground, as they call them, before Obama takes office, the Israelis have forgotten the ways in which colonial apartheid systems can dig their own graves. The Gaza massacre of Christmas 2008/2009 is the Palestinian version of the Jallianwala Bagh (Amritsar) Massacre of April 1919 in India and in one exceedingly significant way. It shows not just the utter moral depravity of the Israelis, but infinitely more importantly, it also shows the military cul de sac that they have entered in the face of the collective uprising of a nation that refuses to be ruled by the brutal occupiers of its homeland. (At Jallianwala Bagh, the British army under the command of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer opened fire on a gathering of men, women and children in an assault that is said to have lasted only ten minutes but that murdered hundreds of defenseless civilians.) The Christmas massacre of Palestinians in 2008/2009 has lasted ten days already and has caused the deaths of hundreds with thousands more injured. This barefaced Israeli crime marks a historic turning point in a prolonged struggle. For it shows the utter moral depravity and military ineptitude of a criminal band of European colonisers in their attempts to crush the will of a nation and force them to submit to their criminal colonialism. The triumph of the Palestinians over the military might of Israel has a crucial lesson for their supporters around the globe -- millions of ordinary people who feel frustrated and helpless in the face of this barefaced barbarity. Precisely in the same manner that the Palestinians have bypassed their own and other Arab and Muslim corrupt leaderships and battled against the racist supremacists who seek ethnically to cleanse them from their own country by using civil disobedience and urban uprisings, ordinary people around the world can join the Palestinians in their noble struggle through a sustained programme of boycott of and divestment from Israel. This concerns not just Israeli products, but also companies like Starbucks, Nestlé, McDonald's and Coca Cola that actively support the Israeli military and ought to be aggressively boycotted. This divestment campaign, which has been far more successful in Europe, needs to be reinvigorated in the United States, as must the boycotting of Israeli cultural and academic institutions. It is not just the worst of the Israelis who (according to a recent poll by Haaretz ) condone and actively support the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. So have their very best representatives, their intellectuals, professors, journalists, filmmakers, novelists and poets, from Amos Oz to David Grossman, A B Yehoshua and Meir Shalev and scores of others. Naming names and denouncing every prominent Israeli intellectual individually who has publicly endorsed Israeli elected officials' wide-eyed barbarism, and then categorically boycotting Israeli universities and colleges, film festivals and cultural institutions, is the single most important thing that such intellectuals' counterparts can do around the world. 1.5 million impoverished human beings have been choked to death in Gaza, and the obscenity that calls itself "Israeli intellectuals" does not even blink and says it is Hamas' fault that these human beings are being slaughtered in their hundreds by the Israeli military. Hamas is the poor and impoverished representative of a poor and impoverished people. The obscenity of first demonising Hamas and then blaming it for the vicious crimes against humanity that Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinians has now passed any measure of common decency. Hamas is the legitimate and democratically elected representative of Palestinian people -- a grassroots organisation deeply embedded in, and integral to, the Palestinian national liberation movement. It is impossible to separate -- either physically or ideologically -- Hamas from the people who have willed it into existence and made it integral to Palestinian national liberation. Hamas is neither the only, nor even the most important, representative of the wishes and will of the Palestinian people, but it is certainly a crucial aspect of those wishes and that will, and no amount of murderous bombing of women and children is going to change that. In fact, precisely the opposite is the case: more and more young and defiant Palestinians will join the noble cause of defending their homeland against this militant band of European colonisers who have stolen their land and liberty in the broad daylight of history. As they are slaughtered in their hundreds by a vicious military machine called "Israel," Palestinians are today teaching humanity at large how to join their noble cause and safeguard the dignity of the human soul -- with the soul of the Jewish people being first and foremost. * The writer is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.
