Pro-Israel activists should be shunned as moral degenerates
Activists supporting the Israeli assault on Gaza can never again legitimately demonstrate against similar massacres like Beslan or Darfur.
By Richard Seymour on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 - 602 words.
Here’s something to chew over. If you have participated in a public demonstration supporting Israel’s operation in Gaza (such as this one or this one), you are a moral idiot. You don’t get to tell anyone about ‘terrorism’, or ‘war crimes’, or ‘humanitarianism’ ever again, because you have flunked it at the first test, proving that your passionately avowed norms do not apply universally as far as you are concerned. The next time there is a Beslan or some similar atrocity, you will have to live with the fact that you have chosen to exist at roughly the same moral level as the perpetrators. In the interests of avoiding hypocrisy, in fact, you should be out on the streets cheerleading the massacre. The fact that you are unlikely to understand this only means that you are not just a moral idiot.
Let’s bring ourselves up to date. The death toll as of Thursday — certainly a sizeable underestimate, given that there is only a rare interval in which to recover bodies crushed under the flaming rubble — is 758, 42% of which the UN estimates are women and children. Last night the UN Security Council produced a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, unimpeded access for humanitarian and relief workers, and the opening of border crossings. From an ‘international community’ that has hitherto backed Israel’s blockade and regular offensives, this is jaw-dropping.
This only happened because the US surprisingly refused to use its veto power, and even stressed that it “fully supports” the resolution in principle – a signal to Israel that its paymasters are not completely happy with how this is going. With that resolution passed, Israeli forces proceeded to pound Gaza into the night, and in the process attacked yet another apartment building, killing seven civilian inhabitants. Israel is consciously and deliberately violating almost every possible human norm in the conduct of its war. Whether it is rounding up families and shelling them to death, attacking schools, shooting up medics, killing aid workers, or bombing hospitals, it is increasingly the case that Israel is struggling to outdo itself.
Arguably, Thursday’s news that Israeli forces had been deliberately starving children to death trumps everything else to date. I mean, sealing off a neighborhood, bombing and shelling it, blocking medical and humanitarian entry, and knowingly leaving children to slowly die next to their already deceased relatives is sick. Forcing wounded adults to lie around dying on blood-soaked mattresses is also sick. And when the Red Cross finally gets in there and discovers some of the dead, to then attempt to expel them and prevent them from doing any more work is, well, sick. And I don’t like saying this, but that level of calculated predation and sadism positively invites Nazi comparisons. What does that make the supporters of Israel’s war at this moment?
One unexpected result of the travesty is that even some of Israel’s more aggressive boosters, such as Roger Cohen in the New York Times, are expressing disgust and shame. Some of those who backed Israel’s war in Lebanon are admitting, sometimes with heavy qualification and great reluctance and much ponderous nonsense about how treacherous the pro-Palestinian Left nevertheless is, to similar feelings. But the livid, lunatic fringe of Israel supporters not only have an inexhaustible capacity for sanctimony and hypocrisy, they lack any sense of shame. They are truly at their worst hour, the vilest they have ever been. No excuse can or should be made for such people: they ought to be shunned, and treated as the moral and political degenerates that they are.
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Excellent, well said. What a relief that Thank God voices like yours are starting to cry out and rise above the ignorant masses, about this final impunity of complete moral degradation of horrific proportions.
Edward Said often wrote about the talisman that Israel had become to political and moral leaders in the Western media. I'm also beginning to think that Palestine is becoming a similar talisman to the Left. If you want to talk about moral and political degeneracy, we should be talking about those people ON BOTH SIDES who condone the use of violence and have little regard for the value of human life. Until each are properly derided for their actions, Israel's struggle for security and Palestine's struggle for freedom will continue.
Dude, in that part of the world, being BORN is a political statement.
Of course you're going to have talismans, rallying points, heroes.
But the point is that these demos happened outside the theatre of cyclical hatred and mistrust. They happened in a country that is proud of its free press.
London is where you can access all sorts of information. This info gives you perspective. Armed with this knowledge, to still come to the conclusion that what Israel gets up to in Gaza, the West Bank, the settlements is right is to be seriously sick in the head.
Sure, I'm not condoning their words or actions. The rallies were certainly perverse affairs amidst such a disproportionate Israeli response. But, if you are serious about applying a morality argument to the Israel-Palestine issue, I find it hard to imagine that one can degrade the demos from one side without similarly chastising those from the other.
My comment wasn't meant to be a critique on your piece. If anything, I was hoping to further the moral argument. In other words, where is the moral outrage in the Arab world (and, for that matter, on this website) for those Palestinians who displayed a similar lack of regard for human life by firing missiles into Israel. This is one of the reasons why the pro-Israel demonstrations happened in the first place.
Your piece was important for isolating several groups of Western, pro-Israel activists who champion the use of violence on a largely defenseless group of people. As informed outsiders to this conflict, though, I think we are called to be consistent in our application of moral judgments. We should advocate that all parties involved respect the humanity and dignity of each other and, likewise, critique the situations with the same regard.
Mate…I'm not Richard.
And everyone's got the right to say what they want…just not to kill who they want.
This is powerfully put. Nice one.
Message to Elliot: Israel is illegally occupying the West bank, and has been illegally imposing a siege on Gaza for months, that's why Hamas was bombing Israel. It was in protest against the people of Gaza being starved to death. and in protest to continued Israeli violations of Palestinian autonomy and sovereignity and Israel's inability to accept that Palestinian land is not there for the taking and that Palestinians have a right to self-defense much greater than Israel, because Palestinians are the oppressed and illegally OCCUPIED people. Israel demands that Hamas give up their weapons, mere guns, in comparison to all of Israel's high tech arsenal, and all the while Israel herself has justified her war as an act of self-defense. What about the right of Palestinians to defend themselves?
Seymour,
Why doesn't your family get that hell out of northern ireland just like these damn israelis should get out of palestine. Your protestant family murdered, raped and killed the indigenous Irish catholics. You slowly colonized and took our land. Then you shun the IRA, but you are here supporting the likes of Hamas. Your a hypocrite and a fool.