I
With the help of a very few so-called leftists who think that Zionism is the only thing worth protesting, Hamas has just about discredited the Palestinian cause by slaughtering more than a thousand Jews, most of them helpless noncombatants, in a terrorist attack on Israeli soil. There doesn’t seem to be any way beyond this moment except a resumption of the forever “war on terror” that has wasted so many lives over the last 30 years. So I make these notes without a shred of hope, writing as if I’m consoling someone who has lost a loved one.
The new choices now on the table aren’t that new. The most fundamental of these is, how to deal with Iran, the sponsor of both Hamas and Hezbollah, the two organizations that now rule the territories to the immediate south and north of Israel? It’s the same question US policymakers faced in 2006-08, while conducting the “war on terror” in Iraq, where the principal opposition to American occupation were the zealous insurgents trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and led locally, in Baghdad, by Moktada al-Sadr, a radical Shi’ite cleric. Then as now, the answer is either military or political engagement.
The “surge” of that moment, which put an extra 30,000 US troops in combat roles, was apparently a successful military answer to that insurgent threat. But as I argued in 2009, in chapter 6 of The World Turned Inside Out, the “surge” did not and could not have worked that way, because according to the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual published in 2007, success requires 20 counter-insurgent combatants per one thousand members of the local population—meaning that a minimum of 120,000 new troops would have been required in Baghdad alone. The “surge” worked because military personnel bribed tribal leaders in Anbar Province and negotiated with al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Baghdad, which finally stood down on orders from Iran.
So today’s choice on Iran boils down to the choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Biden has more or less followed the lead of Barack Obama in trying to bring Iran to where it can negotiate and make political decisions about its role in the Middle East rather than define itself as the military headquarters of opposition to US hegemony (as locally represented by Israel). That is the crucial foreign policy “pivot” of the last ten years. Trump would tear up these diplomatic tracks and, to that extent, enhance Iran’s interest in armed terrorist struggle against its regional foes. In short: prolong the fruitless, forever “war on terror,” or find a way beyond its rhetoric and its consequences.
II
We can’t forget that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. Whether practiced by Russian anarchists, Irish nationalists, diasporic Zionists, Palestinian refugees, or Islamic jihadists, it has been the recourse of those who lack the territorial platform, the mass support, and the weaponry to wage conventional war against a modern nation-state. They have meant instead to sap the will of the enemy state by bringing the carnage of war to civilian populations—by making everyday life the theater of battle, thus erasing the distinction between combatant and non-combatant, or, in a larger sense, between the public and the private. “The whole point is for the psychological impact to be greater than the actual physical act,” as Louise Richardson, the author of What Terrorists Want (2006), puts it: “Terrorism is indeed a weapon of the weak.”
But terrorism, as it developed in the late-20th and early 21st centuries, is neither anti-modern nor irrational, as the neoconservative and liberal cheerleaders for the war on Iraq insisted—and as those who call for the annihilation of Hamas now insist. As the product of globalization, terrorism is both trans-national and post-liberal in the sense that it proposes to erase the distinction between state and society. But that doesn’t make it a nihilist cause bent on the obliteration of western civilization. Again, it’s the weapon of the weak.
George W. Bush & Co. insisted otherwise, of course. Nine days after the towers fell, Bush described the followers of Osama bin Laden as follows: “They’re the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism.”
There can’t be any political discussion or compromise with such brutes—you have to wage an endless, borderless war on them, with all that implies for the militarization of foreign policy and international relations, and with all that entails for the noncombatants caught between the belligerents.
Bush and the liberal intellectuals who gathered under the banner of a war on terror were emphatic in claiming that the enemy so designated had no political agenda except a “cult of death and irrationality,” which somehow meant the end of the world as we know it. Here is Bush on October 6, 2005, two years into the war: “In fact, we’re not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed [sic] and addressed. We’re facing a radical ideology with unalterable objectives to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of the killers—and no concession, bribe or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.”
And here is Paul Berman, a left-liberal supporter of the war, at an even more delirious and incomprehensible pitch of prophetic dread, in 2003: “The successes of the Islamist revolution were going to take place on the plane of the dead, or nowhere. Lived experience pronounced that sentence on the Islamist revolution—the lived experience of Europe, where each of the totalitarian movements proposed a total renovation of life, and each was driven to create the total renovation in death.”
And here is a sample of the language in use now by the Israeli defense establishment, provided by Rashid Khalidi in NYT, October 16:
“The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in,” a reservist major general, Giora Eiland, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli newspaper. “Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.” He added, “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian declared that in Gaza, “there will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.”
This is the rhetoric of that forever war: it mimics and then amplifies the apocalyptic language it excoriates, striving to make warriors—hard, stoic, isolate killers—of us all. It’s the result of rationality run riot, turning sober, agnostic social democrats into keepers of a faith. It guarantees that nothing will come of the siege of Gaza except more violence, more terror, more rhetorical extremity and idiocy—nothing more or less than what came of the “war on terror” as it was carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan.
III
What is to be said of these events? Begin with two fervently pro-Israeli voices, the NYT columnist Thomas Friedman and Brigadier-General Shlomo Brom of the Israel Defense Forces, retired. They are perfectly willing to claim that Israel now reaps what it has sown. Indeed, both declare that Netanyahu’s repudiation of a two-state solution was the proximate cause of this catastrophe. Here’s Friedman, NYT October 11:
“One must never forget that Netanyahu always seemed to prefer to deal with a Hamas that was unremittingly hostile to Israel than with its rival, the more moderate Palestinian Authority — which Netanyahu did everything he could to discredit, even though the Palestinian Authority has long worked closely with Israeli security services to keep the West Bank quiet, and Netanyahu knows it.
“Netanyahu has never wanted the world to believe that there are ‘good Palestinians’ ready to live side by side with Israel in peace and try to nurture them. For years now he’s always wanted to tell U.S. presidents: What do you want from me? I have no one to talk to on the Palestinian side. That’s how Israel reached a stage where the increasingly costly — morally and financially — Israeli occupation of the West Bank has not even been an issue in the last five Israeli elections.
“Or as Chuck Freilich, a former deputy Israeli national security adviser, wrote in an essay in Haaretz on Sunday: ‘For a decade and a half Prime Minister Netanyahu has sought to institutionalize the divide between the West Bank and Gaza, undermine the Palestinian Authority, the P.A., and conduct de facto cooperation with Hamas, all designed to demonstrate the absence of a Palestinian partner and to ensure that there could be no peace process that might have required territorial compromise in the West Bank.’”
Here's Brom, from The Economist, October 10:
“In 2009 Mr Netanyahu gave a speech at Bar-Ilan University in which he declared his acceptance of a Palestinian state with several conditions. Despite this, he abandoned the political process with the Palestinians, eventually making it clear that he opposed the establishment of a Palestinian state. He replaced the political process with a strategy of ‘divide-and-conquer’, which was aimed at weakening the Palestinian government in Ramallah on the West Bank and strengthening Hamas’s hold on power in the Gaza Strip. Mr Netanyahu believed this to be the best way to ensure that no viable political process would be possible.
“The prime minister took this policy to a new level in building his current government: a coalition with extreme religious, ultra-nationalistic parties, which stated quite openly that Israel would never enable the establishment of a Palestinian state, give equal rights to the Palestinians under a one-state solution or stop the plundering of their lands through settlement-building. This policy led to most of the Israeli army being deployed to protect Jewish settlers in the West Bank, at the expense of protecting the border around the Gaza Strip.
“The current crisis demonstrates the utter failure of this strategy. It is absurd to hope that Israel can indefinitely contain with its military might and security services millions of Palestinians who claim the right to self-determination and a free, normal life. Eventually the oppressed will rise against their oppressor. Suffering under oppression and a strong desire for freedom breed resourcefulness. The Hamas fighters who planned last weekend’s attack were indeed very resourceful in exploiting Israel’s unpreparedness.”
IV
Lyman Gage was the president of the First National Bank of Chicago when the Haymarket “riot” of 1886 took place—that is, when the city’s police attacked what they, local officeholders, and the newspapers described as an anarchist, bomb-throwing mob, what was in fact a large, boisterous crowd of people demonstrating in favor of the 8-Hour Day. In his Memoirs (1937), he reflected on those days of rage, when class conflict and armed struggle seemed to have become normal moments in the life of the new industrial city: “The facts led me and others of like mind to consider whether repression by force ought not be supplemented by moral methods.”
Gage was narrating the intellectual maturation and transition of his social peers, from an upper class to a ruling class, at the moment when the combination of large industrial corporations and modern credit—the proliferation of new kinds, volumes, and uses of monetary instruments, including the stock market—made a new, socialized mode of production possible and necessary. By “moral methods,” he meant the cultural and ideological initiatives that would persuade the working class and its allies among farmers to accept, even embrace, that new mode of production, corporate capitalism. In Gramsci’s terms, he was thinking through the difference between domination and hegemony, assuming that power and authority were species of force that could be made justifiable and thus legitimate, in a bid for consent from those who might abide by its application, at the law and in everyday life.
That kind of thinking is what both Netanyahu’s coalition and American politicians seem incapable of doing, or even beginning. Domination by military force is their only recourse in dealing with any challenge to their policies, as if every alternative to their way of seeing things is a mortal threat to their way of life because it represents a moral challenge.
Judith Butler and Peter Beinert plead with us to think in terms of the “moral methods” that Gage and his peers learned as they made themselves a class worthy of leading American society. To do that, Butler suggests, is to know that the people we propose to lead out of this catastrophic impasse are in every respect our equals, whose consent we not only need but want, because without it we’re no better than a self-righteous cadre, a petite politbureau that knows what’s best for our fellow citizens. To avoid that fate, which inevitably leads to terrorism, Beinert argues that we must acknowledge the limits of armed struggle against even the worst kinds of oppression, and thus make room for persuasion—for the attainment of moral authority, as the ANC was able to do in South Africa.
Here's Butler, London Review of Books, October 14:
“If we think that moral condemnation must be a clear, punctual act without reference to any context or knowledge, then we inevitably accept the terms in which that condemnation is made, the stage on which the alternatives are orchestrated. In this most recent context, to accept those terms means recapitulating forms of colonial racism which are part of the structural problem to be solved, the abiding injustice to be overcome. Thus, we cannot afford to look away from the history of injustice in the name of moral certitude, for that is to risk committing further injustice, and at some point our certitude will falter on that less than firm ground. Why can’t we condemn morally heinous acts without losing our powers to think, to know and to judge? Surely we can, and must, do both.
“The acts of violence we are witnessing in the media are horrible. And in this moment of heightened media attention, the violence that we see is the only violence we know. To repeat: we are right to deplore that violence and to express our horror. I have been sick to my stomach for days. Everyone I know lives in fear of what the Israeli military machine will do next, whether Netanyahu’s genocidal rhetoric will materialise in the mass killing of Palestinians.
“I ask myself whether we can mourn, without qualification, for the lives lost in Tel Aviv as well as those lost in Gaza without getting bogged down in debates about relativism and equivalence. Perhaps the wider compass of mourning serves a more substantial ideal of equality, one that acknowledges the equal grievability of lives, and gives rise to an outrage that these lives should not have been lost, that the dead deserved more life and equal recognition for their lives.
“How can we even imagine a future equality of the living without knowing, as the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has documented, that Israeli forces and settlers had killed nearly 3800 Palestinian civilians since 2008 in the West Bank and Gaza even before the current actions began. Where is the world’s mourning for them? Hundreds of Palestinian children have died since Israel began its ‘revenge’ military actions against Hamas, and many more will die in the days and weeks to come.
“It need not threaten our moral positions to take some time to learn about the history of colonial violence and to examine the language, narratives and frameworks now operating to report and explain – and interpret in advance – what is happening in this region. That kind of knowledge is critical, but not for the purposes of rationalising existing violence or authorising further violence. Its aim is to furnish a truer understanding of the situation than an uncontested framing of the present alone can provide. Indeed, there may be further positions of moral opposition to add to the ones we have already accepted, including an opposition to military and police violence saturating Palestinian lives in the region, taking away their rights to mourn, to know and express their outrage and solidarity, and to find their own way towards a future of freedom.”
Here’s Beinert, in NYT, October 15:
“Palestinians have noticed. In the words of Dana El Kurd, a Palestinian American political scientist, ‘Palestinians have lost faith in the efficacy of nonviolent protest as well as the possible role of the international community.’ Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, cited this disillusionment during last Saturday’s attack. ‘In light of the orgy of occupation and its denial of international laws and resolutions, and in light of American and Western support and international silence,’ he declared, ‘we’ve decided to put an end to all this.’
“Hamas — and no one else — bears the blame for its sadistic violence. But it can carry out such violence more easily, and with less backlash from ordinary Palestinians, because even many Palestinians who loathe the organization have lost hope that moral strategies can succeed. By treating Israel radically differently from how the United States treated South Africa in the 1980s, American politicians have made it harder for Palestinians to follow the A.N.C.’s ethical path. The Americans who claim to hate Hamas the most have empowered it again and again.
“Israelis have just witnessed the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. For Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where Israel has now ordered more than one million people in the north to leave their homes, the days to come are likely to bring dislocation and death on a scale that should haunt the conscience of the world. Never in my lifetime have the prospects for justice and peace looked more remote. Yet the work of moral rebuilding must begin.”
V
In 1869, in his first substantial publication, the young William James ridiculed Horace Bushnell, an eminent theologian who had written a whole book claiming that woman suffrage was an unnatural and quite possibly unholy threat to western civilization. In the same review, he criticized the premises but praised the purposes of John Stuart Mill’s incendiary tract, The Subjection of Women. His objections to both books derived from what he took to be the central assumption of modern society—that justice should govern all social relations, whether between officers of the state and citizens, or individuals, or parents and children, or males and females.
James didn’t bother to define justice, but in context he clearly meant that obligation, whether political and public or familial and private, was something by which individuals could be bound in and through contract, but only if they had freely and knowingly given their consent to its entailments.
His contemporary and fellow pragmatist Jane Addams was similarly engaged in rethinking the scope of consent, exporting it, in the context of the Pullman boycott and strike of 1894, from the narrow field of politics, where liberalism would confine it in both theory and practice, to the scene of goods production, where wage-earners, unionized or not, were trying to establish an equitable social relation between capital and labor that would require the latter’s consent, through collective bargaining, to working conditions and compensation.
Most of the social and intellectual unrest of the late-19th century derived from thinking along these lines, which, by enlarging the kinds, the numbers, and the locations of the people whose consent was required for legitimate governance, led well beyond liberalism—toward socialism, anarchism, populism, and eventually communism and fascism. This “revolt of the masses” against the domination of traditional ruling classes also led to a reconsideration of imperialism, which among other things had given exploitation a bad name.
The most significant result of that reconsideration, which was fully articulated between 1898 and 1919, was the design for a post-imperialist world order devised by American diplomats in search of a way to allow for competition between nation-states over access to global resources, and for corresponding shifts in the seat of empire—at this juncture, from Great Britain to the US or to Germany—without resort to world war. “Development” and the consent of the governed became the watchwords of their design because they were witness in real time to what colonial conquest and exploitation produced: armed rebellion and cultural reversion in the name of tradition, custom, and/or restoration of “national honor.”
The American architects of the new imperialism pondered two salient examples of this response to colonization and exploitation, in real time: the so-called Boxer rebellion in China and, much closer to home, the racist revanchism that animated the Jim Crow South—both of these places were less-developed parts of the world that had been conquered by foreign powers bent on transforming the local property/labor system to accord with that required by modern-industrial capitalism, and both places had responded to military occupation with insurgencies that advertised their atrocities.
What was to be done? How to restart economic, social, and cultural development in these resolutely “backward” enclaves, and so prevent repeated colonial rebellions? How not to provoke more spastic violence and terrorism, the weapons of the weak, and thus encourage the militarization of colonial rule, something that would only increase the chances of war?
The answers invariably came down to economic development, which, policy-makers assumed along with vulgar Marxists then as now, would allow for if not fully determine the correlative benefits of social complexity—the division of labor—cultural diversity, and political pluralism. But embedded in this Whiggish forecast was the assumption that modern markets would teach local populations the lesson of equality, and with it the principle of consent and the even larger idea of justice for all.
The goal of economic development would be best served, these policy-makers also assumed, by what they called an Open Door World, a “fair field and no favor,” wherein colonial rule, exclusive spheres of influence, tariff barriers, and other obstacles to the unfettered flow of capital and finished goods would be forever dismantled. The project of an anti-colonial imperialism was born, and with it the dream of a post-imperialist future.
Neither the project not the dream ever neared realization. And the US, the source of both, has been the principal impediment to its own stated purposes since 1950, in Latin America (Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama), in Asia (Vietnam), and in the Middle East (Iraq, Iran, Israel). It has squandered whatever moral credibility it had many times over by intervening with military force on the side of economic development under capitalist auspices—not cultural diversity, political pluralism, or anything resembling democracy. It has paid no price for doing so, except for the repeated humiliations of military defeat in Asia (Korea, Vietnam) and the Middle East (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan), not to mention the forced migrations that attend them and the unrequited atrocities they have consequently imposed on the Western Hemisphere.
The lesson has not been lost on its client states, especially Israel. But now, it has paid a price too high, too much to bear, and its citizens will inevitably exact “revenge” upon the perpetrators. And so the forever war resumes.
This is an excellent and thoughtful article. It clearly describes the current state and the inherent causes that will seemingly go on forever. Is there a chance that world leaders will read it and learn the lessons you've outlined? I hope so but that is not a plan.
Is your assessment of the 2007 Iraq surge derived from a particular source? Not questioning, looking for a reading recommendation.