Best thing done so far. I admit I skimmed the first half, as I agonized over the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan at the time, read my Andrew Bacevich and Andrew Cockburn, was well aware. But it's necessary for newcomers to the news to go back over it, and how it all is of a piece with the approach to Arabs in Israel.
Best thing done so far. I admit I skimmed the first half, as I agonized over the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan at the time, read my Andrew Bacevich and Andrew Cockburn, was well aware. But it's necessary for newcomers to the news to go back over it, and how it all is of a piece with the approach to Arabs in Israel.
One of the ignored side-effects of 9/11 was to let Israel have far more free reign over Gaza and the West Bank, partly because westerners were much less likely to have Arab sympathies, partly because Bush could hardly complain about behaviour that his own forces were inflicting on other Arabs.
And now, it's come to this. Inevitably. That's the unacceptable message that's being called "support for terror". It's not "support" to observe that something was inevitable, if people were made to suffer for long enough. And this piece is not supporting Hamas to note that the current Israeli strategy will end in shame and pain.
I suspected that a Gwynne Dyer fan would appreciate this dispatch.
I think it's really only the memetic political debates that we're heaving on Twitter and CNN that requires you to either be anti-Hamas or anti-Israel. Things are complicated: We can hold complicated views!
Nah, it's really not that complicated. Stephen Pinker and Dyer agree on this: humans are the most-social animals on the planet, save for hives; we hate hurting each other, and only do so under stress. Remove the stress, the violence will stop. Pinker also notes that nothing makes a man ready for violence, not hurts or hunger, as humiliation. And humiliation is constant. Glenn Greenwald dug up this factoid early in the Iraq War:
"In 2002, during the second Intifada, Moshe (“Boogie”) Ya’alon, the Israeli Chief of Staff (and [later] the Minister of Defense) declared: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”
Joe Sacco's book, Palestine, tells many stories, not just of violent treatment of Palestinians, but routine, endless little humiliations. It's a recipe for inciting violence. Sacco's book ends with an image of a young boy being forced to stand in front of an IDF soldier for a long time: the soldier under an eave, the boy out in the rain, and Sacco asks, what is that boy thinking?
Read Pinker about humiliation, read Sacco about a clear policy of endless humiliations in the hope of reaching the "deepest recesses of their minds" with defeat, and my word "inevitable" for violence, is like a mathematical proof.
It beggars belief that an entire nation, whose own foundational story is that they clapped back and broke out of bondage, slavery itself, and after 400 years, would imagine that another people could be broken to harness in a few generations, but it appears to be the idea.
There are many places where you can show that people don't need their own nation-state; that's an invented "need". They need to feel secure; modest prosperity; and above all, some respect, a complete lack of humiliation. Then the violence will stop. Maybe you can only get there with the vote - I respected a fine lecture from Ali Abunimah at the U of C about how only a one-state solution will work - or only with a second nation. But if you can give people those three things, they'll stop shooting.
Best thing done so far. I admit I skimmed the first half, as I agonized over the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan at the time, read my Andrew Bacevich and Andrew Cockburn, was well aware. But it's necessary for newcomers to the news to go back over it, and how it all is of a piece with the approach to Arabs in Israel.
One of the ignored side-effects of 9/11 was to let Israel have far more free reign over Gaza and the West Bank, partly because westerners were much less likely to have Arab sympathies, partly because Bush could hardly complain about behaviour that his own forces were inflicting on other Arabs.
And now, it's come to this. Inevitably. That's the unacceptable message that's being called "support for terror". It's not "support" to observe that something was inevitable, if people were made to suffer for long enough. And this piece is not supporting Hamas to note that the current Israeli strategy will end in shame and pain.
I suspected that a Gwynne Dyer fan would appreciate this dispatch.
I think it's really only the memetic political debates that we're heaving on Twitter and CNN that requires you to either be anti-Hamas or anti-Israel. Things are complicated: We can hold complicated views!
Nah, it's really not that complicated. Stephen Pinker and Dyer agree on this: humans are the most-social animals on the planet, save for hives; we hate hurting each other, and only do so under stress. Remove the stress, the violence will stop. Pinker also notes that nothing makes a man ready for violence, not hurts or hunger, as humiliation. And humiliation is constant. Glenn Greenwald dug up this factoid early in the Iraq War:
"In 2002, during the second Intifada, Moshe (“Boogie”) Ya’alon, the Israeli Chief of Staff (and [later] the Minister of Defense) declared: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”
Joe Sacco's book, Palestine, tells many stories, not just of violent treatment of Palestinians, but routine, endless little humiliations. It's a recipe for inciting violence. Sacco's book ends with an image of a young boy being forced to stand in front of an IDF soldier for a long time: the soldier under an eave, the boy out in the rain, and Sacco asks, what is that boy thinking?
Read Pinker about humiliation, read Sacco about a clear policy of endless humiliations in the hope of reaching the "deepest recesses of their minds" with defeat, and my word "inevitable" for violence, is like a mathematical proof.
It beggars belief that an entire nation, whose own foundational story is that they clapped back and broke out of bondage, slavery itself, and after 400 years, would imagine that another people could be broken to harness in a few generations, but it appears to be the idea.
There are many places where you can show that people don't need their own nation-state; that's an invented "need". They need to feel secure; modest prosperity; and above all, some respect, a complete lack of humiliation. Then the violence will stop. Maybe you can only get there with the vote - I respected a fine lecture from Ali Abunimah at the U of C about how only a one-state solution will work - or only with a second nation. But if you can give people those three things, they'll stop shooting.