Tag: Israel

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Opinion The Last Word

The ‘Accepted Insanity’ of World War III

“National interests” are the prize at stake. (Photo: James Vallee | Dreamstime.com)

“Mr. Netanyahu faces a delicate calculation — how to respond to Iran in order not to look weak, while trying to avoid alienating the Biden administration and other allies already impatient with Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.”

Yeah, this is virtually nothing: a random, utterly forgettable quote pulled from The New York Times — from the basic corporate coverage of our present-moment violence, as the world shimmies on brink of … uh, World War III. It’s the forgettable quotes, especially in regard to ongoing war, that may be the most dangerous because all they do is solidify a collective sense of normalcy. My term for it is “accepted insanity.” We have the technological and psychological capacity to kill not simply thousands or even millions of people but the whole human race, but let’s talk about it in terms of strategy, tactics, and public relations! Let’s talk about it as though we’re covering a bunch of 10-year-old boys throwing stones. Which one’s going to win?

That’s the key issue here: winning. When two cowboys face off in an armed confrontation, the one who draws and fires fastest, hitting the other guy in the stomach or wherever, wins. He gets to walk away with a self-satisfied smirk.

I’m not singling out the Times story quoted above as uniquely problematic in its coverage of the latest turn of events in the Middle East, but rather as representative of the accepted insanity of endless war — the reduction of war to an abstraction, virtually always involving clearly defined good guys and bad guys, and describing murder (including mass murder) as retaliation, self-defense, “show of force,” etc., etc. “National interests” are the prize at stake. Human lives are just bargaining chips, except, of course, when the bad guys kill them.

The Times story, for instance, steps beyond its abstraction of the Israel-Iran confrontation at one point. Israel bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing several Iranian officers, the story informs us. Iran retaliated two weeks later, firing 300 drones and missiles at Israel, almost all of which were shot down, and very little damage was caused. The Times notes: “The only serious casualty was a 7-year-old girl, Amina al-Hasoni, who was badly wounded.”

War affects children! Yes, yes, yes it does. My heart goes out to Amina al-Hasoni. But my God — some 13,000 children have been killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza, and thousands more injured, not to mention orphaned. And some are simply missing, lying under the rubble. What are their names?

What if war were covered the way street crime is covered — not as an abstraction, but with awareness that it’s a profound social problem? What if war were covered with external awareness, i.e. with wisdom that transcends political platitudes — rather than in obeisance to those platitudes?

Here, for instance, is CNBC reporting on the Israel-Iran confrontation. Noting that Israel has pledged to “exact a price” from Iran in response to the missile attack, CNBC then quotes President Biden condemning the attack and adding that the United States “will remain vigilant to all threats and will not hesitate to take all necessary action to protect our people.”

Can you believe that his words didn’t make me feel safer? I’d been pondering not just the possibility but the likely reality of World War III, and to read these words — “take all necessary action to protect our people” — made the wolves start to howl in my own soul.

Platitudes plus nukes? Biden wasn’t talking about transcending war and shunning the country’s trillion-dollar military budget. Presumably, he was talking about using it, putting it to work to “protect” us — you know, to “defeat” our declared enemy (Iran, apparently), no matter the price exacted on Planet Earth, including on you and me. How about some media coverage that doesn’t blow this off with a shrug?

Coverage of war requires awareness of the lies that prop it up politically. For instance, as World Beyond War has put it: “According to myth, war is ‘natural.’ Yet a great deal of conditioning is needed to prepare most people to take part in war, and a great deal of mental suffering is common among those who have taken part.”

In other words, war is not a product of human evolution — humanity finally becoming mature enough to fight itself in an organized, collective fashion — but essentially the opposite of that: an unevolved aspect of who we are … an embedded failure to evolve, you might say.

So many veterans, as the World Beyond War quote implies, often bear the burden of this truth well beyond their time of service. They are forced to face, on their own, the psychological and spiritual implications of what they did — of following orders, of participating in the dehumanization and murder of alleged enemies. In the wake of wars, vet suicide rates can be horrific. While such psycho-spiritual trauma is officially defined as a mental illness — post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — others with deeper understanding, including many vets, call it moral injury. Following orders forced them to act beyond their own humanity: When you dehumanize others, you dehumanize yourself.

This is the accepted insanity the corporate media cover with such win-lose abstraction, even when we’re on the brink of World War III. Multiply moral injury by several billion human beings and what you could wind up with is human extinction.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, and his newly released album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments.

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Opinion The Last Word

Biden’s Choices

A cease-fire is the clearest path toward humanitarian aid. (Photo: Viorel Dudau | Dreamstime.com)

Presidents always face uncomfortable choices: supporting human rights versus providing weapons to governments that consistently violate human rights; adding to the nuclear weapons stockpile versus spending money on social well-being; sanctioning an adversary or working with it.

In the Middle East today, Joe Biden’s choice is between wholeheartedly supporting Israel and doing all he can to protect the innocents in Gaza. He’s trying to do both, but he is not satisfying advocates of either policy. In Israel, Biden’s pressure on the Netanyahu government to avoid a full-out invasion of Gaza, provide humanitarian aid, and avoid unnecessary civilian casualties are resented by the Israeli far right. It wants 100 percent support, period, and it has a powerful argument: It has been attacked, many innocent lives have been lost, and there are well over 200 hostages. Nor is Biden’s approach appreciated in Palestinian circles, in Arab countries, in the UN leadership, or by U.S. human rights groups, progressives in Congress, and some officials in his own State Department. They all see his policy as impossibly contradictory: You can’t have an “ironclad” pro-Israel policy and expect to moderate Israel’s actions in Gaza.

The Biden administration is a party to the war but, in fairness, is not at the controls. To be sure, U.S. military aid — jet fighters, drones, and Special Forces — is supporting Israel’s operations in Gaza. But it’s the right-wing government in Tel Aviv that not only wants to decapitate Hamas but also use the war to exert new controls on the Palestinian population, possibly including mass deportation.

Unless Biden is willing to do what no previous U.S. administration has been willing to do — namely, impose severe restrictions on U.S. economic and military aid and political support, subject to Israel’s behavior in Gaza — the administration has very little leverage.

Unwillingness to use U.S. leverage undercuts Biden’s entire Middle East policy. He can’t expect Saudi Arabia to move on normalizing relations with Israel. He can’t expect support from the region or from developing countries for putting pressure on Iran and Hezbollah not to enter the fighting. Nor, at home, can Biden expect understanding from Palestinian and other Muslim communities — or even from progressive Jews — on his current policy.

All these groups see the glaring contradiction, not the logic, of fully supporting Israel while calling for its restraint. They all are calling on the administration to push for a cease-fire. But Biden, like previous presidents, seems to have given Israel veto power over such calls. Netanyahu has explicitly ruled out a cease-fire until the hostages have been released. Biden has finally called for a pause “to get the prisoners out,” but not for a cease-fire. Yet only a cease-fire holds out any hope for the release of some hostages, for saving civilian lives in Gaza, for enabling hospitals to treat the wounded, and for opening the way to more substantial humanitarian aid.

The fundamental dilemma that Biden faces is that he is the inheritor of many decades of unqualified U.S. support of Israel. Numerous critics over those years have warned of the consequences of that support, most especially for the deprivation of Palestinian rights and the denial of their statehood aspirations.

Liberals in the U.S. government, notably in Congress, have from time to time tried to tie U.S. aid to Israel’s apartheid policies (as Jimmy Carter called them), but politics at home — the Israel lobby, in short — has always nipped that effort in the bud.

I sympathize with Biden’s situation. I believe he and other top U.S. officials are truly concerned about, perhaps even appalled by, the devastation of Gaza and the civilian deaths there. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made an impassioned plea for protection of Palestinian civilians in a Washington Post op-ed, saying that “preventing a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is vital to Israel’s security.”

And we know that Biden is no friend of Netanyahu; he probably mistrusts any assurances Netanyahu has given him about trying to limit civilian losses of life and property. Yet as The New York Times recently described, Biden has a long and deeply personal history of support for Israel — so much so that “a longtime Israeli official more recently called him ‘the first Jewish president.’”

He has made numerous trips to Israel and has met with every Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir. No doubt Biden can count on considerable financial support for his presidential campaign from Jewish organizations.

All these ties only tighten the bind he’s in, not least because they increase his difficulty in dealing with members of Congress and State Department officials who are now sharply critical of his policy. They don’t see the choices he is making as either wise or humane.

What they, and we, do see every day is video and photographs of deadly bombardments that are making Gaza a moonscape and killing scores of innocent people with every strike.

The only way Joe Biden can break the bind is to do the courageous thing, which is also the right thing: join those calling for a cease-fire in order to save lives, including those of the hostages and Gaza’s population; and support a “safe Israel beside a safe Palestinian state” as essential to the long-term security of both.

Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is professor emeritus of political science at Portland State University and blogs at In the Human Interest.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Friends Don’t Let Friends Kill Innocent Civilians

According to the United Nations, more than 4,000 Palestinians have been killed in four wars since 2008. In this December 2012 image, a child stands amid the rubble of the destroyed Al Dalu family home in Gaza City. Ten members of the Al Dalu family were killed, as well as two neighbors, by an Israeli air strike that November. Four of those killed were children, and four were women. (Photo: Rrodrickbeiler | Dreamstime.com)

Turn on any mainstream news media and you are guaranteed to see grisly details of violence transpiring in Israel and Palestine. Interviews with survivors and witnesses describing horrors; observers asking important questions like “how could this happen?” and “why didn’t we stop it?” Sooner or later the politics, the leaders, and the responses become central to the story.

The New York Times reported: Israel’s defense minister said “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed into Gaza after an invasion by the militant group Hamas.

All I could think was, “Not again!”

I hate seeing the same failed responses. But breaking the narrative is a daunting task. 

Attacks on civilians are morally reprehensible — always. Hamas, however, is not just repugnant in its horrific choice of tactics but counterproductive. Over and over, we see terror groups using violence against civilians; while it makes the news, it does not achieve desired outcomes. 

Simply put, with rare exception, when Hamas targets civilians it is used as justification for an even more violent response, and one that much of the world supports.

No critique of grievances is necessary to make a full condemnation of the violent terrorism employed by Hamas, and the choice to target civilians makes it much less likely for those grievances to be considered at all. “Idiotic” understates the monumental stupidity in such a bad strategic choice. 

Hamas, likely, just set the Palestinian resistance/struggle for legitimate grievances back several years. As usual. Once again.

But what is this about a siege of Gaza? “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” — are you kidding me? Worse, Israel is bombing apartment buildings full of Palestinian families, and hospitals. How many children or suffering patients does Israel kill before the world throws up its collective hands and stops caring much about either side?

If the U.S. is any friend to Israel, then they must help them to avoid such an unforced error. There is no doubt that such a blockade would kill innocent civilians, they always do, and they place the most vulnerable at greatest risk. Grandparents and newborn babies have these survival needs; cutting off access to basic human needs … it is just as counterproductive for Israel as terrorism is for Hamas.

And the world sees the Israeli air strikes on civilians and asks, so how is that not terrorism?

Being a friend does not mean standing idly by while your friend makes bad choices. The U.S. has participated in such bad choices too many times, and we have learned these lessons. Killing innocent civilians, whether directly or indirectly, tends to do several things: First, it undermines legitimacy; second, it is used as a recruitment tool for the opposition; third, it causes committed opposition to dig in and become even more entrenched.

The U.S. ought to tell Israel, “Believe it or not, when we dealt with the Taliban in Afghanistan, we always accomplished more with bridges than bombs.” It’s true, the innocent civilians provided great intelligence on the terror group when they came to see the U.S. for doing good. Never underestimate the achievements you can make when the choice is taking two steps forward instead of two steps backward; in this regard, violence is always regressive. 

Wim Laven, Ph.D., syndicated by PeaceVoice, teaches courses in political science and conflict resolution.

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Editorial Opinion

Foreign Affairs Should Move to the Front Burner in Congressional Races

Former University of Memphis law professor Larry Pivnick, whose underdog candidacy for Congress in the 8th District is discussed in this issue, turned up at a meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club last week with copies of

a broadside he intended to pass out in support of his campaign. On a single sheet of paper were crowded 12 bullet points, dealing with foreign policy issues relating to Israel/Hamas, eastern Ukraine, and other potential flashpoints on most of the continents of the known world.

Another subject, that of the amount of attention, which the media owe a candidate like himself, a certifiable longshot, came to occupy Pivnick, however — to the point that, when his time came to say a few words, he ditched his intended subject and discoursed instead on the problems that political neophytes like himself have in transcending anonymity.

“Discoursed” is something of a euphemism; the (usually) mild-mannered ex-academic, who normally lectures in what might be considered a professorial style, was hot under the collar and, as a result, was making his points sharply, concisely, and directly — in a mode, in other words, that might work for him out on the hustings.

As for the discarded 12-point position paper, it is highly doubtful that there were — or are — any votes in it, however Pivnick might choose to deliver it. It has been a long time since foreign policy played a major role in determining the outcome of American political contests, and the further down the power chain you go — to the level of congressional candidates, say — the more minute is the impact of such matters on the electorate. That’s the bottom line — especially so, one might conjecture, in the mainly rural and agriculture-oriented 8th District, despite the inclusion of a hunk of eastern Shelby County in the redistricting that followed the census of 2010.

Even more to the point, freshly elected congressmen have almost no say on which committees they’re assigned to (Foreign Affairs is a plum for the well-tenured) and not much post-assignment influence in them for years to come. The more’s the pity. The fact is that rarely have so many global issues posed such direct import on the future of domestic circumstances in the United States — perhaps not since the end of the Cold War.

Or should we say the original Cold War. There may be further surprises to come from the hand of Vladimir Putin, but there is no great mystery as to what he is up to — a wholesale revision of the adverse circumstances imposed on Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union under the terms of what former President George H.W. Bush used to call “the New World Order.”

That “order” is now under enormous strain and may not last. Clearly, the Middle East is undergoing unprecedented jihadist ferment virtually everywhere, and the decades-long standoff between Israelis and Palestinians is igniting disastrously, once again. There are multitudes of other such issues, and there would be worse things indeed than having a few more foreign policy mavens on hand in Washington, where they might find that their concerns have jumped all the way to the front burner.

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Opinion Viewpoint

The Fruitcake Trade

I had been thinking recently that I might start a business that would export fruitcakes to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. That was the most appropriate export I could think of. But the president has put the kibosh on that idea with his tough new sanctions.

Sanctions imposed by President Bush or Congress are always described as tough, but they only apply to Americans. Anybody in any other country who might like to sell fruitcakes to the Iranians is free to do so.

My point is that sanctions are generally stupid, since they affect only American businesses. As much as the president and Congress might wish otherwise, U.S. laws apply only in the U.S. American businesses can be barred from doing business with a country that displeases American politicians, but the ban doesn’t apply anywhere else.

And it does seem to me that I have at least heard rumors that today there is something called a global economy. Americans can’t invest in Cuba or in any of the other countries on the politicians’ scat list, but Europeans, Asians, and others can and do.

Other than substituting empty gestures for real action and appeasing domestic lobbies, I really don’t see what good sanctions do. It’s no longer 1945. We are not the only surviving industrial power. No matter what product you desire, you can find it in lots of other countries.

This empty gesture is just part of the buildup to attacking Iran militarily. As some noted expert recently said, you have to be living on a different planet to imagine that Iran is or ever would be a threat to the world.

Unfortunately, the president and Vice President Cheney apparently do live on another planet, because after a number of lies, they attacked two countries that were even less of a threat than Iran could ever hope to be.

Never mind that the Israeli foreign minister just said publicly that Israel would not be threatened by a nuclear Iran. Never mind that Iran says it wishes only to enrich uranium enough to fuel its reactors for generating electricity. Never mind that Iran does not have the capability of attacking either us or Israel.

I’d bet a dog that the president has convinced himself that we can stage another “shock and awe” show that will take out Iran’s nuclear facilities and its military assets in one easy surgical strike. Strategic bombing has been overrated ever since World War II. The president might know a lot about baseball, but he knows practically nothing about war.

Ask an American veteran who sat on an invasion fleet for days while naval guns and airplanes blasted some small Pacific island to smithereens. He will tell you that when he went ashore, the Japanese were still there ready to fight.

Our bombing campaign against Serbia no doubt killed Serb and Albanian civilians, but when it was over, the Serb army forces came out of Kosovo virtually intact. The famous shock-and-awe show made for good television but missed its intended target: Saddam Hussein and his top lieutenants.

If you hope that bombing can take out Iran’s nuclear facilities and its military assets, you are hoping for something that only a magic fairy can deliver. And please, to talk about a “surgical” strike with bombs is like saying a sawed-off shotgun can be fired with pinpoint accuracy. You cannot bomb any urban area without killing innocent civilians.

Nobody can know for sure what will happen if our Great Leader decides to attack Iran, but anybody will tell you that it won’t be good. Come to think of it, maybe we all should send fruitcakes to the fruitcakes in the White House, if we can find the address of the planet they are living on.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.