One of the beautiful things about the new debate over Israel/Palestine is how it has sorted out the weak from the strong; and courageous scholars and journalists have emerged who have educated themselves about the issues and are not taking any guff, and don't care what you call them. It is very much like the emergence of the Republican Party in American politics in the 1850s from a decadent accommodationist old order. Following from the transcendentalist writers, politicians were willing to put their futures on the line for the sake of their country and a moral question. Today we see writers from across the spectrum, Max Blumenthal, Glenn Greenwald, John Mearsheimer, Daniel Levy, Scott McConnell, Paul Craig Roberts–who have educated themselves and said, No thanks, we draw the line. They are making this movement.
And here is Harvard Law Professor Duncan Kennedy in today's Harvard Crimson. A calm, honest, and brilliant piece that puts Israel's horrifying acts in Gaza in a historical/critical context. And where is Laurence Tribe? Holding out for the Taney spot, the Supreme Court, that's where. Just listen to Kennedy's soft, persuasive voice. It's a long excerpt. But important. First the Gaza bit:
Numerous observers have charged Israel with committing war crimes
during the war. Without downplaying that aspect, I think it is
important to understand the 1,300 Palestinian casualties, including 400
children as well as many, many women, versus 13 Israeli casualties, as
typical of a particular kind of “police action” that Western colonial
powers and Western “ethno-cratic settler regimes” like ours in the
U.S., Canada, Australia, Serbia and particularly apartheid South
Africa, have historically undertaken to convince resisting native
populations that unless they stop resisting they will suffer unbearable
death and deprivation. [Here Kennedy seems to agree with my
law-and-order post of yesterday] Not just in 1947 and 1948, but also in
Lebanon
in 1982 and 2006, Israel used similar tactics.
defensible under the laws of war, which favor conventional over
unconventional forces in asymmetric warfare. The outright “crimes,”
like the My Lai massacre, Abu Ghraib, or Russian massacres in
Afghanistan and then in Chechnya, are less important for the civilian
victims than the daily tactics of air assault, bombardment, and brutal
door-to-door sweeps, meant to draw fire from the resisters that will
justify leveling houses and the people in them…
History bit:
occupied the West Bank and Gaza, largely populated by refugees of 1948,
as well as East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and Sinai (later returned
to Egypt). This generated another approximately 200,000 Palestinian
refugees who were also forbidden to return. Since 1973, Israeli
governments have gradually moved about 400,000 Jewish settlers into the
West Bank and another 200,000 into East Jerusalem, appropriating about
50 percent of the land (when roads and other infrastructure are taken
into account), taking over the water, and alternately exploiting and
starving the West Bank and Gaza economies to the point where the Arab
population is overwhelmingly dependent on the international “donor
community” for subsistence.
Palestinian non-violent and violent resistance to the
military occupation is fully legal under international law. On the
other hand, many of the specific tactics, especially airplane
hijacking, suicide bombing targeting civilians, including children and
old people, and indiscriminate rocket attacks, have been widely
denounced as criminal….
Now compare this peroration to the shrill Dershowitz:
what is to be done? If you are not already clear about what you think,
it is crucial to try to find out for yourself. If the situation is as
bad as I have painted, you might consider some small step, perhaps just
a contribution to humanitarian relief for Gaza, or e-mailing the White
House, or something more, like advocating for Harvard to divest.
(Phil Weiss)
