Exterminate the brutes

I have never been able to make sense of the deep and unequivocal affection so many Americans have for Israel given what I know about its treatment of Palestinians. While it is true that American media, as far back as I can remember, have tended to promote a positive image of Israeli society, another, highly troubling image of a country inclined toward cruelty and racism has never been far in the background. This second image is of a world in which acts of brutality toward the impoverished and subjugated native population, the Palestinians, are a social and political norm, embraced, accepted, and repeatedly ratified by the citizens of Israel through their celebrated institutions of democracy. I could never square this vision of a society grounded in racist violence against a desperate and downtrodden people with the enthusiasm and approbation that so many in the U.S. routinely express for the country, nor with the glowing reviews given by those I met who had visited Israel.

In contrast to these positive views, I have found it ever more difficult over the years — years spent watching the continuous and ever-worsening devastation inflicted on Palestinian lives — to get away from an idea of Israel as a society beset by a psychological compulsion toward acts of wanton cruelty. This impulse to cruelty appears in myriad forms. It is evident in the insistence that any challenge to Israel’s occupation, however small, be met by forms of collective punishment made to inflict maximal suffering on the families and localities of the perpetrators; in acts of gratuitous brutality, such as the policy of breaking the bones of arrested Palestinian protesters, a practice once ordered by, among others, one-time Prime Minister and so-called peacenik, Yitzhak Rabin, and that, according to the Israeli colonel tasked with implementing the policy, had “nothing special in it. . . . nothing out of the ordinary”; in the routine torture and denial of medical assistance to Palestinian detainees, many held for years without formal charges; in the constant bulldozing of Palestinian houses in the West Bank, done with no identifiable objective other than to deepen collective misery; and of course, in the indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian civilians, as we have seen repeatedly in the past, and again at a much greater scope today — a slaughter of primarily women and children done in the name of national self-defense.

These scenes of routine cruelty (of which countless others could be adduced) bear all the markings of a particular historical project: 19th-century European colonial rule. Viewing the native populations of Africa and Asia as inferior beings whose governance frequently required harsh measures, European colonial officials violently subdued the populations they came to dominate through practices of individual and collective punishment similar in many respects to those found in Israel, including, I would note, the blockading of access to food, water, and medicine to force restive groups into submission, a technique Israel has deployed in Gaza for 17 years now. Moreover, advantaged by the technological superiority of their weapons, European colonists also made frequent recourse to mass slaughter, and at times genocide, as a technique of domination in Algeria, Namibia, Tanzania, South Africa, and numerous other locations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. As is well known, these forms of violence and cruelty found support and legitimation in the racist attitudes of European societies toward the non-white subjects of their rule.

Some years ago, when Rahm Emmanuel was first appointed chief-of-staff by then-President Obama, his father, as an Israeli citizen, was asked if the appointment of his son would benefit Israel. In response, he noted: “Obviously he’ll influence the President to be pro-Israel. Why wouldn’t he? What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to be mopping floors at the White House.” While Emmanuel senior’s comment created a minor embarrassment for his son, it offered, for a brief moment, a small window into a kind of racism that, although rarely documented in Western media, is extensive within Israeli society. More straightforward examples of such racism abound in the comments of Israeli politicians in their references to Palestinians as “sub-humans,” “roaches,” “a cancerous manifestation,” “vermin,” “human animals,” and other dehumanizing terms. The fact that there is limited opposition today among the citizens of Israel to the bombing of Gaza’s civilian population, a campaign that has killed close to 4,000 children while probably no more than a few hundred of Israel’s stated targets, Hamas fighters, bears witness to the extent of such racist attitudes within Israeli society. Today in Israel (and, of course, among many Americans as well), the groundswell of public opinion seems to coalesce around a call to “exterminate the brutes,” more than around any alternative view.

The picture of Israeli society that I have drawn here is far from the vibrant, modern, fun-filled haven imagined by so many Americans. My own personal experience of Israel is limited to a half day spent in Jerusalem over ten years ago now, made during a week-long visit to Ramallah in the West Bank. Walking around the beautiful old quarter of East Jerusalem, I could not escape a deep sense of unease, one I associated with accounts of European colonial society I had read, including by George Orwell, if my memory is correct. What those accounts described, and what I felt in Jerusalem, was a world divided in two, with a dominant (white) group strutting confidently around the alleyways with an air of ownership and security, enjoying the cultural vibe of the Arab wares for sale, and a subordinate (non-white) group, whose vulnerability (to job loss, arrest, prison, expulsion) and social inferiority were woven into their expressions, movements, and gestures. It was not an experience I would want to repeat.

So why, I ask again, does all of this obvious brutality remain invisible to American policymakers and large swaths of the American public, such that the image of Israel as a flower in the desert, a bastion of democracy and decency, can be continuously sustained and championed? One answer, or at least part of an answer, is that beneath the veneer of a celebrated concern for human rights, democracy, equality, and humanitarianism, the racism that defined the project of 19th-century European colonialism continues unabated, providing the dominant lens through which the U.S. and Europe (and Israel) view the practices of violence they exercise in the management and subordination of the non-West. Far from being rendered invisible, these practices are recognized and accepted as legitimate and necessary forms of violence when applied to non-Western populations in the course of ensuring their compliance with Western geopolitical ambitions. It is for this reason that the 20-year decimation of Afghanistan by the U.S. military, during which countless Afghani civilians (a purposefully uncounted number) were killed, produced little public outcry, nor did the death of 500,000 Iraqi children in the 1990s, the number, according to UNICEF, who died as a direct result of U.S. sanctions on the country following the first Gulf War. It is for this reason that Israel’s long history of cruelty and violence against the Palestinians does little damage to the glowing image of the country commonly expressed by Americans.

Across his numerous writings, Joseph Conrad, from whose character in The Heart of Darkness the title of this essay was taken, laid bare the crude and brutal realities that lay beneath Europe’s so-called civilizing mission. Today, the viciousness and cruelty of that ongoing mission are again being exposed to a perhaps unprecedented degree, as U.S. and European governments scramble to affirm their support for Israel’s “right” to slaughter the people of Gaza. Except today, the pretense that this action will have a civilizing effect has been dropped. Now, we are being invited to indulge directly in the pleasures of murder.