My OperaKillers and Soldiers
Thursday, December 8, 2011 11:48:27 PM
[This post concerns this story.]
Hello everyone,
Whenever I talk to friends and family, I sometimes field a familiar question about how safe or dangerous it is to live in Palestine. I’ve given a couple different answers: it depends where you are, it depends who you are, it depends what day of the week it is, and in most cases I feel safer here than I would in New York City. This post is designed to answer the question more fully and maybe enter a deeper discussion about violence, danger, and death. Not the lightest reading I’ve ever offered, I know, but stay with me.
I interviewed a man named Hani Jaber last week. He’s 36 years old, broad-shouldered, talks really fast, laughs about everything, and when I was five years old, he killed a man with a kitchen knife. I don’t know for sure, but I think Hani is the first person I’ve ever had a long conversation with who was directly responsible for another person’s death. I qualify that with “long conversation” because I’ve talked to some Israeli soldiers, but only briefly, and with “directly responsible” because these days everyone is more or less complicit in murder. We’ll talk about that later.
The kitchen knife is important.
Israel fashions itself “a villa in the jungle,” a bastion of Western culture surrounded by uncivilized Arabs: this mindset, which of course is racist at the core, features in everything from Israeli music and television to the country’s often unbelievable political discourse. As far as weapons are concerned, you can see why the villa patricians that Israelis position themselves as would not be interested in anything too bloody, lest they be confused with the surrounding savages. So knives and rocks are out, drones and F-16s are in. But what does a savage and civilized weapon make?
Some of the force of killing is lost to distance, sure. It would be hard to gather non-literary evidence of the effect, but from the introduction of the longbow to gunpowder to remote explosives and planes, I don’t think it’s preposterous to suggest that over generations, people have found it less emotionally taxing to kill each other the further they get from their victims. But Palestinians—or any indigenous people cast as barbarian foils to a “civilized” foe—have ranged weaponry as well. Rocket fire from Gaza, which Israel-sympathizers will gladly inflate to millions of rockets per day if you let them, killed a 56-year-old man in southern Israel in late October. So it has to be something else—the ultimate “civilized” weapon cannot merely be something you use from far away.
My theory starts out nominally optimistic and quickly gets dark. I think that people may be getting gentler and the notion that killing itself is savage has really entered the mainstream. I’m not saying that’s a widely, much less deeply felt consensus, just that its opposite is no longer publicly palatable. Since propaganda became PR, it just hasn’t been a winning platform to talk openly about spilling the blood of the enemy (nobody told Hamas). So if you want to kill, you have to make it look like you’re not. Two methods I can think of.
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The first means, language, is the elder of the two. Prehistoric thinkers figured out as long as you are not killing a person but an animal, barbarian, infidel, or otherwise already-hellbound malefactor, there isn’t any use getting upset about it, though I guess it’s best to dispatch said creature at an arm’s length so as not to be infected. This later morphed into heroes like St. George, who is often depicted lancing a dragon (representing paganism) writhing beneath his horse—two whole points of contact away from evil, his stallion and his spear—instead of biting its head off or something. Anyway, St. George, who appears over a lot of Bethlehemites doorways…
…is so symbolic of Christendom’s cultured ways of killing that his red-and-white cross was borne on ships and shields during the Crusades and later served as the flag of Great Britain, the country over which he is still patron saint. St. George, by way of coincidence, is buried in Israel. In the years interceding since his death in the fourth century, I shudder to think how many real, breathing and bipedal humans have lain in the place of the dragon—pagans, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, atheists, Protestants and Catholics alike, etc. All you had to do was eliminate their human essence, and today Israel does this like the best of them—the magic word, as you may have guessed, is “terrorist.”
The second means is drone warfare, which was pioneered by the Israeli military in the 1970s. The logic here, as far as I can see it, is twofold: first, the killer is airborne and non-human and therefore expendable and not accountable for mistakes, which is like taking St. George’s horse and cubing its value as an experiential blindfold. Second, it makes people feel a new kind of powerless. There’s a very good Washington Post article about the psychological conditions of being under attack by drones. As long as you cannot strike back or even hide—two things Gazans have tried in vain to do, over and over—you might as well be at war with God.
This, I hope, should not come across as a stretch. The divine bolt is such a cliché, but it’s God’s MO. So far as we know from the Abrahamic faiths, God has never come down and beaten anyone to death. He certainly ordered many unpaid hits, insta-calcified Lot’s wife, engulfed cities in fire and drowned the entire world at least once, but he has never done anything like Hani Jaber. So when Israel deploys drones, it isn’t just to protect the lives of its pilots, it’s to project an idea that the Palestinians in their sights are akin to game animals and Israel the gamekeeper, or to continue the religious metaphor, that Palestinians are otherwise unsanctified mortals and Israel is acting within the grace of God. Once again, this is not fringe rambling by any means, and a brief survey of religious Zionist discourse about war will tell you that.
Hani Jaber, therefore, is operating on the complete other end of the spectrum. Knifing someone to death, or mob-lynching someone, or killing someone with a rock—these things are considered more base than missiles by virtue of their closeness to “raw” human emotion, because when you’re really furious, your hands don’t instinctually make the shape of a stealth bomber control stick, they make fists. But if you consider knives, fists, etc. more “barbaric” than drones, you may be perpetuating the idea that instinctual violence is more wrong than premeditated violence. Rage is one of the seven deadly sins, right? Where, then, is genuinely cold blood?
From what I know, Hani Jaber was acting on impulses of rage when he killed 22-year-old Erez Shmuel, who was allegedly beating Hani’s 9-year-old sister at the time. At least in my mind, that doesn’t make him less of a murderer. But I, like many others, have to learn to judge less direct acts of murder with the same severity. Israeli air force commanders are responsible for more than a thousand deaths in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead three years ago. Palestinians are killers, too. Harry Truman carried out mass murder on an unprecedented scale, George W. Bush is responsible for between 100,000 and a million dead Iraqis, and President Obama’s expanded drone warfare program in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen makes him a bigger killer than we liberals would all like to think. As D.C. journalist Charles Davis writes, “While Obama might seem like a nice, smart guy who tucks his kids in and gives them a kiss on the forehead good night, remember that because of his decisions there are Pakistani and Afghan fathers who will never get to do the same.”
The point will probably deserve repeating until eternity—that human goodness is not a function of power, popular or otherwise—but maybe the moral sense can be a reflex that responds to rote repetition as well as a perceptive sense like vision. I don’t know if I even agree with that now, having just written it. Nonviolence is not a guarantee, violence is both sanctioned by international law and somewhat hard to define, and ultimately it gets into either politics or tactics and this blog isn’t about either. I am only making the point that having voted for Obama and with no plans to do so again, I think others should investigate how and why people are considered killers and act in good faith afterwards.
Because I’m an American citizen—and privileged and white to boot—I never grew up with a clear picture of what we do abroad and I’m still more or less on the manicured side of the barbed wire when it comes to a lot of issues. Divorcing the idea of humanitarian military intervention is still something I’m not prepared to do. But these days, when it comes to elevating the value of military operations over murder with kitchen utensils, I am losing patience with the “support our troops” crowd. I think individuals deserve respect and support, not organizations—not the army, not the police, not the government—and if individuals are engaged directly or indirectly in human rights denial, they ought to be judged.
That’ll do it for me, before I veer completely off-topic. For the record, I don’t feel unsafe among Palestinians. When I was talking to Aryeh King for the story, the settler who set up the volunteer surveillance program in Jerusalem, he warned me personally that if I was in the same room as one of the freed Palestinian prisoners, my life would be in danger. Well, I sat down with Hani Jaber for the better part of two hours, and the most he did was try to kill me with caffeine. Similarly, a reactionary comment in a Swarthmore Daily Gazette article about me alleged that I’m liable to be raped and killed if I go to Egypt, which would seriously surprise my Egyptian friends. I feel unsafe, I should say, in a barrage of tear gas canisters aimed at head-level, which is certainly not limited to Israel, but which only Israel has done to me. Danger shadows power, which good journalism is supposed to afflict. But the front line is not the only place to do that, and that’s why I’m not going to be there forever—the words we use are important, and if through mere conversation we can remove whatever legitimacy was ever conferred on “civilized killing,” then that would be a step, I think, toward peace.
Best,
Brendan
Hello everyone,
Whenever I talk to friends and family, I sometimes field a familiar question about how safe or dangerous it is to live in Palestine. I’ve given a couple different answers: it depends where you are, it depends who you are, it depends what day of the week it is, and in most cases I feel safer here than I would in New York City. This post is designed to answer the question more fully and maybe enter a deeper discussion about violence, danger, and death. Not the lightest reading I’ve ever offered, I know, but stay with me.
I interviewed a man named Hani Jaber last week. He’s 36 years old, broad-shouldered, talks really fast, laughs about everything, and when I was five years old, he killed a man with a kitchen knife. I don’t know for sure, but I think Hani is the first person I’ve ever had a long conversation with who was directly responsible for another person’s death. I qualify that with “long conversation” because I’ve talked to some Israeli soldiers, but only briefly, and with “directly responsible” because these days everyone is more or less complicit in murder. We’ll talk about that later.
The kitchen knife is important.
Israel fashions itself “a villa in the jungle,” a bastion of Western culture surrounded by uncivilized Arabs: this mindset, which of course is racist at the core, features in everything from Israeli music and television to the country’s often unbelievable political discourse. As far as weapons are concerned, you can see why the villa patricians that Israelis position themselves as would not be interested in anything too bloody, lest they be confused with the surrounding savages. So knives and rocks are out, drones and F-16s are in. But what does a savage and civilized weapon make?
Some of the force of killing is lost to distance, sure. It would be hard to gather non-literary evidence of the effect, but from the introduction of the longbow to gunpowder to remote explosives and planes, I don’t think it’s preposterous to suggest that over generations, people have found it less emotionally taxing to kill each other the further they get from their victims. But Palestinians—or any indigenous people cast as barbarian foils to a “civilized” foe—have ranged weaponry as well. Rocket fire from Gaza, which Israel-sympathizers will gladly inflate to millions of rockets per day if you let them, killed a 56-year-old man in southern Israel in late October. So it has to be something else—the ultimate “civilized” weapon cannot merely be something you use from far away.
My theory starts out nominally optimistic and quickly gets dark. I think that people may be getting gentler and the notion that killing itself is savage has really entered the mainstream. I’m not saying that’s a widely, much less deeply felt consensus, just that its opposite is no longer publicly palatable. Since propaganda became PR, it just hasn’t been a winning platform to talk openly about spilling the blood of the enemy (nobody told Hamas). So if you want to kill, you have to make it look like you’re not. Two methods I can think of.
The first means, language, is the elder of the two. Prehistoric thinkers figured out as long as you are not killing a person but an animal, barbarian, infidel, or otherwise already-hellbound malefactor, there isn’t any use getting upset about it, though I guess it’s best to dispatch said creature at an arm’s length so as not to be infected. This later morphed into heroes like St. George, who is often depicted lancing a dragon (representing paganism) writhing beneath his horse—two whole points of contact away from evil, his stallion and his spear—instead of biting its head off or something. Anyway, St. George, who appears over a lot of Bethlehemites doorways…
…is so symbolic of Christendom’s cultured ways of killing that his red-and-white cross was borne on ships and shields during the Crusades and later served as the flag of Great Britain, the country over which he is still patron saint. St. George, by way of coincidence, is buried in Israel. In the years interceding since his death in the fourth century, I shudder to think how many real, breathing and bipedal humans have lain in the place of the dragon—pagans, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, atheists, Protestants and Catholics alike, etc. All you had to do was eliminate their human essence, and today Israel does this like the best of them—the magic word, as you may have guessed, is “terrorist.”
The second means is drone warfare, which was pioneered by the Israeli military in the 1970s. The logic here, as far as I can see it, is twofold: first, the killer is airborne and non-human and therefore expendable and not accountable for mistakes, which is like taking St. George’s horse and cubing its value as an experiential blindfold. Second, it makes people feel a new kind of powerless. There’s a very good Washington Post article about the psychological conditions of being under attack by drones. As long as you cannot strike back or even hide—two things Gazans have tried in vain to do, over and over—you might as well be at war with God.
This, I hope, should not come across as a stretch. The divine bolt is such a cliché, but it’s God’s MO. So far as we know from the Abrahamic faiths, God has never come down and beaten anyone to death. He certainly ordered many unpaid hits, insta-calcified Lot’s wife, engulfed cities in fire and drowned the entire world at least once, but he has never done anything like Hani Jaber. So when Israel deploys drones, it isn’t just to protect the lives of its pilots, it’s to project an idea that the Palestinians in their sights are akin to game animals and Israel the gamekeeper, or to continue the religious metaphor, that Palestinians are otherwise unsanctified mortals and Israel is acting within the grace of God. Once again, this is not fringe rambling by any means, and a brief survey of religious Zionist discourse about war will tell you that.
Hani Jaber, therefore, is operating on the complete other end of the spectrum. Knifing someone to death, or mob-lynching someone, or killing someone with a rock—these things are considered more base than missiles by virtue of their closeness to “raw” human emotion, because when you’re really furious, your hands don’t instinctually make the shape of a stealth bomber control stick, they make fists. But if you consider knives, fists, etc. more “barbaric” than drones, you may be perpetuating the idea that instinctual violence is more wrong than premeditated violence. Rage is one of the seven deadly sins, right? Where, then, is genuinely cold blood?
From what I know, Hani Jaber was acting on impulses of rage when he killed 22-year-old Erez Shmuel, who was allegedly beating Hani’s 9-year-old sister at the time. At least in my mind, that doesn’t make him less of a murderer. But I, like many others, have to learn to judge less direct acts of murder with the same severity. Israeli air force commanders are responsible for more than a thousand deaths in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead three years ago. Palestinians are killers, too. Harry Truman carried out mass murder on an unprecedented scale, George W. Bush is responsible for between 100,000 and a million dead Iraqis, and President Obama’s expanded drone warfare program in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen makes him a bigger killer than we liberals would all like to think. As D.C. journalist Charles Davis writes, “While Obama might seem like a nice, smart guy who tucks his kids in and gives them a kiss on the forehead good night, remember that because of his decisions there are Pakistani and Afghan fathers who will never get to do the same.”
The point will probably deserve repeating until eternity—that human goodness is not a function of power, popular or otherwise—but maybe the moral sense can be a reflex that responds to rote repetition as well as a perceptive sense like vision. I don’t know if I even agree with that now, having just written it. Nonviolence is not a guarantee, violence is both sanctioned by international law and somewhat hard to define, and ultimately it gets into either politics or tactics and this blog isn’t about either. I am only making the point that having voted for Obama and with no plans to do so again, I think others should investigate how and why people are considered killers and act in good faith afterwards.
Because I’m an American citizen—and privileged and white to boot—I never grew up with a clear picture of what we do abroad and I’m still more or less on the manicured side of the barbed wire when it comes to a lot of issues. Divorcing the idea of humanitarian military intervention is still something I’m not prepared to do. But these days, when it comes to elevating the value of military operations over murder with kitchen utensils, I am losing patience with the “support our troops” crowd. I think individuals deserve respect and support, not organizations—not the army, not the police, not the government—and if individuals are engaged directly or indirectly in human rights denial, they ought to be judged.
That’ll do it for me, before I veer completely off-topic. For the record, I don’t feel unsafe among Palestinians. When I was talking to Aryeh King for the story, the settler who set up the volunteer surveillance program in Jerusalem, he warned me personally that if I was in the same room as one of the freed Palestinian prisoners, my life would be in danger. Well, I sat down with Hani Jaber for the better part of two hours, and the most he did was try to kill me with caffeine. Similarly, a reactionary comment in a Swarthmore Daily Gazette article about me alleged that I’m liable to be raped and killed if I go to Egypt, which would seriously surprise my Egyptian friends. I feel unsafe, I should say, in a barrage of tear gas canisters aimed at head-level, which is certainly not limited to Israel, but which only Israel has done to me. Danger shadows power, which good journalism is supposed to afflict. But the front line is not the only place to do that, and that’s why I’m not going to be there forever—the words we use are important, and if through mere conversation we can remove whatever legitimacy was ever conferred on “civilized killing,” then that would be a step, I think, toward peace.
Best,
Brendan
