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Tom Suarez
Israel-Palestine, and the tyranny of Mind Set
May, 2008 En route back to the United States from a recent trip to Palestine, I was struck by a feeling that I was returning to a land of make-believe in which the rest of the world appeared unrecognizable from first-hand reality. There is a presumption in the West that our open society brings with it an awareness of the world that if not perfect, is nonetheless essentially correct and fair, certainly fair enough for us to distinguish good from bad, hero from rogue, right from wrong. Since ours is a transparent society, lies and bias are naturally countered by evidence and reason. But to examine the issue of Palestine is to confront just how false this is. Democracies exist in name only unless their citizenry is well-informed; elections are meaningless if ballots are cast based on grievously faulty data. If the American people understood what was being perpetrated in their name and with their money, nothing in US elections, or in US policy, would be as it is. The several factors that forge public perception of Israel and Palestine combine to take on a separate life, more potent than the sum of the parts, in the form of mind set. Whereas its component parts might individually be dispelled by facts, evidence, and reason, mind set is highly resistant to these. The US collective mind set regarding Israel and Palestine is straight-forward: Israel is good, and Palestinians are bad. Note the juxtaposition of the Israel (nation) versus Palestinians (people) -- this distinction is integral to the mind set. Facts, reason, and evidence, are all shunned into the shadows of this mantra. If one demonstrates that entire Palestine-Israel "conflict" exists only because Israel refuses to abide by international law, the mindset responds Yes, but Israel is good, and Palestinians are bad. If one shows that Israel was created by the violent expunging of 750,000 people from the their land and the razing of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages, literally erasing them from the map, the mindset replies Yes, but Israel is good, and Palestinians are bad. Or that through campaigns of state terror, Israel is systematically killing civilians and stealing whatever land Palestinians have left? Yes, but Israel is good, and Palestinians are bad. That Gaza has been turned into the largest concentration camp in history? Yes, but Israel is good, and Palestinians are bad.
Let's examine the anatomy of this potent mind set. Nuts and bolts of the mind set Implied association with the Crusades and Biblical Good vs Evil. By exploiting the imagery of a "clash of Civilizations", one enlightened and the other rooted in superstition, violence, and tribalism, and then by depicting the Palestine-Israel "clash" as a manifestation of this epic war, the dispossession of the Palestinians is placed in a framework that transcends any contradictory details of the present. Most politicians veil their method in translucent language; but let’s sample the words of US President GW Bush, whose calculated “naivete” allows us to cut straight to the heart of the mind set. "This struggle", to use his words at the Knesset upon Israel’s 60th birthday, is "an ancient battle between good and evil." There you have it, plain and simple: Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestine, as explained by the professed leader of the free world. Israel is reclaiming the Holy Land from the Infidels, fighting David’s battle against Goliath, God’s war against Satan. Israel is good, and Palestinians are bad. But even more outrageously, two sentences later the US president cites this evil force’s "[flying] planes into office buildings," with Palestinians still the implied subject -- the "they" that attacked the US is the "they" that Israel is fighting. Other language hardly veils that Israel is also fighting Christendom's 555 year-old Crusade to regain the Holy Land after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Many US Christians actually see Israel as fulfilling a Biblical prophesy of return on Christendom's behalf, but the mindset that the Holy Land is "ours" and Israel is "us" is common even among secular Americans. The ever-moving starting line of negotiations. One of the most curious aspects of the mind set is that while the "clash of civilization" sense is rooted in our deepest historical and mythological past, the way we intuit negotiations between Israel and Palestine is without any past at all. Negotiations are always relative to things as they are at that exact point in time, not relative to who is legally entitled to what. The zero-point moves with each successive day's illegal territorial expansion, each yesterday becoming irrelevant. Since the mind set sees every successive Israeli expropriation of Palestine as the new zero-point, when Israel provisionally agrees to return a small part of what it has illegally seized and which by international law belongs to Palestine, it is seen as Israel "compromising", making a sacrifice for peace. Then at the next negotiations, the additional land stolen in the interim becomes part of the new zero-point. What this mind set means is : I rob $100 from you. When made to talk to you about the return of your money, the starting point is that the $100 has become mine and anything I return is a sacrifice to make peace. As we "negotiate" I steal more money from you, so that by the end of the negotiations I have $110 of your money. As I steal more and more, the total theft becomes the new "zero" point of negotiations. When, unexpectedly, the international community convinces you to forfeit almost your entire loss to end the problem, I am horrified because I see there's still $65 in your pocket I haven't gotten to yet, so I break off negotiations. By the next round, I have $120 of your money, and that is the new point from which "compromise" begins... Such a mind set would be unthinkable, indeed criminal, in any other context, but in Palestine-Israel we accept it as normal. This fluid zero-point also explains how our mind set finds it logical that one people maintains right-of-return after millennia, whereas another is denied it the day after their expulsion. It is with this mind set that the politics of archeology come into play. Ongoing excavations are used to suggest ancient "Israeli" precedent wherever Zionist land grabs proceed; in part through the erasing of Palestinian nomenclature and supplanting it with Israeli place-names; and more subtly in the gradual expropriation of Palestinian or Middle Eastern culture, elements of the indigenous culture being continually redefined as "Israeli" motifs. More on the media. Distortion in the US media is typically attributed to the oft-cited "Israeli lobby". But while AIPAC and other interest groups do wield considerable influence, the information void in the United States can only have been sustained because it serves powerful US corporate, political, and imperialist ambitions. These "American" interests are directly contrary to the true national interest, and are the silent "lobby" that manipulates the news. The US media’s concept of "balanced" news is based around the absurd premise that issues have two – exactly two – sides, no more, no less, the media choosing which two of the many "sides" are "the" sides. This framework is naive under the best of circumstances; but as regards Palestine it is disastrous, because the recognized representatives of Palestinians serve at the pleasure of Israel and the US. Those not to US/Israeli liking, including high, democratically elected officials, are excluded by any of three methods: imprisonment, assassination, or simply by being labelled "terrorist" to keep their words taboo and off the media. The result is that even when Americans believe they are being given the "Palestinian side", they are being give one, likely atypical side, modelled for the occasion. The rare times media bias is cited, it is usually demonstrated in ways measurable by statistics. Israeli deaths, even military, are always victims and always news; the far more numerous Palestinian civilian deaths are rarely even statistics, much less news-worthy. While this proof of bias by body count is a legitimate piece of the puzzle, when cited by itself it is misleading because it further obscures the source and circumstances of the violence. The pivotal lie of whom-is-attacking-whom remains, so that Palestinian "militant" casualties are not seen as moral equivalents to Israeli soldiers or civilians (thus in effect justifying the statistical imbalance of the news), and Palestinians are ultimately blamed for "their" civilian casualties. Selective language is ingrained: Palestinians "claim", whereas Israelis "confirm"; Palestinian resistance is "terrorism", whereas Israeli aggression is "defense"; Palestinians with guns are "militants", whereas Israelis with guns are "soldiers" or, if settlers, civilians; Israel has supporters; Palestine has sympathizers. The US media engage in both "passive" lies, in which it simply serves as the megaphone for Israel and the US interests that profit from it; and "active" lies, in which the media deliberately deceive through in-house decisions. Citing examples risks presenting the problem as mere aberrations; so let’s look at an example of each, while stressing that these are illustrations of what is in fact endemic. When in May of 2004, Israeli tanks and fighter helicopters moved into Rafah, and the helicopters fired into the unarmed crowds protesting the invasion, the attack was unusual only in that it was caught on film. At first, the knee-jerk explanation by the media was Israel’s right to self-defense, without any attempt to explain why the world’s fourth largest military had to defend itself against unarmed civilians, or of course to explain why Israel was invading Palestine in the first place. But the Israeli military went further: using one of its favorite devices, it claimed that the Palestinians were killed not by the missiles it was firing directly into the crowd, but by explosive devices set by Palestinian militants to frame Israel. This remarkable explanation was immediately accepted in America: somehow "militants" had predicted where the tanks would come and where the crowds would stand, planted bombs that no one noticed even as they walked into them, and detonated them while the missiles that were being recorded on film, fired from the helicopter into the crowd, had no effect. The next example illustrates how corporate news goes beyond simply parroting the Israeli government's claims. Here, the active intent to deceive is undeniable — it can not be rationalized as error or faulty source or "perspective". CNN had a series of reports from what it referred to as the "Jewish neighborhood of Gilo." Each report would show a part of a nice-looking "neighborhood" of new homes, and then the anchor would explain that Palestinians had become such a problem that Israeli tanks had be to stationed nearby to protect the "neighborhoods". Sounds like Israel defending itself, right? The anchor, however, would neglect to mention that we are not in Israel. We are in Palestine. Israel invaded Gilo and built illegal Settlements on it. But the anchors were forbidden by CNN executives from referring to the Settlements with that word. They were required to call them "neighborhoods", and let their audience assume that these "neighborhoods" were in Israel. Thus CNN deliberately reversed victim/aggressor. The "they" problem. Palestine, even more than most political struggles, suffers from this four-letter word. Mind set in the US non only treats this diverse group as monolithic, but extends the "they" to be synonymous with "Arabs", with "Middle East", with "Muslims", and every cliché afflicting these. The "anti-Semitism" tactic. Another element of the mind set is an intrinsic, even metaphysical, link between the nation-state that is Israel, and Judaism or Semitism, so that anyone who criticizes Israel is stigmatized as being anti-Semitic. It hardly need be said that it is preposterous for Israel, or any nation, to assign itself the right to embody any religion or ethnicity. But let's pursue the claim. In all nations except Israel, when politicians "hide behind the flag" they insinuate that to criticize them is to criticize their country. What Zionists have done is to take this fraudulent equation yet further, substituting ethnicity/culture/religion for simple national identity, thus transcending national borders and making the claimed offense outright bigotry rather than a mere lack of patriotism. Perhaps more troubling, if the nation-state of Israel and Jewish ethnicity are linked, then crimes committed by that nation (i.e., the sum actions of its politicians) must also reflect on that ethnicity. In other words, those who link criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism are also holding Jews everywhere culpable for the actions of the Israeli government -- an outrageous linkage, but the inescapable result of the original premise. The Holocaust. The perception that Israel was created to provide safe haven for the survivors of the Nazis is routinely exploited by Israel to shield its actions from scrutiny, the memory of Nazi victims invoked whenever it needs to silence a critic. The original premise — that Israel was a safe haven — was certainly true in the hearts of people liberated from the camps. Whether one accepts that this was the motivation behind the militant Zionists who actually carved out the nation-state, or whether the goal was political for its own sake, is irrelevant; the murder and mass displacement of an innocent indigenous people was hardly a necessary part of this "safe haven". To use the memory of the millions who perished under the Nazis, to justify a new assault on an innocent people is, indeed, a cynical betrayal of the professed motivation. Guilt transference. Another aspect is the discreet transference of guilt for the Holocaust from Europeans to Arabs. Historically, the Muslim Middle East had been a relative haven for Jews when European anti-Semitism was open and institutionalized. Yet Palestinian and Arab resistance against Zionist imperialism has enabled Israel and Europe to convey the impression that Arabs were always at the throats of Jews, in the process transferring to them some of the perceived historical guilt for Nazi genocide. Germany’s Chancellor Merkel made no attempt to hide this, recently citing her country’s "Holocaust shame" as a justification for its military and financial "support for Israel". The effect on the Western mindset is that when Israel attacks Palestinians, in our mind set it is like they are defending themselves against their WWII tormentors.
Conclusion Governments that commit violence against a people, whether those of another country or a segment of their own, must sustain a body of lies, and must, in concert with a complicit media, attack any who attempt to expose the lies. A danger is fabricated, the "Other" is demonized, nationalism is invoked to dull rational thought, and the facade maintained by any means necessary. Nowhere else in the modern world is extreme injustice and suffering so wholly dependent on United States complicity. What the US causes in Palestine is counter to every value for which we claim to stand. Palestine is the symbol of American colonialism in the post-colonial world. Palestine is iconographic of the abyss between what the West says and what it does, of the immorality and dishonesty of its foreign policy. For Americans who are bewildered at the hatred against their country in much of the world, answers are most obvious in Palestine. Israel is in the final analysis the West’s grand attempt at colonization in the post-colonial world. Successive US administrations have financed, armed, and stood behind Israel because Israel is its proxy to continue imperialistic policies of former centuries. Pragmatists may argue that Western security and prosperity require this conquest in the Middle East, but the truth is quite the opposite. How can ordinary Americans help break the mind set that shields the lies upon which the current US-Israeli course is predicated? Mind set requires the appearance of near-total compliance. But symbols, in the form of buttons, a bumper stickers, a t-shirts, bracelet, books, whatever -- have the power to break that continuity. Many people suppose such symbols to be pointless, even narcissistic, because they have no intellectual value. That is to miss the point. Americans do not question the Official Line on Palestine because the mind set tells them that no reasonable person questions it. But if symbols were used to break the uniformity, they would have the power to crack the Orwellian bubble, like Dorothy's toto pulling the curtain to expose the wizard. And there are enough people to fracture it, though most remain invisible out of fear and a failure to recognize the importance of making their "opt out" visible. Imagine, for example, if every twentieth car on US roads had a FREE PALESTINE bumper sticker, every twenty-sixth wrist a FREE PALESTINE bracelet, one instrument case out of every orchestra a conspicuous FREE PALESTINE sticker. Ordinary citizens would start wondering ...
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