Lies of Desperation:Answering Thomas Friedman

pradeep ppillai at sprint.ca
Wed Apr 3 14:59:11 PST 2002


April 3, 2002

Lies of Desperation:

Answering Thomas Friedman

By M. Shahid Alam

Be ever steadfast in upholding equity, bearing

witness to the truth for the sake of God, even though

it be against your own selves or your parents and

kinsfolk.

Qur'aan (4: 135)

Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down

his life for his friends.

John (15:13)

As the ratio of fatalities between Palestinians and Israelis

has narrowed during the past few months, the media mills in

the United States that have demonized Palestinians for the

past 50 years have been going into higher gear.

One of the honored captains of this industry, the honorable

Mr. Thomas Fried-man, has now struck a high note in this

campaign with his "Suicidal Lies," in New York Times of March

31, 2002. His objective is to raise the alarm for Americans.

The Palestinians "are testing a whole new form of warfare,

using suicide bombers," and if this "new strategy of

liberation" is allowed to suc-ceed-presumably in forcing the

Israelis to end their occupation of West Bank and Gaza-the

consequences will be cataclysmic for United States, and

indeed, for all civilization. The imperative for United States is

clear. In order to save Civilization, it must fight Israel's war

as if it were a war for its own survival.

This indictment of Palestinians is built cleverly, but it is the

kind of cleverness that substitutes for facts and logic. Mr.

Friedman opens his indictment by wiping the slate of history

clean of the daily, unremitting struggle that

Palestini-ans-men, women and children-have waged over the

years against Israeli ter-ror, massacres, executions,

expropriations, deportations, house demolitions, sieges,

curfews, and myriad new forms of intimidation and

humiliation. This long, hard, constant, unflagging and valiant

struggle over more than 50 years is equated with the acts of

'suicide' bombers. In the words of Braveheart, this is history

written by those who have hanged heroes.

After completing this demolition job-accomplished with a

wave of his hand-Mr. Friedman proceeds to build his

penitentiary for the Palestinians. His immediate objective is

to prove that the Palestinians "have adopted suicide bombing

as a strategic choice, not out of desperation." There are

several steps in the argument that Mr. Friedman employs to

arrive at this devastating conclu-sion. I have to admit that

this charge ought be devastating-if it can be proved.

Mr. Friedman does not deny that the Israeli occupation has

caused "desperation" (the quotes are not mine) amongst

Palestinians; what he rejects is that there is a necessary link

between their desperation and 'suicide' bombing. First, "there

are a lot of people in the world who are desperate, yet they

have not gone around strapping dynamite to themselves."

Surely, Mr. Friedman must have heard of Samson, Guy

Fawkes, the Kamikaze pilots, the Hizbullah and the Tamil

Tigers: since almost everyone else has. The Palestinians can

scarcely be credited with inventing this "new form of

warfare."

But there is another way of posing the question that would

shift the onus to the Israelis. A quick glance at the recent

history of settler colonialism reveals that there have been

many episodes, both long and short, of occupation and

resis-tance to occupation, but it is not too often that the

oppressed have employed 'suicide' bombing against their

occupiers. Is it mere happenstance, then, that every time the

Israelis occupy another people-whether it is Southern

Lebanon, Gaza and West Bank-they have had to face 'suicide'

bombers? Might the fault lie in the occupiers, and not the

occupied?

Mr. Friedman presses on with his indictment. President

Clinton "offered the Palestinians a peace plan that would

have ended their "desperate" occupation, and Mr. Arafat

walked away." We are back to the canard about the

'generous' peace plan, so perversely rejected by the

Palestinian leadership. In return for municipal control over a

few Bantustans, dominated by armed settler encamp-ments,

the Palestinians were asked to forego their sovereignty, their

right of re-turn, the right to defend themselves, control over

their borders, and rights to their own water resources. A

'generous' peace plan it was indeed-generous to the Israelis.

Is it surprising that the Palestinians are castigated ad

infinitum for rejecting this plan?

The Palestinians must account for another sin of omission.

They had the option of engaging in nonviolent resistance-à la

Ghandhi-that would have won them an independent Palestine

30 years ago. But, instead, they chose the path of violent

resistance. Oops! I mean, 'suicide' bombing. Mr. Friedman

writes as if Israeli occupation had somehow earned the right

to expect Gandhian nonviolence from its victims-as if this

was part of the divine package which gave them ex-clusive

rights to historic Palestine.

A presumption so brazen demands a response. One must ask

if the Zionists too had chosen this Gandhian alternative to

appropriating historic Palestine: if at any time their dreams

embraced the Palestinians as associates, equal partners, in

return for sanctuary in their country. Instead, all that the

Zionist visionaries saw was "a people (themselves) without a

land, and a land (Palestine) without a peo-ple." The

Palestinians did not exist: and if they did, they would be

"spirited across the borders" with some small inducement.

This was a dream of settler colonialism: quite commonplace

amongst Europeans in the nineteenth century. But since the

Zionists did not have their own gun-boats, they would

contract out the job to Britain, the arch imperialist power in

those times. In 1917, even before it had acquired

Palestine-in the Balfour Declaration-Britain generously

offered to create a Jewish state in Palestine. A year later,

when the British had occupied Palestine, the European Jews

estab-lished their first settlements in Israel, their heads full

of dreams of messianic colonialism. It is these dreams,

resurrecting archaic and arcane prophecies, that would

eventually create a new colonial settler state in 1948-when,

in other parts of the world, such states were being

dismantled.

These are the mechanics of Mr. Friedman's argument. He

does not reject some "desperation" amongst Palestinians, but

this is not why they engage in 'suicide' bombings. They do

this out of a perversity, "because they actually want to win

their independence in blood and fire," and this has led them

to adopt "suicide bombing as a strategic choice." Mr.

Friedman forgets-I admit, it is hard to feel the enemy's

pain-that while the first 'suicide' bombings against Israeli

occu-pation began in 1993, the Palestinians have been going

through "blood and fire" since at least the 1930s.

What this means is that Palestinians are now engaged in a

most dangerous inno-vation in the strategy of liberation. "A

big test is taking place of whether suicide terrorism can

succeed as a strategy for liberation." It is truly extraordinary

that Mr. Friedman, writing on the op-ed page of the New York

Times, can assume that his readers have never heard of the

Kamikaze, the Tamil Tigers, or the Hizbullah. There you have

an index of the power of NYT.

It would appear that the deployment of 'suicide' bombers was

a strategic choice made by Japan when the odds against

them appeared to be mounting. It was a choice they

implemented massively, mobilizing tens of thousands to

launch 'suicide' missions using airplanes, torpedoes, mines

and small boats. They were also quite effective. Warner and

Warner, in The Sacred Warriors, show that the Allies lost 65

naval and merchant ships to these 'suicide' missions, and 370

more were damaged. By comparison, the recent 'suicide'

bombings are minor league distractions. At least until

February 2000, the Palestinians were not the biggest players

even in this minor league. Hamas claimed only 22 'suicide'

mis-sions compared to 168 strikes by Tamil separatists.

So why does Mr. Friedman raise this alarm about Palestinians

"testing" "a whole new form of warfare," "a new strategy of

liberation?" Faced with a second intifada against their

deepening control over the West Bank and Gaza-an intifada

that was slowly replacing stone-throwing children with

guerilla war-fare-the Israelis made a strategic choice. On

February 6, 2001, they let loose Ariel Sharon, convicted by

his own courts of personal responsibility for the Sa-bra and

Shatilla massacres, to crush the new intifada. But the

Palestinian re-solve, tested for 33 years under the occupation

of the world's most efficient military machine, refuses to

capitulate before yet another round of warfare. The people

who should have been "spirited across the borders" by beads

and baubles have shown yet again that their spirits will not

be cowed: that they will rise to match and neutralize the

power of Israeli military.

Mr. Friedman admits this. The Palestinian resistance-he calls

it 'suicide' bombing-"is working." That is what alarms him. He

thinks that Israel now "needs to deliver a military blow that

clearly shows that terror will not pay." In other words, he

wants United States to give Israel a free hand in dealing with

the Palestinian resistance. This might mean more Palestinian

deaths, more house demolitions, more incarcerations, and

may be even deportations on some significant scale.

Everything that is necessary to crush the resistance. Yes, the

Europeans will make noises-and there will be some noise in

the Arab streets. But with solid American backing, none of

this should matter. At least, that is Mr. Friedman's fantasy.

I have been placing 'suicide' in 'suicide' bombings within

quotes. This requires an explanation. The Oxford English

dictionary defines a suicide as "one who dies by his own

hand." This definition is clearly inadequate. In the absence of

a motive, we cannot distinguish between (i) a person who

takes his life because he wants to die and (ii) a person who

takes his life because this will save her soul-or her honor,

her family, her friends, her community, or her country. The

first suggests suicide; the latter is ordinarily regarded as a

martyr. Judge for yourself then whether the Palestinians are

suicides or martyrs.

Although the Jewish tradition considers suicide reprehensible,

it admits excep-tions. According to the Talmud-Kaplan and

Schwartz, A Psychology of Hope-"suicide can be permissible

and even preferred" when the alternative is forced apostasy

or torture that is beyond endurance. Imaginably, the

Palestinians who choose to 'sacrifice' their lives might argue

that the pain and indignity of life under Israeli occupation

exceeded their capacity for endurance.

Use your imagination again. Consider a different history of

Germany and Europe-one without the Second World War,

without the Final Solution, with-out Auschwitz-all because a

lone Jewish 'suicide' bomber in 1938 had pene-trated the

inner chambers of Nazi leadership and blown them to

smithereens while also killing herself. Would this 'suicide'

bomber-and her likes-also be regarded as a threat to all

civilization? What would Mr. Friedman say about her?

M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern

University, Boston. His recent book, Poverty from the

Wealth of Nations was published by Palgrave (2000). He

may be reached at m.alam at neu.edu.

http://www.counterpunch.org/



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