> > Just a question for the curious: do you think
> > "martyrdom" or suicide bombing, whatever you want
> to
> > call it, is a morally acceptable and/or
> politically
> > prudent method of struggle?
> > jks
> >
>
> No, of course not. In any struggle in which there is
> any hope of
> victory, such a tactic is both wrong and
> counter-productive.
>
> But what _do_ you do when there is no hope?
It is unseemly for me in the comfort and safety of Loop office tower in Chicago to condescend to those living for generations in refugee camps, whose houses and shops have been bulldozed as an exercise in collective punishment, who are cut off their their family orchards by Israeli-only roads, whose land and water is stolen by theocratic fascists (I mean the settlers), whose children have been shot for throwing stones, who are dairly harassed and humiliated for hours and checkpoints, and otherwise subject to the indignities and oppression of life under the occupation. The suicide bombings, though wrong and counterproductive, are entirely understandable.
Nonetheless, since you ask, I would say with all
humility that if there is no hope, one alternative
would be to die with honor, killing enemy soldiers and
adult male settlers but not children, old people,
fellow Arabs and Palestinians, and other random
victims. There are precedents. The Warsaw Ghetto
fighters did not expect to survive, and almost all of
them perished; they did not have the option of killing
German or Polish civilians, but it is a pretty good
bet that they would have recoiled at the thought as
much as they rejoiced at killing SS murderers. Who
stands in which place in this analogy does not reflect
well on Israeli and American Jews. But if the suicide
bombers have muddied the clean lines of the analogy,
they cannot claim that they have improved on the older
choice.
>
> Everyone (or almost everyone) wants to reduce the
> case of the suicide
> bombers to a simply yes/no. Is that possible?
No. As Fish said about Osama bin Ladin, it is wrong and unwise to reduce the situation to a choice between inexplicable evil and prenatural good. The evils here on both sides are all-too explicable. The Israelis face, or think they face, the Athenian's choice as described be Pericles (according to Thucydides), "What we have is, to speak frankly, an empire; to take it perhaps was wrong, but to surrender it is imprudent." If you steal people's land and treat them like beasts, they will resist, and if you don't allow them hope, they will lash out. Thus the explanation of the Evils on the other side. But the explanation does not mean that we must suspend the judgment that we are dealing with _evils_ on both sides, if not with Evil.
>
> Also (leaving aside for a minute the practical needs
> of agitation:
??? Why?!
I
> would not be writing this post on the local anti-war
> list-serve), what
> is gained/lost by people taking a purely verbal
> position of
> approval/disapproval of a situation on which they
> can have no effect?
> There will not be a single life either saved or lost
> by my abstract
> moral judgment of a suicide bomber on the West Bank.
That is true of almost everything we say and do.
>
> There are some on this list who believe that one is
> corrupted forever by
> admiring a paragraph in WITBD or _Two Tactics_.
Not me. Lenin was an astute political thinker.
>
> P.S. What kind of conversation re Palestine would be
> occurring on this
> list had there never been a suicide bomber?
>
Presumably we would be able to devote ourselves entirely to understanding and damning the evils of the Israeli occupation, and thinking about how to end it.
Btw, Luke suggests that while he thinks the suicide bombers' tactics are wrong because they reduce the chances for a just peace, nonetheless they are not wrong in principle because if they did not, they would be OK. He alludes vaguely to (I think) the civilian casualties of Allied bombing in WWII --Dresden, Rotterdam, and the like. I may be quaint and old fashioned, but I think that strategic bombing is both legally and morally a war crime. Also, it didn't work, as Luke knows (or should know) the US determined after the war.
jks
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