``Or they could just stop causing the injuries in the first place? How generous...'' DC
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Certainly.
I've been thinking about this trying to re-conceptualize what's going on, in its more abstract level.
I've started a terrible kind of ritual. I wake up, get my coffee, scan the news, LBO, then switch to electronic intifada, then ingaza.wordpress.com, then go read Juan Cole's latest.
It finally hit me last night while I was watching a brief video clip of a long time compatriot from long ago battles over disability rights. The two central concepts are human rights and the demand for universal access to fulfill those rights. It appeared within the disabled movements through the concept of access. Okay enough background.
So now we can see the war between Israel and the Palestinians in a different light. In the concrete, the Palestinians demand and are fighting for access to these rights. It is worth a few moments to go to this link and read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights
The important part, is not to make a legal argument, but to use these rights as conceptual tools to re-orient the concept of what is going.
Now reconsider the so-called largess of Israel's offer of medical assistance and what that means.
Israel's concept of concession or humanitarian concern, is already a universal human right that has been turned into a charitable donation. They, meaning the Palestinians, have certain animal needs, like the need to drink water, the need to scavange for food, and the need to not be killed for a few hours a day while doing so.
This is the same logic behind all of Israel's so-called concessions in the past. The basic idea is that Israel when it is in a peaceful mood will negociate with the Palestinians over what are already their universal human rights in the first place. This has been the Israeli logic of all the so-called peace processes of the past.
Now turn it around and understand what the systematic abuse and denial of fundamental human rights means. The very template that formed the Universal Declaration was war, mass murder, and oppressions, including of course the internment and extermination camps! So, then in the negative case, the use the UDHR as a system of denial, becomes genocide, by default.
In other words, you can use the Declaration as a template for how to conduct war and genocide. And, then you can be persuaded to graceously slow down by offering to grant, as a gesture of humanitarian charity, one or two, here or there on a conditional basis as you see fit.
Did the neoconservatives learn these lessons from Israel? I think they discovered some modern Israeli or rather rightwing Zionist nuances to a very long history. I think it is important to remember that first the Clinton administration and then the Bush administration carefully went back over the UN Geneva Conventions and carefully re-wrote them to accomode their plans on how to conduct the War on Terror. In other words, both administrations used UN documents in the negative sense of how to justify and conduct a war.
Of course the neocons had other teachers. The US has our own long history and you can certainly make a very good argument that we started off with the 3/5ths rule and land graps and war on Native Americans. We have done our own share of teaching others through our history how to go about this business. It is a dialectical process.
I am going into these details because I think it is important to understand our enemies so that we have the conceptual tools to deal with them, and have a positive alternative to present. The left has too long been completely marginalized by its lack of answers as to what we stand for, rather than what we stand against.
Of course we are against Israel's war in Gaza and the US war on Iraq. What are we for? My suggestion is that we can start with the Declaration as a conceptual tool of what we are for---minus of course some the later articles on property provisions that show the mark of US neoliberal meddling.
CG