What do you do when Israel mounts an assault, as equally horrific as the one in Palestine in recent weeks, against language? Who is out there to defend the sanctity of words when someone cheapens and debases them? Who will speak up when idiom is injected with falsehood and an inescapable sense of dissimulation? Is there not — and if not, should there not be — a kind of Semantic Rights Watch that documents the acts of those who pollute language in order to give voice and justification to their savageries, or when they turn verbal discourse upside down to say “incursion” when they mean “invasion”, “defense when they mean “revenge”?
Ariel Sharon is a man of peace, so pronounced him the American president recently.
No snickering for now, please. We’ll return to that momentarily.
For upward of 50 years, Zionist leaders have, through the use of cunningly sophisticated rhetoric, convinced the world that “tiny Israel” (remember that engagingly cute phrase from the 1950s and 60s?) had been the victim of five wars of aggression mounted against it by Arabs hellbent on “destroying” it (the apocalyptic term “obliterating it” was an alternate) and driving its denizens “into the sea.”
You may be surprised to know that there are a lot of Americans around today (including noted columnists) who do not know that of all the five Arab-Israeli wars in question, only the one that took place in 1948, mounted by ragtag armies supplied with defective weapons, from newly decolonized countries, was Arab-initiated. The Suez War, 1956, and the June War, 1967, were both started by Israel, the one in collusion with then colonial Britain and France, and the other in search of lebensraum. In the October War, 1973, no one attacked Israel, or got anywhere near it. The Egyptian Army assaulted foreign occupation forces ensconced in Egyptian national territory in Sinai, and the Syrian Army, in like manner, attacked foreign occupation forces equally ensconced in Syrian national territory in the Golan Heights.
And we all know of what has come to be known as “Sharon’s war” in Lebanon in 1982, an unprovoked invasion of the territory of a neighboring sovereign nation.
In each case, as the soldiers marched off to war, so did the words, subverted words whose goal was not only to delude the outside world about the “justice” of what Israel was doing, but also to build between the Israeli mind and the factual word a wall of myth. (The war in Lebanon was disingenuously called “Peace for Galilee” and the recent one in Palestine was obscenely called “Defensive Shield.”)
That is what has been happening all these years — an immense outpouring of precise, serviceable words to conceal the deception, the militarism and the race arrogance of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. Much of the Western world, and more particularly the American world, went along with the rasping cadence, the nebulous jargon, issuing forth from Israeli spokesmen. Who, among the pundit cowboys have read, say, George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” a book that deconstructs the notion that our semantic fashions of expression derive from the politics of our objective reality?
The 800,000 Palestinians expelled from their homeland in 1948? They were “Arab refugees” who fled Palestine in response to radio broadcast from the Arab capitals urging them to do so, a claim plucked out of thin air with no basis in fact. And what the heck, Arab refugees are Arab and thus — what’s the brouhaha about? — they can be resettled in Arab countries.
The plan that Israel today has on hold to expel the entire Palestinian population from the West Bank and Gaza (a plan chillingly given all the more credence with Effi Eitan, one of its most ardent advocates, joining Sharon’s government recently) is called “transfer,” not ethnic cleansing or expulsion.
Colonizing occupied land is “settlement activity.” Palestinians living in Israel, remnants of their community that was not driven out in 1948, are “Israeli Arabs.” (See? Call a Palestinian an Israeli Arab and who is to know that he is the original native son?) Israel legitimately “buys” arms from the US, but Palestine surreptitiously “smuggles” them from Iran. Israel defends itself against “the terrorist infrastructure,” but Palestinians, who barely possess a wet match, want to burn Israel down to he ground. Jews from Kiev, who had never in their entire lives been to, say, Haifa, “return” there, but Palestinians who had been born there — as had been their ancestors, their culture and their history — will “change the Jewish character of Israel” if they were to do the same. Israel’s war of conquest in 1948 is uniformly referred to as “the war of independence,” as if the Zionist movement were a national liberation movement not unlike those in the Third War that had struggled against colonialism, not a movement waged against a little native people aimed at disenfranchising them of their land, their home and their name. And of course, there was the Israeli “incursion” into Palestine recently, a term connoting the benign image of a man taking a walk in the park.
You get the picture.
Language here is being put at the service of those big lies on which so much of Israeli society was built and later nurtured.
When you hear Israeli Army spokesmen justifying what they did in Jenin, among other places — but Jenin in particular — you know that language is being used to run hell, imbuing the terrors of hell into its idiom, metaphor and syntax.
That is no less than horrific.
Horrific because language is not a mere currency of everyday exchange. There is organic, vital reciprocity between language and consciousness, between those who speak a language and their felt reality. In fact, among linguists, it is axiomatic that language and culture are one and the same.
To be sure, there are Israelis today, like the New Historians, and there were Israelis in the past, like Ahad Ham, Martin Buber and Israel Shahak, who tried to impose on their society the humane sobriety of their sensibility, but they were dismissed as eccentrics at best or as traitors at worst. It is the Ariel Sharons and Effi Eitans, the militarists and the expansionists, those who give massive echo to their army’s justifications for the smashed down boots and the mass graves, who are in control. Those Israelis who are against these policies but remain silent will be judged along with them. You are implicated in that which leaves you indifferent.
Language is a fund. When you draw from it, when you draw from its deposits of accumulated verbal overtones, in order to twist reality so as to make it conform to the needs of hell’s horrors, you subvert more than language. You subvert human grace.
And, Oh yes, of course. Sharon is a man of peace. Sure, George. Whatever. (disinherited @yahoo.com)
