For many years the Israeli peace activist, Jeff Halper, has made heroic efforts to stop the arbitrary demolition of Palestinian homes by the Israeli authorities. Yet the demolitions persist.
A US anthropologist who has lived in Israel since 1973, Halper wrestles with the question: How does Israel get away with it? How does it manage to sustain a lawless occupation and trample ad infinitum on Palestinian human rights without finding itself utterly shunned by the rest of the world?
In his instructive new book, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification, Halper argues that decades of occupation have equipped Israel with techniques and expertise for which there is a growing global demand. Israel’s impunity has much to do, he maintains, with its pre-eminence as an arms manufacturer and source of advice on public security. His book evokes a country that successfully sells itself as the “go-to” nation for governments anxious to avail themselves of what he calls its “technologies of control.” No nation has gone to greater lengths to make a science of “securitization” and that quintessentially 21st century appurtenance of state surveillance.
There is surely much in this, though Israel enjoyed impunity long before it commanded the respect of foreign rulers on account of its mastery of civil repression. In truth, Israel’s impunity has complex origins in European guilt about anti-Semitism that found its most terrible expression in Nazi Germany but which was always widespread. Yet if he oversells his central thesis, Halper has nevertheless written an important and timely book. His chapter on the Israeli doctrine of “disproportionate force” is especially pertinent at the present time as Israel contends with the most severe security crisis it has faced in many years.
Halper traces the doctrine back to the late 1970s when Israel’s right-wing Likud government presided over by Menachem Begin and Gen. Ariel Sharon adopted a new approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Hitherto, Israel had prepared for warfare abroad, regarding adjacent Arab states as the chief threat to its existence. But Begin and Sharon projected the Arab-Israeli conflict as an inter-communal one, with Israel primarily pitted against Palestinians. Bent on disguising their intention of emptying Palestine of its indigenous Arabs, they presented Israel as facing a life-and-death struggle against terrorism, a threat that could be portrayed as having no possible political solution. Henceforth, Israel’s domestic policy became ever more militarized, ever more fixated on a belief in the efficacy of maximum force. Halper cites the staggering statistic that during the first few days of the “Al-Aqsa Intifada” in 2000 Israeli soldiers fired over a million bullets. The objective was to “burn into the consciousness” of Palestinians the inescapability of their subjection.
Halper’s analysis of this megalomaniacal doctrine appears at a moment when its folly is being exposed as seldom before. What its framers failed to see was that the goal of achieving control over the very consciousness of a subject people was not just intrinsically unrealistic but disastrously counter-productive. Can it be doubted that the upsurge of random acts of murderous violence by young Palestinians has its roots in Israel’s unswerving unilateralism, its commitment to brute force at the expense of efforts to pursue a political process based on negotiation and dialogue?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given the impression of being as much bewildered as outraged by the so-called “knife Intifada.” His bewilderment may be ascribed to defective understanding, the incapacity of the Israeli political establishment to grasp that Palestinian violence is a reaction to a perception of injustice, and to the perpetuation of that injustice by forms of coercion that have brutalized the very psyche of Palestinian people. Indeed, it is possible to suspect that Israel’s occupation has increasingly undermined the basic mental health of Palestinian society, with de-stabilizing consequences that its endlessly proliferating “technologies of control” serve only to exacerbate.
Seeking to burn defeat into the Palestinian psyche, Israel is in danger of immolating itself. Far from bringing security, its multi-billion dollar investment in savage repression has spawned a deepening nightmare, a country at the mercy of traumatized youths brimming with pent-up rage and liable to erupt into violence without warning.
