By Dennis Loo
The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens. And so I can assure you that if — I don’t even care if I was a politician — if somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing. – Barack Obama
Let’s examine this statement – and the first sentence especially, since it concentrates the premise upon which everything else follows.
Is it the first job of any nation state (and its political leaders) to protect its citizens? On the surface, the statement seems uncontestable. Of course protecting one’s citizens is their first task. But then, if this is a general principle, then it applies to any and all nation states. You cannot take a general principle and say that it only applies to one or some nation states and not to others. As Glenn Greenwald points out today, Israel is responsible for “the ongoing four-decades brutal occupation [and] the recent, grotesquely inhumane blockade of Gaza.” So does not Hamas have the right to self-defense against Israel?
If you accept the premise – any nation state’s first job is to protect its citizens – then internecine and endless warfare can always be justified.
Moreover, as the back story to Israel’s attacks on Gaza, two things should be noted. First, Israel’s real aim here, as analyzed by Ethan Broner in today’s New York Times (“With Strikes, Israel Reminds Foes It Has Teeth”), is to redo with better results their failed 2006 attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel’s savage 2006 attacks that resulted in great loss of civilians’ lives ended up in a victory for Hezbollah, badly tarnishing Israel’s self-conscious image as invincible. Like the selective provocation that launched those 2006 attacks, Hamas’ rocket attacks are a pretext for Israel’s larger strategic goals to intimidate its adversaries and, according to a senior Israeli military official, to “shape a different and new security situation there.”
Second, Israel created the villains they are trying to destroy in the first place. Both Hezbollah and Hamas came into being because of Israel’s attempts to destroy and discredit the PLO.
Hezbollah arose out of Yassir Arafat’s capitulation to Israel in 1982, leading directly to the Sabra Shatila massacre in which thousands of defenseless Palestinian women, children and men were slaughtered by Lebanese Phalangists, effectively escorted to the site by the Israeli Army under Ariel Sharon’s leadership (who was then Defense Minister). With Hezbollah came the infamous suicide bombing tactic – the public raison d’etre for Israel’s ongoing war on Palestine and the rest of the Arab world – as a direct consequence of Israel’s infamy.
Hamas was encouraged and supported by Israel itself, and Mossad in particular, as an alternative to the PLO. As Israeli Prime minister Ehud Olmert said on February 12, 2007, “Netanyahu established Hamas, gave it life, freed Sheikh Yassin [Hamas founder] and gave him the opportunity to blossom.”
Be careful what you wish for as you might get it, as they say.
You cannot destroy people’s resistance to oppression by stepping up your oppression of them. You only create more resistance, more anger and more frustration. That anger and frustration will find an outlet.
This is the problem with not only what Israel has been and is doing; it is also a problem with the premise upon which Obama sees the world. What he says above could very easily have come from Bush or Cheney’s lipless mouths.
These words are the underlying justification for the so-called war on terror.
The war on terror isn’t a war against terror. It’s a war of terror for empire and conquest, concealed under the guise of self-defense.