laura.fo

The American International School in Gaza is now rubble. This is what it used to look like.

I've seen some gruesome pictures in the past few days. Bodies of children contorted in a fashion I didn't know was possible, even in death. I could post them, but you've seen them, too.

So instead I'll post some links questioning the way we in the U.S. traditionally talk about the Palestinian conflict. I don't know of any other country, including Israel itself, where the language used to talk about this issue is so consistently used to squash debate and cover Palestinian reality.

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Abu Aardvark asks "whether to define the current Israeli attack as against 'Gaza' or 'Hamas'":

The stakes are clear. If the attack is defined as against "Gaza", then what follows is solidarity with the Palestinians and demands to stop the killing. If the attack is defined as against "Hamas", then what follows is the division of Arab opinion along sharply polarized lines defined by their views towards the Islamist movement.

Juan Cole writes that we are entering the age of micro-wars. This is a long post that successfully backgrounds the current conflict. It also questions the assumption (really a rhetorical tool more than an actual assumption, even among those who deploy it) that Israel always acts defensively:

Israel's political tradition seeks expansion if possible; if not possible, it seeks a balance of power with its enemies. If that is not possible, it seeks to be held harmless from its avowed foes. If that is not possible, it is willing to wage total war to punish the enemy population until it accepts at least a cold peace. Where necessary, Israel is willing to give up territorial expansion to get the cold peace.

Adrian at OpenLeft talks about "the 'Arab rejectionist' dodge":

Defenders of Israel's policies often short-circuit any meaningful dialogue on the Arab-Israeli conflict by reducing the problem to the Arabs and their alleged "rejectionism," i.e. their refusal to accept Israel's right to exist. This argument conveniently removes Israel's actions from the realm of moral consideration because it implies that changes in Israeli policy will ultimately have no impact one way or another on the ongoing conflict.

In his Salon blog, Glenn Greenwald writes about the killing of civilians as a political objective (as opposed to unfortunate consequence) for both sides in this conflict, and how, in the U.S. particularly, this objective is treated as smart policy when the Israeli military engages in it but an act of insanity when "terrorists" do the same.

He also differentiates between American Jews whose cultural identification with Israel impacts their views on this conflict and neocons whose motives are far less noble. He is critical of both groups, but makes what I think is an important distinction between the two:

Still, there is a substantial difference between, on the one hand, basically well-intentioned people who are guilty of excessive emotional and cultural identification with one side of the dispute and, on the other, those who adopt the Goldfarb/Peretz psychopathic derangement of belittling rage over widespread civilian deaths as mere "whining" or even something to view as a strategic asset. The latter group is a subset of war supporters and evinces every defining attribute of the Terrorist.

Those who giddily support not just civilian deaths in Gaza but every actual and proposed attack on Arab/Muslim countries — from the war in Iraq to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to the proposed attacks on Iran and Syria and even continued escalation in Afghanistan — are able to do so because they don't really see the Muslims they want to kill as being fully human.

In Haaretz, Yossi Sarid asks "If you (or I) were Palestinian."