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Why the world is silent

By Mireille Astore - posted Tuesday, 1 August 2006


It is now week three of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the world keeps watching in wonder at the might and determination of the Israeli military. For some, the spectacle is indeed awesome, shocking, and devastating. Last week, it was a milk factory, a paper mill, a pharmaceutical plant and two Red Cross ambulances that were obliterated with Israeli precision and know-how.

As a Jewish friend tells me, she cries every time she watches the news at the killings in Lebanon. It seems everyone around me acknowledges the horror that is being inflicted on the Lebanese but somehow feel helpless to stop it.

Article 85, Paragraph 3 of the Geneva Conventions states that making civilians the object of attack is illegal. Further, it states that launching an attack against civilian infrastructure breaches these conventions. And yet the majority of influential countries who abide by these very laws and protect their own citizens through them remain silent at the sight of the atrocities taking place in Lebanon.

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Theories abound about Israel’s grand plan, about Iran’s role, about Syria’s supply of arms to Hezbollah, and Hezbollah’s intentions. But the theory that I find most plausible at the moment was devised four decades ago by the Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she draws attention to the similarity between the racist foundation of the state of Israel and the 1935 Nuremburg laws. Both laws were based on an idea of Judaism as a race, not as a religious practice, regardless of whether individuals identified themselves as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish religious community.

Today as well as in the past, the state of Israel treats any non-Jewish Arab in Israel and the Occupied Territories as dispensable while actively recruiting and subsidising the migration of Jews from around the world to Israel. As such, non-Jewish Arabs have no rights to the protection of the state that all citizens of the world enjoy in their capacity as citizens of states.

While some non-Jewish Arabs have gained representation in the Israeli Parliament, the Jewish state of Israel’s legal system allows the country’s machinery, such as soldiers with machine guns holding legally binding documents, or bulldozers for those who resist, to march into a house belonging to an Arab family anywhere in Israel and the Occupied Territories and regardless if they are Christian or Muslim. These soldiers then demand that the owners leave forever.

Israel’s legal system makes it perfectly legitimate to take away the small plots of land that Palestinian families have owned for generations. These plots of lands are then levelled and given to the Israel Land Administration who then decides to whom to give them. It's needless to point out here that these lands and houses would not be given back to an Arab family. And the world is silent about these injustices.

Today the collective punishment of the Lebanese people, and the killing of refugees bundled together as they are ordered to flee their homes, seems to have the same resonance as some of the atrocities inflicted on Jewish people in the past. The world was silent then and it is silent again.

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There is only one reason for this silence. It is the silence that accompanies the insidious nature of racism. It is its ability to be cloaked under other guises such as irresponsibility, denial, envy, survival and its capacity to be transformed into victimhood.

Commenting on a 2004 photography exhibition on the horrors inflicted on Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, an Israeli soldier Yitzhak Laor wrote: “The Holocaust is part of the victim imagery; hence the madness of [Israeli] state-subsidised school trips to Auschwitz. This has less to do with understanding the past than with reproducing an environment in which we exist in the present tense as victims.”

And now, as I watch photographs of pretty Israeli young girls writing on the artillery shells destined to explode in Beirut, the city of my birth, I begin to understand the mechanics of this victimhood.  How in Israel, children are taught to think of bombing Arabs as a form of pest control. A feedback caption reads: “Can't ... keep ... eyes ... from ... watering. I'm so proud.”

Here all Lebanese citizens under the umbrella of the all-encompassing Arab enemy are considered expendable. What chance do these girls have of recognising their own racism? What form will it take when they will propagate it themselves as mothers, teachers, politicians or soldiers perhaps?

This is precisely how the invisibility of racism goes hand in hand with the “living in the present tense as victims”. It is in deciding that living as eternal victims will ensure the survival of the Jewish identity and that this is a perfectly normal and legitimate state of being.

However, if Israelis see their neighbours as the threatening enemies and hence continue to be victims, it is precisely because Israel chose at its inception as well as now to make enemies of the Arabs within itself. Racism is in the simple act of encouraging seemingly unrelated irresponsible behaviour both in the past as well as in the present.

In its extreme form, the logic of victimhood does not allow room for even the possibility of there being other victims. More dangerously it turns everybody, even the aggressor, into a victim. Through this logic the aggressor is reduced to this powerless state, by virtue of having to take actions he or she deems necessary albeit unpleasant and in some cases horrific, in order to maintain this status.

Here imprisoning, killing and even torturing are all justified and considered necessary since the aggressor adopting the status of a victim feels helpless and unable to have any other options or any control over these actions. Adopting the status of a wounded injured party with no alternative but to commit atrocities by supporting Israel, the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice expresses herself after the Qana massacre as "deeply saddened by the terrible loss of innocent life". At this point, victimhood is perpetuated, propagated and last but not least rendered invisible as well invincible.

I wrote an email to a highly educated Jewish Australian friend recently about how the survival of Jewish tradition and ethics in the world is becoming ever more threatened because of the irresponsible acts of the Israelis and their racist laws that engender dismay and hate both in Israelis as well as in its enemies.

He shrugged it off with an illogical hypothetical question about what would Australia do if Indonesia kidnapped two of its soldiers. Here again, the invisibility of racism and the humiliating and degrading conditions to which Arabs have been subjected over decades can only take place if Arabs are not considered worthy of humiliation. Or, through the logic of victimhood Israelis have no choice but to subject the Arabs to this disagreeable state of affairs.

I responded by pointing out that Indonesia, unlike Israel in the Occupied Territories, does not have hundreds of Australian prisoners in its jails nor does it occupy Australian territory.

Racism, I keep telling my children, does not last. I am an optimistic Lebanese Australian. I tell them of the part played by the racist laws of the Nazi government in the downfall and decimation of Germany earlier in the 20th century. I tell them that Germans have learnt a great deal from the horrors they inflicted on the Jews and others in World War II.

They have learned that military conquest, occupation and exploitation of other peoples, with the purpose of establishing a total security state, is not only immoral but does not provide the security it seeks. Living in harmony with neighbours entails empowering the self in order to shake off the logic of victimhood from its foundation. This can only be achieved by taking positive steps towards reconciliation and addressing past and present wrong doings from all sides. In the meantime it could begin by providing equal citizenship and equal rights for all within one’s borders.

I also tell my children that silence does not make problems go away; it only makes them fester underground. After a while, when enough pressure is exercised on them, they surface with the most explosive and destructive force imaginable.

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About the Author

Mireille Astore is an internationally recognised artist, a writer and a University of Western Sydney scholar. She is also the Arabic Project Coordinator at the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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