I’m a pompous theocratic fool

His eminence Grand Sheik Sayyed Tantawi of the al-Azhar in Cairo — the most respected religious authority in the Sunni Islamic world — won’t let go of the Muhammed caricatures. In an interview with Berlingske Tidende he now condemns their publication nearly a year ago as “one of the worst crimes ever,” and demands the following punishments:

* For the newspaper Jyllands-Posten: banning for several years.

* For its editor-in-chief: 1-3 years in prison.

* For its cultural editor, Flemming Rose: to be drawn as a pig.

No, I’m not making this up!

Memo to the Grand Sheik, his like-minded ulama, and their followers: the day you non-violently protest Israeli aggression with half the zeal which you have put into this farce, it will be possible to take you seriously again.

Is someone feeling stupid?

This is what Israel got out of depleting its last stocks of sympathy in the civilized world? Suckers.

Hell is going to host the Winter Olympics before Hizbollah surrenders its weapons. Anyone demanding otherwise will be told what King Leonidas of the Spartans told the Persians at Thermopylae: “Come and get them.”

And if any external force — be it the Lebanese “army,” a beefed-up UNIFIL operation, or any combination thereof — is suicidal enough to attempt this on Israel’s behalf in a hardcore Shia region which Israel has just turned to dust for the second time, then Hell is going to host it, too.

As is painfully obvious to anyone who hasn’t swapped his brain for a FOX News antenna, this war was absurd even on its own terms. It started out as a quest to reclaim two prisoners of war, but the chosen means (strategic bombing of Beirut and South Lebanon) led Hizbollah to deploy its strategic deterrent. Then, by mission creep, the Israeli objective morphed into the supposedly “existential” one of removing the said deterrent while it was already being put to use in response to the Israeli campaign! How can a mere threat be intolerable whereas its actual realization, to the tune of 3,790 missiles, is just the cost of doing business?

Moreover, if the threat truly was “existential” — i.e. both intended to and capable of annihilating Israel — then how come only 41 Israeli civilians have been killed? That’s annihilation in the slow lane for you.

Yet these are still significant losses. When it now turns out that they were the price for weakening Israel’s mid-term and long-term security, one must conclude that the Israelis have played themselves for fools.

I’m sure those two captured soldiers, wherever they are, concur.

For the Arab side to declare victory after clashing with Israel is merely what ritual demands. What is new is that the Arab side really did score a strategic and historic victory this time. Here is an analysis from Strategic Forecasting (subscription):

Sometimes a tactical draw is enough for a strategic win. The mystique of Israeli power has been dispelled, and Israel, hellbent on “restoring” its “deterrent,” has undermined it instead. Meanwhile it has sown enough hate to fuel Islamist radicalism for generations.

Of course, it hasn’t escaped the Arab masses that it was a paramilitary, subnational movement that stood up to the bully, while the perfumed operette dictators stood idly by, as they did during the invasion of Iraq. This too bodes ill for the traditional power elite on which Usrael relies.

Nasser was beloved (and to some extent, still is) just for trying to take on Israel, even though he failed. Nasrallah has tried and succeeded. As to those in Lebanon who still do not love Hizbollah, there is the Machiavellian maxim that being feared is more desirable than being loved. Warned the Lebanese pundit Michael Young in the NYT back on August 4:

Uh-oh.

As far as I can see, this has been a disaster for Usrael and for long-term Western interests in general. But I’m sure the luminous minds of Bush and Olmert have got it all figured out.

The calculation behind the wasting of Lebanon was akin to supposing that, upon 9/11, Americans would turn on the US Government and demand the disarming of the US military.

When I posted my unauthorized translation to English of Jostein Gaarder’s essay ‘God’s chosen people’, I had no idea of the amount of international attention it would attract. Had I known that it would be quoted in Haaretz and, in a crossposted incarnation at Booman Tribune, quoted and linked to by Time Magazine’s blog and linked to by Der Spiegel, I would certainly have spent more time on it, though it still strikes me as mostly accurate.

Yet my surprise at the brouhaha pales to insignificance compared to the author’s shock at the firestorm his piece set off, especially in Norway but also abroad. The debate has been raging for a week among intellectuals, writers, politicians, and thousands of Joes and Janes writing LTEs or duking it out online: Is the essay foul and dangerous anti-Semitism, or simply a brave calling out of a country in the process of committing moral suicide before our eyes?

Despite my intention not to post more on this subject, I guess I owe it to Jostein Gaarder to also translate his follow-up op-ed, wherein he answers his critics. As I thought, he does not advocate the abolition of Israel as such, but cautions that “Israel’s intransigent policies with respect to its neighbors may in the long term pose a threat to Israel itself.”

As before, the translation is unofficial and neither solicited nor reviewed by Jostein Gaarder.

I evidently have been misunderstood by many due to the literary technique I used when writing the op-ed about “God’s chosen people,” and I therefore find it necessary to return to the Aftenposten op-ed space with an attempt to clarify.

We need discussion

The genre proved demanding, and I regret if I have hurt anyone — though I intended and still intend to be harsh in my critique of the state of Israel. However, we need the discussion and exchange of views of public conversation. I mean by this fair discussions and exchanges of view — not inarticulate abuse.

The dream of dialogue

I give thanks for all rational criticism — and naturally, for all declarations of support. I also noticed a wise and sober commentary piece by the chair of The Mosaic Religious Community, Anne Sender. We have disagreed fervently in this matter, but I share with her the “dream of dialogue.”

In my Aftenposten op-ed on Saturday August 5 I wrote among other things: “We recognize and pay heed to Europe’s deep responsibility for the plight of the Jews, for the disgraceful harassment, the pogroms, and the Holocaust. It was historically and morally necessary for Jews to get their own home.” It is on this background and from this fundamental premise — to wit, the recognition of the state of Israel — that I sharply criticize the state of Israel’s policy of war.

What ‘recognize’ means

The op-ed begins with this rhetorical touch: “It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel….” It has no doubt spawned much confusion that I have here deliberately played on several meanings of the word ‘recognize’. I refer at one point to the international legal recognition of a state, but I also use the word in the sense of being recognized for a practice, win recognition, enjoy recognition, etc. Or as in my op-ed: “We do not recognize the rhetoric of the state of Israel. We do not recognize the spiral of retribution of the blood vengeance… etc.” And towards the end: “We do not recognize the state of Israel. Not today, not as of this writing, not in the hour of grief and wrath.” (italics added) The op-ed was written on the same day that the pictures from Qana reached us.

1948 versus 1967

Regarding matters of international law, I specify, as I have also tried to emphasize in all interviews: “We recognize the state of Israel of 1948, but not the one of 1967. It is the state of Israel that fails to recognize, respect, or defer to the internationally lawful Israeli state of 1948.”

I thus do not dispute the state of Israel’s right to exist within the borders of 1948, but the border extension of 1967 by means of military force violates international law. In this I have both the UN and the majority of world opinion with me.

No god-given mandate

Many have expressed a view that I conflate religion and politics. I tried to do the exact opposite. When I have entitled the op-ed “God’s chosen people,” it is in order to emphasize that we must never accept that any party to a conflict can claim a god-given mandate.

Here it is primarily what we may call “Christian Zionist” notions I have had in mind, i.e. notions that God still has a plan for the Jews, and that what is going on in the Middle East today is an omen of the Acopalypse, the Second Coming, etc.

Back to Israel

One instance of what I warned against is the fresh statements from a representative of the Pentecostal movement’s work in Israel. He points out that the Second Coming and salvation for the believers are tied to Jews being able to return to Israel. By Israel he means “From the wilderness, and this Lebanon, even to the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and to the great sea toward the going down of the sun” (Joshua 1,4).

According to a recent edition of a newspaper he says: “How can we trust God if He does not fulfill these promises? This is of the essence for many Evangelical Christians, among them 70 million in the USA.” He continues: “Neither Judea nor Samaria have been part of the Arab realm. Why does one persist in using the concept ‘occupied land’?” Corresponding conceptions are also represented among Orthodox Jews, especially some settlers in the occupied areas.

Richer in humanism

I do not believe that Jewish thought and practice have been any less humanistic than what is found in Christian or Muslim history. Maybe quite the contrary; I think a comparative study might have to conclude that the culture and practices of Jews have by and large been richer in humanism and freer from religious fanaticism than what the Christian cultural area has to show for itself (with its crusades, conquistadors, inquisitions, persecutions of Jews, and the Holocaust, etc.).

Different interpretations

But that was not the point. Only in regard to the very notion of “the Kingdom of God” do I believe that Jesu’ preaching and what I take to be Christianity have had a more humanistic interpretation than the late-Jewish, and now Christian Zionist, notion of a political restoration of the Kingdom of David as a “Kingdom of God” for the people of Israel. I am here referring to different interpretations of the religious message — be they Christian or Jewish — and to the problems we all encounter when extreme interpretations are put into life.

A symbol of intransigence

“May spirit and word sweep away the apartheid walls of Israel,” I write. Thus I hope that diplomacy and intellectual force will suffice to convince Israel that the illegal wall on occupied land must be torn down, not least because it will otherwise remain as a monumental symbol of intransigence. The wall does not only cause daily irritation and harm to the Palestinian people, but may in a somewhat longer term be a greater danger to Israel than the country will appreciate.

In other words, I fear Israel’s intransigent policies with respect to its neighbors may in the long term pose a threat to Israel itself.

Violence against civilan population

I naturally do not advocate that any citizens of Israel should ever have to leave their country. I do not even consider it a possibility. When I evoke an image of Israeli civilians fleeing the ‘occupied areas’ (such as Jerusalem and the West Bank), I realize that this may elicit strong emotions.

Yet the message is crystal clear: Whatever the background and context — whatever religious or eschatological conceptions we might have — we never can tolerate violence against a civilian population.

Triggering anti-Semitism

And finally: It can be outright irresponsible to prematurely accuse a debater of anti-Semitism — simply because it may serve to legitimize and trigger anti-Semitism. (If he or she is an anti-Semite, hey, maybe it ain’t so bad….) When one of the provincial councils in Norway decided to boycott Israeli goods, this was in certain Jewish circles said to be “in the spirit of the Nazis,” and they concluded that “this is unquestionably an expression of anti-Semitism.”

Well, such characterizations are in my view not only highly irrational. In the long term they can prove fatal. For how are we then going to describe Nazism and anti-Semitism?

Missiles and bombs

I hope I have cleared up some misunderstandings with this entry. Meanwhile the missiles and bombs are raining; civilians are dying; roads, water supply, and healthcare are being set back decades. We all owe the victims of war a cry of distress.

Let us now concentrate on the matter of substance.

While Israel, a rogue state, is reducing its northern neighbor to a failed state, Sudan already is both. The escalating disaster in the west of that giant country, larger than Western Europe, is being totally eclipsed by the Lebanon war:

It is not inconceivable that denizens of Darfur are less understanding.

Village torched by Janjaweed milita, Darfur.

Writes leading Darfur specialist, Eric Reeves:

The stumbling block is oil-thirsty China, whose intransigence on behalf of its rogue client state equals that of the US on Israel’s behalf. Yet there is an asymmetry: Whereas China threatens to veto any Chapter 7 resolution authorizing an international peacekeeping force in defiance of Khartoum, the US threatens to veto any resolution that does not authorize such a force in defiance of Beirut. In other words, China wields its veto power to buttress legal state sovereignty; the US wields its ditto in contradiction thereof. About the humanitarian dimension, neither really gives a damn.

The result may very well be that an international peacekeeping force with a robust mandate is sent to occupy south Lebanon on behalf of Israel as a reward for the latter’s willful and catastrophic escalation of a low-intensity border conflict, while millions of Darfurians continue to be starved, gang raped, shot, or hacked to death by genocidal Janjaweed, abetted by the bombs of the Sudanese Air Force.

Thus the rogue regimes of Khartoum and Tel Aviv will be equally pleased.

It’s a sobering prospect for anyone clinging to the hope that in A.D. 2006, power and basic decency can mix.

For some background on the Darfur disaster, see my post from earlier this year: They sing when they rape.

Shimon Samuels, Director for International Relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Paris division, goes into a frenzy over the essay by Jostein Gaarder:

Shimon Samuels and his “center” — in fact a huge international lobby group — are a disgrace. In the name of millions of murdered Jews they shy no means, short of violence, to bully, intimidate and vilify anyone who points out the dark underbelly of Israel, or what I have called the Spartan side of Israeli society.

One example out of many is how they have led a campaign to have the UN recognize any objection to Zionism (the nationalist ideology underpinning Israel as a specifically Jewish nation-state) as racism worthy of censure and censorship:

In other words, far from being in a position to criticize Gaarder’s highly problematic conflation of Judaism with the state of Israel, Samuels has lobbied for having the UN recognize that very same conflation. The only difference is that Samuels extols the package solution and condemns anyone who doesn’t as evil or deranged.

Samuels’ previous communiques on matters Norwegian are marked by the same sense of unhinged dishonesty. In a recent open letter to the Prime Minister he claims that Norway has donated $100 million to Hamas since January 2006, whereas the actual amount is $0 (all support being channeled to President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, whose office even the US doesn’t mind funding). He also conveniently ignores the reason why one government party is proposing to slash tax deductibility for donations to certain Zionist institutions: these are financing settlement expansion on the occupied West Bank, a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention and under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which Israel refuses to ratify on these very grounds.

Last year, in another open letter to PM Jens Stoltenberg, he held the national government responsible for a provincial council’s boycott of Israeli products, which he called a return to Quisling. I don’t know, Mr. Samuels. The motivation for the provincial council’s decision is the similarities between Israeli occupational practices and the apartheid regime of South Africa, which that council was the first in Norway to boycott. The similarities are confirmed by people like Ronnie Kasrils, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela; are they Nazis too?

Perhaps in your mind, Israelis and they alone are a priori immune from such comparisons, judging by your misplaced complaint to Norway’s ambassador in Washington about a newspaper caricature of Ehud Olmert?

This is how the Israel lobby operates.

Anyone who sincerely wants to restore Israel’s standing in the eyes of the world are better advised to engage in honest dialogue with those of us who find pictures such as this more obscene than any cartoon or essay:

Manal Husseini, killed in Israel’s war of choice. R.I.P.

P.S. The English version of Gaarder’s piece accompanying Samuels’ letter is largely based on my translation. It is instructive to note, however, that Samuels & co have tried to get a better fit with traditional anti-Semitic myths. For instance, my accurate translation of the term ‘barnemordere‘, ‘child murderers’, has been altered to the incorrect ‘baby killers’. Nice job.

Andrew “Flytrap” Sullivan slams Jostein Gaarder as an anti-Semite calling for the “obliteration” of Israel and for Jews to “surrender.”

These are certainly misinterpretations of the furious, fire-and-brimstone essay I translated. The prophetic voice, speaking in the first person plural, explicitly recognizes the “internationally lawful” Israel of 1948.

True, the voice is at points unclear in separating policy recommendations from the expected bad consequences of ignoring same. In my reading, however, the message is that the Israeli state we know today is no longer sustainable, having forfeited its legitimacy in the eyes of the world:

This is an uplifting prospect, the prophetic voice suggests, for it signals the abolition of apartheid-like injustice:

Let us briefly pause for a historical sidebar:

The ensuing liberation struggle was predominantly non-violent yet eventually succeeded in ending oppression, with equal rights for all featherless bipeds entrenched in a new constitution. By no means did it involve the physical “obliteration” of South Africa. This is therefore an optimistic forecast, though as Robert Sharp and many others (including Norwegian debaters) rightly complain, it is not made explicit.

Later on, the prophet cautions that the demise of Israel in its current form could also come about in a darker way:

Thus, if Israel elects to continue its self-destructive policies of occupation and aggression, then the international community is not obliged to prop it up when the tables ultimately turn. This does not, however, amount to “calling for the obliteration of Israel.”

Furthermore, it is unclear to what ‘occupied areas’ refers. If this is simply the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Sheeba Farms, the Golan Heights, and so forth, then the statement is relatively unproblematic.

Otherwise, however — and arguably, in any case — the prophet should not limit himself to petition the victors to give the Jewish refugees free passage (plus “milk and honey”). He should councel letting them stay as citizens of a new and better state, be it called Israel, Palestine, or whatever. Possibly the author has here been tempted to echo his literary model:

Be that as it may, this is a serious flaw in Gaarder’s cri du coeur. And it is not the only one. Many critics, including yours truly, have noted how it lumps together a questionable construal of Judaic religion with the state of Israel. It is fair to say that Gaarder has hardly gone out of its way to avoid misunderstanding of his real intent.

Then again, as the Jewish Norwegian journalist Mona Levin — the essay’s fiercest detractor — agrees, that intent is not anti-Semitic.

One last point. Part of my own motivation for translating this piece was to show the extent to which Israel’s international image, outside of the American bubble, is in tatters. Before the ongoing demolition of Lebanon over two abducted soldiers and the engineered humanitarian crisis in Gaza, I doubt that it would have seen print in a major newspaper.

Accordingly, if one insists that it does reflect genuine anti-Semitism, then it also illustrates how Israel’s behavior qua self-declared “Jewish State” unfortunately makes fertile ground for such. As I put it in a previous post:

But that is of course a fact which Flytrap Sullivan and his ilk would never dream of acknowledging.

Update: Gaarder reflects on his essay in an interview with Aftenposten.

This isn’t funny anymore. Actually, it ceased to be so quite a while ago.

After some 3,149 Iraqis were killed in June alone and 20,000 citizens of Baghdad — mostly the last tattered remains of the middle class — were driven out by militias during the last ten days of July, Chimpoleon takes stock of the situation:

Incredible. By standard scholarly definitions, there has been civil war in Iraq since 2004. And if democracy was “born quickly,” it was either stillborn or strangled in the cradle.

A few days ago, this entity that passes for a US President diagnosed the dramatic conditions a bit farther west:

I cannot improve on Matt Yglesias’ comment:

Obviously that assumes he was aware of it in the first place. Another possibility is that his lips just mindlessly mouthed some staff-prepared script. If that sounds far-fetched, consider this:

Sorry, I don’t know how to properly comment on that. I just don’t.

What I do know, and what in fact any fool with a newspaper must know, is that the New Middle East ™ and adjacent areas are turning out less than stellar under the guiding hand of this monstrous man-child. Here’s Daniel Levy summing it up in Haaretz:

Oh, and Lebanon — that tiny place with the adorable “Cedar Revolution” which until a month ago was a showcase for the “domino theory of democracy” — has been reduced to a smoking crater whose hitherto pro-American PM now talks like a Hezbollah spokesman without a beard.

Bush and his regime are a cosmic joke. Yet it’s been a long time since laughter was even possible.

Update: God help us. See Fred Kaplan on the Killer Chimp’s most recent press conference. To make this individual POTUS was an insult to the entire human race.

Nearly three out of four Americans think Iraqis are better off now than before the invasion, a survey shows.

Iraqi blogger Riverbend might beg to differ. She describes how Baghdad’s middle class is being expelled by Mahdist goons:

This takes the surprise out of the fact that, in a survey carried out this April by the International Republican Institute, only 1% of Iraqis said they trusted American and coalition forces for their personal protection (and that poll was taken before a certain ‘incident’ was known).

Mahdist militiamen in Baghdad

Nor is it rocket science to see why, as even the Wall Street Journal admits, “the middle class — upon whom so much depends — is fleeing Iraq in numbers.” A point worth noting for the 55 percent of Americans who, according the the aforementioned poll, think “history will give the U.S. credit for bringing freedom and democracy” to Iraq. For without an urban, educated middle class, Iraqi freedom and democracy remain a chimera.

It’s the last remains of this middle class that are going now. Here’s a BBC report from 2002:

Riverbend continues:

As documented in this HRW background paper, Iraq ranked among the most progressive Arab societies with respect to women’s rights from the 1968 Baathist coup until the Gulf War. Gender equality was enshrined in the constitution; there were compulsory schooling and free higher education for both genders; and the law ensured equal employment opportunities in the public sector. However, the tide turned after 1991, as a weakened dictator traded off his modernizing vision for religious support, especially among reactionary Shias. Additionally, UN sanctions hit women disproportionately, just as they decimated the middle class.

After the second US-led war on Iraq, the wheel has now turned full cycle.

Not depressing enough, you say? Try this fresh report in the Observer:

What’s not to like? Reading on:

I think this goes to show that three out of four Americans can be wrong.

However much Israel’s war of choice is sold to its Jewish majority as a war of necessity, this doesn’t work with Arabs. Least of all with Israel’s own 1.3 million Arab citizens, many of whom are also victims of the increasingly savage missile attacks, and nearly all of whom watch Arabic TV stations.

These Israeli Arabs, or Palestinians, were disenchanted with the “Jewish state” of Israel at the outset. This is due not only to solidarity with their kin in the occupied areas. Nor is it only due to the apartheid-like law reserving 94 percent of land for Jewish purchase only; nor to the one excluding Muslims from serving in the military (thus limiting their eligibility for social benefits) as well as in the police, the security services, and the prisons (though not as inmates); nor to a host of discriminatory statutes ranging from a 2003 “emergency regulation” restricting the right of Arabs to naturalize their families, to lower children’s allowances for non-Jews. It is due to the sum of all these, and more generally, to systematically occupying the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder:

These data are from 2000, but things are hardly better now. For further reading, see this book entitled The Other Side of Israel, written by an Israeli Jew who, as it happens, grew up in apartheid South Africa.

On top of this one now has the simmering resentment over the brutal, meaningless destruction of Lebanon, with its consequent missile rain over Arab and Jew alike.

It’s common in Israel to talk about an ‘Arab population bomb’; indeed, several of the aforementioned discriminatory practices are justified in terms of such. But unless a constructive ‘Operation Change of Direction’ be launched, and soon, some Arab Israelis may well find themselves at their wit’s end. That could involve far uglier bombs than childbirth.

Olmert applies avant garde logic to the Kosovo conflict in order to defend his pointless atrocities:

Never mind that Israel’s onslaught on Lebanon wasn’t prompted by rocket attacks either. What stands out is that Serbia’s brutal counter-insurgency cum ethnic cleansing and the NATO effort to put an end to this — about which much can be said, but to which Olmert himself does not object — are both filed under “European attacks on Kosovo”! Fantastic!

Jostein Gaarder, the author of the global literary phenomenon Sophie’s World (printed in 26m copies in 53 languages), launches a scorching attack on Israel in Aftenposten, Norway’s paper of record. Gaarder, a historian of ideas, describes himself as a friend of the Jewish people but doubts whether Israel truly is the same. Suffice it to say that this will not appear in the New York Times anytime soon.

The form of Gaarder’s condemnation is inspired by Amos, the first Judaic prophet whose message is preserved in scroll (ca. 750 B.C.). Quoting Wikipedia: “The central idea of the book of Amos according to most scholars is that Yahweh puts his people on the same level as the nations that surround it — Yahweh expects the same morality of them all.”

Please note: the below is an unofficial translation with no connection to Jostein Gaarder. Any errors are mine alone. On the other hand, I do not endorse all the views expressed: see my postscript.

There is no turning back. It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel. We could not recognize the South African apartheid regime, nor did we recognize the Afghan Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing. We must now get used to the idea: The state of Israel in its current form is history.

We do not believe in the notion of God’s chosen people. We laugh at this people’s fancies and weep over its misdeeds. To act as God’s chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.

Limits to tolerance

There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance. We do not believe in divine promises as justification for occupation and apartheid. We have left the Middle Ages behind. We laugh uneasily at those who still believe that the God of flora, fauna, and galaxies has selected one people in particular as his favorite and given it funny stone tablets, burning bushes, and a license to kill.

We call child murderers ‘child murderers’ and will never accept that such have a divine or historic mandate excusing their outrages. We say but this: Shame on all apartheid, shame on ethnic cleansing, shame on every terrorist strike against civilians, be it carried out by Hamas, Hizballah, or the state of Israel!

Unscrupulous art of war

We acknowledge and pay heed to Europe’s deep responsibility for the plight of the Jews, for the disgraceful harassment, the pogroms, and the Holocaust. It was historically and morally necessary for Jews to get their own home. However, the state of Israel, with its unscrupulous art of war and its disgusting weapons, has massacred its own legitimacy. It has systematically flouted International Law, international conventions, and countless UN resolutions, and it can no longer expect protection from same. It has carpet bombed the recognition of the world. But fear not! The time of trouble shall soon be over. The state of Israel has seen its Soweto.

We are now at the watershed. There is no turning back. The state of Israel has raped the recognition of the world and shall have no peace until it lays down its arms.

Without defense, without skin

May spirit and word sweep away the apartheid walls of Israel. The state of Israel does not exist. It is now without defense, without skin. May the world therefore have mercy on the civilian population. For it is not civilian individuals at whom our doomsaying is directed.

We wish the people of Israel well, nothing but well, but we reserve the right not to eat Jaffa oranges as long as they taste foul and are poisonous. It was endurable to live some years without the blue grapes of apartheid.

They celebrate their triumphs

We do not believe that Israel mourns forty killed Lebanese children more than it for over three thousand years has lamented forty years in the desert. We note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs like they once cheered the scourges of the Lord as “fitting punishment” for the people of Egypt. (In that tale, the Lord, God of Israel, appears as an insatiable sadist.) We query whether most Israelis think that one Israeli life is worth more than forty Palestinian or Lebanese lives.

For we have seen pictures of little Israeli girls writing hateful greetings on the bombs to be dropped on the civilian population of Lebanon and Palestine. Little Israeli girls are not cute when they strut with glee at death and torment across the fronts.

The retribution of blood vengeance

We do not recognize the rhetoric of the state of Israel. We do not recognize the spiral of retribution of the blood vengeance with “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” We do not recognize the principle of one or a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye. We do not recognize collective punishment or population-wide diets as political weapons. Two thousand years have passed since a Jewish rabbi criticized the ancient doctrine of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

He said: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” We do not recognize a state founded on antihumanistic principles and on the ruins of an archaic national and war religion. Or as Albert Schweitzer expressed it: “Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.”

Compassion and forgiveness

We do not recognize the old Kingdom of David as a model for the 21st century map of the Middle East. The Jewish rabbi claimed two thousand years ago that the Kingdom of God is not a martial restoration of the Kingdom of David, but that the Kingdom of God is within us and among us. The Kingdom of God is compassion and forgiveness.

Two thousand years have passed since the Jewish rabbi disarmed and humanized the old rhetoric of war. Even in his time, the first Zionist terrorists were operating.

Israel does not listen

For two thousand years, we have rehearsed the syllabus of humanism, but Israel does not listen. It was not the Pharisee that helped the man who lay by the wayside, having fallen prey to robbers. It was a Samaritan; today we would say, a Palestinian. For we are human first of all — then Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. Or as the Jewish rabbi said: “And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others?” We do not accept the abduction of soldiers. But nor do we accept the deportation of whole populations or the abduction of legally elected parliamentarians and government ministers.

We recognize the state of Israel of 1948, but not the one of 1967. It is the state of Israel that fails to recognize, respect, or defer to the internationally lawful Israeli state of 1948. Israel wants more; more water and more villages. To obtain this, there are those who want, with God’s assistance, a final solution to the Palestinian problem. The Palestinians have so many other countries, certain Israeli politicians have argued; we have only one.

The USA or the world?

Or as the highest protector of the state of Israel puts it: “May God continue to bless America.” A little child took note of that. She turned to her mother, saying: “Why does the President always end his speeches with ‘God bless America’? Why not, ‘God bless the world’?”

Then there was a Norwegian poet who let out this childlike sigh of the heart: “Why doth Humanity so slowly progress?” It was he that wrote so beautifully of the Jew and the Jewess. But he rejected the notion of God’s chosen people. He personally liked to call himself a Muhammedan.

Calm and mercy

We do not recognize the state of Israel. Not today, not as of this writing, not in the hour of grief and wrath. If the entire Israeli nation should fall to its own devices and parts of the population have to flee the occupied areas into another diaspora, then we say: May the surroundings stay calm and show them mercy. It is forever a crime without mitigation to lay hand on refugees and stateless people.

Peace and free passage for the evacuating civilian population no longer protected by a state. Fire not at the fugitives! Take not aim at them! They are vulnerable now like snails without shells, vulnerable like slow caravans of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees, defenseless like women and children and the old in Qana, Gaza, Sabra, and Chatilla. Give the Israeli refugees shelter, give them milk and honey!

Let not one Israeli child be deprived of life. Far too many children and civilians have already been murdered.

Postscript by Sirocco: I am quite ambivalent about this piece because of how it seems to lay the crimes of Israel at the feet of Judaism, implying that the Jewish religion has failed to absorb the humanism and universalism of Christianity. I think a more apt perspective is the following.

Yet its blind patronage may not last forever. And without it, Israel will reap the whirlwind.

Update: Here is my translation of Gaarder’s follow-up article, wherein he clarifies his stance.

When the dust has settled, the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon will commence. It will soon become the IDF’s waking nightmare, to be inherited by any international stabilization force dumb enough to venture in.

Why? The short answer is that occupation of a hostile territory always is hell. The somewhat longer answer can be couched in terms of order and chaos.

It’s inherently far easier to create chaos than order. Because there are infinitely more ways for things to be disorganized than to be organized, tearing down is far quicker and less taxing than building up. South Beirut took twenty-two years to even partly rebuild and an equal number of days to turn back into refuse.

Now, in a conventional war of attrition, the aim is to disrupt the enemy’s organization and infrastructure, and the strongest force is the one that can do so most decisively. However, if the victor wants to occupy the conquered territory, his task is reversed: he must nourish order instead of destroying it, and he must do so amidst the rubble he himself created.

This gives the insurgency the advantage, not just because it’s easier to destroy than to build, but also because an army is designed to do the former.

Furthermore, in war it is generally not enough to contain the enemy: you have to harm him too. But when the occupying army strikes back to protect the order it seeks to impose, it usually fans the flames of disorder by antagonizing the civilian population.

This problem is exacerbated insofar as the insurgent force:

* has a decentralized command structure, making it hard to deal a decisive blow;
* is integrated with the civilian population, blending in with same;
* is expected by the civilians to be around longer than the occupying force;
* perceives itself, and is perceived by the civilians, as directly defending the homeland, while the occupiers at most perceive themselves as indirectly defending theirs;
* consists of fighters who fear failure more than death;
* is well-prepared and can be resupplied from outside.

On all of these variables, Hizbollah scores extremely highly.

The IDF is so hated that it is going to take serious losses before an international force arrives, if it ever does. As to the latter, it will be less hated (anything else would be tough to achieve) but also less motivated; and above all, the contributing nations will inevitably be far less prepared to take losses.

This occupation has the potential to make Afghanistan resemble a chamber music concert at a daycare center for the elderly. It is bizarre to see European countries like France and Denmark even thinking of signing up. The only two bodies of people I would like to see deployed into this meat-grinder are the Knesset and the US Congress; the latter with ‘410-8′ tattooed on their foreheads.

Photos of Beirut, three weeks apart.

The most recent one, to the right, is the new Middle East.

What is the crossbreed of the IDF and post-structuralism? Oppression you can’t comprehend.

A chilling article by Eyal Weizman reveals an unlikely migration of ideas from the Left Bank of the Seine to the West Bank of the Jordan:

“This is why,” explains the erudite warrior, “that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls.”

In Arab culture, the boundary between private and public — the home and the street — is generally conceived more robustly than in the West. But after all, post-structuralism is all about collapsing rigid boundaries.

What Israel did and still does to Palestinian homes, it is now doing to the entire Lebanese nation, through whose walls it crashed nearly a month ago. A million have been hoarded “inside one of the rooms” on pain of death.

Yet it isn’t cost-free to retrain a combat army for brutalizing civilians with a sugar-coating of outdated po-mo jargon. This helps account for why the IDF — which Israelis trust more than any other institution — is choking on a rag-tag militia of at most some 5,000 men.

Somehow I doubt that Deleuze and Lyotard will be of use to them there.

A new report by HRW confirms what has been evident for the last three weeks.

Unsurprisingly, most in the Haaretz talkback section take a different tack (I don’t even want to know what they are saying in the rightwing rags). Here is one characteristic uttering by one Shmuel Goldstein:

Yeah, why don’t you go do that. Give Dr. Karadžić my regards.

By all accounts, Israel is gripped by nationalistic war fever, but even so a handful of sane voices can be discerned through the maniacal abuse of war drums. Below are excerpts of two opinion pieces in Haaretz (where else?) that deserve to be read in full.

What an agonizing hangover the war-mongering majority will experience when the intoxication passes and they wake up to the reality of what they have done.

From the Angry Arab. I don’t know whether this is true, but it wouldn’t surprise me:

This calls to mind a little known story which Steven Spielberg left out in his movie Munich: The only act of international terrorism ever committed in my country, Norway, was done by Mossad in 1973, when their hit team murdered Ahmed Bouchiki, an innocent Moroccan waiter whom they mistook for a Black September leader. The mix-up was mind-numbingly stupid, as was their attempt to get away, although some of them did escape.

Being experienced at terrorism doesn’t necessarily mean you get it right.