Saturday, April 13, 2002

In the book LI mentioned in the last post � The Siege, by Conor Cruise O�Brien � there�s a
quotation from a critic, Edward Alexander, that is much on our mind today. Alexander, glossing
a poem, exudes a telling phrase: �... the Jewish people finds itself caught in a conflict between
the covenant and the historic necessity to survive within history...�

Indeed. But we are living, just as the evangelists say, in the end time -- the time when this kind of talk, this pattern of thinking, this use of a coy theology to justify the regretable theft, the imperial murder, has collapsed in on itself, corrupted by its own sentimentality. The covenant and the historic necessity have converged; the messianism of one coincident at all points with the irrationality of the other. Covenant and historic necessity are hauled out by thugs, ultras, gunmen, and news personalities to rhetorically drape any wretched activity whatsoever that can be enforced on one set of skin and bones by another, favored set. So watch: History wrenches concrete from concrete in Jenin; history blows itself up in the marketplace in Jerusalem, and survives; then it is ambushed on the West Bank, eleven dead, and
it survives. It whispers to soldiers that wouldn�t it be a good idea to use civilians as shields to advance on terrorist nests? Its spokesman come on the radio and admire themselves and their government for sparing life and limb by not carpet bombing encampments of refugees. With malice towards none, and a few missiles towards all, here we have a perfect moral stance for our times. It is a morality that dances on its own immoral means and jeers at critics.

Well. What did we go out in the killing fields to see, kiddies? A reed broken in the wind? Or
this
:

Powell was only about a mile away when today's blast happened, about to board a helicopter for
a tour of Israel's volatile Northern border region with Lebanon. His helicopter did a turn in the sky to allow the secretary to survey firsthand the bombing site, where glass and metal mixed with body parts and a severed head across a wide area of asphalt.

Or this:


JENIN, West Bank, April 11 -- There is the Fashafsheh family. According to their relatives, the mother, father and 9-year-old son were killed when an Israeli tank fired a shell through their living room in downtown Jenin and an Israeli bulldozer plowed into the thick walls of their home, smashing it down on top of them.
There is Rina Zayyed, 15, who said she was struck in the chest by a bullet as she sat at home
with her father and brother. An Israeli helicopter gunship opened fire on a man in the street below who was recharging a cell phone with his car battery, she recounted, and a fragment hit her.

And there is Khadra Samara, 33, who said she shepherded more than a dozen children as she fled from house to house to house in the adjacent Jenin refugee camp, under repeated assault from Israeli bulldozers and missiles that, house by house, nearly toppled the walls on top of them

Well, those are definitely some stories we could have gone out to see. But they aren't stories of much interest to, say, the New Republic. This week the magazine runs two stories on the Jenin operation, and both of the stories are pumped. The smell of massacre in the morning agrees with these guys. However, in the tumult of emotions attendent on seeing the enemy and his wife smashed by the finest American weaponry, the writers come to two completely opposite conclusions: one that Hamas� infrastructure has escaped the Israeli sweep,the other that it has been destroyed by it.

Both, however, conclude that the Palestinian will and ability to retaliate has been severely impeded. Both were written before the bus bombing, and before yesterdays return of the repressed bombing in Jerusalem.

To everything, there is a spin, it says in Ecclesiastes. The spin in preparation was that Sharon, in spite of petty criticism, launched an absolute operation that worked. The new justification will be that the Palestinians haven't been tamed yet. Robert Wright, with whom LI usually has no truck, had a sensible column about this in Slate last week which predicted, wrongly it turned out, that Sharon's hardcore strategy would pay off in the short run, and diminish the likelihood of suicide bombing. The two final grafs in his piece,consonant with that prediction, and with the puppylike excitement of the TNR reporters, makes a very LI-like point:

"And we shouldn't be beguiled by short-run success. If terrorist bombings indeed abate after the current incursion, prepare yourself for the inevitable Charles Krauthammer column touting the success of Sharon's iron-fist policy. It's a natural sequel to Krauthammer's column belittling the significance of the "Arab Street" after the Street failed to boil over and depose any Arab regimes in the wake of the Afghanistan war. In both cases, the fallacy is the same: failing to see 1) that metastasizing hatred can work slowly, beneath the surface; 2) that, increasingly, hatred needn't be mediated by a regime (or a quasi-regime, like the Palestinian Authority) to be lethal; and 3) that the lethal leveraging of hatred�the hatred-death conversion factor�will probably grow exponentially over the next five to 10 years, as lethal technologies advance and spread. (Hamas recently moved from crude fertilizer bombs to sophisticated plastic explosives.)

Unfortunately, Krauthammer's time horizons mirror those of many politicians in a democracy. If your goal is to keep your poll numbers up for a few months or even years, it may pay to be crudely, crowd-pleasingly tough on terrorists while avoiding the messy and frustrating spectacle of addressing terrorism's causes: Just do the immediately popular things and hope that the long-run cost of your negligence doesn't show up until your successor takes office. If that is your ambition, Ariel Sharon is a fine role model."



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