In Siegebreakers, all of the main characters face a serious, and very concrete, problem: getting in and out of Gaza.
Some are trying to get out, and to do that, they have to go through Israel – through Erez Crossing, which is a scene out of a dystopian future. A few years ago I interviewed a doctor who had made the crossing. He talked a bit about what it was like coming and going from Israel, but I also put a description together (for the book) from that and a few other interviews of what it is like to go through Erez (I went through Erez myself in 2002, but that was before it was rebuilt into its current form):
Laila made the long walk through the wire-encaged sidewalk, like an enclosure at a zoo, to the first turnstile. Israel modified these turnstiles to reduce the space between the arms, to press harder against Palestinian bodies. Remote-controlled, of course, by the occupier’s security who watched her progress through the tunnel from above. Through the turnstile — if the invisible occupier chose to open it, by remote control — then, a big steel door. Also, remote-controlled. Once it opened, there was another long, outdoor passageway to the terminal. She rolled her bag along behind her, her shoulders slouching when she forgot herself, but when she remembered, with her back arched and her chin up. She faced the sliding steel doors at the entrance to the terminal, waited in suspense for the occupier’s decision to open or close it. They opened it for her, so she could go through the metal detector and the next set of turnstiles. She put her luggage on the carousel and it disappeared into another room, where someone working for the occupier went through her every possession. Then, the occupier used a scanner to create a three-dimensional model of every centimetre of her body… More remote-controlled doors. More modified metal turnstiles. Laila claimed her bag and went to face the occupier’s passport inspectors, who sat in blast-proof booths. She handed the inspector her documents...
I won’t spoil what happens next, but let’s continue on the problem of getting in and out of Gaza. Anyone trying to get goods in or out of Gaza has to use a different high-tech remote-controlled crossing, Kerem Abu Salem. The description of how that crossing works is assembled from the organization Gisha.org. Play a round of Safe Passage, if you’re up for the frustration.
And then there’s Rafah, the crossing to and from Egypt. Taking a look at Rafah is where you see how much a participant Egypt’s dictatorship is in the siege of Gaza.
Sea and air? Not happening. I wouldn’t even have my fictional characters try. Some years ago I was asked why people don’t just fly into Gaza through Yasser Arafat International Airport. Grand opening: November 1998. Grand closing (via Israeli bombs): October 2000.
The Great March of Return, which has shaped Gaza’s politics for over a year now and which is one event I didn’t anticipate in Siegebreakers, is about all of the rights that are denied to Palestinians, but it is deeply about the fundamental right to come and go, the right to not be born and live one’s whole life in a prison, which is Israel’s (and Egypt’s, and the US, and Canada, and all of the allies collaborating in the siege) design for every single person in Gaza (children included). Abby Martin’s new film, Gaza Fights for Freedom, filmed in large part by Palestinian journalists from Gaza, can show you what it looks like.
Those people marching to the fence every week? They’re the real-life Siegebreakers.
The oppressed in my novel Siegebreakers spend their entire page counts trying to resolve the military problem that seems to hold in several of today’s seemingly endless conflicts – whether it’s Israel’s wars on Gaza, in which the book is set, or it’s the Saudi dictatorship’s war on Yemen. In both cases, the more powerful side (Israel and Saudi Arabia), with all the backing and blessing that the US can provide, cannot seem to militarily defeat their outnumbered, outgunned opponents (the Palestinian resistance in Gaza – referred to simply as “Hamas” in the West, and the so-called “Houthis” in Yemen). So, the stronger side reverts to aerial bombing, destruction of civilian infrastructure, killing large numbers of civilians from the air, siege, blockade, and deliberate, genocidal destruction of the economy.
Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon had a similar character: As it had decades before, Israel bombed the cities and invaded on the ground. Israel’s ground forces were defeated by their Lebanese opponents, Hizbollah. So they withdrew their ground forces and bombed the country for several weeks. In Israeli media there is frequent talk about the next war with Hizbollah, which is supposedly ‘inevitable’ (as is the next war with Gaza, as is war with Iran, etc.) In this hypothetical next war, Israeli leaders have pledged much more thorough bombing of Lebanon, including the usual promises to send it back into the stone age (the idea that these are war crimes seems no longer relevant: it may become relevant again). For their part, Hizbollah has warned that the next war won’t take place in Lebanon alone.
Returning to Gaza, the battle scenes in Siegebreakers are based on Israel’s 2014 war in the territory, and are portrayed, as the saying goes, from both sides. Ari’s experience as a soldier in the Israeli Army is drawn from various sources, but I highly recommend the report This is How We Fought in Gaza, by the group Breaking the Silence. If you find what Ari sees in Gaza shocking, read that report and you’ll see that, as I wrote in the Afterword, the most outrageous things in Siegebreakers are the true things. On the other side, Nasser’s experience fighting the invaders in Gaza draws from, among many other sources, Max Blumenthal’s book, the 51 Day War. Blumenthal traveled to Gaza shortly after the assault, while memories were still fresh, and documented what the war looked like on the Palestinian side. I got the chance to praise him for the book in a podcast in May 2019.
In Siegebreakers, the impasse gets broken in a particular way. I can’t tell you how, despite my love of everything to do with spoilers.
In a slightly better world, one with a powerful anti-war and anti-imperialist bloc within the US, these military impasses would lead to more energetic diplomatic initiatives. But in our world, there’s no need for diplomacy if you have America on your side (which apparently is cheaper and cheaper to attain). The fictional Siegebreakers rely on a few American dissident super-sleuths. The real-life Siegebreakers are part of a multi-decade slog to build an peace movement strong enough to change the current equation.
[This is one of a series of blog posts about the politics of my 2019 thriller novel, Siegebreakers, in which a team of heroes battles to break the siege on Gaza. Much of the politics and technology of the book is discussed and referenced in the Afterword: here I’ll take on specific issues once in a while and extend the discussion.]
One of the goals I had in writing Siegebreakers was to “de-exoticize” Palestinians, and along the way, Arabs and Muslims. The best way to explain what I mean is through an example.
In Siegebreakers, you won’t hear any of the Arab-speaking characters say “Allah”, “Inshallah”, “Ya Allah”/”Allahu Akbar”, or “Mashallah”. Instead, I use the most colloquial English translations: “God”, “If God wills it”, “Oh God”, or “Thank God”. In Western writing, media, and pop culture, using Allah instead of translating to God, or even using literal translations like “God is Great” instead of just “Oh God”, is exoticizing. It creates a distance between the Arab-speaking character and the English-speaking reader, and one that is unnecessary.
I say it’s an unnecessary distance because there are times when real cultural differences exist and come into play in interactions between people – on a human level and on a political one. But in the case of “Allah” and “God”, these words are used the exact same way by Arab-speakers and English-speakers, at the exact same times and in the same contexts. There isn’t a cultural difference between someone who sees something horrific and says “Ya Allah” in reaction and someone who says “Oh God”. It’s an artificial difference.
One way that Arabs great each other in the morning is to say “Sabah al Khair”, to which the response is “Sabah al Nur”. I’ve read one book (I won’t say which or by whom, no need to get into that here) where the author (a Westerner) renders the Palestinian characters saying “Morning of Joy,” and the response as “Morning of Light”.
What’s wrong with “Good Morning”?
That’s what I’d call exoticization – it really does just mean “Good Morning”.
Like so much in Siegebreakers (and I’d argue every other piece of art you’ve ever read, I’m just more honest about it) there’s a political agenda behind the de-exoticization. The distance between Western readers and even fictional Palestinians is part of what makes Westerners accept the injustices that are happening in Israel/Palestine. Exoticization extends that distance.
I don’t de-exoticize everywhere. Elsewhere in the book, reminding readers of the science-fiction nature of high-tech warfare and surveillance conducted on Palestinians by Israel is done through science-fiction like world-building techniques. The best exoticizer of the present that I know is author William Gibson. Decades ago, Gibson wrote science fiction (with a lot of implicit critique of corporate power and capitalism and where things were headed with computers and the internet…), whereas his more recent novels are set in the present, though they are still adventure books with extensive world-building, science, and technology in them. It’s just that our reality is science fiction now, so Gibson doesn’t have to speculate so much as describe the present.
When I went to Occupied Palestine in 2002, I felt my lack of Arabic and decided to remedy it (not entirely successfully, as you’ll see). Back in Toronto I took three years of university Arabic – it was my good luck to have the same Palestinian linguist for a professor even though it was at two different universities over several years. I got an A in Beginning Arabic, a B in Intermediate, and a C+ in Advanced (probably the plus was pity – I had too much going on by the time I was in advanced Arabic to apply myself properly). When I thought about how to render some of the Arabic conversations that I imagined, I heard my professor’s voice: she insisted that Allah was just the Arabic word for “God”, and that we translate it as such. So it’s not just a political or literary imperative: de-exoticization also keeps me out of trouble with my Arabic prof.
We are gonna launch Siegebreakers the evening of October 4th, at the marvelous Another Story Bookshop in Toronto, at 7pm. There’ll be a special guest there in addition to me, talking about the real Gaza. See you there!
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
I wrote Siegebreakers because I can’t liberate Gaza or Palestine, but I can dream about it. I wanted it to be a proximate dream, a dream of the next step from now, not a distant dream that depends on too many unpredictable things going right. I wanted to write about how just a few things going right could change the whole thing—to show, through fiction, the real fragility of the apartheid system that always seems so invincible.
Gaza is besieged. Its children are systematically malnourished. Its economy has been under an active program of what scholar Sara Roy called “de-development” for decades. Israeli drones watch everything that happens. Israeli towers guard the wall that surrounds the enclave on three sides. On the side facing the sea, Israeli gunboats shoot at its fishers. At their own discretion, Israeli warplanes and artillery drop bombs where they please, always with the most convincing of pretexts. Sometimes they are solemnly warned by other Western politicians to ensure their bombs are not excessive for their self-defense. Other times, it is the Palestinians who are told that the bombings are their own fault.
It should have been a sleepy beach town, a place where oranges are grown and where kids play soccer and tourists come to feel their feet in the sand. Instead it is an experiment in human despair, its population imprisoned and punished for the crime of being Palestinian.
When I went to Gaza in 2002, I had just visited Jenin. The Israelis had turned most of the center of the camp to rubble. I saw the Israelis blow up a bank, for some reason I still don’t understand. But Gaza was still scarier. The first thing I saw after crossing at Erez was an Israeli armored bulldozer, bulldozing orange trees. I paused to take a picture and was immediately told to put the camera away and move on—from a loudspeaker I hadn’t noticed until after I’d been given the order.
It’s been 17 years since that visit under the auspices of the International Solidarity Movement. ISM had been inspired by previous solidarity movements, perhaps starting with those Americans who traveled to Nicaragua to try to bring attention to the U.S.-backed Contra insurgency in the 1980s, part of the Central American wars that Bernie Sanders has recently—and to his credit—not apologized for opposing. In the 1990s, the Zapatistas in Chiapas further developed the ideas and practices of international solidarity with their observer programs. International observers in Zapatista communities were obliged to study the Zapatista struggle and to think of solidarity as a reciprocal practice, not a gift from benevolent Westerners to the struggling poor people in the global South. People who travel from the global North were always asked by the Zapatistas: what are you doing for the struggle back where you live?
All struggles against injustice on this small planet are intertwined, whether we see the links or not. With Palestine it takes real effort to miss the links: the U.S. Congress and other state legislatures pass bills to oppose the small, nonviolent BDS movement whose goals are to sanction Israel until it complies with international law; Ilhan Omar is made to apologize for mentioning that there is an Israel lobby that tries to influence U.S. policy in Israel’s favor; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez apologizes for even speaking to Jeremy Corbyn, who in turn is demonized as an anti-semite even though everyone knows that he is a lifelong anti-racist whose real crime is supporting Palestinian rights. As it walls in and starves the Palestinians on all sides, Israel receives billions of dollars every year in aid, and many politicians in the West fall over themselves to embrace it (and condemn the Palestinians and their advocates). Palestine is where Israel’s high-tech arms industry tests out its anti-civilian weapons, exporting them as “battle-tested” in the laboratory of the occupation. Whether you want universal health care, school desegregation, for children not to die in concentration camps, or a Green New Deal, you won’t be able to sidestep the issue, tactically back down, or diplomatically leave it off the table for now. The chosen rhetorical weapon to attack socialist, democratic, redistributionist, and anti-racist leaders is Israel, whether it’s Corbyn in the UK or Omar and others in the U.S. There is no understanding how the empire works today without understanding the Palestinian struggle.
The empire wants the total dehumanization of the Palestinians, especially those Palestinians who resist. If they can be dehumanized, they can be isolated. If they can be isolated, then Israel is free to do what it wants to them. And since what Israel wants is the land without the people, the idea is to make the people go away. The policy, enabled by nearly all Western politicians and media, is genocidal.
Palestinian artists and writers do the work of humanizing: Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin is in the literary genre; Mischa Hiller’s Shake Off is a dark thriller. Both writers show you the exterior worlds and the interior lives of extraordinary Palestinian characters living through brutal times.
For leftists, fiction is always part of the trade. A generation ago, Ghassan Kanafani, a political leader assassinated by Israel in 1972, wrote Men in the Sun and several other indispensable political novels of Palestine. Here in our time, Arundhati Roy writes both nonfiction essays analyzing the dynamics of war, empire, and capitalism and novels that take you along with people living through the same dynamics. Roy’s latest book The Ministry of Utmost Happiness ends with the creation of a small and fragile utopia, a community of people taking care of one another—in a cemetery.
Utopias, big and small, have a special place in leftist writing. Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who has said that “science is now a leftism,” writes utopias because “anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines, but utopias are hard, and important, because we need to imagine what it might be like if we did things well enough to say to our kids, we did our best, this is about as good as it was when it was handed to us, take care of it and do better. Some kind of narrative vision of what we’re trying for as a civilization.” Robinson was talking to another utopian writer, Terry Bisson, whose extraordinary novel Fire on the Mountain imagines what American history would have been like had John Brown succeeded in his raid on Harpers Ferry. Australian leftist writer Tamara Pearson concludes her novel The Butterfly Prison—which showcased how dystopic life can be for poor people in the West—with the struggling characters winning a revolution and starting to build a better world.
When I wrote Siegebreakers it was important to me for the titular characters to succeed beyond what we have seen in the real world, for reasons similar to those articulated by Robinson: the siege is crushing the people who live under it, but it is crushing all of our imaginations. It is only twenty years old, and it can be broken. If we can’t do it easily right now, we can at least imagine it. We certainly won’t be able to do something we can’t imagine. I want at least imagining a free Palestine and a free Gaza to become commonplace.
My other goal in writing Siegebreakers was to go beyond humanizing Palestinians and lionize them. I’m as much of a pop culture critic as anyone, but I grew up in the 1980s watching Transformers cartoons and reading Marvel comics, reading Encyclopedia Brown mysteries as a kid and Sherlock Holmes in my teens. I played Dungeons and Dragons well into adulthood and I still read every Jack Reacher novel within three days of it coming out. As a fan, I am obsessed with superpowered heroes facing even more powerful villains and winning because of cleverness and courage.
North Americans are conditioned to accept quite a bit of violence from our heroes. Jack Reacher kills more people than the villains in his novels, as author Lee Child famously said. In real life, Palestinians are always asked to be nonviolent, while Israel starves and kills them freely. At least in fiction, I wanted to read a thriller where the action heroes were fighting occupation. Ghassan Kanafani said in an interview that history was a struggle of the strong against the weak. But North American fictional heroes aren’t weak: they’re strong. For me, Siegebreakerswas a study of heroism. Was the idea of a hero pure propaganda meant to sell toys and militarism to the younger version of me? Or is it an important concept that I could reclaim and map onto different contexts? I’ve concluded it’s the latter. Heroes are real: a hero is someone who takes risks and makes sacrifices for others. In the context of Israel/Palestine, heroism means facing a superior force (Nasser, the Palestinian protagonist of Siegebreakers), it means sacrificing belonging in one’s country to stop oppression (Ari, the Israeli character), it means getting involved when your privilege means you could just look away (Maria, the American character).
I am not Palestinian or Israeli and I don’t claim any rights to represent anyone. Often with Palestine, making it a Muslim, or Arab, or Palestinian, or Israeli, or Jewish issue has been another way of trying to sweep it under the rug.
In any case, to me, writing is never about speaking for people—unless you’re the official spokesperson for an organization writing official communications—much less claiming their struggle. You don’t have to be what you are writing (only memoir can do that). You just have to know what you’re talking about. Readers who know can decide what they think of Siegebreakers.
Artists do things because they are moved and hope to move others. What Israel, with ample help from the U.S., the UK, the EU and Canada, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and so many others, is doing to the Palestinians breaks many people’s hearts, including mine. So does what the Palestinians do to live and take care of each other in the face of it all. If it isn’t breaking yours, maybe my book can help.
The Ossington Circle Episode 32: The Wrong Story – Palestine, Israel, and the Media with Greg Shupak
I talk to Greg Shupak, author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media. We use the Israel/Palestine story as a launching point for a technical discussion about tropes, frames, narratives, and propaganda, and about why and how to argue against it all.
The Ossington Circle Episode 31: The Management of Savagery with Max Blumenthal
I talk to Max Blumenthal, author of The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State fueled the rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump. We begin with the latest coup attempt in Venezuela and go from there to talk about anti-imperialist politics, the need to rebuild an antiwar and anti-imperialist mentality, and the hunger for such a perspective – as evidenced by the positive reaction to Max’s book – despite it being pushed away from the mainstream.
Source: Independent Media Institute This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Who
can we believe? Political parties and partisan organizations now
present not only their own opinions but, as the old joke goes, their own
facts as well. Are the Palestinians being shot at the Gaza fence trying
to invade Israel, as the Israeli Army shooting them claims, or are they
trying to protest their confinement in the open-air prison in which
they are being slowly starved, as their spokespeople argue? Is
Venezuela’s president Maduro a dictator, as Trump says, or did he win a
fair election, as the country’s electoral council states?
The
news reader faces diametrically opposed versions of truth, and on
matters of life and death. A natural instinct would be to look for
neutral, non-partisan voices—to find arbiters of truth that are not on
one side or another, but seek only to adhere to matters of high
principle. And what principle is higher than that of human rights, the
idea that we all have rights solely because of our common humanity?
Surely in the fog created by self-seeking politicians, armed groups that
use deception as a weapon of war, and careerist journalists who climb
the ladder by serving the powerful, organizations dedicated to human
rights—like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—can serve as beacons of light.
Sadly,
they cannot. The very authority that human rights organizations own,
their appearance of principle and neutrality, has become a commodity too
valuable for the powerful to pass up. The result? Human rights
organizations have sacrificed their credibility and become a
sophisticated part of the U.S. foreign policy machine—or, to put it more
bluntly, a part of the U.S. empire. Things have been this way for
longer than most “people of conscience,” to use a human rights word,
realize.
In his 2010 book Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights,
author James Peck describes how Cold War U.S. officials searched for an
ideological slogan that could rival the appeals to equality and
anti-imperialism that were offered to the world’s downtrodden by
communist revolutionaries. Anti-communism worked well enough at home,
but it was a negative slogan—against communism, sure, but what would the
U.S. be for? U.S. president Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor
Zbigniew Brzezinski argued in a letter to Carter that a U.S.-based,
quasi-governmental human rights foundation could promote “a worldwide
constituency for human rights,” while being “insulated from direct
dependence” on the United States, providing a voice “independent from,
and in some cases more credible than, the U.S. government.” A broad
definition of human rights, Brzezinski argued, would “retain for us the
desirable identification with a human cause whose time has come.”
Human Rights Watch
(called Helsinki Watch at its founding) came to serve exactly this
purpose. Peck writes that in the 1970s “as Helsinki Watch worked closely
with dissidents in the USSR and Eastern Europe, it found itself
emulating long-standing American government practices.”
Amnesty International
took a more independent path, focusing on specific practices like
torture, political prisoners, and genocide. In doing so, one of its
founders argued, Amnesty appealed to those “tired of the polarized
thinking which is the result of the Cold War… but who are deeply
concerned with those who are suffering simply because they are
suffering.” But despite this beginning of trying to find and appeal to
universals and avoid contentious and partisan issues, Amnesty quickly
found itself in the middle of just such a controversy: according to
Amnesty’s definition, prisoners of conscience could not be advocates of
violence; Nelson Mandela hadn’t renounced violence;
therefore Mandela wasn’t a prisoner of conscience. In this way, Amnesty
ended up on the wrong side of one of the most historic struggles of the
time.
In
practice, these human rights organizations consistently find themselves
on the side of the empire, despite the contradictions and contortions
that such a stance requires.
Amnesty failed to give Chelsea Manning the “prisoner of conscience” designation. Amnesty representatives told journalist Joe Emersberger in 2013
that its investigation was ongoing, and that it wasn’t sure if Manning
had “released information in a ‘responsible manner,’” and wasn’t sure if
the government was punishing her “in order to prevent public knowledge
of human rights abuses.” By contrast, Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez,
who led multiple violent coup attempts against the government, was
quickly given prisoner of conscience status by Amnesty. Were Lopez’s
violent coup attempts less violent than Mandela’s refusal to condemn
anti-apartheid violence? Were his coup attempts conducted in a more
“responsible manner” than Manning’s whistleblowing?
In 2006, Jonathan Cook pointed out how Human Rights Watch
researcher Peter Bouckaert told the New York Times that “it’s perfectly
clear that Hezbollah is directly targeting civilians, and that their
aim is to kill Israeli civilians. We don’t accuse the Israeli army of
deliberately trying to kill civilians… so there is a difference in
intent between the two sides.” Cook pointed out that “just as Bouckaert
is apparently sure that he can divine Israel’s intentions in the war,
and that they were essentially benign, he is equally convinced that he
knows Hizbullah’s intentions, and that they were malign. Whatever the
evidence suggests—in a war in which Israel overwhelmingly killed
Lebanese civilians and is still doing so, and in which Hizbullah
overwhelmingly killed Israeli soldiers—Bouckaert knows better.”
This
is an amazing two-step process: First, the human rights organization
suggests that effects (vastly disproportionate civilian deaths) matter
less than intent. Second, the human rights organization assigns bad
intent to the weaker side and good intent to the stronger, claiming in
essence the ability to read minds. The emphasis is on (presumably
telepathically discovered) intent—which for the U.S. or its allies is
always good and for its enemies is always bad. The emphasis is away from
disproportion, since the casualty ratios of U.S. wars are monstrously
disproportionate (that is, the United States and its allies kill many
more civilians than their enemies).
Such
an argument, Cook goes on to point out, “legitimises the use of
military might by the stronger party, thereby making a nonsense of
international law and the human rights standards HRW is supposed to
uphold.”
It
also legitimizes the stronger party to focus on individual cases and
avoid discussing the numbers. When human rights organizations argue that
every individual case of torture or violation of human rights is a
crime, they are completely right. But by failing to note that one side
is killing 10, 100, or 1,000 times more than the other, they fail to
bring their readers to any conception of who is responsible for these
conflicts and where to apply pressure that could save lives.
There are more biases in practice. As the U.S.-led coup against Venezuela continues to unfold, recall HRW’s
performance last month when the organization endorsed the U.S. attempt
to force entry into Venezuela with “humanitarian aid” (Venezuela has
been accepting humanitarian aid from other countries the whole time,
while refusing aid from the U.S., citing the coup attempt). Adam Johnson
from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting noted on Twitter
that HRW “never technically endorse regime change but pass along every
misleading, distorted shred of propaganda required for regime change
then, when pressed on this, insist they’re just calling balls &
strikes.” HRW’s executive director Kenneth Roth justified the coup
attempt directly, calling it,
“sad testament to… Maduro’s destruction of Venezuelan democracy that
the opposition leader must resort to appeals to the military.” Roth’s
obsession with Venezuela has gone on for years, during which serious
violations of human rights and democracy in other Latin American
countries, notably Honduras, were neglected by HRW.
Amnesty performed little better. On its list of 10 elements
of the Venezuelan crisis, Amnesty found it in its heart to include as
the 10th and final element, the “Damaging US sanctions.” The sanctions,
which a U.S. official likened unironically to Star Wars villain Darth Vader choking someone to death using the force,
may have deserved top billing, given its effects, which now extend to
the theft by the U.S. and UK of billions of dollars of funds belonging
to Venezuelans—harming Venezuela’s oil production, its energy sector,
and even its health system.
The U.S. campaign against Venezuela today echoes the campaign to overthrow Salvador Allende in 1973, when Nixon ordered the CIA director to “bring the Chilean economy under Allende to its knees,” and when the U.S. ambassador to Chile told Henry Kissinger, “Not a nut or bolt will be allowed to reach Chile under Allende. Once Allende comes to power we shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to the utmost deprivation and poverty, a policy designed for a long time to come to accelerate the hard features of a Communist society” (quoted on Peck p. 57).
Inconsistencies
in practice are matched by problems of human rights theory, as Amnesty
and HRW are not against aggressive war on principle. The post–World War
II international legal framework defined aggressive war as the supreme
crime from which all other crimes of the Nazi regime followed; the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared social and economic
rights to be human rights. But past executive director Aryeh Neier of
HRW argued that “the concept of economic and social rights is profoundly
undemocratic” and that HRW “has never labeled any party to any conflict
as an aggressor, holding that the concept of aggression is poorly
defined. As Israel and the United States
argued at the Rome conference in 1998… it is impossible to come up with
a definition of aggression that is not politically controversial”
(quoted on Peck pp. 95 and 227, emphasis mine). But aggression is no
more poorly defined (and no more disputed) than other human rights
concepts—genocide, democracy, dictatorship, political prisoner, even
torture. The refusal of human rights organizations to oppose aggression
leaves them in a demeaning position of begging aggressors to try to
conduct their bombing campaigns in a way that minimizes harm to
civilians—as any reader who grimaced their way through HRW or Amnesty
reports about the Saudi/U.S./UK war on Yemen, or Israel’s bombings of
Gaza, knows.
This
is no way to take a stand on principle. But what to do? Discovering the
bias of human rights organizations is even more demoralizing than
discovering the propaganda power of social media.
It is impossible to find a democracy and critical-thinking nourishing
set of globally connected social media, and it is impossible for a
person of conscience to find an unbiased comprehensive global database
of human rights violations. On the other hand, the solutions may be
similar: the creation of real-world connections, contacts, and
ultimately movements.
In Ideal Illusions,
Peck contrasts the legalistic, bureaucratized, and ultimately co-opted
human rights organizations to the peace movements that rose and fell
over the same decades. The alternative to these captured organizations is just such a
peace movement: one that’s against war on principle, against aggression,
wants to dismantle the war economy, understands the difference between
the powerful and those resisting, and uses people power and not legal
arguments and pleas to the powerful.
Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer. You can find him on his website at podur.org and on Twitter @justinpodur. He teaches at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies.
The Ossington Circle Episode 16: The Destruction of Syria and Solidarity with Max Ajl
In this episode of The Ossington Circle, academic, activist, and editor at Jadaliyya Max Ajl discusses the destruction of Syria and the vitriol directed at leftists and Palestine activists who have opposed intervention in Syria.
