Dr. Lawrence Davidson

I – Who Is Alan Hart?

Alan Hart is an author and a journalist. He is the former Middle East Chief Correspondent for Britain’s Independent Television News and a former BBC Panorama presenter whose beat was the Middle East. He has written a number of books, including Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker? (1984) and the three-volume  Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews (2009-2010). He is also a longtime activist for various causes, particularly his three-decade struggle on behalf of justice for the Palestinian people.

II – Alan Hart Resigns

On April 25 Alan Hart, the activist for Palestine, literally turned in his resignation letter. In it he states, “I am withdrawing from the battlefield of the war for the truth of history as it relates to making and sustaining of the conflict in and over Palestine.” Why did he do this? In Hart’s opinion, the struggle for justice in Palestine is “mission impossible.” The information/propaganda war between Zionists and those, such as himself, supporting the Palestinians (which, in any case, had always been “the most asymmetric of all information wars”) is lost. He notes that the Western media still follow a Zionist line and asserts that most of the Western populations remain either pro-Israel or indifferent to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.

Hart blames this alleged Zionist victory in the propaganda war on a lack of financial support for those trying to write and speak out for Palestinian justice, and contrasts their plight to the situation of the Zionist writers and advocates, who enjoy almost unlimited funds. Hart feels it is mainly wealthy Palestinians and other Arabs who have failed to support pro-Palestinian activists. These wealthy Arabs  have failed to step forward because they either are afraid of Zionist retribution that would damage their businesses or careers, or are afraid of their own Arab governments, which do not want trouble with Israel because of assertive actions by pro-Palestinian wealthy citizens.

III – Mr. Hart’s Plight

With all due respect to Mr. Hart, who certainly does deserve our respect, I can’t help asking myself whether his assessment of this “war for the truth of history” is objectively true or an expression of personal disappointments. According to his own explanation, Alan Hart’s decision to leave the struggle is connected to the fact that Arab publishers and media failed to financially support and promote his recent book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. This was a great disappointment to him because the Arab media had serialized his prior work on Yasser Arafat and this had brought him “a significant income.” He had obviously made the assumption that the situation would repeat itself. So strong was that expectation that, as Mr. Hart tells us in his resignation statement, he made certain decisions, such as mortgaging his property in order to support the production of the Zionism study, which have now brought him into financial distress. Hart appears to see the failure of Arab money to come to his assistance as indicative of Arab failure to support the Palestinian cause.

IV – How accurate Is Alan Hart’s Assessment?

As disappointing as the Arab failure to promote Hart’s important work on Zionism may be, it is not accurate to conclude, as Hart does, that most wealthy Arabs “do not care about the occupied and oppressed Palestinians.” Before the first Iraq war, both public and private Arab money generously supported the PLO. Yasser Arafat’s unfortunate attempt to mediate that conflict and prevent a war against Iraq stopped most (but never all) of that support. Whether the wealthy Arabs could now do much more is another question. However, and this is an important point, this is not the same question as to whether Western supporters of the Palestinian cause should or should not give up.

Hart is correct that in the past thirty years supporters of Palestinian justice have not been able to create the necessary critical mass of public opinion to change the policies of national governments. However, that does not mean there has been no progress. It does not mean this is a lost cause.

I too have been a strong supporter of the Palestinians for decades, and I have seen a tremendous difference over time. Thirty years ago you could not critically raise the subject of Israel in public, and thus the Zionists had a monopoly on the entire history of this issue. That is emphatically not the case today. Despite Alan Hart’s unfortunate experience, the fact is that, at a popular level, the Zionists have lost control of the Palestine narrative. There are other real positive signs in this struggle that Hart fails to mention, including the progress of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement; the continuing maturation of counter-lobbies, particularly in the United States; and the growing worldwide recognition of Israeli criminality, which has slowly increased that country’s sense of isolation. In other words, there is more to this than the Arab failure to support Mr. Hart’s latest work.

V – How Do We Measure Success?

One has to also understand that success and failure come on many levels. On the macro level, progress is slow, but as pointed out above, it is far from nonexistent. Sometimes you just need to know where to look to see the ongoing activity. For instance, in the case of the United States, there are a growing number of organizations that are constantly busy getting out the message of Israeli crimes and the Palestinian demand for justice. There are the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (a coalition of almost 400 member groups and organizations), Jewish Voices for Peace, and the Council for the National Interest, to name just a few. The struggle against Israeli apartheid might well be, as it was in the case of South Africa, multigenerational. But among the many organizations waging this struggle there is no sign of slacking.

On the micro level, success comes when one is consistently true to one’s principles in a manner that is personally acceptable. No one is asking Western supporters of the Palestinian cause to go bankrupt or put themselves in physical danger, although in the latter case notably heroic individuals such as Rachel Corey and Tom Hurndall have chosen to do so, with tragic results. However, there are less dangerous routes. To do what you can in a steady, consistent way for a just cause in which you believe is already to have achieved success at the personal level. We struggle not only for the cause, but also because of who we are.

Alan Hart is an admirable man who has done admirable things, and we all owe him our thanks for his contributions to the Palestinian cause. But his decision to retire from the field should in no way be taken as a sign that that cause is lost. It is emphatically not lost. It has made significant progress over the past three decades and it is well positioned to make more progress in the future.

Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

The author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com.More articles can be found onRamallahOnline.com, Logos Journal, and Dr. Davidson also maintains an online blog, you can find it athttp://www.tothepointanalyses.com

Critical Thinking Gone Missing — An Analysis (5 April 2013) by Lawrence Davidson

Part I – Ignorance As a Default Position

In 2008 Rick Shenkman, the Editor-in-Chief of the History News Network, published a book entitled Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter (Basic Books). In it he demonstrated, among other things, that most Americans were: (1) ignorant about major international events, (2) knew little about how their own government runs and who runs it, (3) were nonetheless willing to accept government positions and policies even though a moderate amount of critical thought suggested they were bad for the country, and (4) were readily swayed by stereotyping, simplistic solutions, irrational fears, and public relations babble. 

Shenkman spent 256 pages documenting these claims, using a great number of polls and surveys from very reputable sources. Indeed, in the end it is hard to argue with his data. So, what can we say about this? One thing that can be said is that this is not an abnormal state of affairs. As has been suggested in prior analyses, ignorance of non-local affairs (often leading to inaccurate assumptions, passive acceptance of authority, and illogical actions) is, in fact, a default position for any population.

To put it another way, the majority of any population will pay little or no attention to news stories or government actions that do not appear to impact their lives or the lives of close associates. If something non-local happens that is brought to their attention by the media, they will passively accept government explanations and simplistic solutions. 

The primary issue is “does it impact my life?” If it does, people will pay attention.  If it appears not to, they won’t pay attention. For instance, in Shenkman’s book unfavorable comparisons are sometimes made between Americans and Europeans. Americans often are said to be much more ignorant about world geography than are Europeans. This might be, but it is, ironically, due to an accident of geography. Americans occupy a large subcontinent isolated by two oceans. Europeans are crowded into small contiguous countries that, until recently, repeatedly invaded each other as well as possessed overseas colonies. Under these circumstances, a knowledge of geography, as well as paying attention to what is happening on the other side of the border, has more immediate relevance to the lives of those in Toulouse or Amsterdam than is the case for someone in Pittsburgh or Topeka.  If conditions were reversed, Europeans would know less geography and Americans more.   

Part II – Ideology And Bureaucracy

The localism referenced above is not the only reason for widespread ignorance. The strong adherence to ideology and work within a bureaucratic setting can also greatly narrow one’s worldview and cripple one’s critical abilities.

In effect, a closely adhered to ideology becomes a mental locality with limits and borders just as real as those of geography. In fact, if we consider nationalism a pervasive modern ideology, there is a direct connection between the boundaries induced in the mind and those on the ground. Furthermore, it does not matter if the ideology is politically left or right, or for that matter, whether it is secular or religious. One’s critical abilities will be suppressed in favor of standardized, formulaic answers provided by the ideology.  

Just so work done within a bureaucratic setting. Bureaucracies position the worker within closely supervised departments where success equates with doing a specific job according to specific rules. Within this limited world one learns not to think outside the box, and so, except as applied to one’s task, critical thinking is discouraged and one’s worldview comes to conform to that of the bureaucracy. That is why bureaucrats are so often referred to as cogs in a machine.

Part III -  Moments of Embarrassment 

That American ignorance is explainable does not make it any less distressing. At the very least it often leads to embarrassment for the minority who are not ignorant. Take for example the facts that polls show over half of American adults don’t know which country dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or that 30% don’t know what the Holocaust was. We might explain this as the result of faulty education; however, there are other, just as embarrassing, moments involving the well educated. Take, for instance, the employees of Fox News. Lou Dobbs (who graduated from Harvard University) is host of the Fox Business Network talk show Lou Dobbs Tonight.  Speaking on 23 March 2013 about gun control, he and Fox political analyst Angela McGlowan (a graduate of the University of Mississippi) had the following exchange: 

McGlowan: “What scares the hell out of me is that we have a president . . . that wants to take our guns, but yet he wants to attack Iran and Syria. So if they come and attack us here, we don’t have the right to bear arms under this Obama administration.”

Dobbs: “We’re told by Homeland Security that there are already agents of Al Qaeda here working in this country. Why in the world would you not want to make certain that all American citizens were armed and prepared?”

Despite education, ignorance plus ideology leading to stupidity doesn’t come in any starker form than this. Suffice it to say that nothing the president has proposed in the way of gun control takes away the vast majority of weapons owned by Americans, that the president’s actions point to the fact that he does not want to attack Syria or Iran, and that neither country has the capacity to “come and attack us here.” Finally, while there may be a handful of Americans who sympathize with Al Qaeda, they cannot accurately be described as “agents” of some central organization that dictates their actions.  

Did the fact that Dobbs and McGlowan were speaking nonsense make any difference to the majority of those listening to them? Probably not. Their regular listeners may well be too ignorant to know that this surreal episode has no basis in reality. Their ignorance will cause them not to fact-check Dobbs’s and McGlowan’s remarks. They might very well rationalize away countervailing facts if they happen to come across them. And, by doing so, keep everything comfortably simple, which counts for more than the messy, often complicated truth.  

Unfortunately, one can multiply this scenario many times. There are millions of Americans, most of whom are quite literate, who believe the United Nations is an evil organization bent on destroying U.S. sovereignty. Indeed, in 2005 George W. Bush actually appointed one of them, John Bolton (a graduate of Yale University), as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Likewise, so paranoid are gun enthusiasts (whose level of education varies widely) that any really effective government supervision of the U.S. gun trade would be seen as a giant step toward dictatorship. Therefore, the National Rifle Association, working its influence on Congress, has for years successfullyrestricted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from using computers to create a central database of gun transactions. And, last but certainly not least, there is the unending war against teaching evolution in U.S. schools. This Christian fundamentalist effort often enjoys temporary success in large sections of the country and is ultimately held at bay only by court decisions reflecting (to date) a solid sense of reality on this subject. By the way, evolution is a scientific theory that has as much evidence to back it up as does gravity.  

Part IV -  Teaching Critical Thinking?

As troubling as this apparently perennial problem of ignorance is, it is equally frustrating to listen to repeated schemes to teach critical thinking through the public schools. Of course, the habit of asking critical questions can be taught. However, if you do not have a knowledge base from which to consider a situation, it is hard think critically about it.  So ignorance often precludes effective critical thinking even if the technique is acquired. In any case, public school systems have always had two primary purposes and critical thinking is not one of them. The schools are designed to prepare students for the marketplace and to make them loyal citizens. The marketplace is most often a top-down, authoritarian world and loyalty comes from myth-making and emotional bonds. In both cases, really effective critical thinking might well be incompatible with the desired end. 

Recently, a suggestion has been made to forget about the schools as a place to learn critical thinking. According to Dennis Bartels’s article “Critical Thinking Is Best Taught Outside the Classroom” appearing in Scientific American online, schools can’t teach critical thinking because they are too busy teaching to standardized tests. Of course, there was a time when schools were not so strongly mandated to teach this way and there is no evidence that at that time they taught critical thinking. In any case, Bartels believes that people learn critical thinking in informal settings such as museums and by watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He concludes that “people must acquire this skill somewhere. Our society depends on them being able to make critical decisions.” If that were only true it would make this an easier problem to solve.

Part V – Conclusion

It may very well be that (consciously or unconsciously) societies organize themselves to hold critical thinking to a minimum. That means to tolerate it to the point needed to get through day-to-day existence and to tackle those aspects of one’s profession that might require narrowly focused critical thought. But beyond that, we get into dangerous, de-stabilizing waters. Societies, be they democratic or not, are not going to encourage critical thinking about prevailing ideologies or government policies. And, if it is the case that most people don’t think of anything critically unless it falls into that local arena in which their lives are lived out, all the better. Under such conditions people can be relied upon to stay passive about events outside their local venue until the government decides it is time to rouse them up in some propagandistic manner. 

The truth is that people who are consistently active as critical thinkers are not going to be popular, either with the government or their neighbors. They are called gadflies. You know, people like Socrates, who is probably the best-known critical thinker in Western history. And, at least the well educated among us know what happened to him. 

Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

The author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com.More articles can be found onRamallahOnline.com, Logos Journal, and Dr. Davidson also maintains an online blog, you can find it athttp://www.tothepointanalyses.com

Civil Rights Takes a Hit – An Analysis (5 March 201) by Lawrence Davidson

Cultures can evolve over centuries and once their major parameters are set they have remarkable staying power. The notion that such parameters can be reversed in, say 48 years, is naive at best.  Nonetheless, the presumption that 48 years can eliminate historical racial prejudice in the U.S. South is indeed the basis of the attitudes of a potential majority of the U.S. Supreme Court when it comes to the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.  

Part I – The Background

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (reauthorized for an additional 25 years by Congress in 2006) requires nine southern states and parts of seven others (including Michigan, New Hampshire and New York) to submit any changes in local voting rules to the Justice Department for prior review.  This was done to prevent voting procedures that discriminate against minority groups.  “The Justice Department has used the pre-clearance requirement, also known as Section 5, to object to more than 2,400 state and local voting changes since 1982.”  One might ask what are the odds that the federal government would raise frivolous and unjustified objections 2,400 times?  Not likely.  Thus, it is fair to conclude that racial discrimination still plays a role in the making of voting rules in many localities.  

Why, after 48 years (counting from 1965), would that be so?  A good part of the answer is that a culture of racism shaped the way of life, particularly in the southern United States.  This was only briefly interrupted by the Civil War.  After that war, there followed a period known as Reconstruction when the U.S. Army’s occupation of the South interfered with ingrained racist practices.  But Reconstruction lasted only a brief twelve years, until 1877, and thereafter the South reverted to racist ways under a legal regime commonly known as “Jim Crow.”  That lasted until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.  In other words, racism defined Southern culture and was prevalent in some of the North as well for hundreds of years. 

This pervasive and long-lasting culture was reflected in local and regional laws.  Laws, in turn, are to be understood as educational tools that tell citizens what society deems to be right and wrong behavior.  If laws are consistently enforced over a long period of time most citizens will internalize these messages and they will become part of their moral code.  Except for the 12 years of Reconstruction the South had known nothing but racist rules of behavior right up to the middle of the 20th century.  And these, as a consequence, was thoroughly internalized. 

What the Civil Rights laws did in the 1960s was to suddenly, and partially, reverse these educational messages.  They did so partially because these laws concentrated on making  discrimination illegal within the public sphere.  You could no longer segregate public schools, hotels, restaurants and the like, as well as government offices.  Today, African-Americans can go into the South and check into a hotel, eat at a restaurant, shop where they want to without much trouble.  However, if he or she does happen to have trouble, there is recourse under the law to deal with the problem. That has now been the case for 48 years (counting from 1965).  Yet this is not nearly enough time to have the message that racial discrimination is wrong penetrate deeply into the private sphere of a region where the opposite attitude has long been the default position.  My guess is that among some Southern citizens, the new egalitarian way of thinking is superficially there, and among others it is not there at all.  What this means is that, if you withdraw the law, in this case Section 5, reversion to old discriminatory ways will likely be rapid. 

Part II – The Supreme Court Case

An effort to rescind Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is now under way.  The political officials of Shelby County, Alabama, have brought suit, and their case (Shelby County v. Holder) is now being heard by the United States Supreme Court.  Bert W. Rein, Shelby County’s attorney, argued that Alabama’s voter registration rolls show that minorities are now fairly represented and so the law is unnecessary in that state.  Justice Stephen G. Breyer suggested that Rein’s assertion demonstrates that the statute is working.  Breyer’s statement translates into the working assumption that Alabama’s good record of minority registration is there only because the law is there. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked if the Justice Department lawyers defending the law are asserting that “the citizens of the South are more racist than those in the North?” It is a question that calls into question the Chief Justice’s knowledge of U.S. history.  Historically, Southerners certainly have been more racist than many Northerners.  For Bert Rein to prove his case, he should have to demonstrate that the people of Alabama, and particularly Shelby County, are now able to sustain racial equality in the public sphere without any federal oversight.  On this account it is to be noted that in 2008 the Justice Department sued the state of Alabama, including Shelby County, for refusing to stop using overly large voting districts that made it almost impossible for local minority groups to elect members to city or local councils. Therefore, Justice Sonya Sotomayor observed that “some parts of the South have changed. Your (Rein’s) county pretty much hasn’t.  You may be the wrong party bringing this (suit).”

Rein also argues that Section 5 is unconstitutional because it singles out only certain states and regions for review while the Constitution is based on the equal application of the law.  This argument has some logic to it.  However, the thrust of this logic would not be to take Section 5 requirements away from areas that may still require them, but to extend the law to the entire country.

However, there are four, and perhaps five, Supreme Court justices who are less interested in the constitutional voting rights of minorities than in the rights of the states to define voting rules.  This attitude caused Robert Parry, in an article posted on the Consortium News website, to describe this potential majority as “neo-Confederate.” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has apparently taken just such a “states’ rights” position and described Alabama and other states as “independent sovereign” entities.  He also asserted that “times change” and “while the provision (Section 5) was necessary in 1965, this is 2013.”  Of course, times do change, but how long does it take to change a culture?  The most acerbic opinions came from Justice Antonin Scalia.  Scalia is generally “the intellectual anchor of the court’s conservative majority.”  He is also quite pugnacious and such aggressiveness can sometimes serve as cover for weak arguments. As in the case of Roberts, we can ask just how much history does Scalia know?  Thus, in the Court’s arguments on Section 5, Justice Scalia asserts that the Voting Rights Act represents “the perpetuation of racial entitlement.”  Actually, it is more historically accurate to assert that this act is a corrective to aggressive perpetuation of white racial entitlement.  Scalia went on to assert that Section 5 had created “black (voting) districts by law.”  It just so happens that Scalia led the way in disallowing a suit (Vieth v. Jubelirer) in 2004 against the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania General Assembly for the partisan redistricting of congressional voting districts.  Therefore, until he is ready to condemn such extensive gerrymandering on the part of Republicans, his complaining about “black districts” sounds like hypocrisy.  In these apparent “neo-Confederate” attitudes, Justices Kennedy and Scalia are joined by Justices Roberts, Thomas and perhaps also Alito, whose final stance on Section 5 is not yet clear.  

Part III – The Constitution as a Text

If the questions and answers of the justices are indicators of their positions, we have to assume that four, and perhaps five, out of the nine are ready to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.  Among the many messages that one can take away from such an action, an important general one is that socio-political progress is not inevitable.  In terms of our social and political arrangements, the past and its faults are not dead and gone.  They can come back.  And, because the Civil Rights laws only purged the public sphere of overt racism, and have not had time to reorient the private sphere, there are plenty of Americans out there who are ready to turn back the clock on civil rights.  There are even more Americans who don’t care one way or another and therefore would passively stand by while this turnabout takes place. 

But what about the Bill of Rights?  Isn’t that supposed to keep us all “free?”  Well, the Bill of Rights was operative, at least in theory, during the period of the nation’s history when slavery, and then Jim Crow practices, were a daily way of life for African- Americans.  The truth is that the Constitution is not an automatic protection of rights.  That is because it is a text and, as such, must be interpreted.  You can interpret it in a progressive and humane way that extends rights in a generous and inclusive manner, or you can interpret it in a restrictive way that only extends rights selectively.  

It is dangerous to become complacent about rights.  They don’t come from God, they come from the community we belong to.  That means it is dangerous to become complacent about who is running the community.  Yet it is clear from the history of general voter participation in elections that the majority of Americans do not pay close attention to politics, and even those who do are often all too easily swayed by everything from personal appearance to silly propaganda.  No, there is nothing inevitable about socio-political progress, and the Supreme Court may be about to prove that this is so. 

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

The author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com.More articles can be found onRamallahOnline.com, Logos Journal, and Dr. Davidson also maintains an online blog, you can find it athttp://www.tothepointanalyses.com

 Lawrence Davidson

 Part I – Bureaucracy

 The institutions of modern society, including governments, large economic structures, and  military forces, are organized in bureaucratic fashion. A bureaucracy is a form of organization that operates by means of a wide range of closely supervised departments capable of performing specific tasks in efficient ways. This division of labor, or specialization, is carried on according to well-defined rules and regulations. Therefore, the workers in a bureaucracy (i.e., the bureaucrats) perform their tasks within a compartmentalized environment that narrows their focus to the task at hand. Potentially mitigating circumstances that might call into question the task set for the worker, or the rules governing its implementation, are almost always ignored. 

The command structure of bureaucracies is hierarchical, or what is called a “vertical pyramid power structure.” This is how Max Weber, the great sociologist, described this topdown arrangement and its consequences:

The principles of . . . graded authority mean a firmly ordered system of superiority and subordination in which there is a supervision of the lower offices by the higher offices. . . . Rational  calculation . . . reduces every worker to a cog in this bureaucratic  machine and, seeing himself in this light, he will merely ask how  to transform himself into a somewhat bigger cog. . . . [Such an institution’s] specific nature. . . develops the more perfectly the more bureaucracy is dehumanized.

Out of this emerges a “bureaucratic mindset.” The bureaucrat is supposed to think of his or her assigned task and how best to accomplish it. That is what is meant by “staying with the program.” The bureaucrat is not supposed to think why the task has been assigned or what its implementation might broadly mean. Like the task itself, thinking too becomes detached from any context but that generated by the bureaucracy. This attitude is reinforced by the fact that responsibility is also compartmentalized. As long as one pursues the task efficiently, according to prescribed procedure, one is acting responsibly. Through this approach, it becomes difficult to hold any particular bureaucrat responsible for the overall impact of a policy. The task of implementation is too fragmented.   

Part II – The Military Bureaucracy

No institution is a better fit for the bureaucratic structure than the military. It is a model for Weber’s “firmly ordered system of superiority and subordination in which there is a supervision of the lower offices by the higher offices.” Work goes on within a compartmentalized environment structured by rank and myriad rules and regulations. Action is focused on fulfilling specific orders normally without reference to outside consequences. 

As a result, within the military bureaucracy thinking must always be within the box, which means it is done within the institution’s set thought-collective. Indeed, given the military’s particular environment, one that strives to shape the thought as well as the action of its participants, thinking can take on near totalitarian constraints. The following scenario reflects this reality. Imagine a room in which two privates sit discussing some mission-related issue. Between them there is an equality of rank and so the discussion can be relatively candid. In walks a sergeant, who joins the discussion. The sergeant’s opinion can immediately supersede those of the privates and end the discussion. We can repeat the scenario using two sergeants joined by a lieutenant or two lieutenants joined by a captain, and so on up the line. It is rank that carries the power to decide mission-related issues and not necessarily knowledge or even experience. And, once the decision is made, the senior officer’s version of reality cannot be challenged except by someone of superior rank. His or her orders must be obeyed even if a subordinate can reasonably predict disaster as a result. Thinking outside the box, and then acting on the resulting unauthorized thoughts, opinions, and conclusions, is the bureaucracy’s equivalent of criminal behavior.

At first it seems surprising just how few people in the military challenge its thought-collective.  Today there are about two and a half million individuals in the U.S. military (including the reserves), and the number incarcerated in military prisons with a sentence of one year or longer is (using 2007 numbers) 1,089. Relative to the incarceration rate in the U.S. civilian society this is remarkably small. The percentage of this number that represents the willful disobeying of orders (rather than the usual criminal acts such as assault or theft) is smaller still.

While at first this might seem surprising it is not on second thought. The military is not a democracy. It is the closest thing we have to a successful version of George Orwell’s 1984. The restrictive thought- collective is reinforced not only by a rigid hierarchical culture of obedience but also by carefully cultivated peer pressure.  Someone who breaks out of this “box” and does so for reasons of conscience is a rare individual indeed.     

Part III – The Case of Bradley Manning

Private Bradley Manning is just such an individual. I first wrote about Manning in August of 2010, and here is how I describedhim and his situation:

 

Bradley Manning was an army intelligence analyst with U.S.  forces in the Middle East who became deeply disturbed by what  his job revealed to him.  Essentially, it made him a front row  witness to what he described as “incredible things, awful things.”This primarily entailed the careless killing of innocent civilians. As an act of conscience he gave to the website WikiLeaks over 200,000 classified documents as well as a graphic video  showing an attack on Iraqi civilians. 

Manning confirmed his status as a prisoner of conscience in a statement he read at a pre-trial hearing on 2 March 2013. In the statement he described how (1) the high number of civilian deaths in Iraq, (2) the stubborn refusal of army authorities to admit to and deal with this issue, and (3) the lack of U.S. media coverage of all this “collateral damage” disturbed and “emotionally burdened” him. His response was to release the material noted above. He continued in his statement to say, 

 

I hoped that the public would be as alarmed as me about the  conduct of the aerial weapons team crew members [this refers to  a particularly egregious army helicopter attack on civilians recorded on video tape and leaked to WikiLeaks]. I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan are targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in a pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare. After the release I was encouraged by the response in the media and general public. 

However, the U.S. military has shown no serious concern about what its soldiers have done, and continue to do, to civilians in the Middle East. This is because those soldiers have acted in ways compatible with the bureaucratic rules of the organization they serve. Under these conditions the killing of civilians, no matter at what frequency or number, is deemed accidental as long as the soldier follows the military’s self-prescribed “rules of engagement.” Having done so, civilian casualties become “collateral damage.” Therefore, no one is culpable. It is, of course, possible to force the military to change its behavior by making “collateral damage” so distasteful to the U.S. public that it becomes a political problem that civilian leaders must address. That is exactly what Bradley Manning was trying to do.  

That is why the military has shown dramatic concern over what Bradley Manning has done. He has gone outside the box. He has broken free of and actually publicly challenged the military’s thought- collective. Since the Viet Nam War the U.S. military has eschewed the draft and embedded the journalists, so as to minimize public awareness of battlefield realities. They are not now going to let one private with a conscience bring public revulsion down on their heads.  So, they have accused him of “aiding the enemy” and hope to send him to jail for the rest of his life. They hope this will be a lesson that prevents others from following in Manning’s footsteps. 

It is the leaders of the military bureaucracy, and not the out-of-step private, who will probably succeed in this contest. That is because Manning’s hope that the data he released might “cause society to re-evaluate the need or even the desire to engage in counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore the complex dynamics of the people living in the affected environment every day” has, to date, failed. Why so? 

There are some U.S. citizens who see Manning as a hero (I am one of them), and some who see him as a traitor. Manning’s target population was and still is all of the rest. Yet the sad truth is most of this remainder doesn’t care much about Manning’s fate and will, in the end, accept the government’s verdict on him. This is how I reasoned out the situation back in 2010, and I think my conclusion is still sound.  On the assumption that most people are locally focused and apolitical I conclude that this vast majority are unconcerned about the Manning case because it seems not to touch their lives. And, on the assumption that the government and its allied mass media control the information flow, I conclude that most of the minority who are aware and concerned share the official view that Manning is a traitor.   

That leaves a minority of the minority who are aware of the significant implications for justice and human rights involved in this case, and who are aware of the broader contextual circumstances that led to Manning’s actions and their implications for future U.S. international relations.  The prediction that this minority of a minority totals “millions,” as some suggest, is almost certainly an exaggeration.  However, whatever the number of his sympathizers, it is far less than is needed to either obtain justice for Manning or save the United States from its own criminal policies. 

Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

The author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com.More articles can be found onRamallahOnline.com, Logos Journal, and Dr. Davidson also maintains an online blog, you can find it athttp://www.tothepointanalyses.com

Part I – Emotionally Moving Pictures

 Some images move us, or at least should move us, to sudden insight into the consequences of our actions. Images of innocent victims of violence, particularly children, should have the capacity to penetrate the most hardened defenses and touch our hearts.  However, the truth is that this does not always occur.  Skewed information environments, operating over time, may condition us to react with compassion only to images depicting the suffering of our own community.   When many of us see the anguish we have caused an “enemy,” we feel not compassion or regret but annoyance. The reaction is:  “Why are you showing me that? Don’t you know it is their (the other’s) own behavior that made us hurt them?  It is their own fault.”  That we react this way to the horrors we are capable of causing is a sure sign that those same actions have dehumanized us.

 Part II – The Pictures in Question

– On 15 February 2013, The World Press Photo of the Year 2012 (pasted above) was made public.  The winning image (selected from 103,481 photos submitted by 5,666 photographers from 124 countries) was taken by Swedish photojournalist Paul Hansen, working for the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

 The photo depicts a funeral procession in the narrow streets of Gaza. Two men, visibly expressing the emotions of anguish and anger, are leading the procession. They are carrying the bodies of two-year old Sahaib Hijazi and her four-year old brother Muhammad. Both children are wrapped in white shrouds. Both were killed when their house was hit by an Israeli missile strike on 20 November 2012.

 In making the announcement of the winning image, Santiago Lyon, vice president and director of photography for The Associated Press, said, “A picture should engage the head, the heart and the stomach….This picture for us on the jury reached us on these three levels.” Winning the prize with such a photo brought mixed emotions to Hansen, “I was very happy on one level, of course….And, I was also very sad. It was a very sad situation.

– On 15 November 2012, five days before Hansen’s photo was taken, another photograph showed up on the front page of the Washington Post. This image showed Jihad Masharawi, a Palestinian journalist resident in Gaza, in deep anguish as he holds the body of his dead 11 month-old son killed when an Israeli bomb landed on their home. Mary Ann Golon, the Post’s director of Photography, explained, “When we looked at the selection that night of Middle East photos from the wire services, this photo got everyone in the gut…it went straight to the heart, this sobbing man who just lost his baby son.” It should also have spoken to the head, but for some of the Post’s readers, that was not the case.

The fact that this image found its way onto the front page of the Washington Post meant that it was noticed by many more Americans than the Hansen photo. As a consequence  Zionist readers and organizations wrote to the paper’s ombudsman and the editors, “protesting the photo as biased.” What they meant was that the Post should have somehow made it clear that the Palestinians had “made the Israelis do this” by periodically launching their small rockets into southern Israel.  In other words, they wanted to know why the paper had not “balanced the photo of the grieving [Palestinian] father with one of Israelis who had lost a loved one from Gaza rocket fire.” The answer was that, as of that date, there were no such victims in this round of fighting. “No Israeli had been killed by Gaza rocket fire since Oct. 29, 2011, more than a year earlier.”

The Post readers who complained were obviously ignorant of this fact. It is probably the case that the Washington Post itself had done nothing to enlighten them about the asymmetric nature of Israeli-Palestinian violence. However, even if the protesting readers were aware of this factor, it might have made little difference. The grieving man was a Palestinian and, in the eyes of the staunch supporters of Israel, that made him responsible for his own grief.  His enemy status delegitimized his emotions and thereby undercut the legitimacy of the photograph.

 – As soon as the the Washington Post image appeared, the Israeli military started posting images of wounded Israelis, particularly children. One emotionally moving photo of a wounded baby also ended up on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s official Twitter account.

Thus began a sort of contest of emotionally moving pictures.  Which ones would be seen and move the largest audience?  

 By virtue of their superior firepower and readiness to use it the Israelis could not win this contest. They simply were out there killing and maiming more people than the Palestinians ever could.  Thus it would be Palestinian suffering that was bound to provide the most newsworthy pictures.  This asymmetry was compounded by an apparent need, on the part of some Israelis, to advertise their willingness to be brutal.  And so, Israeli images that were at once threatening and disturbing were posted on the internet. 

– For instance, on 15 February 2013, an image was posted on Instagram, an image sharing website, by an Israeli soldier, Mir Ostrovski, who apparently belongs to a “sniper unit.” It shows the head and back of a Palestinian boy in the cross-hairs of a rifle. One assumes it is Ostrovski’s rifle. The photo was commented upon by the organization Breaking Silence, which represents Israeli veterans critical of their government’s policies toward the Palestinians. “This is what the occupation looks like,” the group wrote, “[such] pictures are testaments to the abuse of power rooted in the military control of another people.”

We can be pretty sure that was not Ostrovski’s take on the situation. The head in the crosshairs, despite its youth, belonged to an enemy.

Part III – Conclusion

The old cliche that tells us a picture is worth a thousand words, says nothing about what those words might be.  As it turns out, they are not determined by the image alone. They are also determined by the state of mind of the viewer and that mind is, in turn, embedded in an information environment.   In respect to Israel and Palestine,  the West’s informational environment was once dominated by the Zionist narrative.  That is no longer the case. The Palestinian narrative is now also present.  That the first two images pasted above are in the news at all is a sign of this change.  As a result, the Zionist readers of the Washington Post cry foul and speak of “bias.”  It would be better if they stopped complaining and tried to look at those images with an “unbiased” mind. 

 Perhaps it would help them do so if they considered the words of  Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and their application to the Palestinian frame of mind. 

 If you prick us, do we not bleed?…if you poison

us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not

revenge?  If we are like you in the rest, we will

resemble you in that….The villainy you

teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I

will better the instruction.

The Israelis and their supporters should look long and hard at those images that depict the consequences of their own actions.  They should think long and hard on the fact that they may pay for that action in kind.  For it is primarily they, the stronger party, who must overcome the barriers to compassion and regret.  

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

The author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com.More articles can be found on RamallahOnline.com, Logos Journal, and Dr. Davidson also maintains an online blog, you can find it at http://www.tothepointanalyses.com

- See more at: http://ramallahonline.com/2010/10/dr-lawrence-davidson/#sthash.xma4UfwK.dpuf

Part I – The Film

There is a new documentary movie about Israel, called The Gatekeepers.  It is directed by Dror Moreh, and features interviews with all the former leaders of the Shin Bet, the country’s internal security organization.  The Shin Bet is assigned the job of preventing Palestinian retaliatory attacks on Israel and, as described by Moreh, the film “is the story of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories as told by the people at the crossroads of some of the most crucial moments in the security history of the country.”   Along the way it touches on such particular topics as targeted assassinations, the use of torture, and “collateral damage.” 

The Gatekeepers has garnered a lot of acclaim.  It has played at film festivals in Jerusalem, Amsterdam, New York, Toronto and Venice, and elsewhere.  It has received critical acclaim from critics and won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s Best Documentary Award. It has been nominated for an Oscar.   

Part II — The Messages 

In order to promote the The Gatekeepers, Moreh has been doing interviews and recently appeared on CNN with Christiane Amanpour.  He made a number of points, as did the Shin Bet leaders in the clips featured during the interview.  I shall review and critique some of these below.

– Moreh says that “if there is someone who understands the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it’s these guys”  (the Shin Bet leaders).  Actually, this not necessarily true.  One might more accurately claim that these men, who led Israel’s most secretive government institution, were and are so deeply buried inside their country’s security dilemma that they see it in a distorted fashion (with only occasional glimmers of clarity).  For instance:

– Avraham Shalom (head of the Shin Bet from 1981-1986), tells us that “Israel lost touch with how to coexist with the Palestinians as far back as the aftermath of the Six Day War in 1967….When the country started doubling down on terrorism.”  But is this really the case? One might more accurately assert that Israel had no touch to lose.  Most of its Jewish population and leadership has never had any interest in coexistence with Palestinians in any equalitarian and humane sense of the term.  The interviewed security chiefs focus on the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza because they are the ones who offered the most resistance to conquest.  But what of the 20% of the population of Israel who are also Palestinian and who actually lived under martial law until 1966?   You may call the discriminatory regime under which these people live “coexistence,” but it is the coexistence of superior over the inferior secured largely by intimidation.   

–Moreh also insists that it is the “Jewish extremists inside Israel” who have been the “major impediment” to resolving issues between Israel and the Palestinians.  The film looks at the cabal of religious fanatics, who in 1980, planned to blow up the sacred Muslim shrine of the Dome of the Rock  on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount,  as well as the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin in 1995.  Yet, as dangerous as are Israel’s right-wing extremists and settler fanatics, focusing exclusively on them obscures the full history of the occupation.   

By the time Menachem Begin and Israel’s right-wing fanatics took power in 1977,  the process of occupation and ethnic cleansing was well under way.  It had been initiated, both against the Arab Israelis from 1948 onward, and against the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza after 1967,  by the so-called Israeli Left:  the Labor Party and such people as David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Shimon Peres, and Yitzak Rabin himself.  Amongst the Israeli leadership, there are no clean hands.   

– Finally,  Dror Moreh  repeatedly pushes another message:  “a central theme of the documentary is the idea that Israel has incredible tactics, but it lacks long-term strategy…if [security] operations do not support a move toward a peace settlement, then they are meaningless.”  

Again, this erroneous assessment is a function of being so deeply situated inside of a problem that you cannot perceive it clearly.   Moreh assumes that achieving peace with the Palestinians is the only “long-term strategy” Israel ought to have and, in its absence, Israel pursues no strategy at all.  However, an objective assessment of Israeli history tells us that there has been another strategy in place.  The Zionist leaders have in fact always had a long-term strategy to avoid any meaningful peace settlement, so as to allow:  1. occupation of all “Eretz Israel,” 2. the ethnic cleansing or cantonization of the native population, and 3. settlement of the cleansed territory with Jews. 

It is because of this same naivete that Moreh confesses himself “shocked” when Shalom compares the occupation of the Palestinian territories to “Germany’s occupation of Europe” which, of course, had its own goal of ethnic cleansing.  It is to Shalom’s credit that he made the statement on camera, and to Morah’s credit that he kept the statement in the final version of the film.  But then Morah spoils this act of bravery when he tells Amanpour, “Only Jews can say these kind of words. And only they can have the justification to speak as they spoke in the film.”  Well, I can think of one other group who has every right to make the same comparison Shalom makes– the Palestinians.  

Part III — The Retired Official’s Confession Syndrome 

For all its shortcomings, the film is a step forward in the on-going effort to deny the idealized Zionist storyline  a monopoly in the West.  Indeed, that The Gatekeepers was made at all, and was received so positively at major film venues, is a sign that this wholly skewed Israeli storyline is finally breaking down.  Certainly, this deconstruction still has a long way to go, but the process is picking up speed.   

On the other hand there is something troubling about the belated nature of the insights given in these interviews.  They are examples of what I like to call the “retired official’s confession syndrome.”  Quite often those who, in retirement, make these sorts of confessions were well aware of the muddled or murderous situation while in office.  But, apparently, they lacked the courage to publicize it at the time.  It would have meant risking their careers,  their popularity, and perhaps relations with their friends and family.  One is reminded of the fate of Professor Ilan Pappe who did stand up and live his principles, and eventually lost his position at Haifa University and was, in the end, forced into exile.  For most, however, including these leaders of the Shin Bet, their understanding was clouded and their actions skewed by a time-honored, but deeply flawed, notion of “duty” to carry on like good soldiers. 

Part IV – Conclusion  

To date, Israel’s leaders and Zionist supporters have shown an amazing capacity to ignore all criticism.  The newly re-elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has let it be known that he has no intention of watching The Gatekeepers.  It is also questionable how many of those who voted for him, or other right-wing politicians, will bother to seek the documentary out.  

Israel’s government has recently made the decision to ignore the country’s obligations under the United Nations Human Rights Charter,  a decision signaled by its representatives refusal to show up for the country’s “universal periodic review”  before the Human Rights Council.  Nor is there any sign that any new right-wing led government coalition will stop the ethnic cleansing and illegal colonial repopulation of East Jerusalem.  

The only reasonable conclusion one can come to is that it will take increasing outside pressure on Israel, in the form of boycotts, divestment and sanctions, to convince a sufficient number of that country’s Jewish population that they must change their ways.  To not change is to acquiesce in Israel’s evolving status as a pariah state.  The irony of it all is that that status will have little to do with their being Jewish.  Yet, It will have everything to do with the fact that, in this day and age, even the Jews have no right to maintain a racist state.

Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

The author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com.More articles can be found onRamallahOnline.com, Logos Journal, and Dr. Davidson also maintains an online blog, you can find it athttp://www.tothepointanalyses.com

 Dr. Lawrence Davidson

PART I – What Is Important When It Comes to Rights?

Question:  Why is it that so many Americans are more angry over the prospect of relatively minor adjustments to the gun laws, than they are over the serious erosion of Constitutional rights to due process in the courts? 

Despite the fact that proposed changes to the gun laws would leave the Second Amendment’s* alleged basic right of ownership intact, thousands of Americans rallied in state capitals across the nation last week to demand their “right” to own all manner of automatic weapons and multiple round ammunition clips. The rationale for this ranged from “the Second Amendment comes from God,” a popular claim with protesters in Austin Texas, to the equally absurd notion that the Obama administration is obsessed with controlling all our lives.  “It is not about guns, it is about control” proclaimed  the folks rallying in Annapolis, Maryland.  All this took place on the nation’s first impromptu  “gun appreciation day” (Saturday, 19 January 2013) during which five accidental shooting occurred at celebratory gun shows and three others took place elsewhere.  Nonetheless, as one protester in Maine put it, the right to “bear arms” is “a constitutional right no one can take away.”  

Actually, the last twelve years have proved this fellow from Maine quite wrong.  There has been an erosion of constitutional rights that are much more important than his so-called inalienable right to own weapons with thirty round clips. For instance, the federal government has been steadily eroding the Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments which guarantee one’s access to fair procedures in the courts.  These are the ones that say your life, liberty and property cannot be taken away without your being charged with a crime and tried by a jury of your peers and/or a judge following due process rules.  There are multiple examples of such deterioration:

–The federal government now asserts that it has the authority to hold Americans, as well as others, indefinitely without charge or trial.  It does so on the assertion that we are in a perennial state of war.  This allows for the perversion of the Fifth Amendment which allows for the suspension of Habeas Corpus in the special cases of war and rebellion.  The government’s claim to this authority has been challenged in court but the U.S. Court of Appeals has sided with the Feds and the issue will probably end up in the Supreme Court.  In the meantime, to fall into this black hole in American jurisprudence all you have to do is be is labeled a “terrorist” by the president.  This, of course, can happen based on alleged evidence never made public.  

– Another weird but relevant point.  If you do happen to meet someone who is a member of a  “designated terrorist group,” don’t you dare try to talk them out of being violent.  That is illegal as well. Our very own Supreme Court told us so in the 2010 case of Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. In what may well call into question the rationality of a majority of the justices (the decision was decided 6 for the government position and 3 against), the Court declared that trying to persuade members of  such an organization give up violence is the equivalent of rendering “material aid” to the bad guys.  Try to save their souls in this fashion and you will end up in some special hell-hole of an American prison where all communications with your lawyer will be taped for the benefit of the prosecution. 

–The president can also put anyone, including American citizens, on a list of folks to be murdered at the first suitable opportunity.  The government often uses drones to do this.  Here is one of the ways this works:  some Air Force officer living in Las Vegas gets up in the morning, has his breakfast, kisses the wife goodbye and tells the kids to behave at school.  He gets in his four door sedan and drives to Creech Air Force base in the desert outside of town.  He passes through the security checks and finally gets to his “office.”  The office is a video studio affair from which he controls a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) full of explosives.  The UAV in question is actually sitting at an another air base in Afghanistan, Yemen or some such location.  Our man’s job is to remotely fly this thing into somebody’s house half-a-world away.  Doing so usually kills another man, his wife, his kids, and maybe the neighbors too.  All this happens without any due process establishing the victims’ guilt or innocence.  

– Then there is the case of the Holy Land Foundation in which five American citizens who ran the largest Muslim charity in the nation were convicted of “material support of terrorism” and sentenced to up to 65 years in jail on the basis of an anonymous witness whose credibility could not be challenged. This is a prima facie violation of the Sixth Amendment which guarantees (or used to guarantee) the accused his or her right to confront the accuser.  You would think the Supreme Court would have something to say about this, particularly considering that all the real evidence in the case showed that the Holy Land Foundation was simply supporting institutions such as Palestinian hospitals, and that its directors had repeatedly consulted the State Department to assure the legality of their activities.  But no,  in a miscarriage of justice not rivaled since Dread Scott, our present Court refused to hear the Holy Land Five’s appeal. 

PART II –  Why the Apathy?

Alas, with the exception of a handful of citizens, no one has hit the streets in protest over any of these horrid legal precedents.   No one has dreamt up a “due process appreciation day” and called for commemorative rallies.  How come? The answer has to do with how basic communal impulses play out.  These include natural localism and the  power of custom and tradition.

Natural localness is my term for the fact that most people live their lives according to the precepts of their immediate local communities.  Therefore, local customs and traditions are usually taken quite seriously.  In the United States, gun ownership is widespread enough to be an issue for self-conscious subsets of most local populations.  In other words, for millions it is an important local custom which helps shape their self-images.  Gun ownership has also been tied to a Constitutional right allegedly enshrined in the Second Amendment.  Support for this claim links these subsets into a powerful “special interest” that translates local custom into a national tradition.  So, you can get thousands protesting on the same day in state capitals across the U.S. 

What about due process?  Is it not a local practice of major importance representing a national tradition enshrined in law through the Constitution?  Yes, that is correct, but psychologically, due process rights have completely different personae.   Due process laws protect the rights of those accused of wrong doing.  They try to assure, among other things, that the accused is assumed innocent until proven guilty.  Yet among the public this assumption is almost never held.  If you end up in court, the public assumption is that you must have done something wrong.  This is particularly true if you can be tagged with a label that suggests danger to or betrayal of community values.  The media uses such labels all the time, for instance, terms such as terrorist or whistle blower.  So, those who are in need of due process protections are almost always assumed by the public to have acted outside the parameters of acceptable behavior. 

The other side of this coin is that ordinary individuals, the mass who make up “the people,” naively feel that due process protections are not important to them.  This is because they rarely trespass against the customs and traditions they themselves have, over time, established.  In other words, the “people” define what is acceptable.  Carrying guns or, in the local lingo, to “go packin,” is sufficiently within the bounds of acceptable behavior to be “normal” in much of the U.S.  As long as you register all the weapons in your arsenal (even if you have enough of them to wage a small war), you are still a “law abiding” citizen. However, give charity to the Palestinians or try to tell the Kurdish PKK (a group on the State Department’s Terrorism List) how to pursue their goals non-violently,  and you are a danger to the American way of life and on an obscenely fast track to indefinite detention.  And very few law abiding citizens are going to care, because if they notice your fate at all, they will assume you are guilty and getting what you deserve. 

PART III – Conclusion

“The people” simply do not like those who think outside the box. They never have and probably never will.  Non-conformists (in this case those in need of due-process and not those “packin”) make the majority feel uneasy and fearful.

In relatively peaceful times such “others’ can be tolerated if they don’t make too much noise and, with the American Civil Liberties Union watching,  they can demand their due process rights when needed.  However, since the September 11, 2001 attacks things have changed.  We are being told that there are no more peaceful times. Crisis is, supposedly, perpetual and that leads to the erosion of the rights of those assumed guilty of something endangering the majority–even if there is no real evidence or logic to the claim. This is a awful slippery slope.

There is a passage in the 1957 play A Man For All Seasons, by Robert Bolt, that speaks to this present predicament.  The play tells the story of Sir Thomas More, the singularly principled Chancellor of England under King Henry VIII.  The passage we are concerned with is about the importance making the law available to all, even the Devil.   

“William Roper (More’s son-in-law):  So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law! 

Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? 

William Roper:  Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that! 

Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

So that is the crux of the matter.  As long as the law is denied to some, we are all at risk.  The majority does not understand this.  They do not understand that for democracy to be worth its salt, it must defend the rights of everyone, and particularly those who disagree with, live differently from, and think differently than the majority.  The United States as we know it can easily survive without everyone having assess to assault rifles.  It cannot survive without everyone having assess to due process. Thus, as goes due process rights, so goes our democracy.

 * The origin of the Second Amendment lies, at least in good part, with the Founders’ perceived need to give local jurisdictions control of militias in slave holding sections of the young United States.  See Thom Hartmann piece on this issue at:  http://truth-out.org/news/item/13890-the-second-amendment-was-ratified-to-preserve-slavery 

Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

The author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com.More articles can be found onRamallahOnline.com, Logos Journal, and Dr. Davidson also maintains an online blog, you can find it athttp://www.tothepointanalyses.com

Part I – Savagery On-Going

In my last analysis I noted that a Zionist organization run by the Islamophobe  Pamela Geller is posting messages on buses and subways calling for support for Israel.  The messages claim that Israel represents the “civilized man” in a struggle against Jihadist “savagery.”  I questioned Israel’s qualifications for civilized status in the earlier piece, but am drawn back to the subject by the almost daily revelations of the Zionist state’s questionable behavior.  It is not that the Jihadist cannot be a savage at times, it is that the Israeli government seems quite incapable of being civilized.  For instance:

– On 16 October 2012 the Israeli organization Yazkern hosted dozens of veterans of  Israel’s 1948 “War of Independence” for a look at what that struggle really entailed.  The veterans testified to what can only be called a conscious effort at ethnic cleansing–the systematic destruction of entire Palestinian villages and numerous massacres.  A documentary film by  Israeli-Russian journalist Lia Tarachansky, dealing with this same subject, the Palestinian “Nakba” or catastrophe, is nearing  completion.  It too has the testimony of Israeli soldiers of the 1948 war.  These latest revelations lend credence to the claims of Israel’s “new historians” such as Ilan Pappewho have written books based on evidence gleamed from government archives showing that, even before the outbreak of hostilities leading to the creation of the State of Israel, the Zionist authorities planned to ethnically cleanse as much of Palestine as possible of non-Jews.   The aim of Yazkern’s effort at truth-telling is to break through the  sanitized “mainstream nationalistic narrative” of 1948  and the accompanying denial of any legitimate Palestinian counter-narrative.” 

– OK.  The Israelis were savages in 1948 and only a small minority will admit it. What about after “the War of Independence”? As it turns out the ethnic cleansing never stopped.  Conveniently, the long-standing denial that it ever started has helped to hide the fact of its on-going nature.  Yet just this week we received the news that Defense Minister Ehud Barak has given the order to demolish eight Palestinian villages with some 1500 residents in the south Hebron hills. The excuse offered by Barack is that the land is needed for military training exercises.  According to the “new historians,” this is a standard Israeli government cover for ethnic cleansing.  Sure, for a couple of years the Israeli army will use the land that held the demolished villages.  Then, almost inevitably, the area becomes the site of a new Israeli Jewish settlement.  

– On 20 October 2012 Al-Jazeera reported on Israeli documents showing that between 2008 and 2010 the Israeli army allowed food supplies into the Gaza Strip based on a daily calorie count that held the basic diet of a million and half people to a point just short of malnutrition. According to the Israeli human rights organization Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, “the official goal of the policy was to wage economic warfare which would paralyze Gaza’s economy and, according to the Defense Ministry, create pressure on the Hamas government.”  Actually, this bit of savagery predates 2008.  Back in 2006 Dov Weissglass, then an .,,,.advisor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, stated that “the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”  Of course, precedents for this can be found in the treatment of European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s.  One assumes that Mr. Weissglass was aware of this. 

However, just as with the barbarism practiced in the “War of Independence,” in this case too there is a well practiced capacity for national denial.  According to Gideon Levy writing in Haaretz, “the country has plenty of ways…of burying skeletons deep in the closet so that Israelis shouldn’t be overly disturbed.”  The military authors of the document that turned Weissglass’s hideous “idea” into savage practice,  operated in “a country afflicted with blindness.”  Just so the present Israeli government does not worry about public unease over the fact that it is slowly but surely destroying the Gaza sewage system and rendering its water supply undrinkable. 

– Then there are the petty acts of cruelty that can be considered telltale signs of savagery.  For instance, the fact that Israeli customs officials  held back the the exam sheets for the October 2012 College Board tests bound for the West Bank graduating high school seniors.  AMIDEAST, the organization that serves as the testing agency for the Palestinian territories, had made sure the Israeli authorities had the tests in their hands weeks in advance.  Nonetheless, in an apparent act of petty vindictiveness, the customs officials held on to them until AMIDEAST had to cancel the exam.  One observer has asked the question, “what has the SAT [tests] have to do with Israeli security?”  Well it might be that, in the mind of a savage customs official, the more college bound Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, the more articulate witnesses to Israeli oppression. On the Gaza side of the equation the U.S. was forced to cancel a small scholarship program for Gaza college students because the Israelis refused to let the students leave their open air prison, even if only to go to a West Bank school.  

For anyone who might want to follow the grim procession of Israeli oppressive and barbaric acts on a day to day basis, I recommend the web site Today In Palestine.

Part II – Challenge and Denial

In the face of this persistent savage behavior on the part of Israel, that country’s public support has finally begun to slip in the United States.  Most recently, fifteen prominent church leaders, representing major Christian denominations, wrote an open letter to Congress calling for “an immediate investigation into possible violations by Israel of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act and the U.S. Arms Export Control Act which respectively prohibit assistance to any country which engages in a consistent pattern of human rights violations….We urge Congress to hold hearings to examine Israel’s compliance, and we request regular reporting on compliance and the withholding of military aid for non-compliance.”  

So far the Congress has turned a deaf-ear to this request, but the Zionist reaction was loud and clear.  Leading the way in this effort was the head of the misnamed Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Abraham Foxman.  Charging the Christian leaders with a “blatant lack of sensitivity” (one might ask just how sensitive one is suppose to be to a oppressor?) Foxman decided to punish the offending clergy by refusing to engage in on-going “interfaith dialogue.”  The Zionist reaction to being called out for their own savage behavior is a classic example of denial. 

Part III – Conclusion

 Having “big brains” is a two edge sword for human beings.  It means we can think all manner of creative thoughts and even exercise some self-control over our own inappropriate impulses if we care to try.  However, it also means that we can be manipulated into thinking that we need not try–that we are the victims even as we are oppressing others and that any criticism of our actions is just another example of our victimization. Israeli culture, and indeed the culture of Zionism generally, is one on-going project of self-manipulation to achieve just such a state of mind.  And, to a great extent, it has succeeded.  A recent poll taken in Israel shows that “a majority of the [Israeli Jewish] public wants the state to discriminate against Palestinians….revealing a deeply rooted racism in Israeli society.”  

The Zionists are not the only experts in denial.  The United States, Israel’s chief ally, has always been good at this gambit as well.  After the 9/11 attacks any consideration of the possibility that United States foreign policy in the Middle East might have helped motivate the terrorism was anathema, and it still is over a decade later.  Instead of taking a hard look at our own behavior we are simply expanding our capacity to kill outright anyone who would challenge our policies in a violent fashion.  Our answer is targeted killings by drone or otherwise.  A bit of savagery we learned from the Israelis.    

Machiavelli, who can always be relied upon to see the darker side of things, once said, “Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events resemble those of preceding times.  This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.”  

But yet, is it really inevitable?  

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

Part I -  Taking Progress For Granted

People often take things for granted.  Take the concept of progress.  My students all assume that progress is continuous.  In fact, they think that it is inevitable.  Mostly they conceive of progress in terms of technology:  smart phones and computers of every sort. However, there is also a sense that there is a steady and inevitable movement toward the realization of social ideals.  Whether they are conservatives, liberals or libertarians, they all assume that the kind of world they want to live in is the kind of world that will evolve.  

That is also true for the feminists in my classes.  They know that they have to fight for gender equality and they are  willing to do so.  Yet they also assume the betterment of women’s conditions will be continuous and that victory for their cause is inevitable.  In terms of their own local communities, they are sure that conditions for women today are better than they were in their grandmothers‘ day, and that conditions will be better still for their own granddaughters.  They can’t imagine things going backward.

They may be in for a shock.  It is reasonable to conclude that conditions for  women, not only in places far away, but right here at home are deteriorating.  That they will continue to do so is not inevitable, but it is certainly possible.  Let’s take a look at the trends.  We will start with the ones manifesting themselves abroad and end with the ones here in the U.S.

Part II -  Women’s Progress in the Middle East?

Most of my feminist students see the Middle East as a central battleground for women’s rights.  Of course, they define those rights in terms of Western secular culture and ideals and have a hard time suspending that point of view long enough to consider women’s rights from the standpoint of Muslim cultural ideals.  Nonetheless, trends in the Middle East do not bode well for women’s status even in terms of Islamic precepts.  

1. For instance, last week authorities in Saudi Arabia refused entry to over 1000 Nigerian Muslim women who had arrived for the annual pilgrimage known as the Hajj.  The Saudi Ministry of Pilgrimage claimed the women were not accompanied by “male guardians” as required by Saudi law.  Actually, the women were accompanied by “male escorts” but the Saudis had segregated the Nigerians, male from female, and then claimed the women were unescorted. When their mistake was pointed out to the Saudi officials they refused to listen.  I seriously doubt that Prophet Mohammad would have reacted this way. 

Perhaps an American feminist would just dismiss this as Saudi backwardness.  After all we are talking about a country that refuses to allow its women to drive cars, which is a ban that cannot easily be drawn from the Quran or Hadith.  Perhaps feminists feel that, over time, outside pressure will bring the Saudis around to conform to Western standards of gender relations.  Yet it is quite possible that influence could flow the other way. 

For instance, in early October it was reported that IKEA, the Swedish furniture company with worldwide sales, purged the company’s Saudi catalogue of pictures of females.  They just airbrushed them out.  The Swedes generally pride themselves on their equitable gender relations, but obviously some of their business executives are quite willing to accommodate Saudi standards when money is to be made.  And, we all know that money, rather than feminist ideals, makes the world go round. 

 2. Then there is Iran.  An American feminist would again dismiss Iran as a backward place when it comes to women’s rights.  But, despite the chadors (under which one can often find designer clothes), this is a Western propaganda image that does not tell an accurate story.  Upon the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979,  most women’s rights were expanded.  They had open access to the job market and earned the same wages as men for the job they held.  They also had open access to the country’s universities including those courses of study usually considered male preserves.  Today, women make up more than 60% of those enrolled in institutions of higher learning, and women engineers, scientists, doctors, architects and the like are common.  That is progress by any standard, east or west.

Yet, progress is not necessarily continuous.  In September 2012  it was reported that thirty six Iranian universities have prohibited women from registering for courses in a range of subjects from chemistry and mathematics to education and business.  Apparently, this was a measure demanded by powerful conservative factions who feel that women have become too “active in society” and should “return to the home.”  It remains to be seen if this change is long-term.

3. Both Saudi Arabia and Iran are countries with Islamic governments, but within the Middle East the challenge to gender equality is not just a product of a conservative Muslim outlook.   Thus we can move on to Israel.

 According to a recently released report of the Israel Women’s Network, women have made little or no progress over the last decade.  “Discrimination against women in this country is spread across all sectors of society and culture.”  Twenty percent of Israeli women live in poverty (it is even worse for children and the elderly).  This is so even though Israeli women tend to be better educated than men.  

In the last few years the Israeli problem of gender discrimination has been illustrated by the “back of the bus” scandal occurring in Israeli cities.  Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel often impose gender segregation and, as those communities expand out from their traditional urban enclaves, they insist that secular Israelis conform to their standards rather than the other way around.  Thus, busses running routes that go through both Orthodox and secular communities often try to get women to restrict themselves to the back of the vehicle.  

Here is how Mickey Gitzen, the Director of Be Free Israel, an NGO promoting religious pluralism, explains the situation, “It’s a slippery slope.  What starts with women boarding the bus in the back because of modesty….can turn Israeli society into a segregated society in which women don’t have a place in public life.”  How very Saudi of the Israeli Orthodox!   

Part III – Women’s Progress in the U.S.?

That is there and not here in the U.S.  Really?  Consider the following: 

– Conservative Christians make up more than 20% of the voting public in the United States.  Their influence  runs deep in the Republican party, as can be seen by the statements of many of the recent contenders for the Republican presidential nomination.  And, among the lines pushed by this  conservative Christian element is an exceedingly patriarchal view of the role of women.

– The American Christian Fundamentalist Pat Robertson runs a TV program called the 700 Club.  It has a daily average audience of one million viewers. Here is what Robertson is telling his audience about the role of women: “I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband…the husband is the head of the wife and that is the way it is, period.”

– In an Alternet interview with author Kathryn Joyce, who has researched and written on the subject of conservative Christian views of women, she makes the following points:  

 1. There is a growing movement among conservative Christians that preach that women  should be married homemakers, and that each must have “as many children as God will give you.”  They see the God-given structure of human society as patriarchy.  

2. This point of view has been endorsed by Christian leaders whose long range goal is to so powerfully influence the U.S. government that they will be able to frame patriarchal precepts into law. 

 3. For these Christian conservatives the major enemy,  the “root of the problem,” is feminism and all those who assert a woman’s right to control her own fertility. 

Some these sentiments can be found in the present Republican Party national platform.  According to Jill Filipovic writing in the Guardian UK, “the entire Republican social platform is structured around the idea of the traditional family where men are in the public sphere as breadwinners and heads of households, and women stay in private, taking care of children and serving as helpmates to their husbands.”   

If this Christian conservative sentiment has captured the outlook of one of the nation’s two major political parties, you know it must not stop there.  A New York Times report recently asserted that there is  widespread social anxiety among American men caused by the confusion of gender roles that has allegedly come with growing gender equality in the U.S.  This has brought about a backlash.  “The masculine mystique is institutionalized in work structures” and both men and women who try to challenged this are “often penalized.”      

Part IV -  Conclusion

You might have noticed how the attitudes toward women of Muslim, Christian and Jewish fundamentalists are quite similar.  Each has fixated on the feminist drive for greater gender equality as a threat to their patriarchal concept of social life.  But, as the New York Times piece suggests, the problem is by no means restricted to those who describe themselves as religious conservatives.  It is a society wide, worldwide happening.    

In the end, it is much harder to realize social progress rather than technical progress.  For the latter, all you have to do is the research necessary to master elements of nature.  These elements might take a lot of work to get at, but they do not consciously fight back.  To achieve the former, however, you must go up against vested interests that do fight back.  That is why progress in society is hardly ever continuous and never inevitable. 

Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

The author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com.More articles can be found on RamallahOnline.com, Logos Journal, and Dr. Davidson also maintains an online blog, you can find it at http://www.tothepointanalyses.com

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

Part I – The Death of Rachel Corrie

On 16 March 2003, the last day of her life, 23 year old Rachel Corrie was in the Gaza town of Rafah standing in front of the Palestinian family home (not just a house) of Dr. Samir Nasrallah. Dr. Nasrallah was a local pharmacist and Ms Corrie had been staying with his family while serving as part of an International Solidarity Movement (ISM) cadre seeking to disrupt the Israeli army’s (IDF) on-going demolition of Palestinian homes. Between 2000 and 2004, the Israelis had destroyed enough homes in the Rafah area to leave some 1700 people homeless.

The Israeli army claimed they did this because these homes were used as “terrorist hiding places.” The result, they claimed, was frequent gunfire at Israeli settlements and soldiers. Yet for the time that Ms Corrie stayed with the Nasrallahs, everyone in the home had slept on the floor and away from the windows to avoid a constant barrage of gunfire from Israeli snipers.

On the day that Ms Corrie died, she had interposed herself between the Nasrallah home and a very large “D9R” armored Caterpillar bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier. This was one of those infamous, made-in-the-USA machines sold to Israel by the Caterpillar Inc. even though the CEO, Board of Directors and sales staff know that their product is used to destroy homes in ways that violate international law. At the time the bulldozer in question stood twenty to thirty meters from Corrie, who was wearing a “high visibility” fluorescent orange jacket and was speaking through a megaphone calling for the tractor driver to stop or turn away. The tractor moved toward her and the home slowly in an operation the IDF later described as the “clearing of vegetation and rubble” so as to remove “explosive devices.” As it approached, the driver lowered the tractor blade and began accumulating a mound of dirt and debris as the machine went along. When the bulldozer was close to the outer wall of the Nasrallah home, Corrie climbed on top of the accumulating debris. At that point she was so positioned that she could look directly into the tractor cab, and the driver could look directly out at her, from no more that three or four meters. The machine kept coming. In the next few seconds, she lost her balance, fell backwards, and was run over twice by the tractor blade. The bulldozer driver later testified that he never saw Corrie until he noticed “people pulling the body our from under the earth.”

There was, of course, an internal military investigation of the incident, an investigation that then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised then President George W. Bush would be “thorough, credible and transparent.” Senior U.S. officials, including the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, later observed that the militaryinvestigation was none of these things. The military exonerated both the driver of the tractor and his commander, saying that neither had seen Corrie and also they weren’t even trying to destroy the Nasrallah home that day.

The judgment followed a long-standing practice of the Israeli military, reconstructing scenarios after the fact in order to rationalize just about any action soldiers take against the Palestinians, no matter how criminal. In the Rafah area during the years that Corrie and other ISM volunteers worked there, the Israeli military was in the habit of targeting Palestinian children, killing some 400 of them, one-fourth of whom were under the age of 12. In almost all cases there was no penalty for committing these murders. The practice of granting immunity has also been followed by Israeli police and courts with reference to crimes committed by Israeli civilians, especially settlers, against Palestinians. To date, “91% of investigations of such criminal acts committed by Israelis against Palestinians and their property are closed without indictments being served.”

Part II – The Corrie Family Civil Suit

In 2005, frustrated by the apparent whitewash of their daughter’s murder, Corrie’s parents filed a civil suit in an Israeli court against the country’s Ministry of Defense. They hoped that the trial would provide the “credible and transparent” accounting that had so far been denied. Subsequently, fifteen court sessions were held in the city of Haifa and just 23 witnesses testified. Yet the whole thing dragged on for seven years–until 28 August 2012 when the presiding judge, Oded Gershon, finally issued his ruling.

“I reject the suit,” Gershon stated in his 62 page decision, claiming that Corrie and the other ISM activists had purposely chosen to enter a “daily combat region” where they acted “to protect terrorists.” The judge accepted the army’s claim that the bulldozer driver had not seen Corrie. In any case, according to the judge, she was acting irrationally. “Corrie could have simply gotten out of the way of the bulldozer as any reasonable person would have done,” but she did not, and so she was ultimately responsible for her own death. According to the Corrie family lawyer, Hussein Abu Hussein, Judge Gershon’s judgment was “so close to the state’s attorney’s version of events that it could have been written by him.”

The Judge’s mind-set is perhaps the most telling part of the judgment. In Gershon’s world, the Israeli army was not seeking to engage in a siege that was turning Gaza into the world’s largest outdoor prison while illegal Israeli settlements expanded. And, because that was not what was going on, any response by the people of Gaza could not be seen as legitimate acts of resistance or self-defense. No, the people of Gaza were at best supporters of terrorists or at worst terrorists themselves. That was the paradigm into which both the judge and all the Israeli army witnesses were locked. These witnesses spoke from behind a curtain, using aliases. This was done “for security reasons.” And, they all said basically the same thing: we did not see Rachel Corrie and even if we had we would not have seen a civilian. Why? Because Israel is at war with the Palestinians and, as one testifying IDF officer (aka Yossi) put it, “during a war there are no civilians.” There are only terrorists and their allies (Corrie) and Israel does not prosecute its soldiers for waging “war” against them.

The resulting a priori immunity is not unique to Israel. Just days after the Corrie decision was announced, another decision, this time by the U.S. Justice Department, was made public. The Department ended its investigation into deaths occurring during CIA interrogations conducted using torture. No charges were brought against the torturers in these cases due to insufficient “admissible evidence.” That is, the evidence which the government itself would declassify so as to make it admissible was not sufficient to “sustain a conviction.” The American Civil Liberties Union called the decision “nothing short of a scandal…Continuing impunity threatens to undermine the universally recognized prohibition on torture and other abusive treatment.” How Israeli of the American Justice Department–or is the other way around?

Part III – Conclusion

If you come across an individual who condemns an entire category of people and is also willing to violently act on the basis of that belief, you might call him or her a pathological racist, or a pathological xenophobe, or a pathological paranoid chauvinist. But what happens when those same sick sentiments get institutionalized in powerful bureaucracies? When, say, all Arabs (be they Muslim or Christian) are suspect and subject to government surveillance, segregation, collective punishment and worse. What then do you call this? National security? All too often that is exactly what we call it. The “we” here includes almost all politicians, media newscasters, security personnel, talking head “experts,” and the like. What it comes down to is that, in the name of “national security,” we can justify almost anything, including killing kids in Gaza and torturing people to death in some dungeon, the whereabout of which is classified, as well as running over a 23 year peace activist with a massive bulldozer.

That is certainly what the Corrie episode has shown to be the case in Israel. And it does not matter what is driving this obsessive stereotyping of the Palestinians as collective enemies by both individuals and entire government departments. The Israelis and their Zionist supporters can evoke the Holocaust (and, for that matter, the Americans can talk about 9/11) until the end of time. The actions stemming from such ultimately racist perspectives are still thoroughly dehumanizing and criminal. Such is perpetual “war.”