[Cross-posted at Z Word.]
Glenn Greenwald links, with some caveats, to this piece by Nir Rosen as a “must-read” on the Gaza conflict. “…[Rosen’s] generalized explanation about how the concept of ‘terrorism’ is distorted and exploited by stronger countries can’t be emphasized enough.” What can’t be emphasized enough is that Rosen’s case is sophistry from start to finish.
I’ve profited from some of Rosen’s analyses of Iraq and Afghanistan, although I found his Rolling Stone piece overly deferential to the Taliban. Now I see why. Rosen is in thrall to a crude, romantic, frankly adolescent view of “resistance” movements, and his totalizing rhetoric on Israel/Palestine places this respected journalist on the furthest fringe of the left.
“A Zionist Israel is not a viable long-term project,” he writes, “and Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long since made a two state solution impossible. There can be only one state in historic Palestine.” Also this: “To call oneself an Israeli Zionist is to engage in the dispossession of entire people [sic].” Note the language: merely to call oneself a Zionist is to engage in dispossession. Never mind that there are left-wing Zionists who have fought Israel’s settlements policy and advocated for a two-state … oh wait, right, there can’t be a two-state solution, even though, as Johann Hari points out, “72 percent [of Palestinians] want a two-state solution on the 1967 borders, while fewer than 20 percent want to reclaim the whole of historic Palestine.”
Rosen’s broader claims about terrorism — the ones Greenwald endorses — are even dodgier. What’s more, they’re unoriginal. If the Palestinians only had tanks and planes, Rosen says, they’d never have to bomb cafés — a tiresome and spurious apologia for terrorism straight out of “The Battle of Algiers.”
Laying bare his intellectual dishonesty, Rosen also repeats a malicious slander against Madeleine Albright: “When you impose sanctions, as the US did on Saddam era Iraq, that kill hundreds of thousands, and then say their deaths were worth it, as secretary of state Albright did, then you are deliberately killing people for a political goal.” Arundhati Roy used the same out-of-context quotation from Albright to smear the former Secretary of State as a murderer.
Ian Buruma set the record straight:
This sounds pretty horrible. In fact, Albright had already made it clear to Lesley Stahl of CBS, who asked the question, that the Iraqi children were not dying because of the sanctions. Iraq can buy as much medicine as it wants. She admitted that sanctions did have negative consequences, but she argued that this was a price worth paying for containing the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
Albright did not say, nor did she mean, that “the Iraqi children’s deaths are worth it.” This is a lie. And it tells us much about the foundation on which Rosen builds his case. Dividing the world simplistically between the weak and the strong, Rosen suggests that the weak are moral, the strong immoral, and that’s pretty much it.
An American journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified. My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the Jews in Nazi Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.
[…]
Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. […] When the native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.
In other words, for the weak, everything is permitted if they so choose, and no one else may judge. This is insidious, and as Fred Halliday has observed (in Two Hours that Shook the World: September 11, 2001—Causes and Consequences), it is simply wrong:
There are … broad principles, some enshrined in historic discussions, some in international law, including the Geneva conventions and its protocols, which provide a basis for discussion of this issue. […] These principles, framed in different historical idioms, now overlain by international law and convention, take terrorism out of the realm of the subjective: one person’s terrorist is not another’s freedom fighter.
Also from Rosen, not a word about Hamas’s virulent antisemitism, or its oppressive policies toward the Palestinian population itself. And this is the core deficiency of his argument: the storybook notion that in situations where terrorist violence occurs, the victims are simply rising up. Rather, it’s thuggish armed groups who take advantage and oppress the very people they’re claiming to liberate.
For all Rosen’s hand-wringing that we’ll never arrive at a fair definition of terrorism, his view on the matter is in fact very clear. Terrorism is what Israel does. It’s what Madeleine Albright does. The Other is morally blameless by definition. Hardline positions like these — and there are indeed parallels on the pro-Israel side — are very much a part of the problem, not the solution.
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