The helicopter is, of course, though I didn't grasp it at first, not monitoring some crime wave in the area of London in which I live (which is what I first feared) but of course, is guarding the air space over the Israeli Embassy and, I presume, filming and monitoring the daily protesters who gather nearby.
It is worth noting that although the British media reports these demonstrations as being 'outside the Israeli Embassy', in fact they are not. The Israeli Embassy is practically unapproachable, and no-one in the Embassy glancing out of one of its windows (if any were to, which I would doubt) would be able to see them. And probably not hear them either, though I suspect that there will be security men or Mossad operatives poring over video of the protesters. Many of whom I imagine would be well advised not to holiday in Eilat in the future.
But that mildly irritating buzz, of course, is nothing to what the inhabitants of the Gaza strip are hearing all hours of the day and night. What kind of fear and dread the noise of unmanned and lethal drones, the sudden blast and shock of a missile exploding, the howl of a jet aircraft overhead, and the scream and squeal of shells passing overhead, I cannot in truth imagine.
it has been described to me by friends who have been the victims of an Israeli bombardment. But nothing in my experience gives me, and can give very few Westerners who are pontificating about the need for ‘restraint’, no real idea of what it must be like. Even though I have, just twice in the last twenty years, heard revolver shots in my own London street, and once, was round he corner from an IRA bomb, which left me dazed, deaf and disorientated but otherwise unharmed.
To deliberately inflict this on the scale the Israelis are doing it yet again, as they have before and most recently in Lebanon, amounts to a perverse form of cruelty. It is, obviously intended to frighten and intimidate.
And yet, my knowledge of Palestinians tells me that while people may be frightened, the result will inevitably be that they are not intimidated into sullen subjection but angered and—if it were possible—provoked into even greater loathing of the politicians, at least, if not the populations, of the two countries that have inflicted this upon them
This was the effect of the Blitz on London and the bombing of Dresden. It could be said to have been the result of the ‘shock and awe’ bombardment of Baghdad, though the anger and loathing of the perpetrating country and its soldiery took perhaps not days or months, but years to develop.
It astonishes me that after 60 years, there are only two military powers in the world which have neither understood nor learnt this lesson, the USA and Israel. Perhaps that should not be so surprising, because it appears so often that the two countries are, militarily, twins in what is called ‘doctrine’ and tactics. Both have constantly begun wars in which air power and missiles, the demolition of infrastructure from the air, have been expected to disempower and disable a country.
And though it has never succeeded in anything other than reducing a country to poverty and anarchy, we are hearing Israeli military spokesmen (and women) repeating yet again the mantra that destroying physical embodiments of government—ministries, offices, schools, universities—will incapacitate a population that in the case of Gaza has been used to the improvisation of local populations and local communities unconnected with any governmental or political organisation.
A military doctrine based on assumptions like these demonstrates nothing more than a maive grasp of how a society under occupation, or at war, actually functions. that naiveté and ignorance can perhaps be understood in the case of Americans, who have not been the victims of an occupation, or of war on their own territory for more than a century.
Perhaps this may also be true of Israel, since it also has never suffered occupation. But I think there are e deeper reasons. One, no doubt, is that since Israel relies so much on the USA for its military ability, that these doctrinal assumptions somehow come attached to the dollars that pay for the war machine.
Or, and I suspect this is fundamental, that it is simply that the Israelis view Arabs (and particularly Palestinians) in 19th century colonial terms; politically and socially underdeveloped, undereducated, and therefore incompetent and easily influenced or overborne. We see precisely the same traits in American attitudes to peoples and societies in various parts of the world. It is a part of what is so often referred to as ‘American arrogance’.
Historically, the arrogance that diminishes other peoples, culturally, politically or economically inevitably is bolstered by militarism and war. Until maintaining that cultural, economic and intellectual superiority through military means becomes unsustainable.
Maybe the bombardment of Gaza, an invasion, the destruction of the entire governmental and societal infrastructure of the territory, and what I expect to be a form of imposed ‘cantonisation’ in which Gaza is militarily reduced to small overpopulated ‘camps’ with no communication allowed between them, will, for Israel, be a sufficient resolution of the Palestinian problem, one which can allow no possibility of a functioning state any larger than a small town can exist for another 50 years or more.
But whether it will cow Palestinians into accepting it as a permanent fact of history I doubt. A people’s aspirations to live freely in their own state, to make their own decisions free of outside influence, to maintain and develop a culture, are not destroyed along with ministries, schools and mosques in weeks; not even after a series of invasions and occupations over years and decades? Not even if that population is entirely and deliberately dispersed away from its homeland, as I fear may well be the eventual conclusion of this current Israeli action.
Should not the Israelis (and Americans) of all people, be able to understand that?
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