A Million Mutinies Now

The Canadian economist and US Presidential advisor, John Kenneth Galbraith, once famously wrote, “Faced with the choice between

changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need

to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

As the Israelis seek to justify their preoccupation

with violence in the name of peace, Hezbollah

continues to fire rockets. As the television screens

show Israeli air raids in Beirut, a few minutes later

the UN planes land in the distance on the dilapidated

runway with emergency supplies. It makes for a rather

metaphoric visual of the power structures and human

ingenuity involved in sanctioning a killing spree of

innocent civilians. It has now been absolutely confirmed that the international system is rife with bullshit just as it was in the case of Rwanda, Sudan and the Balkans.

The UN is desperately in need of a backbone. This is what our civilization has come to after all these years.

The bureaucratic intransigence and diplomatic foot dragging of Western powers in their inability to call for a ceasefire when it

matters, will no doubt have violent implications in

the future. In the current power dynamic, the lesson

that was learned was that Israeli strategic interests

supercede the lives of innocent civilians that were in

the line of fire. Saving the lives of a few kidnapped soldiers somehow justified bombing a country in to oblivion and displacing close to a million people. Hezbollah’s firing of rockets was just as indiscriminate and irresponsible in their failure to protect civilians.

It has become abundantly clear that human beings and the societies and institutions we have created to govern ourselves are woefully inadequate to address our collective divisions. As

media stalwarts like Anderson Cooper of CNN sit at the

Lebanese border playing to their television crowd, it

merely perpetuates an erroneous context to the

conflict.

The right wing playbook is getting back to

basics: the ‘War on Terror’ rhetoric superimposed on

the present conflict to meet Israeli and US interests

in the region. Equally divisive, most of the Arab satellite television stations send out a distorted view of the conflict to its audiences as well.

The present conflict is not only opening new wounds in

the Middle East, it is openly laying to rest old

assumptions and hierarchies; it is exposing a

pandora’s box of hypocrisies virtually every day.

What is happening in Israel, southern Lebanon, Gaza

and the West Bank is building broad and long-term

movements that can only lead to fundamental changes in

the coming years if an all out war is to be averted -

rather, if it can be. No one in Israel seems ready to bear the immense social and political burden of standing up to the IDF and the elite who really run the country.

Unfortunately, most institutions of power in the West

are incapable of seeing this happen due to the

historical biases they have engaged in. Recently, the

Canadian right wing national newspaper, the National

Post, ran a commentary comparing the appeasement of

Hezbollah to Neville Chamberlain. It ran a large

black and white picture of the former British Prime

Minister to show why the ‘Arab terrorists’ had to be

done in. Nasrallah was Hitler in this paradigm while

Israel represented the best of Western civilization

that needed to be protected. Were life and politics

as simple as the mainstream news constructed it, this

conflict would not have carried on for so long. This

construction of the conflict virtually negates the

value of innocent civilians affected by the conflict.

In a recent interview in Haifa, Abir Kopty, a

spokesperson with the Mossawa Center said, “Israel is

still engaging in a racist system, not only

economically but by building walls and fences. The

problem is also psychological - they are putting the

fences and walls in people’s minds.”

Kopty says that women are leading most of the

resistance activities during the war. “This a men’s

war. That is why it’s important that women lead the

peace movement.”

In her view, there is an unfairness in the world

system and the way in which the US is engaging in the

world. Kopty says that the US will not be taken

seriously in the region while most view their presence

as one which involved hundreds of American leaders

cooperating with an occupation. She says, “Peace is a

nice word, but I’m talking about justice - historical

justice. When one side is strong and the other is

weak, it is not peace, it is coercion.”

In the past weeks, Kopty has been arrested, beaten and

briefly placed under house arrest as have many other

peace protesters in Israel. As Palestinian Arab

Israelis protested in Haifa about Israel’s military response in

Lebanon, right wing Israelis taunted the crowd by

chanting, “Death to the Arabs.” In Kopty’s view,

Israeli society is misled by the government and the

media to the extent that it has distorted the

political culture of the land and has affected the

reality of the people. Referring to the latest

escalation, Kopty says, “This state is now on its way

to a kind of neo-fascism. Israelis only think of their own

interests.”

She adds, “People who are pretending to be left are

supporting the war. This is not an atmosphere where

we can live together and make change unless this

political culture changes.”

Kopty says that, “What Israel and the US is doing is

making enemies. They are every day making new enemies

amongst the Arab people. What people are seeing on TV

and all this violence, they can see through this - it

will not end. Israel has no right to portray itself

as the victim. Each one is responsible for the

dehumanization of innocent civilians that is going on

right now as part of normal state activities...Israel is following a ghetto policy.”

Social activist Leila Mosenzon who will be spending 3

months in jail beginning in September for protest activities attempting to stop the construction of the Separation Wall in East

Jerusalem, in a recent interview in Jerusalem said,

“Peace has lost its meaning. We need to move to a

campaign of divestment and sanctions to push Israel to

change its policies. The privileges of Israeli

society are built upon a foundation of violence that

is unjust.” Monsour has had as many as 11 cases

against her and was recently arrested after refusing

to move on the orders of a security officer in

Jerusalem. She has also been detained by the Shabbak,

interrogated, been physically threatened and called a

threat to state security.

“In this society, I am made in to a criminal and told

that I’m violent even though I’m a pacifist. It is my

life’s obligation to break the will of the

occupation,” she says. “There is a matrix of control

in practice here. It is a war of control and power.

In their heart, in these close surroundings, people

understand what is going on. But we fall in to that

trap of not getting anywhere.”

Mosenzon says that the construction of the national

narrative is racist. “Until we get in to a common

conversation which can incorporate the need for

co-existence and social change, the situation on the

ground will not shift very far. Activists have thus

far been willing to get beaten, arrested and even

killed. Many people play a part in this war without

asking questions. Basic humanitarian aid like food

and water doesn’t even get to where it needs to...this

is not justice. We have no right to live off the

privileges of violence.”

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC News Middle East editor recently wrote that for peace to happen in this region, “dreams must die.” Absolutely - let them die.

The old narrative is dead and may the mutinies in the Middle East and the rotten power structures rip open a new way to look at the problem. The entire Middle East has a human rights crisis and Western meddling in the region is doing little to change the situation on the ground. The world would be a better place without the demagoguery, grandstanding and posturing of George W. Bush, Ehud Olmert and Hassan Nasrallah. Let it also be very clear, that no one has the right to live in a bubble or live in a kind of sanitized freedom created by inflicting brute force upon others without taking a level of personal responsibility for it.