In the Nablus shopping district, a woman with bags and a balloon waited for transportation. The removal of an Israeli checkpoint has made access to the city easier.-- NY Times

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently went public with an Israeli plan for ‘economic peace’ with the Palestinian people. This concept is distinct from political peace, which addresses the stated demands of the Palestinian authority, in that it ‘circumvents’ this neutered government to give Palestinians what the Israeli government knows they want deep down: economic growth. Netanyahu: “[Economic peace]…means that we have to strengthen the moderate parts of the Palestinian economy by handing rapid growth in those area, rapid economic growth that gives a stake for peace for the ordinary Palestinians.”

The next section is under the heading “Development mitigates” and explains Tony Blaire’s perspective that problems must be mitigated before they are solved. I get the feeling that there is a very specific set of characteristics that go into the “ordinary Palestinian” category. Palestinians who are reasonable, humble, profoundly apolitical and even anti-political, who are concerned only with protecting and feeding their family and/or business. It’s this Palestinian which is the human material the authorities hope to use to remake the region.

A few days ago the New York Times published an article that seems to act as an ode to this hypothetical Palestinian’s hopes and dreams. Some quotes that smell of cheap perfume:

“The International Monetary Fund is about to issue its first upbeat report in years for the West Bank, forecasting a 7 percent growth rate for 2009.”

“Two years ago I couldn’t have even gone to Nablus,” said Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who serves as international envoy to the Palestinians, after a smooth visit this week. “Security is greatly improved, and the economy is doing much better. Now we need to move to the next stage: politics.”

“The Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says it shares the goal of helping Mr. Abbas, which is why it is seeking to improve West Bank economic conditions as a platform for moving to a political discussion.”

“Palestinian troops have been training in Jordan under American sponsorship.

There are now several thousand men trained in that way, and their skills, along with those of the European-trained police force here, have made a huge difference.

An important element in making the Palestinian force effective, American and Israeli officials say, was taking young Palestinian men out of the ancestral grips of their villages and tribal clans and training them abroad, turning them into soldiers loyal to units and commanders.”

The last sentence is frightening. Loosening the human material from its backwardness and tradition in order to outsource pacification? An original yet unmistakable reiteration of the colonial dynamic. Tzipi Livni, an Israeli-Jewish Ashkenazi politician offered these sometimes confusing words of wisdom on the nature of the state of Israel:

Sporadic clashes were reported in the operations focussed on the Old City area of Nablus. February 25, 2007, news.bbc.co.uk

“A Jewish state is a matter of values. It is not a matter of religion, it is more a matter of nationality. And a Jewish state is not a monopoly of rabbis, it’s what each and everyone feels inside, it’s about the nature of the state of Israel,” she said.

“Its about the Jewish tradition, it’s about Jewish history. But we need to keep the nature, the character of the state of Israel as a Jewish state because this is – excuse me for using French – the raison d’etre of the state of Israel.”

Maybe the authors of the NY times article will explain these views as proof of the ‘ancestral grip’ that Livni’s village or family has on her. Perhaps they should send her train as a soldier in Jordan so that she can be loosened from them.

It seems that the powers that be are drilling Palestinians to replace the IDF in the population centers (not the majority of the West Bank), and that cooperation is rewarded with ‘economic growth.’ All the Palestinians interviewed were high-class managers and vice-presidents talking about the importance of the rule of law, but I’m not sure whether the Palestinian attacks or Israeli checkpoints were holding their back their purely economic agendas.

Law and order, security, and economics, totally apolitical things that can be endlessly and apolitically improved to mitigate, to contain, to clean up the wound so political surgery can finally be performed. But there are too many echoes from South Africa here; it seems that all these apolitical interventions comprise a very political aim, namely building the basis for a Palestinian ‘government,’ a group of heavily armed municipalities, who are recognized by the world as a somehow separate entity from the Israeli government, which actually calls the shots.

Economic growth is not a substitute for being recognized as human beings. One of us should look into ‘economic peace’ in South Africa, in the American south after slavery, and in other places.

Richard Silverstein talks about this NY Times article here.

The first school’s lessons usually involve the deployment of military force. A typical example is the Israeli Chief of Staff, who used the setting of Auschwitz to promote his government’s campaign to equate Iran and Nazi Germany, by falsely claiming the Iranians called for the physical destruction of the Israeli population.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/979478.html

(in fact, Ahmadinejad said he hoped the current Israeli regime would disappear, just like the Soviet regime and that of the Shah – without wishing for the Soviet peoples and his own Iranian nation to be exterminated http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/rumor-of-the-century/ I am no fan of this dictator, but there is no need to exaggerate his words). The current Prime Minister, Netanyahu, recently stated quite bluntly “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany” http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/787766.html

Such Nazi comparisons have often been used in the past to justify military operations: for instance, when the IDF bombed Beirut, killing PLO fighters and several thousand civilians during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Prime Minister Begin wrote to President Reagan that the destruction of Arafat’s headquarters felt to him like he was destroying Hitler’s bunker. http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/11/11/arafat/index3.html

I find the universal interpretation much more appealing: never forget to show solidarity. Here, the famous words of the theologian Niemöller come to mind:

“In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then… they came for me… And by that time there was no one left to speak up”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came…

However, recently I’ve been thinking about a third interpretation, concerning the dangers of extreme self-righteousness. I read and re-read the text of the speech given by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, in Poznan, Poland, on October 4, 1943.  The address, of which there is a surviving recording, was given to his SS officers, and it seems to have been aimed at raising their motivation. Exterminating so many people was apparently difficult to cope with psychologically: Christopher Browning, in his wonderful “Ordinary Men”, recounts how sorry the members of the exterminating units felt for themselves decades later, because of the hard job they were expected to fulfill.

So Himmler wants to raise his listeners’ spirits. He tells them that many Nazi party members speak of extermination as if it is “a small matter”. But “none of them has seen it, has endured it”, unlike his audience: “most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when there are 500, or when there are 1000″. Actually exterminating people is much harder than it sounds, but Himmler has words of encouragement: his subordinates “have seen this through, and – with the exception of human weaknesses […] have remained decent”.

How do you exterminate decently? “We have taken away the riches that they had, and I have given a strict order [… to deliver] these riches completely to the Reich, to the State. We have taken nothing from them for ourselves. A few, who have offended against this, will be [judged] in accordance with an order, that I gave at the beginning: He who takes even one Mark of this is a dead man […]We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who wanted to kill us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves with even one fur, with one Mark, with one cigarette, with one watch, with anything. That we do not have. Because at the end of this, we don’t want, because we exterminated the bacillus, to become sick and die from the same bacillus”.

http://www.holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/speech-text.shtml

Incredible as it sounds, the Nazis felt the need to morally justify their actions to themselves as they were systematically murdering millions of men, women and children. To do this, and to distinguish themselves from the “bacillus” (germs) they were eliminating, Himmler came up with a criterion that, to him, really proved his subordinates’ basic decency: they may be busy piling up bodies, but at least they weren’t looting them. They showed honorable self-restraint throughout this ordeal, so difficult for them to perform.

Many sides in the Israeli-Arab conflict “Nazify” their opponents: I find these comparisons exaggerated and highly dangerous, and as I wrote, they are too often a prelude to more violence. I believe the Jewish Holocaust should only be compared to other cases of organized extermination. One variety is a bureaucratic apparatus implementing a systematic plan to wipe an entire group off the face of the earth within a limited timeframe (examples include the Armenian genocide of 1915, and Rwanda in 1994). Another is repeated attacks of colonial armies on indigenous populations over a longer period, which are frequent and violent enough to lead to full-blown extermination – as happened in Northern California in the 1850s and 1860s, or in Tasmania in the 1820s and 1830s. Without detracting from their seriousness, I don’t think we have any evidence to support framing current events in the Middle East in this specific way.

But I think the Poznan speech can serve us as a yardstick, as a warning: this is how far self-righteousness can go. People can undertake a vast project of killing off an entire people, and still convince themselves they are morally superior. Read this text:  it is really worth your consideration.

http://www.holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/speech-text.shtml