Categorical Aperitif

I first heard of the Zbigniew Brzezinski take-down of Joe Scarborough ("You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you") that everyone's talking about now through the good Attaturk yesterday. When I watched the clip he posted, though, what leaped out at me was not so much Brzezinski's disdainful verbal slaps at the blowhard Scarborough but his desperate attempts to argue for "a sense of proportion" when it comes to the "Israel is just defending itself" framing of the Gaza conflict—a framing that conveniently erases inconvenient facts and that effaces the astounding disproportion between the amount of harm done by Palestinian rockets (which, it must be acknowledged, is certainly not zero) and the amount done by Israeli bombs. Norman Solomon puts this in perspective:

Israelis and Arabs "feel that only force can assure justice," I. F. Stone noted soon after the Six-Day War in 1967. And he wrote, "A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them."

The closing days of 2008 have heightened the Israeli government's stature as a mighty practitioner of the moral imbecility that Stone described.

Israel's airstrikes "have killed at least 270 people so far, injured more than 1,000, many of them seriously, and many remain buried under the rubble so the death toll will likely rise," Phyllis Bennis, of the Institute for Policy Studies, pointed out on Sunday, two days into Israel's attack. "This catastrophic impact was known and inevitable, and far outweighs any claim of self-defense or protection of Israeli civilians." She mentioned "the one Israeli killed by a Palestinian rocket attack on Saturday after the Israeli assault began was the first such casualty in more than a year."

Even if you set aside the magnitude of Israel's violations of the Geneva conventions and the long terrible history of its methodical collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, consider the vastly disproportionate carnage in the conflict.

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," Gandhi said.

What about a hundred eyes for an eye?

// posted by nash @ 11:16 AM