Roger Cohen Sheds No Tears
There is no moral equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian actions.
(Tijen Erol / Flickr)
The Gaza Strip is under violent assault, but Roger Cohen isn’t feeling particularly outraged. He writes:
None of this is edifying. Much is abhorrent: indiscriminate Hamas rockets on Israel, Israeli killing of Palestinian civilians in ‘collateral damage.’ Yet I find myself short on moral outrage. It is all so familiar, a recurrent curse. It is a sham fight, and so doubly inexcusable. The Jews and Arabs of the Holy Land are led by men too small to effect change. Shed a tear, shed a thousand, it makes no difference.
There is no moral uproar from Cohen because the attacks are part of a recurrent tragedy for which both sides are culpable, especially the leaders. Those leaders, he argues, are comfortable with the status quo and lack the courage to make the necessary concessions to bring peace to the region.
Cohen requires these concessions from the weaker party — namely, that they should relinquish the right of return — even when that right is protected by international law. After all, the international legal vocabulary (“war crimes,” “crimes against humanity”) is entirely missing from his commentary. Cohen subordinates the legal framing (“rights”) to the language of concessions and pragmatism. His analysis moves between a focus on the leaders and the culture of hate on both sides. Between a personality-based explanation and a culturalist one. There is no room left for a structural explanation of the conflict.
Cohen posits a false symmetry between Israelis and Palestinians, because both just happen to be caught in this situation. The passive voice here is fitting because it implies the lack of a primary author of the tragedy — say, an occupier and a political system that sustains the occupation. After all, even the Greek tragedies have authors.
He presents this symmetry despite the fact that the killing in the Gaza Strip has been inflicted entirely on the Palestinian side and most of the dead are civilians. This is an equivocation that has been challenged in other contexts. Reflecting on the reconciliation processes in South Africa, Martha Minow wrote:
Crucial here would be demonstrable evenhandedness and honest acknowledgment of injuries and wrongs committed by the competing sides without losing hold of the distinction between those who abused government power and those who resisted the abuses . . . [T]he very effort to articulate the moral baseline must treat the apartheid crimes as worse than the crimes of the ANC or other antiapartheid activists in terms of scale and motive.
Cohen would not have missed this insight if he had foregrounded a structural analysis of Palestine’s power dynamics into his reflections. From this perspective, the differences between the South African situation and the Palestinian one are not very material to the question of responsibility.
To be clear, by actions committed by those “who resisted the abuses” in the context of South African apartheid, we mean actions that Nelson Mandela himself labels guerrilla warfare and terrorism. We also mean internal fighting among blacks: thousands of blacks lost their lives in such violence, including the so-called “necklacing” practice.
In other words, there is nothing wrong with critiquing some Palestinian forms of violence. But those who impose a moral equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian actions mislead themselves and others. This deception is a good excuse for a lack of action or even a clear condemnation of the stronger party.
There is another reason why Cohen does not feel outraged. He says that nothing can be done, lamenting the fact that “[t]here is no unity of Palestinian national purpose. There is no Palestinian democratic accountability; election talk evaporates.” But this lack of unity, while regrettable, does not undermine the justice of the cause. Divisions among blacks under apartheid did not make them less entitled to freedom. Furthermore, such rhetoric obscures the responsibility of third parties, first among them the United States, for the situation on the ground.
Against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, these parties have been supportive of anti-democratic processes in both Israel and the Palestinian territories. In this sense, the leadership issue harped on by Cohen is a reductionist narrative. It leaves no room for an examination for the international structure of power that feeds into the internal struggles.
Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign and military aid. Effectively, such aid is not conditioned on Israeli enforcement of its obligations under international law with respect to the occupation, nor on its respect for the civil rights for Palestinian citizens inside Israel proper. The aid and military cooperation continues unabated despite the rise of the right-wing in Israel and despite Israel’s rebuffing of the Obama administration on the question of a settlement freeze.
In addition, the US, Canada, and the EU have been funding and training a security apparatus — rife with abuse — in the Palestinian Territories. They were successful not only in security cooperation with Israel but also quashing dissent and protecting the corrupt Mahmoud Abbas regime.
The reports of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, to name just one of many, show that a police state has been established in Occupied Palestine. Torture and degrading treatment, violations of free speech rights, of peaceful assembly, of freedom of association, are rampant.
Undermining Palestinian self-governance is nothing new for the EU and US. They have been the primary driving forces for creating the split between Hamas and Fatah and preventing efforts at reconciliation. As Vanity Fair reported at the time, it was Israel and the United States who initiated a Fatah coup against Hamas. They boycotted, alongside the European Union, the newly elected Hamas government in 2006, and subsequently supported the years-long siege Israel imposed on Gaza. Another recipient of US military aid — Egypt — imposed the blockade on the other side of the border.
European powers also paid the salaries of all the Palestinian Authority employees in the Gaza Strip for years, encouraging them not to work for the elected government. The US, Canada, and the EU have been reproducing the old regional line: support secular Arab dictators rather than risk a democracy that might bring the Islamists into power.
As a European official told the Economist in 2010: “The last thing many in Europe want is for Hamas to regain an executive role in the West Bank. We prefer division and no elections to reconciliation and elections.”
It follows then that the Israeli rejection of the recent Palestinian attempt at a unity government does not emerge from a vacuum. Western positions in recent years have made the attack on the Gaza Strip, to undermine both Hamas and the unity government, possible.
This is not to say that the Palestinians themselves have no hand in their own divisions. But the role of external powers is too big to be ignored.
Cohen’s imposition of a false symmetry between Israel and Palestine and his marginalization of US complicity in the conflict shape his lack of moral outrage. The former line allows him to simultaneously acknowledge the fact of power asymmetry and ignore its effect; to mention history (“1948”) and de-historicize the onslaught nevertheless. Ignoring US involvement allows him to pretend that he is helpless to do anything because he as an American has nothing to do with the creation of the problem.
Both lines allow Cohen to appear as a neutral observer who is merely looking at the abyss and lamenting the fact that both sides are unable to understand what he can. The effect of this kind of political discourse and rhetoric, however, is merely to reproduce the very status quo that Cohen laments.
With a little bit of context and proper analysis, the repetition of familiar patterns of death and destruction would lead Cohen and others to more moral outrage, not less. Maybe that would help shift the status quo in the right direction.