Murder, in any democracy’s foreign policy, is hardly ever sold as murder; instead it is neatly repackaged, advertised as necessary defense to loyal constituents. On November 10, the Fletcher School and Tufts Hillel will host one of the primary architects of this summer’s massacres in Gaza. Even before these massacres began, they had been neatly repackaged, the violence masked with the label of necessity. Tufts Hillel describes Lt. Col. Dr. Eran Shamir- Borer as the “IDF’s legal advisor for Operation Protective Edge.” This latest assault on Gaza killed 2,127 Palestinians by the IDF’s count and was third in what has become a nearly biannual series of massacres. To put this in human terms, children six or older in Gaza have survived three major Israeli assaults in their short lifespans. But Shamir-Borer is not here to talk in any terms as honest as murder, massacre, or assault. He is coming to address “the challenges facing Western democracies in the face of asymmetrical warfare.” Language is a powerful legitimizing weapon, and already there are five suspicious terms to unpack: Israeli Defense Forces, Operation Protective Edge, asymmetrical warfare, democracies, and of course body counts, which speak a language purposely devoid of the true cost of war. These euphemisms of the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict” were designed to make violent domination digestible to those whose political leaders, tax dollars, and indifference uphold it. We in the U.S. are a primary audience. The U.S. donates one-quarter of its foreign aid budget to Israel, and more importantly, provides crucial military equipment and the often lone diplomatic backing for an Israeli government that finds itself increasingly isolated in the international moral landscape. As Tufts students we are participants in the continuing violence in Gaza. From paying sales tax to allowing authorizers of mass murder to be invited to our campus, we need to think critically through the fog of rhetoric that grants Israel and the U.S. impunity for their crimes. The dominant and legitimizing narrative we are fed blames thousand year old Palestinian villages for standing in the way of Israel’s “peaceful” settler colonial project. Ostensibly, Palestinian suicide homes crash themselves into peaceful Israeli bulldozers. Ostensibly, Gazans brought their deaths upon themselves at the hands of the peace-seeking IDF. In dominant discourse, Israeli violence is disappeared. The constant presumption of Palestinian fault and Israeli victimization is reinforced by U.S. politicians: this summer while Israeli forces relentlessly pummeled the imprisoned population of Gaza, our lawmakers produced dozens upon dozens of statements and bills speaking of Israel’s “right to self-defense,” Hamas’ “human shields,” and “unprovoked rocket attacks from the Hamas terrorist organization.” Congress authorized an additional $225 million of aid for Israel’s Iron Dome in early August, and after its passage House Speaker John Boehner reiterated the apparently still unchallenged logic that “Israel is our friend and Israel’s enemies are our enemies.” U.S. politics, too, work to disappear Israeli violence. - See more at: mondoweiss.net/2014/11/tuftssjp#sthash.xvkelOsJ.dpuf
Posted on: Thu, 06 Nov 2014 15:08:58 +0000
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