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Overcoming Impunity
June 8, 1967. Israeli warplanes and boats attack the USS Liberty as it sits in international waters off the coast of Gaza, killing 34 seamen, wounding another 137, and leaving the high-tech surveillance vessel in ruins. President Lyndon B. Johnson calls off a rescue mission and issues orders that nothing further is to be said about the incident. To this day it is the only peacetime attack on a U.S. naval vessel that Congress refuses to investigate. That’s impunity. March 16, 2003. A D-9 bulldozer, made by Caterpillar in the United States and bought by Israel with U.S. taxpayer money, crushes American citizen Rachel Corrie as she tries to prevent its demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah, Gaza. Rachel is wearing an orange flak-jacket, and speaking into a bull-horn under a cloudless sky—yet the Israeli military claimed that its driver could not see her and that she slipped on debris roiled up by the bulldozer. No protest is launched from the U.S. State Department, nor is one generated from within Congress, which shortly afterwards passed yet another resolution pledging near-unanimous and unconditional support for the state of Israel. To this day, no action has been taken against Rachel’s murderers. Israel lives and breathes impunity. • It clandestinely built a nuclear arsenal with full knowledge of the U. S. and in flagrant violation of America’s stipulated goal of checking nuclear proliferation. Israel has refused to acknowledge its arsenal or to join any international covenants for the regulation and restriction of nuclear weapons. But while the U.S. government, politicians and mainstream media obsess over a future nuclear threat from Iran, the present menace of Israel’s nuclear weapons goes unmentioned. • The candidates for the 2008 presidential election vied with one another over who is the better friend of Israel. In May 2008, Barack Obama went to Washington where he pandered to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), promising the Jewish state even more impunity, including undivided sovereignty over Jerusalem. Accompanying him on that trip was Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel, a fervid Zionist, who had volunteered to assist the Israel Defense Forces during the 1991 Gulf War, and whose father was a member of the Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun. Six months later, Rahm Emanuel became President-elect Obama’s first political appointment as chief of staff. • Meanwhile, Israel has been shielded from censure by more than 40 U.S. vetoes of U.N. resolutions and it continues to flout resolutions that variously demand the right of return of Palestinian refugees, the cessation of its occupation of Palestine after the 1967 war, or the taking down of the so-called “Separation Wall,” a monstrosity whose ostensible purpose is checking Palestinian terror, and whose actual effect is to steal yet more Palestinian land, separate Palestinians from each other and their meager croplands, and keep them out of view of Israelis—in short, the Wall seals off the West Bank into a giant prison. Meanwhile Gaza has become the example par excellence of collective punishment, one of the gravest violations of human rights. Israel knows it can thumb its nose at international law—and the principle of law—because it can count on the backing of the U.S. superpower, even when that superpower itself is attacked by Israel, as happened in 1967. Impunity is license to do as one pleases, knowing that there will be neither restraint before nor punishment after the act. It is a conduit to nihilism, that is, a moral degeneration in which everything is permitted and nothing is true. It is the absolute corruption that comes with absolute, unchecked power. This is most pronounced in the occupation of Palestine, where impunity is so marked, the balance of forces so one-sided, and the conflict so prolonged. The Israeli occupation of Palestine is a culture medium for atrocity, which occurs at the far side of silence. When those who should speak hold back, the perpetrator loses his way and falls into a moral abyss. The silence which permits this in the case of Israel is largely made, like D-9 bulldozers, in the United States, Israel’s giant patron and protective shield. As a citizen of the United States and a Jew descended from Russian-Ukrainian immigrants, I perceived this wanton criminality as a betrayal of the moral identity of the Jewish people, whose wanderings across the globe were a veritable chronicle of the impunity of the powerful. The impunity of Israel, its complicity in the injustices wrought by the United States, all with collusion by great portions of its Jewish community, filled me with shame and provoked outrage. I came to reject the tribalized identity of the Jew as perpetual victim, but retained and tried to cultivate that portion of my heritage which stood for the universality of humankind. Although I spent a great portion of my adult life in movements against racism, war, U.S. imperialism, the corruptions of media and mass culture, and—with special emphasis in recent years—the ecological ravaging of the earth, I remained relatively quiet about Israel itself until the year 2000. This was not for lack of aversion to Israeli policies, nor did I fear the accusation of anti-semitism, the identification of which with criticism of Israel I had always regarded as tedious, albeit pernicious, nonsense. My reticence stemmed, rather, from certain family conflicts. When the individuals concerned in these—chiefly my mother—passed away, my political development in this sphere resumed and, as if to make up for lost time, gathered speed.
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