Jacobin
A week into Israel’s summer 2006 assault on Lebanon — which killed 1,200 people, mainly civilians — Harvard Law School’s resident psychopath Alan Dershowitz surfaced on the pages of the Wall Street Journal with his latest upbeat intervention on behalf of Israeli war crimes.
The article, titled “Arithmetic of Pain,” posited the need for a “reassessment of the laws of war” in light of what Dershowitz determined to be an increasingly blurred distinction between combatants and civilians. Unfurling his concept of a “continuum of ‘civilianality,’” he explained:
"Near the most civilian end of this continuum are the pure innocents — babies, hostages and others completely uninvolved; at the more combatant end are civilians who willingly harbor terrorists, provide material resources and serve as human shields; in the middle are those who support the terrorists politically, or spiritually."
The upshot: even purely innocent Lebanese babies were merely “near” the civilian-ish end of the continuum, while Israel was entirely exempt from the whole scheme because it is a “democracy.”
As it happens, however, it is Israel that is suffering from a dearth of “civilianality” — something that is made painfully clear in a new book, An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Forces Made a Nation, by Haim Bresheeth-Zabner. Recalling Prussian minister Friedrich von Schrötter’s characterization of Prussia as “not a country with an army, but an army with a country,” Bresheeth-Zabner contends that this is “even more apt regarding the relationship between Israel and the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces].”
The process was facilitated by Zionism’s embrace of the “mythical biblical Jew” and invention of an “unambiguous trait of Jewish militarism,” thanks to which two millennia of history were excised from the equation and the “new Jew became the imagined heir of genocidal Joshua, Bar Kochba, and Judas Maccabeus — a rogues gallery of militarized heroes who formed the foundation for the conquest of Palestine.”
And as the conquest of Palestine proceeds apace — with the army-with-a-state continuing its traditions of ethnic cleansing, land theft, and massacres to this day — brutal militarism remains the unifying national element. Alongside near-universal conscription is the near-universal approval among Israeli Jews for IDF-inflicted slaughter. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.
24 August 2020
17 August 2020
Against the Loveless World: A Palestinian tale of exile and resistance
Middle East Eye
When Nahr, the thirty-something Palestinian protagonist of Susan Abulhawa’s new novel Against the Loveless World, is tried in an Israeli court, the trial is conducted entirely in Hebrew; Nahr doesn’t find out until she’s in jail what the nature of her alleged crime is.
As the trial takes place near the end of the book, the reader is already sufficiently acquainted with Nahr’s individualistic personality - and the pleasure she derives in throwing Israelis in particular for a loop by behaving in unconventional fashion - that her comportment in the courtroom doesn’t come as a great shock. She launches into a medley of Arabic songs, hoping to make her husband Bilal - himself a frequent prisoner of Israel and a model of defiance - proud, wherever he is:
"I started with ‘Yumma Mweil elHawa,’ to set the mood. The judge admonished me. I waited a while, then sang every Abdel Halim Hafez song I could think of. ‘El Hawa Hawaya’ followed by my favorite, ‘Qariatol Fingan.’ The judge was baffled, then irate, yelling at me, at the prosecutors, lawyers, bailiffs. She ordered the guards to silence me."
As she sings, Nahr - the first-person narrator of the book - summarises the function of her performance for the reader: “I colonised the coloniser’s space of authority. I made myself free in chains and held that courtroom captive to my freedom.”
It turns out that Nahr’s words are fitting beyond the immediate context, as Against the Loveless World itself constitutes a defiance of colonising narratives and a reclaiming of Palestinian space - by both Abulhawa and her characters.
A Palestinian-American writer, human rights activist and biologist, Abulhawa hails from Jerusalem and currently resides in Pennsylvania. She is the author of several books, including The Blue Between Sky and Water and her acclaimed first novel, Mornings in Jenin - about various generations of a Palestinian refugee family - which has been published in more than 30 languages and sold over a million copies worldwide. Abulhawa is also the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, an organisation that builds recreational spaces for children under Israeli occupation.
From her writings and public appearances, Abulhawa seems - much as the fictional Nahr does - as someone who doesn’t take nonsense from anyone, regardless of the effects on personal reputation or career. Case in point: some years ago she publicly took on Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School’s former resident cheerleader for Israeli war crimes, at the Boston Book Festival in 2010, calmly and collectedly tearing him and his arguments to pieces. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.
When Nahr, the thirty-something Palestinian protagonist of Susan Abulhawa’s new novel Against the Loveless World, is tried in an Israeli court, the trial is conducted entirely in Hebrew; Nahr doesn’t find out until she’s in jail what the nature of her alleged crime is.
As the trial takes place near the end of the book, the reader is already sufficiently acquainted with Nahr’s individualistic personality - and the pleasure she derives in throwing Israelis in particular for a loop by behaving in unconventional fashion - that her comportment in the courtroom doesn’t come as a great shock. She launches into a medley of Arabic songs, hoping to make her husband Bilal - himself a frequent prisoner of Israel and a model of defiance - proud, wherever he is:
"I started with ‘Yumma Mweil elHawa,’ to set the mood. The judge admonished me. I waited a while, then sang every Abdel Halim Hafez song I could think of. ‘El Hawa Hawaya’ followed by my favorite, ‘Qariatol Fingan.’ The judge was baffled, then irate, yelling at me, at the prosecutors, lawyers, bailiffs. She ordered the guards to silence me."
As she sings, Nahr - the first-person narrator of the book - summarises the function of her performance for the reader: “I colonised the coloniser’s space of authority. I made myself free in chains and held that courtroom captive to my freedom.”
It turns out that Nahr’s words are fitting beyond the immediate context, as Against the Loveless World itself constitutes a defiance of colonising narratives and a reclaiming of Palestinian space - by both Abulhawa and her characters.
A Palestinian-American writer, human rights activist and biologist, Abulhawa hails from Jerusalem and currently resides in Pennsylvania. She is the author of several books, including The Blue Between Sky and Water and her acclaimed first novel, Mornings in Jenin - about various generations of a Palestinian refugee family - which has been published in more than 30 languages and sold over a million copies worldwide. Abulhawa is also the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, an organisation that builds recreational spaces for children under Israeli occupation.
From her writings and public appearances, Abulhawa seems - much as the fictional Nahr does - as someone who doesn’t take nonsense from anyone, regardless of the effects on personal reputation or career. Case in point: some years ago she publicly took on Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School’s former resident cheerleader for Israeli war crimes, at the Boston Book Festival in 2010, calmly and collectedly tearing him and his arguments to pieces. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.
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