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.
