An Eye for an Eye

A Palestinian family rushes past the wreckage of an Israeli missile
strike. (Photo: Eyad Baba / AP)

    Israelis and Arabs "feel that only force can assure justice," I.
F. Stone noted soon after the Six-Day War in 1967. And he wrote, "A certain
moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either
less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human
and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them."

    The closing days of 2008 have heightened the Israeli government's stature as
a mighty practitioner of the moral imbecility that Stone described.

    Israel's airstrikes "have killed at least 270 people so far, injured more
than 1,000, many of them seriously, and many remain buried under the rubble
so the death toll will likely rise," Phyllis Bennis, of the Institute for
Policy Studies, pointed out on Sunday, two days into Israel's attack. "This
catastrophic impact was known and inevitable, and far outweighs any claim of
self-defense or protection of Israeli civilians." She mentioned "the
one Israeli killed by a Palestinian rocket attack on Saturday after the Israeli
assault began was the first such casualty in more than a year."

    Even if you set aside the magnitude of Israel's violations of the Geneva conventions
and the long terrible history of its methodical collective punishment of 1.5
million Palestinians in Gaza, consider the vastly disproportionate carnage in
the conflict.

    "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," Gandhi said.

    What about a hundred eyes for an eye?

    It makes some of the world ill with rage. And it turns much of the United States
numb with silence. Routinely, the politicians and pundits of Washington can't
summon minimal decency in themselves or each other on the subject of Israel
and Palestinians.

    While officialdom inside the Beltway seems frozen in fear of risking "anti-Semitism"
charges by actually standing up for the human rights of Palestinian people,
some progress at the grassroots level has been noticeable. It includes the growth
of groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Tikkun and The Shalom Center, where
activists have worked to refute the false claims that American Jews are united
behind Israeli policies.

    At the epicenters of the conflict – where the belief that "only force
can assure justice" seems to be even stronger than when I. F. Stone wrote
about it 41 years ago – the conclusion has been drawn and redrawn so many times
that deadly repetition has become paralytic. While some Palestinian "militants"
have terrorized and murdered, the Israeli government has terrorized and murdered
on a much bigger scale, using a vast arsenal largely financed by US taxpayers.

    From afar, in the United States, it's too easy to shake our heads at the lethal
loss of moral vision. Don't they know that "an eye for an eye makes the
whole world blind"? But the cycle of violence is extremely asymmetrical
– while the US government provides Israel with billions of dollars and invaluable
"diplomatic" support.

    What's going on in Gaza right now is not just an eye for an eye. It's a hundred
eyes for an eye. And the current slaughter is not only an ongoing Israeli war
crime. It has an accomplice named Uncle Sam.

    ——–

    Norman Solomon is the author of "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits
Keep Spinning Us to Death." To watch video of his recent appearance on
C-SPAN's "Washington Journal," click here.