[URBANTH-L]Israel's blonde bombshells and real bombs in Gaza

Daniel Sturm sturm27 at gmail.com
Tue Jan 6 14:01:55 EST 2009


Israel's blonde bombshells and real bombs in Gaza
Yosefa Loshitzky, The Electronic Intifada
5 January 2009
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10119.shtml

"I reiterate that we will treat the population [of Gaza] with silk gloves"
- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert

I am not sure that most people understand the meaning of the name
"Operation Cast Lead" chosen by Israel for its murderous and criminal
attack on Gaza. The name is borrowed from a Hebrew nursery rhyme which
was (and may still be) very popular among Israeli children in the
1950s. In this song, a father promises to his child a special Hannukah
gift: "a cast lead sevivon." Sevivon, in Hebrew (A dreidel in Yiddish)
is a four-sided spinning top, played with during the Jewish holiday of
Hanukkah. Somebody, in the Israeli army, who apparently feels
nostalgic about his childhood, decided that if Israeli kids would
enjoy a sevivon cast from lead there is no reason why Palestinian
children would not appreciate it too. After all Operation Cast Lead is
not the first (and unfortunately, will not be the last) of Israel's
cruel war games.

The cynicism embedded in the name, selected for what Ari Shavit, one
of Israel's most celebrated commentators, called "an intelligent,
impressive operation," is symptomatic to the cold, meticulous and
calculated cruelty with which this attack was "designed," "executed"
and "marketed" to the world. As the perpetrators themselves proudly
boast, Operation Cast Lead is not only a great military victory but
also a success story of Israeli hasbara (meaning in Hebrew,
explanation, but practically referring to misinformation, spin and
lies).

This great victory, as some (but not enough) noticed, prominent among
them, Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights
in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is targeted against the
"wretched of the world." They are first, second and third generation
refugees (originating from the area currently being rocketed from
Gaza), the poorest people in the world, crammed in one of the most
densely-populated areas on the planet, already starved and weakened by
months of Israeli blockade. The sanitized language of the western
media calls it "a disproportionate reaction." But the ground zero that
it creates for the Palestinians, who, over the last decades, have
achieved the dubious honor of becoming the world's quintessential
victims, should be a "shock and awe" for any person who has not, as
yet, lost his or her basic humanity and sense of justice.

Israel's oiled propaganda-machine was further lubricated by its
self-acknowledged decision to select women as their masbirim
(misinformation spokespersons) so as "to project a feminine and softer
image." To add some cool glamour to Israel's hot lies, Tzipi Livni,
the state's foreign minister and a natural blonde, announced, in
response to calls for truce: "There is no humanitarian crisis in the
[Gaza] Strip, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian
truce." The blonde offensive, led by the rising star of Israeli
politics, was fortified by a team of peroxide blonde Israeli women,
whose sex, lies and video games decorated TV screens worldwide. They
explained to the sympathetic world the hardships endured by the
nuclear-armed Israelis threatened by the crude rockets. After all, one
Israeli was killed in the last six months, while three other Israelis
(one of them a Palestinian citizen of Israel) were killed by rockets
since Gaza has been turned into a slaughter-house by the silk gloves
of the Israeli army.

Quick to join this sugar-coated team of blonde bombshells were
Israel's most celebrated and translated writers abroad, Amos Oz and
David Grossman. The two project to the international community (i.e.,
the so-called liberal west) what it regards as Israeli political
conscience and moral voice. Both are given a special stage by
prestigious western media platforms to express their opinions
regarding major political events involving Israel. They are Israel's
hamasbirim haleumim (the national spokespersons) a euphemism for
national (or international) deceivers, who whitewash Israel's dirty
laundry in the global launderette.

Grossman (slightly more to the "left" than Oz) has obtained an extra
moral authority after his own tank commander son was killed in
Israel's murderous attack on Lebanon in 2006. In a militaristic
society, centered on the cult of the fallen soldier, a bereaved father
(av shakul in Hebrew) enjoys a special status. One could have expected
Grossman to "cash" in this newly gained status and come out with a
more courageous stance, one that would criticize Israel's immoral
massacre, rather than re-play the eternal Jewish victim, pleading "to
halt" Israeli fire while promising Hamas that: "Even if you continue
to fire on Israel, we will not respond by resuming combat. We will
grit our teeth, just as we did throughout the period before our
attack."

Israelis, in Grossman's self-adulatory discourse, are rahmanim bnei
rahmanim (merciful sons of merciful fathers), dignified and righteous
victims. Perhaps this is what Olmert meant when he talked about the
silky touch of the Israeli gloves caressing "ordinary," non-militant
Palestinians in Gaza.

One could think about a braver bereaved parent, Smadar Elhanan-Peled
for example. A mother who, after losing her daughter in a suicide bomb
attack in Jerusalem, publicly and openly put the blame for her
daughter's death on the Israeli government and its cruel policies
towards the Palestinians. Her teenage daughter, unlike Grossman's son,
was not a tank commander, not even a soldier but just an ordinary
girl.

The well-orchestrated propaganda machinery was also equipped with
Israel's most successful "secret weapons" of mass deception: playing
the role of the victim again. It is not an accident, therefore, that,
as the Israeli spin doctors themselves explained in an interview to
The Jewish Chronicle, that: "The international media were directed to
a press center set up by the foreign ministry in Sderot itself so that
foreign reporters would spend as much time as possible in the main
civilian area affected by Hamas rockets." The scenes of crying,
panic-stricken Israelis added some excessive emotionalism which
counter-balanced, but nicely complemented, the team of the icy blonde
offenders.

The designation of the Gaza Strip and south Israel as a "closed
military zone," and the ban on media coverage of the Gaza carnage
contributes to the sanitized view of the Gaza story as manufactured by
Israel. The real horror and gore is reserved for the Al Jazeera's
spectators, particularly the Arab ones. Ghetto-under-siege Gaza
remains almost silent and partly invisible to the rest of us. We
hardly hear or see in mainstream media, testimonies from the ground.

But we are bombarded by statements and "explanations" given by Israeli
officials and "international experts" who discuss the "situation"
calmly and "logically." After all, unlike the hysterical, always
shouting and crying Gazans, they have not been bombarded by for nine
days straight. They are interviewed in their comfortable (probably
leather-clad) offices. They look and sound like respectable
westerners, just like "us," and their foreign minister is very calm
and cool as her blonde hair obliges.

A pioneering study by the Glasgow University Media Group on media
coverage of conflicts, taught us that if you look respectable and calm
you must be right. The Palestinians, by contrast, usually interviewed
when they are in a state of shock, look disheveled, disoriented,
slightly hysterical. And they are always surrounded by chaos and
disorder. The buildings around are destroyed, debris is scattered
everywhere, and the noise is unbearable (not to mention that they
speak this incomprehensible language). Is something wrong with them?
Also, even when they are not "extremists" they are always on the
defense, almost apologetic, trying to convince us that they are not
terrorists, not even militants, just ordinary people who want to
survive, if not to enjoy this life. This makes them look even more
suspicious.

After all, if they are not terrorists, what are they doing in Gaza?
Gaza, we should remember, was declared as "hostile entity" by Israel
in September of 2007. And since only the powerful have the power to
define, even if their definitions amount to tautologies or oxymorons,
they are still the accepted ones. According to this perverse logic,
produced in Fortress Israel and marketed to the whole world, any Gazan
deserves to die. Furthermore, despite the fact that Israel claims to
attack only Hamas and not the Palestinians (conveniently oblivious to
the fact that, as David Boardman reminds us, the majority of
Palestinians voted democratically for Hamas), it still clings to its
old law of blood, according to which, as John Berger observes: "One
Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives." So if in the
course of the last six months, one Israeli died as a result of a Hamas
rocket attack, it is perfectly logical that in a week 500 Palestinians
will lose their lives and thousands more will be injured. This is what
the Israelis view as a policy of deterrence.

We should not forget, however, that behind this cruel apparatus of
sex, lies and video war games, a more "primitive," "organic," and
tribal cruelty, usually well hidden from the scrutiny of the outside
world, is operating. Most people in the west do not realize the
indifference, and more disturbingly, the joy with which Israelis
receive news about the suffering of Arabs and particularly
Palestinians. It is more common in the west to see Arab and Muslim
crowds "dancing on the roofs" when missiles or rockets hit Israel (as
was the case during the 1991 Gulf War) but it is less common to see or
hear Israelis cheered at the plight of suffering Palestinians and
Arabs. More than once, I have encountered a jovial taxi driver
applauding the good news that he has just heard. "Let them all die in
agony" was a standard reaction that I have become accustomed to hear
on a day-to-day basis while I was still living in Israel.

It was also not uncommon in my Jerusalem neighborhood -- even prior to
the onset of the second Palestinian intifada -- to see Israeli Border
Police brutally harass poor old Palestinians who came to collect some
"valuables" from the garbage bins of the affluent Jews. Time and again
it happened in front of a popular Jerusalem cafe, where people were
sipping their lattes, completely oblivious to the unfolding drama.
Nobody, among these beautiful people, seemed to be bothered by these
scenes, or to suffer from some disturbing reflections on the transfer
of guilt.

Israel's cruelty -- manifested through its use (or rather abuse) of
language, and creative "strategy" of "re-branding" its continuous
assaults on the Palestinians as a war of defense, using their
tautological logic to justify the extermination of an "entity" which
they designate as "hostile" -- should be interpreted in the spirit of
Giorgio Agamben. The influential Italian philosopher argued in
relation to the Nazi death camps that the "correct question to pose
concerning the horrors committed in the camps is, therefore, not the
hypocritical one of how crimes of such atrocity could be committed
against human beings" but what were "the juridical procedures and
deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely
deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed
against them could appear any longer as a crime."

We may well ask the same question today when listening to Israel's
blonde bombshells explain the bombs tearing apart the people of Gaza.

Yosefa Loshitzky is Professor of Film, Media and Cultural Studies at
the University of East London.  Her most recent books are Identity
Politics on the Israeli Screen (2001) and (as editor) Spielberg's
Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List (1997).



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