Almost a year ago, on the celebration of Martin Luther King’s birth and just as the Israeli military assault on Gaza was coming to a close, I wrote a piece titled, Israel in Gaza: A Time Comes When Silence is Betrayal.[1]   In that piece I spoke of the role of American Jews and of Americans in remaining silent in the face of horrendous human rights violations perpetrated on Palestinians.  I acknowledged that:  “ For too long, and I do not exempt myself, most of us have stood silently by or made only a marginal protests about the massive violations of Palestinian rights carried out by Israel.” I pointed out that for “as long as this silence continues so will the U.S. billions in aid and arms that facilitates the killings of Palestinians.”

Since that time, I and many others, Jews and non-Jews alike, have come some distance toward breaking the silence. We knew while the assault was continuing that we were witnessing massive crimes. We watched as most of the world stood by. Gaza, I think for many of us, demanded that we no longer stand on the sidelines. 

I must admit to my shock at reading the Goldstone Report, the report of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.[2]  Fact by fact it documented violations of the laws of war and human rights law that were chilling. The report put the assault in the context of the responsibilities under law of an occupying power which Israel is in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. It addressed the annexation of East Jerusalem, the building of the wall, 85% of which is illegally located in occupied territory, the pass laws and the settlements. It addressed the blockade of Gaza which began years before the December 2008 assault and the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.  As to the war, the Report concluded that the “military operations were directed by Israel at the people of Gaza as a whole” to “punish them” and “in a deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed at the civilian population.”  Each example was more disturbing than the one before and the cumulative effect was horrifying: deliberate targeting of civilians, the intentional destruction of the infrastructure of Gaza including fuel supplies, the sewer system, the only flour mill and the Palestinian legislative building.

The killing statistics tell us almost all we need to know: over a thousand Palestinians were killed (estimates run from 1,166 to 1,444), most of them civilians; 13 Israelis lost their lives of which three were civilians. Imagine Gaza as an overcrowded prison, for that is what it is, with no ability for people to hide, escape or defend themselves. Then imagine an assault with impunity from the air, the sea and the land. Gaza was no accident. It was not a mistake. Israeli leaders justified the destruction of civilian objects: “destroy 100 homes for every rocket fired.”  The Israeli government claimed that “there is really no distinction to be made between military and civilian objectives as far as government and public administration in Gaza are concerned.” [3] 

After the Goldstone report there cannot be, if there ever was, any doubt about the need for investigation and prosecution of the criminality of the military assault on Gaza. Judge Goldstone is one of the most preeminent jurists in the world—he would be in my top 3—and I am not sure who the other two are. His credentials are impeccable. A South African courageously opposed to apartheid, a justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and the chief prosecutor of the special UN tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia—and a Jew as well. Yet, attack him and his report is exactly what Israel and the United States have done.  The U.S. State Department called it “deeply flawed,” but did not elaborate. Israel, which had refused to cooperate in the investigation, said it was appalled and disappointed by the Report claiming it effectively ignored Israel’s right of self-defense, makes unsubstantiated claims about its intent and challenges Israel’s democratic values and rule of law. Even if Israel was acting in self-defense, although many would dispute this, that right does not grant permission to commit war crimes. And yes, the Report challenges Israel’s commitment to the rule of law: it does not seem to have a commitment when it comes to Palestinians.  Despite these protestations, as Shakespeare wrote:  “truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long….but at the length truth will out.” Well it has, but truth still needs a push—a push into action.

That is why I am going to Gaza with the Code Pink Freedom March:[4] because truth needs a push.  It’s straightforward. I want to break the blockade. I want to see for myself the damage caused the weapons bought with my tax dollars. I want it understood that Israel does not kill in my name. I want to follow words with actions.

12/14/2009

[1] http://www.michaelratner.com/blog/?p=40

[2] http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9/FactFindingMission.htm

[3] Goldstone at para. 379.

[4] http://www.gazafreedommarch.org/article.php?list=type&type=416

At a reception I attended the other day a progressive acquaintance came up to me and said the left “must stop bashing Obama. Keep doing it and he will lose the election. We should be thankful for what we have.” I am not sure he thought that I was one who bashed Obama or he just wanted to get that message out in the community. As it happens I do not “bash Obama” whatever that means; but I am sharply critical of a number of his policies and practices and those of his administration. (This is not to say I would have preferred McCain to win; I would not have and on some issues, mostly very safe ones, Obama has made some difference, e.g. Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, ending the HIV exclusion.) I responded to my acquaintance: “It won’t be the criticism of progressives that will lose him the election—we hardly have that kind of power. It is his own actions especially around economic issues that could make his reelection difficult; actions that have alienated and angered significant segments of the unemployed American population. I don’t do my work by thinking about whether it will help or hurt Obama in the next election. I don’t tailor principles to politics.”

In arguing that we should mute our criticisms of Obama we are being asked to accept administration actions that are unacceptable; practices that will involve the deaths of thousands and the violation of our own constitution and binding treaties. I have always believed we must advocate and act on principle and that is the way to make change.  So when we see that Obama will continue the preventive detention scheme that underlies Guantanamo, that he will have detainees tried before military commissions, that he will continue the incommunicado detentions at Bagram and hide detainees from the Red Cross, we cannot and should not stand by in silence. We are seeing the continuation of Bush’s law and the deterioration of fundamental protections of freedom. When we see Obama hide illegal acts behind claims of “state secrets;” when he refuses to have the torture conspirators investigated and prosecuted; and when he even welcomes some of the conspirators into his administration, we must speak up. Granting impunity to officials who torture is to insure that we will again be a nation of torture and that the message heard by every petty dictator around the world is: “The United States can torture in the name of national security and so can we.”  When we see officials of this administration attack the Goldstone report which documents war crimes in Gaza, we understand the deep hypocrisy of this government.

Nor can there be any screaming that is too loud in opposition to the wars that Obama is continuing without end. The July 2011 beginning withdrawal date from Afghanistan was shown to be a fiction within an hour of Obama’s speech. Obama like those before him accepts that “We are the United States and war is what we do.” Obama and the Presidents before him are bleeding our country and world. Of course, I do not expect miracles from one man on top of a huge national security establishment that is hard to buck. Rome was not built in a day and neither will it be dismantled in a day. But I don’t see a lot of dismantling going on. What I see is more and more building of a national security state—perhaps with a softer hand—and that is alarming.

As I said when I began this piece I do not think progressive and liberal criticisms on most of these issues or other disappointments such as Obama’s failure to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” will have much affect the next Presidential election. Even the war probably won’t have much to do with who is our next President. Obama took a safe course, at least for himself and the next election: he gave the generals roughly what they asked for and the Republican Secretary of Defense, like the cat that ate the canary, is smugly satisfied.  

It seems likely to me that the economy will be Obama’s Waterloo. He has shoveled billions and billions into the big banks, and the wars and almost nothing into creating jobs and saving people’s homes.  Regarding the jobs meeting he convened to help with ideas about how to reduce unemployment, he said there are “limits to what government can do and should do,“ and that he was open to “responsible” and “demonstrably good” ideas to create jobs. I don’t think that is what the over 15 million unemployed in the country wanted to hear. They need jobs and they especially did not want to hear Obama say there was not going to be enough money to do it. The danger here is not just that Obama will lose the next election; but it’s one we have already begun to see: a right wing populism that often occurs in times of great economic dislocation, income disparities and joblessness.

We are at a time of great economic insecurity; a time when fundamental rights are under threat from our own government and a time when we are the world’s warriors. Silence or passive acquiescence is complicity. Enough already!  We can applaud Obama’s actions when they are right; we cannot and should not excuse or explain away his actions when they are wrong. If we don’t speak out, who will?

Michael Smith and I have been reading John Gerassi’s new book, Talking with Sartre, Conversations and Debates.[1] The book is a shortened form of three years of on and off conversations Gerassi had with Sartre in the early 1970’s.  The book is utterly remarkable. It is as if you are  seated at the table with Sartre and asking him and debating with him questions on Marxism, existentialism, his life with Simone de Beauvoir, his depression, his plays, novels, political activism, and views about anti-colonial and revolutionary violence both before and after a revolution. In this short piece we write only about this latter subject—taken from the book– in which he takes positions which are almost never found in writings on the political left in the United States today. Even if one disagrees with Sartre, which Michael Smith and I do on some issues, it is a timely discussion in today’s world.

What Makes a Revolutionary?

Gerassi and Sartre discuss what makes a revolutionary. Sartre had great respect for Che and seems to have agreed with Che that “a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” However, Sartre also said that a revolutionary was possessed of both “hatred and love.”  Hating injustice and hating the enemy. Sartre believed it was necessary to hate the enemy in order for a revolution to succeed. As Sartre said,

 “That’s very important hatred. Without it one stops too soon.  It happened in the French Revolution; I think it happens in every revolution, when those who do not hate the enemy suddenly say, Enough already, and stop short of accomplishing the complete restructuring of society, and the result is that the revolution is betrayed.” (56)

Executions in Cuba After the Revolution

Sartre then applies some of his thinking to the Cuban Revolution. Gerassi asks Sartre about Fidel putting on trial the Batista torturers where the evidence of their guilt was overwhelming. Gerassi says that even Time magazine claimed the trials were a catharsis and saved the country from a bloodbath of vengeance. Presumably, this was because the people would have taken justice in their own hands and enacted vengeance without trials. But then 365 torturers were executed and that showed that Fidel was “not just a bourgeois reformer but a genuine revolutionary” and Time and the United States condemned him.  Gerassi then asks what Sartre thinks of the executions when all knew including Fidel that the real culprits were the owners of United Fruit, IT&T and other corporations for who Batista exploited the people of Cuba.

Sartre answers “that under an ideal situation, the torturers could have been rehabilitated.” But he agreed with Fidel that at

“that moment a bloodbath had to be avoided, and these torturers were scum, after all, so if executing them for their proven crimes, even if the president of IT&T is ultimately responsible, will avoid that bloodbath, then ethically their execution was justified….”

 However, Sartre points out that had the trials taken place a year later and there was no risk of a bloodbath, “then no, their executions would not have been justified.” (98-99)

Counter Terror Against Terror

Sartre was consistent on the question of the morality of counter terror against terror. (This is not to say he recommended it as a tactic.)  He supported the FLN in fighting the French for the liberation of Algeria even if that meant killings on the streets of Paris. In the context he even believed the Baader-Meinhof group was “totally justified.”  As Sartre says,

 “Remember that context. The shah [of Iran] comes to Berlin and the students protest peacefully. They are severely beaten by the shah’s security goods and the German police who shoot and kill one student. Benno Ohnesorg.  The pro-US press then yells that the real responsible one was Rudi Dutschke [leader of the student protesters] and he is shot in the head. From a moral and a revolutionary point of view, the groups rampage of murders of German industrialists are absolutely justified. But…you see my problem–all ethics depend on circumstances.” (99)

And here is Sartre addressing the question of resistance by the Palestinians. Gerassi asks Sartre about the French GP (La Gauche Prolétarienne) which supports armed struggle by the Palestinians and considers the suicide bombers “freedom fighters.” Sartre answers “I have always supported counterterror against established terror.  And I have always defined established terror as occupation, land seizure, arbitrary arrest, and so on, as does the Israeli left….” (191)

Conclusion: Michael Smith’s Analysis                                         

   Sartre was a revolutionary.  He was an existentialist, not a Marxist.  He derived his morality from his own unique philosophy involving action and commitment.  He brings his existential sensibility to the question of terror,   For Sartre it was a question of the terrorism of the oppressor versus the terrorism of the oppressed, on whose side he was resolutely on.

     This question was taken up both in theory and in practice by the revolutionary Russian Narodniks of the l880s and by the Bolsheviks in that great laboratory of social struggle which was to culminate in the victorious Russian revolution of l9l7.  It is both historical and extremely contemporary.

      The Narodniks, were skillful and accomplished self-sacrificing terrorists. They managed to kill over three thousand Tsarist officials.  It was Trotsky, who, like Sartre, stood in absolute moral solidarity with them, articulated a different, Marxist, strategy and critiqued the practice of individual terror.  He opposed it for three reasons.

   First, it didn’t work. The Tsarists government simply replaced one dead functionary with another live one.  Second the terrorism took the onus of violence off the government, where it belonged, and placed it on the oppressed, and further stepped up its repression.  But the third reason for the Marxists like Trotsky was central.  All the bombs, assassinations, the violence’s a whole served to sideline the masses, it made them spectators.

    Even if they looked on approvingly at the death of a hated official, which often they did, they did not have any part in their own struggle.  The current of revolutionary socialism condemned terrorism as a tactic because they believed the emancipation of the workers and peasants and their allies from class rule had to be achieved by the oppressed themselves if it were to be conclusive and lasting.  In the words of the International, the song that came out of the first great workers rebellion, the Paris Commune of l87l, “We want no condescending saviors.”   For Marxists, the self-activity of the masses was the absolute key.  To those who advocated terrorism they simply said, “Comrades, chose another path.”

   Sartre’s talk with Gerassi on this subject is a passionate reprise of a crucially important and timely discussion given the U.S. engagement with the Muslim world.

[1] Law and Disorder Radio which can be heard at lawandisorder.org did a lengthy and remarkable interview with John Gerassi regarding this book. Numbers in parenthesis refer to page numbers in Talking With Sartre.