Imperial Perspectives (Part XVI)

by Jim Miles

2006

This is the final article of the Imperial Perspectives series. Part XVI Imperial Petard summarizes two situations, Palestine and its state of dispossession, and American imperial problems abroad and in Iraq.

XVI Imperial Petard

Victorious, but broken and impoverished by the Second World War, Britain gave up on two main colonial territories. In the wake of their sudden removal, without any signs of the building of democracy and peace and civilization that they originally used to rationalize their imperial adventures, huge dislocations and slaughters of people occurred with problems that still exist to this day. After Britain had seen India as ungovernable, and with partition of the Indian sub-continent, war erupted between the Muslim territories of Pakistan and the predominantly Hindu territories of India. Many were slaughtered and millions were moved. These battles continue today in Kashmir, and with internal acts of insurrection on an ongoing basis.

Immediately after that the British abandoned the Palestine Mandate without giving any formal consideration to their departure, a war erupted in that territory. But it was not so much a war initially as an act of ethnic cleansing including all that is common to that genre: mass murder of civilians, destruction of habitat including farms and villages, and expulsion of civilians into less desirable areas or foreign countries. When the Arab neighbours to Palestine attacked, they were poorly equipped and trained to deal with an Israeli force of 65,000 well trained (many had belonged to British army units) and well equipped (from weapons smuggled in or left behind by the British) regulars and – as they were labelled by the British at the time – terrorists.

This was not an occurrence that was a surprise to anyone. It would have been no surprise to Mahatma Ghandi who wrote in 1938, “What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct…. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home. " [1] Arab historian George Antonius wrote in 1938 “To place the brunt of the burden [of Jewish settlement] upon Arab Palestine is a miserable evasion…It is also morally outrageous”. [2] Winston Churchill saw the situation from his own narrow imperialist perspective with the Jewish state surrounded by “the warlike Arabs, backed by the armed forces of Iraq,” offering only “the ceaseless menace of war.” Churchill also touched on one of the keystones of imperial arches that of “the new undeveloped lands that lie around them.” [3]

Imperial Keystones

This keystone resonates throughout imperial histories of all sorts, but the American in particular. The expansion of the American empire across the North American continent occurred into spaces that were supposedly empty, waiting to be opened up for settlement and exploitation, the indigenous populations seemingly non-existent as in some cases was the truth as a result of genocide, removal, and migration. Similarly the colonization of Palestine by Jewish peoples involved “This omission by design, for it was largely within a context of Palestinian non-existence – a perception that the promised land was empty of a people with identity or rights – that the …immigrants set out.” In some cases outright denial of a Palestinian people occurred, as with Golda Meir's comment “There was no such thing as Palestinians…They did not exist,” and from David Ben-Gurion the statement that “we…had the right and duty to fill its emptiness, restore life to its barrenness.” [4]

Coincidental with the denial of Palestinian existence is the Orientalist approach that the Islamic countries are backwards and are not up to modern standards, neither technologically nor morally (an ignorant position derived from decades and centuries of western imperial ambitions throughout the region). For those that could not accept the validation that Israel was an empty promised land, “The representation of Jewish colonization as modernization was a tenacious stratagem…to legitimize the dispossession of the Palestinians.” [5]

Dispossession from al-nakba to the wall

At the end of the first major battle between Israeli forces and Palestinian and other Arab forces (al-nakba – the disaster), Israel controlled seventy-eight per-cent of what had been Mandatory Palestine. Through the wars of 1967, 1973, the First Intifada of 1993 and the Second Intifada of 2000, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) has effectively controlled all of Palestinian territory. Control is achieved through three broad means: the presence of the IDF in any areas where it is deemed necessary; the physical destruction of infrastructure – houses, commercial buildings, farm lands; and the ongoing, ever-present psychological numbing of the “suspended violence” checkpoints, passports, searches, delays, rules and regulations that constantly change. The most obvious physical presence that highlights all this today is the wall, which represents “the continuation of the “Nakba”, or the displacement of approximately 700,000 Palestinians [a low estimate by most accounts] …in 1948 – except that in this case many additional Palestinians will be displaced because access to their land and places of employment will be increasingly denied, along with other resources critical for future demographic growth and economic development.” [6]

But more than a physical entity, the wall is a major psychological event as well. The very existence of a Palestinian people becomes a matter of “their existence [being] not only a matter of their actions but of their very presence and identity.” [7] The wall denies the Palestinian physical existence and makes daily life so routinely difficult, an economic and emotional violence to accompany the daily assassinations, arrests, tortures, and house destructions. This “fragmentation of space and complete control over all movements…made the very presence of Palestinians in their own living spaces a temporary matter.” [8]

The wall, ostensibly to control terrorist actions, also imposes the lie of ‘victim hood’ on the Israeli people, as they claim they are the ones suffering under constant Palestinian attacks, gratuitously reported in western media while the ongoing destruction of the Palestinian society and people occurs in small steps, piece by piece, ignored by the mainstream corporate media. Its construction is fully supported by the American government and their armed forces as they too are the ‘victims’ of terror at home and abroad, ignorant and unapologetic of all the terror they have created worldwide over the past two hundred years.

America Invincible

America's wild west frontier is being relived vicariously in the Palestinian territories or enclaves, not quite yet ‘Bantustans’ or ‘reservations', more closely related to prison camps. The American west was empty, hostile, and inhospitable at the same time that it offered great opportunities for exploitation of resources and empty land for settlers and consumers. The native people were sometimes non-existent, at other times herded together and marched to new territories that became increasingly smaller and more formally reservations. In certain areas, bounties were place on them and outright massacres eliminated any final resistance.

Palestinian territory was deemed empty, in possession of a hostile and primitive society, an uncivilized desert waste. Through the slow erosion of rights and freedoms, through the physical and emotional placement of barriers and blockades, with the ever-increasing settlements in ‘disputed’ territory, and with the full support of the American government and the American military, Palestinian territory has been reduced to a level of third world poverty and to the psychological state of a prison camp.

There is only one country in the world that can use “full spectrum force” and has the policy in place to use that force. But it is not the military that will determine the success or failure of the empire, but their old rationalizations about democracy, a democracy that is doubtfully reliant on the electoral college and electronic voting at home, a democracy that evades them in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a democracy that came full force within the Palestinian people, a democracy that “hoists them on them own petard”.

This is a curious phrase that might need some explanation. The petard is a French creation used to explosively destroy doorways. To be hoisted on one's petard then means to destroy your own position, be it physical, intellectual and/or moral. The Americans have managed all three.

There never was much argument about the intellectual value of America's invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, and its ongoing support for Israel. Certainly there was a lot of right wing patriotic hubris and drivel disguised as intellect, but it could never be supported with any background arguments, and those that were used (al-Qaida, weapons of mass destruction, terrorists in general) have been proven as obviously false. The fallback position of the American empire, as with any empire, is the moralizing about freedom, democracy, progress, enlightenment and all the other ideals that are not necessarily supported even in the empirical homeland.

Physically, the Americans have been “hoisted on their own petard” as the people of the countries they have invaded have shown great ingenuity in contriving means to harass and to a certain degree control the movement and power of a much more powerful force. Undisputedly, the American armed forces could destroy any and all opposition in Afghanistan and Iraq, as could the Israelis with Palestine and their annoying Arab neighbours who refuse to play dead or accede to Israeli demands. But the damage to the people, the infrastructure and the environment would render it all a useless endeavour, not to mention that it crosses what is left of the ‘moral’ line that they pretend is there.

Morally the American position is bankrupt – to use an economic term that indicates that not only is their no morality to their position but that there is an actual deficit, an immorality, surrounding their actions. Their claims for ‘democracy’ are essentially invalid, and their hiding behind the term to further their control registers on the immoral side of the ledger. Both Afghanistan and Iraq have had elections, but the resulting ‘government’ governs nothing but a tiny enclave in each capital city area. Certainly the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan are to be commended for having the bravery to attempt this thing called democracy, only to see it unrealized as their true positions essentially amount to ‘Yankee go home'.

In Palestine, the world has seen the full effect of the American ‘petard', although certain segments of it, particularly the United States, Great Britain, and other supposedly democratic western governments cannot see it. Hamas won a stunning victory in Palestinian elections that were by all accounts fully democratic, fair, and run without interference or coercion on anyone's part. Immediately the game plan had to change and the emphasis was placed on ‘not negotiating or dealing with terrorists', the old fallback line that used to be ‘communists’ (I add this to remind the reader of all the countries of the world that have had democratically elected governments or democratic movements that were destroyed by some type of American intervention). The denial of a truly democratic Palestinian election plays falsely to the American cries for ‘democracy’ in the Middle East. Democracy is messy, especially when the people speak against the powers that be.

Finale

The American Empire teeters on – morally bankrupt, financially bankrupt, but still all powerful, still suffering through its own ignorance and over-weaning patriotic pride. What they say they are doing, and what is actually occurring and the reaction of the people having empire imposed on them are not in agreement. Again, it comes back to “what you are doing speaks so loudly I can't hear what you are saying.”

At its centre is a demographics that is far from the world's best in spite of the propaganda put out by the government and that is swallowed completely by the media. It has abrogated or ignored many international treaties, choosing instead to act unilaterally. It is making its own walls, physically as with Mexico, and technically with passport requirements for Canada, and new immigration laws. China, Japan, and Korea own a tremendous portion of American foreign debt, some three trillion dollars, and could apply great leverage on the American economy. South American countries are turning away from American influence although still harnessed with IMF and World Bank debts. It has an economy that relies on massive consumption and wastage of human and natural resources. It has a military that could attack and destroy any other society in the world.

It is a balancing act that could tumble at any given time.

It is far from a “transcendent perfection”, far from “the cause of all mankind”.

It is unknown which way it will turn next, whether the wounded beast will strike out in nuclear fury, or whether it will retreat to some degree, and lick its wounds until it sees the next opportunity, or as the majority of the people of the world could only wish for, pull back and restructure itself in a climate to promote the health and well being of the planet's citizens and environment. All of the truly democratic world, all of those subjugated by the empire's greed, all the indigenous people of the world, must continue to advocate for the latter.

Notes

[1]	Mahatma Ghandi cited in Jayprakash, N.D. The Palestinian Saga, Seething With Rage from The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, New Delhi, 1977, Vol.68, p.137.
[2]	Cited in Fisk, Robert. The Great War for Civilisation – The Conquest of the Middle East. Fourth Estate, London, 2005. p. 450
[3]	Ibid p.451.
[4]	Kamrava, Mehran The Modern Middle East – A Political History Since the First World War. University of California, Berkeley, 2005. p. 76.
[5]	Gregory Derek. The Colonial Present. Blackwell Publishing, Malden, Maine. 2004. p. 81.
[6]	Koury, Stephanie. “Why This Wall?” Against the Wall, Ed. Michael Sorkin, The New Press, New York, 2005. p. 50.
[7]	Azoulay, Ariella and Ophir, Adi. “The Monster's Tail”. Ibid, p. 8.
[8]	Ibid, p. 9.