Yonatan Zunger’s Blog

Of Bam following the earthquake, from the Federation of American Scientists.

Apparently, a few hours ago, Israeli troops fired live ammunition against protesters at the “security fence” between the West Bank and Israel. One Israeli citizen, a recently (honorably) discharged combat veteran who was at the protest, was seriously wounded; one foreign national, a woman with the international solidarity movement, (ISM) was “lightly injured” (I have no idea what that actually means) by a rubber bullet.

Update: I just heard back from my friend, and she’s ok. Whew.

OK, several things about this:

1. A good friend of mine, female and with American citizenship, is over there right now, working on ground-level peace efforts. I support her very much in this. I know she has some connection to ISM and was almost certainly at that protest; I do not yet have any reports from her, so I don’t know if she is okay or not.
2. This is reminding me of something very important: In the past few years, I’ve spent so much time playing devil’s advocate against the Vacuous Left – the people who say “look, peace would be completely simple, if only…” without any real understanding of what’s going on – that I haven’t spent nearly enough time thinking about the actual problems there and what can be done to solve them. This is something of the utmost importance, and actually doing whatever it is is of even more importance; I’m going to be dedicating a great deal more time to this in the future.
3. On a more proximate note, the fact that troops would fire on demonstrators seems to be a sign that things are deteriorating very, very badly. As far as I can tell morale is falling rapidly, as the army separates into people who believe fervently in the unconstrained use of force and people with increasingly severe moral objections to their orders – often mixed in the same unit, and both routinely placed on the front lines in situations where each decision tends to have extremely severe consequences.
   Unfortunately, I can’t convince myself that this was unexpected. I’ve heard too many reports, from too many sources that I trust, of the use of unconscionable levels of force against civilians at checkpoints and other border areas; once a military starts to accept things like this as being basically routine, not exceptions in need of serious investigation and even courts-martial, things are bad, and only going to get rapidly worse. I hope that all of my friends in the military and related organizations around the world take this situation to heart, and remember to keep a very close eye on how the people in their units and under their command are responding to the stresses of engagement. The balance between self-protection and reasonable force is incredibly hard to find, but it’s extraordinarily important that this always be done, especially in prolonged conflicts; the consequences of failing to do so can include rapid escalations of violence, and worse yet, a split and demoralized military performing random acts of violence on an unsuspecting populace. Yes, I’ve seen this happen with a variety of militaries in a variety of situations – and some of them from very good countries, composed of people with the best backgrounds.
   In this particular case, I can only hope that the extremity of the events, and the fact that Israeli and foreign citizens were involved, will prompt a very thorough investigation, and hopefully severe punishment for the person responsible – either the soldier who fired (if it was in defiance of orders) or the officer on the scene, if it was not.
4. Beyond this, I know that the situation in the Middle East has deteriorated extremely far in the past few months; to say that good solutions are going to be hard to find is probably the understatement of the century. I don’t yet know what to say to that. Enough people seem determined to make matters worse that I don’t know what can happen next.
   But one particular action in the past few days sticks out – after the earthquake in Iran, I noticed that Israel’s government did not make an immediate offer to Iran’s government of aid. I believe this is a deep mistake; above all, we are neighbors and cousins, and have been such for much longer than we have been enemies. Furthermore, there is no better time to begin a genuine process of peace in the long term than at such a moment; it would have been a win for all concerned, and maybe even slowed the process of violence in the region. I do believe that people even at the street level would have stopped and been forced to pause and reconsider their position had Israel sent full assistance teams – and even more so if there were photographs of Israeli soldiers in full uniform, helping Iranian civilians.
   It would have been important to the Israeli soldiers, as well – a chance to participate in something like this, even on a purely volunteer basis, would make a big difference in the morale problem.

I realize this post is a bit vague on specifics. I’m going to have to spend quite a bit of time thinking about several issues raised by this, and several other issues I’ve been letting lie fallow for far too long. So more later.