The State without Shame
William A. Cook

As I watched Ambassador Daniel Gillerman of Israel at the final proceedings of the United Nations Security Council last week, I remembered how Henry David Thoreau described meeting his government: “I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year – no more – in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it…” Today, ordinary citizens meet their representative via generalized statements issued on their behalf: “The Congress today issued …,” or “The White House today announced …,” or “White House spokesman, Tony Snow, announced…,” or Representative _______ met today with Tim Russert on ‘Meet the Press’.” In general, the ordinary citizen no longer meets a representative “face to face.” But I did meet Israel’s government “face to screen” as he enunciated Israel’s position before the Security Council, and I could not help but be repulsed by this state that bears no shame for its atrocities against innocent people.

How does one describe Daniel Gillerman? He images the manicured, impeccably attired diplomat of sophisticated demeanor, calm in facial expression and gesture as he looks attentively at each member of the Security Council assuring them of his sincerity and empathy for the difficult situation that has necessitated this gathering. He speaks in a deliberative manner with soft, sensitive, but modulated tones as he encapsulates his statements in words that obfuscate the reality of their purported meaning.

One might say with Joseph Conrad as he describes Kurtz, who in another era of colonization represented to another world the “civilized” nations of Europe, “He is a prodigy. He is an emissary of pity, and science, and progress …” And Conrad continues as he puts Kurtz’ mission in perspective, “We want for the guidance of the cause intrusted (sic) to us by Europe ( with Gillerman it is the ‘West’), higher intelligence, wide sympathies, a singleness of purpose.” If “all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,” Europe and America contributed to the making of Gillerman. For Gillerman like Kurtz argued that whites, “from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings – we might approach them with the might as of deity’, … By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.” Gillerman’s words, like those of Kurtz, sing of possibilities made inevitable by the gratuitous favor of a beneficent neighbor: “The choice that faces the people of Lebanon is clear. It is a choice between those who would develop agriculture and make the deserts bloom, and those who turn towns into bases of terror and barren land. It is a choice between those who work to advance medicine and bring health to body and limb, and those who manufacture only weapons of destruction to tear limb from limb. It is a choice between those who invest (sic) industry and trade, and those whose only product and export is terror.”

Marlow, speaking perhaps for Conrad, makes this caustic and cynical observation on the eloquent words written by Kurtz, an observation I would suggest is even more appropriate when applied to Gillerman’s tinted and florid language: “It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightening in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’” Buried beneath the implied progress of Israel’s cultivated state that “makes the desert bloom” lies its opposite, the devastated landscape of Palestine where Israel has turned “towns (called settlements) into bases of terror” hidden behind a ‘wall of horrors,’ as Chris Hedges so clearly observes, a landscape that Israel has “cultivated” and “civilized” for the past 60 years, a landscape carved into a chiaroscuro of shadows and filtered light where rage now roams unleashed, a landscape America built and a rage America helped create, a landscape Hedges notes “is the Africanization of Palestinian land.” Gillerman might have been honest and told the assembly of the world, “Exterminate the brutes!”, for that seems to be the promise the Lebanese can expect as their current devastated landscape suggests.

Embedded in Gillerman’s prose resides the “idea” that gives justification to the wanton and illegal slaughter inflicted upon the Lebanese, the idea of superiority in intellect, morality and military might that comes with the efficiency of Capitalistic enlightenment. Condescendingly, Gillerman creates a dehumanized scenario of insane Arabs from Teheran, Damascus, Gaza and “parts of Lebanon” dancing in joy as planes fall from the sky, the result of “terror” tactics planted in London, a rejoicing comparable to that witnessed when the Twin Towers fell. He does not mention the five Israelis dancing on the panel truck in a Jersey parking lot as they filmed the planes slamming into the Towers. There is much that Gillerman does not mention.

Having fictionalized the non-existent suicidal destruction of the planes, he provides a seamless rationale that binds these fanatical Arabs together, a “genocidal ideology inspired it.” Now we have a dehumanized enemy working together to destroy not just “our region” but “the world at large.” And Israel alone has entered the fray to stop this “vile phenomenon” with its “gruesome record of heinous innovations” that uses “hostage taking,” “suicide bombers,” and “hijackings” to carry out its insidious ends. All countries of the west and good, moderate regimes in “our region” “which offer hope of progress and prosperity” can await the impending “campaign of terror.” Thus does Gillerman compress multiple organizations and nation states into one conglomerate of power intent on the destruction of the West providing no evidence of his contentions but unsubstantiated assertions, negating in the process the distinctions between states and insurgent groups that are created and designed for specific response to occupying forces like Hezbollah Shias fighting against Israeli occupation of Lebanon and Syrian land and Hamas Sunnies and Fatah PLO that fight on behalf of those suffering Israeli occupation in Palestine.

But Gillerman goes further than this. He has the unmitigated gall to yoke the people of Israel with the people of Lebanon as victims of these fanatical Arabs with the “genocidal ideology.” As Israel pounds the people of Lebanon and their civilized state into the dark ages, Gillerman, the visible representative of Israel, decries the “heavy price” “the peoples of Israel and Lebanon” have had to pay at the hands of Hezbollah, as if by some miraculous act of God, Hezbollah’s rockets had ricocheted like boomerangs off the homes of Israelis to return and devastate those of Lebanese. Thus does Gillerman make the thousands upon thousands of Israeli bombs and missiles hurled into Lebanon, weapons of mass destruction caused by Hezbollah. Unfortunately, as Gillerman sympathetically proclaims, Israel had “no choice” but to destroy Lebanese roads, bridges, utility plants, gas stations, sea ports, oil tanks, coastal waters, shipping, irrigation systems, hospitals, businesses and homes in order to recapture two of its soldiers “kidnapped” on Israeli land, a decided act of aggression taken by Hezbollah. Now, as he asserts the innocence of Israel in the devastation of Lebanon, Gillerman fails to mention that the cost of this “no choice” has been the death of more than 900 Lebanese, near a million made homeless, suffering untold hardships as they wander the demolished landscape of their country, and a country ravaged and decimated. But, as Yitzhak Laor notes lamentably, “Israelis long ago ceased to be distressed by images of sobbing women in white scarves, searching for the remains of their homes in the rubble left by our soldiers. We think of them much as we think of chicken or cats.” (Yitzhak Laor, “You are terrorists, we are virtuous.”).