Beyond the Threshold of Atrocity: Nationalism, Biopower & Israel’s Occupation of Gaza more

1 Beyond the Threshold of Atrocity: Nationalism, Biopower & Israel’s Occupation of Gaza [DRAFT] August 2010 Please do not quote or cite without permission of the author. Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton Political Science Department City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center 365 5th Ave. New York, NY 10016-4309 kpetersen-overton@gc.cuny.edu +1 347 837 7635 2 Violence against those who are already not quite lives, who are living in a state of suspension between life and death, leaves a mark that is no mark. ~Judith Butler (2004, p. 25) Everything is with the best intentions. ~Slogan from an Israeli sniper unit tee-shirt featuring the image of an Arab man in the crosshairs of a gun sight. (Blau) An open-air prison On August 15, 2005, in preparation for their evacuation from the Gaza Strip, eviction notices were served to the Jewish settlers in Gaza. The Israeli military oversaw their emotionally charged departure over the next few weeks and after a small morning ceremony on September 12, the head of Israel’s mission in Gaza, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi was the last Israeli citizen to leave Gaza. Before crossing over into Israel, he remarked: “the responsibility for whatever takes place inside falls upon the [Palestinian] Authority” (Shany 3). Later that evening, Major-General Dan Harel signed a declaration nullifying the 1967 decree that had first established military rule in Gaza. With this final act, Israel’s 38-year occupation of the tiny coastal enclave had officially come to an end. Implementation of the disengagement plan, Israel hoped, would “obviate the claims about Israel with regard to its responsibility for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip” (Sharon 91). Yet it was clear to most conscious observers that Israel had relinquished little control. Having moved its army to the perimeter, Israel had simply transformed Gaza into a massive open-air prison—replete with automated surveillance blimps, refortified borders and strict regulation of movement. The disengagement plan itself explicitly provided for the continuation of Israeli security prerogatives, sole control over Gazan airspace, border regimes and coastal waters as well as all economic policy—including the entry/exit of goods, tax arrangements, and the monetary regime (Gaza uses the New Israeli Shekel). Following the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election, Israel and much of the international community backed a devastating economic embargo on Gaza. So-called “closure” policies have since become the norm, wrecking havoc in Gaza’s economy by effectively barring Palestinians from travelling to or from 3 the Strip, banning exports altogether and cutting the import of raw materials (Roy, Failing Peace). And while Israeli troops are no longer stationed within Gaza’s borders, the military has intensified its use of “surgical” aerial bombings and cross-border raids.1 In 2007, citing the persistence of Palestinian rocket fire, Israel’s security cabinet labelled Gaza a “hostile entity” which it promptly used to justify even harsher measures. Imports, already reduced to minimal levels, were further limited so that 80% of Gazan families today “would literally starve” without assistance from aid agencies (B’tselem). Israel has punctuated Gaza’s steady descent into humanitarian collapse with brutal episodes of military assault that have targeted Palestinian society collectively—most recently culminating in the attacks of 2008/9 which destroyed thousands of homes and left approximately 1,400 Palestinians dead.2 Although the international community has repeatedly argued that such behavior amounts to collective punishment (and thus constitutes war crimes), Israel always justifies its actions according to an exceptionally expansive notion of self-defence—one that predicates Israeli security on the maximization of control over Palestinian bodies. Unlike Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Israel regards Gaza as a foreign entity even as it exercises near-total control over the lives of those who reside there. Indeed, Israel finds itself in the rather unlikely position of having relegated its enemies to a tiny and forcibly isolated enclave, a space it is capable of militarily penetrating at a moment’s notice for purposes of regulation, discipline or mass slaughter (Weizman). In short, Israel has shifted the nature of its occupation in Gaza from direct military control and partial integration to indirect control and separation—or as Gordon writes, a shift “from colonization to separation” (199). The consequences for Gaza itself have been harsh as Israel has taken a more aggressive stance. Israel’s military siege and economic blockade, two distinct tactics of control, nevertheless work in tandem. While the latter ensures that Gazan lives are perpetually in question, sustained only at a biological minimum, the former enables Israel to erase those 1 Within a week of the implementation of disengagement, Israeli forces were already back in Gaza bulldozing buildings to expand the “buffer zone” near Gaza’s border with Israel. 2 During these attacks, Israel has bombed all variety of public and private infrastructure including Gaza’s main power station, numerous police stations and government buildings, mosques, hospitals, bridges, United Nations buildings, schools, etc. Moreover, Israel frequently fires on ambulances and emergency service providers (see United Nations). 4 same lives on a whim. The inordinate cruelty of the situation demands immediate attention, not only to suspend the culture of impunity that has characterized Israel’s behavior in the occupied territories for so long, but to attempt to understand what is happening in Gaza at a theoretical level: For how are we to make sense of viciousness that goes beyond the banal violence of conventional killing and seeks to impose a multi-layered spectrum of misery and despair in life? This paper uses the case of Gaza to problematize Foucault’s conceptualization of racism as a “break between what must live and what must die” (Society Must Be Defended 254). Arguing that he fails to adequately consider the ramifications of racism in a national context, this paper attempts to (begin to) address a critical gap in Foucault’s thinking on racism generally. I commence in the first section (Race & Nationalism) by outlining Foucault’s ideas on racism as a product of biopower and contrasting them with Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics—a politics that posits death not as an excess of biopower, but as an end unto itself. Both theorists offer compelling accounts, but because Israel seems to have something at stake in the lives of Gazans, I think Puar’s compromise of a bio-necro collaboration can better explain what is happening in Gaza. In the second section (The Spectral Palestinian), I suggest that nationalism prevents Israel from completely obliterating its enemies. Gaza, though not quite fully human in the Israel national imagination, is also not as expendable as Foucault might argue. While one may desire the Other’s total annihilation, it is impossible to do precisely because the Other helps the nation to imagine itself. The Other tells juridical society in part who they are as a group, as a nation, as an idea—but only insofar as they are permitted to exist as an idealized object of hatred. The identity affirming value Israel derives from its Other (in this case, the spectral Palestinian) guarantees Israel’s interest, admittedly minimal, in Gaza’s continued existence and precludes outright conventional genocide. In the third and final section (Beyond the Threshold of Atrocity), I argue that nations are only finitely elastic when it comes to absorbing events that conflict with national mythology. In the past, mass killing was more easily reconciled with a strand of nationalism partial to the gratuitous elimination of its enemies; contemporary, liberal democratic national identity however derives a self-congratulatory satisfaction from embracing vague notions of tolerance and human rights. So while 5 nationalism is notoriously capable of absorbing atrocities in stride, there is a finite threshold of atrocity, beyond which liberal democratic national identity has difficulty traveling. For this reason, contemporary race wars must occur in isolation from notions of national responsibility. For late-modern society to derive any value at all from racial oppression, its enemies must be brought to a condition as close to total eradication as possible—without either crossing into conventional genocide or manufacturing suffering in such a way as to contradict myths of the national self-image. Death, Foucault argues, is stigmatized under bio-power; it is the “most private and shameful thing of all” (Society Must Be Defended 247). Thus, of necessity, contemporary nationalism has dispensed with crude devices. But in concealing atrocities as much as possible, I argue that Israel has spearheaded a form of “colonial genocide” which does not easily conform to Foucault’s analysis of racism and one that is entirely inconceivable without consideration of nationalism. Racism & Nationalism Foucault’s analysis of racism stems from his more general concern with how war came to be the preeminent paradigm of social organization. In his formulation, racism is a product of biopower’s obsession with the health of populations vis-àvis their sensitivity to degenerate elements.3 It is a formulation that transcends superficial biological distinctions because, to a large extent, society defines its degenerates according to accidental criteria, which may or may not be dictated biologically. The crux of his argument is that modern biopower exercises the right to “make live and let die”; it optimizes life by regulating life at the level of populations. According to Foucault, racism then becomes the “precondition that makes killing acceptable” (Society Must Be Defended 256) for the benefit of racial health. Racism is “primarily a way of introducing a break in the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die” (Society Must Be Defended 254). This “break” has two functions: first, the 3 Foucault makes it clear that his use of the term racism bears little in common with either “the ordinary racism that takes the traditional form of mutual contempt or hatred between races” or “the racism that can be seen as a sort of ideological operation that allows States, or a class, to displace the hostility that is directed toward [them] … onto a mythical adversary” (Society Must Be Defended 258). 6 categorization and hierarchization of subgroups divides a population into a superrace and a subrace—it creates “caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by bio-power” (Society Must Be Defended 254-55).4 The second function of racism, according to Foucault establishes a positive relation between the eradication of bad, undesirable, or degenerate elements and the wellbeing of the superrace.5 For Foucault, these functions operate as normalizing mechanisms to the extent that any deviation from established norms of behavior is conceptualized in racist terms. The inversion of Clausewitz’s formula disappears and whereas the subjects of power had formerly found themselves in constant (albeit suppressed) conflict with the sovereign (“we have to defend ourselves against society”), this conflict now turns inward (“we have to defend society”).6 At this point biopower reveals its limits and state racism emerges, “racism that society will direct against itself” in a process of “permanent purification” (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 62). While sovereignty had formerly expressed itself through the right to take life or to let live, biopower introduced the inverse: the right to make live and let die. Death is then merely a side-effect, or as Puar observes, “a form of collateral damage in the pursuit of life” (32). After all, “how could power exercise its highest prerogatives by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure, sustain, and multiply life” (Foucault, History of Sexuality 138)? Foucault avers, “Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone … It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed” (History of Sexuality 137). Killing had to be framed as a safeguard of society, 4 Refer also to his lecture of January 21, 1976, in which Foucault observes that “what we see as a polarity, as a binary rift within society, is not a clash between two distinct races. It is the splitting of a single race into a supperrace and a subrace” (Society Must Be Defended 61). 5 It should be stressed however that the death of the Other alone does not guarantee health and purity at the individual level. Rather, the Other’s annihilation as a subrace within a population makes one healthier and purer as a member of the superrace within that population. 6 In the former case, race struggle was directed primarily at subgroups created by “differences, dissymmetries, and barriers created by privileges, customs and rights, the distribution of wealth, or the way in which power is exercised” (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 79). This notion caused great tension in the sovereign-subject relationship and ultimately inspired Europe’s great class struggles of the 19th century. Indeed, this notion of racism disappeared only after the emergence of State racism, which concerned itself with the preservation of the superrace and directed less antagonism at the sovereign—primarily because the sovereign had successfully positioned itself as synonymous with the supperrace. As Foucault writes, “racism is born at the point when the theme of racial purity replaces that of race struggle” (Society Must Be Defended 81). 7 of the superrace, or of the nation. Thus, Foucault broadly argues that racism serves as ostensible justification for sovereign/disciplinary means towards biopower/regulatory ends.7 For this reason, he notes “the most murderous [states] are also, of necessity, the most racist” (Society Must Be Defended 258). Degenerate lives become not only expendable but also necessary in their expendability, for the sake of the race—indeed, for the sake of the nation. Viewing racism through the lens of biopower, as Foucault does, tends to downplay the ways in which modern power takes an interest in maximizing the suffering of enemy populations. Achille Mbembe argues as much, taking Foucault’s insight in new directions by asking if the notion of biopower is “sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political under the guise of war, or resistance or of the fight against terror makes the murder of its enemy the primary objective?” (12). Rather than understanding death as the result of biopower’s excess—albeit one that is stigmatized, hidden and denied— Mbembe gives death a central position in his analysis. He attempts to account for the creation of “death worlds”, in which “vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (40) by emphasizing a notion of necropolitics. Mbembe’s analysis is especially salient when considering the case of Gaza, as seemingly intuitive parallels can be made with the “death worlds” he describes. Yet both Foucault and Mbembe largely ignore the operation of racism in a specifically national context, leading them to embrace totalizing narratives of life and death respectively. Foucault’s discourse of biopolitics is insufficient to explain Israel’s sustained deployment of death in Gaza, but Mbembe’s focus on necropolitics rather overstates the centrality of death. Bhungalia suggests that there are two logics at work in Gaza—a kind of fusion between Foucault’s biopolitics and Mbembe’s necropolitics. If we interpret Israel’s actions in Gaza as a manifestation of Foucault’s idea of the “race war”, problems clearly arise. Although Foucault regards massacres as vital to biopower, Israel has inflicted mass suffering to such 7 Foucault reminds us that disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms of power are not mutually exclusive and frequently occur in tandem. He offers the birth of the housing development as an example, wherein disciplinary mechanisms reveal themselves in the development’s spatial compartmentalization and in the police apparatus, while regulatory mechanisms appear in the form of health insurance, public hygiene, etc. (Society Must Be Defended 251). 8 a degree that the revitalizing basis for it comes into question. The reconfiguration of Israeli occupation from direct to indirect methods of control suggest that Israel takes this into account; the immense efforts it has undertaken to simultaneously convince the world of its own victimhood and to escape its responsibility as an occupying power vis-à-vis international law testify to this. Late-modern imperialist and neo-colonial endeavors frequently adopt narratives of victimhood to justify mass killing and exploitation. But how do we account for low-level forms of harassment directed against Gazans collectively? Likewise, if we take Gaza to constitute an example of Mbembe’s “death world”, we must acknowledge the measures Israel has taken to slow (though not cease) its destructive policies in Gaza. It has not entirely halted aid shipments, permitting enough so as to avert humanitarian collapse. Puar (2007) suggests a “bio-necro collaboration” that recognizes “biopower’s direct activity in death, while remaining bound to the optimization of life and necropolitics’ nonchalance toward death even as it seeks out killing as its primary aim” (33). Conceptually, I think Puar’s framework help to explain the dynamic of Israeli’s behavior in Gaza more accurately than does that of either Foucault or Mbembe, precisely because her analysis (although she does argue this) balances the delimiting factors of nationalism which negotiate acceptable degrees of slaughter. The next section attempts to highlight the productive elements of racist national by looking at nationalism in the context of biopower. 9 The Spectral Palestinian Giorgio Agamben’s notion of homo sacer can perhaps shed some light on our present task. Denoting someone that has been excluded from juridical society, reduced to “bare life” and who can thus be killed without consequence, Agamben argues that the exclusion of homines sacri broadly constitutes the preeminent paradigm of modernity. In a chapter of his book disquietingly title “Life That Does Not Deserve to Live”, Agamben writes of a “threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant … and can be eliminated” without consequences (Homo Sacer 139). How this threshold is imagined and imposed varies greatly from case to case. “Every society,” Agamben writes “decides who it’s ‘sacred men’ will be” (139) Butler invokes similar themes when she raises the problem of defining what counts as human (Precarious Life). The worrying trend of dehumanization, of conceptually removing certain groups from the realm of the human, has found currency in the Manichean logic of the so-called Global War on Terror. Indeed, erstwhile Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was quick to seize upon the discourse of “terrorism”, to justify his military rampages in the Palestinian territories (Sharon, PM Sharon…).8 For homines sacri and those who do not quite count as fully human—what Butler refers to as the “spectrally human” (Precarious Life 91)—to adopt violent methods of counter-hegemonic struggle is fundamentally illegitimate. As Žižek observes, “the paradox of homo sacer is inscribed into the very notion of a ‘war on terror’—a strange war in which the enemy is criminalised if he defends himself and returns fire with fire.” Israel, for example, regularly demands that Palestinians recognize its “right to exist”9 and renounce violence as prerequisites for peace talks. Yet, for its part, Israel has only nominally recognized the Palestinians and certainly has no 8 In a speech before the Knesset just days after the 9/11 attacks, Sharon attempted to connect Palestinian militancy with the al-Qaeda attacks: “The issue of terrorism – to my regret – is not new to us. The State of Israel has been fighting Arab, Palestinian and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism for over 120 years … The pain of the American people is familiar to us – very familiar to us. The war against terrorism must be an international war, a war by a coalition of the free world against the forces of terrorism and all those who believe that they can threaten freedom and our values. This is a war between good and evil – between humanity and those who thirst for blood. The way of the wicked will be defeated, the way of those who profess evil will not prosper. The way of the righteous, the humane and the free, will be victorious” (Sharon, PM Sharon…). 9 The very notion of a “right to exist”, a “right” to which no other state lays claim, is theoretically dubious at best. From what authority is this “right” bestowed? 10 intention of curbing the innate violence of military occupation.10 The spectral Palestinian, as less than fully human, is entitled to neither recognition nor selfdefense.11 Nor is he entitled to the protection of the law, for while Israel extends its own domestic law to settlers residing in the West Bank, Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza are subjected to marshal law. We might take Israel’s behavior as a straightforward manifestation of disciplinary power aimed at normalizing the occupation, as “management of the conflict with the Palestinians within ‘acceptable’ levels of violence” (Li 39). But is it really possible to say that Gazan life is devoid of all value? Foucault might, I believe, insist as much, perhaps arguing that Israeli biopower requires the eradication of its Gazan degenerates. But I am not so sure that biopower adequately addresses the nuances of the situation. Clearly, Israel justifies the use of overwhelming and highly sophisticated military force by criminalizing Palestinian resistance.12 Framing its conflict with the Palestinians as an existential struggle against terrorism (a category already inscribed with subhuman connotations), Israel reproduces one of the Jewish state’s prevailing national myths and derives a kind of identity-affirming value from recurring episodes of conflict. Nationalism then interacts with biopower in unpredictable ways. Yet this minimal national value, cynical though it may be, nevertheless prevents us from concluding that Gazan life is entirely devoid of value for Israel. With its mythologized history of glories and suffering, the nation connects its contemporary adherents in a very active way with events long past. In this vein, David Miller (1995) describes the nation as “a community that, because it stretches back and forward across the generations, is not one that the present generation can renounce” (p. 24). One might even argue that the perception of historical mythology as a source of inspiration and justification for present-day actions is the essence of nationalism tout court. Moreover, nations are frequently described in decidedly corporeal terms, as biological organisms that possess a 10 More recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu escalated these demands, insisting that Palestinians recognize Israel as a specifically “Jewish” state (essentially ignoring the Arab 20% of Israel’s population) and calling for any future Palestinian state to be fully demilitarized. Again, no reciprocation is considered. 11 Said would add that Palestinians are also barred “permission to narrate” their experience. 12 Israel does not distinguish Palestinian attacks that target civilians from those that target military personnel; it regards both as terrorism, and thus equally illegitimate. 11 clear past, present and future; a physical disposition that can be injured or become sick; a personality with the capacity to take offense and hold grudges; a will; and other such characteristics. “As a result, those who take their national belonging seriously can meaningfully say things like ‘we have been injured,’ ‘we won the war,’ ‘we lost our country,’ ‘we gained our independence,’ ‘we made the desert bloom,’ or ‘we shall prevail sooner or later’” (Abdel-Nour 698). This collectivizing sentiment is also reflected by Anderson’s idea of “horizontal comradeship,” captured in his famous statement: “Members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). This “communion” requires that national subjects possess an understanding of “certain mutual rights and duties to each other in virtue of their shared membership of it” (Gellner 7). Nationalism then is a set of discourses that not only defines identity, but also carries with it a specific value system that can be imposed formally via state institutions and normalized through its actions on behalf of the nation. In his fascinating study of Jordanian nationalism, Joseph Massad looks at the interaction between juridical institutions and national identity (Colonial Effects). Echoing Foucault, Massad observes, “law … in a nation-state enacts the foundational differentiation of all the categories that it interpellates as binaries. It enacts not identity but difference tout court” (20). In short, the state determines who is and who is not a national member; it creates juridical subjects and imposes legal categories of “us” and “them”. This relationship between one’s identity and the power of the state to uphold or to deny that identity is the quintessential symptom of the modern nation-state, but this productive value is by no means limited to juridical regulation. Israeli society is inscribed with antagonism toward the spectral Palestinian, from compulsory military service to institutionalized discrimination against Israeli Arabs. In the typical Orientalist binary between the good “us” and barbaric “them”, Israel’s relationship with Gaza produces evolving notions of degeneracy and dehumanization, clearing the way for increasing levels of violence. As Butler writes, “certain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized; they fit no frame for the 12 human, and their dehumanization occurs first, at this level. This level then gives rise to a physical violence which is already at work in the culture” (25). While Foucault (2003) sees racism as the “precondition that makes killing acceptable” within the context of biopower (as the sovereign right to kill inserting itself within the modality of biopower), Agamben views “life that does not deserve to live” as teleological, as the preeminent paradigm of modernity (Homo Sacer 136-144). Neither theorist however addresses the productive value of maintaining a relationship between the superrace and the subrace. Mass violence produces dissonance and consonance among members of both the superrace and subrace; it tells each party something about who they are as a group and reinforces group solidarity through the shared experience of either wielding the club or receiving the blows. In his book, Making Race and Nation, Anthony Marx makes a compelling argument that the state-sanctioned apartheid regimes of South Africa and the United States were established in part to bridge conflicts within the white communities of each country. By institutionalizing racial domination and its attendant violence, Marx argues, both countries were able to contain interwhite class ethnic conflict. In this way, stability was predicated on the violent subjugation of an entire subnational group; the hegemonic group was able to derive social value through institutionalized violence. The creation of Israel was the culmination of a Zionist project heavily steeped in European ethnic arrogance and obsessed with the reconfiguration of Jewish identity to a predominantly Europeanized, white, Ashkenazi understanding Jewishness. Thus, from its birth, Israel has been plagued with inter-Jewish ethnic tension (see Massad, “Zionism’s Internal Others”; Shohat).13 I cannot fully explore the thought here, but it is perhaps possible that the solidarity derived from statesanctioned oppression of the occupied Palestinian population has helped keep these inter-Jewish tensions from spilling over. Not only does the state dictate acceptable and upright forms of national behavior, but its actions produce new or nuanced conceptions of the nation itself. These new methods of power, according to Foucault, extend far beyond the state and its apparatus and have in fact become more important than the state’s repressive function (Discipline and 13 Ashkenazi Jews have historically held disproportionate political power in Israel while darker skinned Mizrahi, Sephardic and Ethiopian Jews frequently complain of discrimination. 13 Punish). Thus the spectral Palestinian and Israel’s relationship with it in a national context are beyond the scope of Foucauldian biopower but absolutely must be considered if we are to understand Israeli actions in Gaza. Beyond the Threshold of Atrocity Nationalism is not indefinitely pliable and it does not always acquiesce to atrocity, even when the atrocities in question have been predicated on the optimization of life. First of all, it should be clear that nationalism lacks any familiarity with Arendt’s purely objective notion of “factual truth”; instead, it thrives on a unique ability to forget history, to invent traditions, and to generally discourage critical thinking outside the mythical framework for understanding national behavior. Atrocities carried out by the nation are commonly absorbed, denied and ultimately forgotten; and when history cannot be suppressed, nations possess a remarkable ability to reconcile the irreconcilable. Yet this ability is not limitless. There is an indeterminate threshold of atrocity that, when breached, causes national solidarity to falter and begins to undermine the credibility of power in the service of the nation. In contemporary liberal democratic societies, the nation’s mythological self-image is tied up with a generalized discourse of noble ideals like “democratic values”, “human rights”, “justice”, “tolerance”, etc. Yet the nations proclaiming these ideals loudest are the often one’s flouting them most brazenly. Without understanding nationalism, Foucault is unable to fully explain racism. In his analysis, he reminds us that “the most murderous [states] are also, of necessity, the most racist” (Society Must Be Defended 258). Perhaps he should have added that they are also the most deferential to national identity, often going great lengths to preserve the national myth when it conflicts with the actions undertaken on the nation’s behalf. Such measures include everything from secret wars and spurious legal justification to Orwellian propaganda and appeals to jingoism. Paradoxically, it is at this moment when power disassociates from the suffering it imposes (perhaps it even denies such suffering exists) that it is able to inflict the most unrestrained forms of cruelty imaginable. When “colonizing genocide” is taken to extremes for prolonged periods of time, the ensuing bloodbath may conflict with the nation’s self-image. Yet, when the nation is perceived to act with restraint (whether or not this is actually the 14 case), it can positively reinforce national myths of benevolent intentions, humanitarianism, etc. Each time it launches a military assault in the Palestinian territories, Israel reminds us of its “restraint” because such a narrative conforms to its national self-image as the only democracy in the Middle East. Following Israel’s 2008/09 attack on Gaza, which left 1400 Palestinians dead, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni explained Israel’s logic: “During the operation, the goal was to change the equation after eight years in which Israel showed restraint.”14 The selective interpretation of history is striking. Before so-called Operation “Cast Lead”, according to Livni’s narrative, and from the time Palestinian militant groups first began firing rockets 2001, Israel did little if anything to challenge it. One must forget that, between 2004-08, Israel justified five major military operations in the Gaza Strip as retaliation for Palestinian rockets, which collectively resulted in the deaths of nearly 900 Gazans.15 Certainly, the 2008/09 assault took the carnage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to new heights (or perhaps lows), but to trivialize past military operations by characterizing them as restrained is to purposefully appeal to the Israeli national self-image. Livni was feeding into a particular narrative of Israeli victimhood, one that believes no matter Israel’s actions, the Jewish state will always suffer attacks by enemies bent on its total destruction—Gaza is represented as the spectral Palestinian tout court. From this perspective, it should be unsurprising that Israel immediately blamed Hamas for the staggering body count.16 After all, what liberal democratic nation could accept unconditional responsibility for an attack that was quickly being described as a “massacre”?17 To do so might very well expose the hypocrisy of the national myth and take us beyond the threshold of atrocity. There is clearly something unusual happening here; during and after the 14 “Itt is clear,” Livni said, “that one of the goals of this operation … is to stop the smuggling of weapons being delivered by Iran to Hamas in the Gaza Strip … The international community decided, after Hamas won the elections, that the only way to give legitimacy to them is if they accept the international requirements, including recognizing Israel’s right to exist, renouncing violence and terrorism, and accepting former agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.” 15 The Israeli names of the operations are as follows: Operation “Rainbow” (2004), Operation “Days of Penitence” (2004), Operation “Summer Rains” (2006), Operation “Autumn Clouds” (2006), and Operation “Hot Winter” (2008). 16 The United States was quick to defend Israel’s actions and to blame Hamas for the mounting civilian death toll (see Raghavan and Eggen 2009). 17 Sara Roy, speaking to the press towards the end of Israel’s attack, was among those describing the attack as a massacre. “I am a scholar and I use words very carefully, and this seems like a massacre” (cited in Marquand). 15 attack, Israel lapsed between two narratives. On the one hand, we have Livni’s narrative, in which Israel rejects responsibility for the attacks and instead seeks to place the blame for civilian deaths entirely with Hamas. During the assault, Israeli officials constantly accused Hamas fighters of hiding among civilians, in mosques, or in hospitals, apparently as retroactive justification for having attacked what were clearly civilian targets.18 “Its not our soldiers who are aiming their guns at Palestinian children,” one Israeli commentator insisted, “but the leaders of Hamas who are using them as human shields and decoys” (Marcus). According to this narrative, Gazan civilians are fully human and their lives are valuable; Hamas is not only an enemy of Israel, but also of Gazan civilians; thus, we should be morally outraged that Hamas has brought (necessary) destruction on the people of Gaza. Supporters of this narrative afterwards pointed to the leaflets dropped by the Israeli military as well as radio broadcasts and prerecorded telephone calls made to Gazan homes warning of impending airstrikes.19 Indeed, some would argue that Israel acted partly out of humanitarian concern for the people of Gaza, who suffer “enslavement” under Hamas rule (Proser 2008).20 On the other hand, Israel also offers a contradictory narrative, one that accepts responsibility for Palestinian deaths and argues that such an overwhelming display of force will serve as a deterrent to Palestinian militants in the future. According to this hawkish narrative, Gazan civilians are complicit either in their support for or in their failure to overthrow the Hamas government; despite their complicity, Israel only targets terrorists; there will, however, be unanticipated deaths; but these deaths cannot truly be considered civilian deaths as all Gazans are complicit. Giving voice to this narrative during the Israeli attack, one commentator deplored the outpouring of international pity for the people of Gaza: 18 It should be noted that no evidence has surfaced that would confirm the allegations of Palestinian militants using civilian shields. However, there is a great deal of evidence that Israel used Palestinian civilians as human shields in a number of cases during the assault, in violation of both international and Israeli law (Goldstone 2009, p. 59) 19 The Goldstone report found that although these methods were occasional useful when sufficiently specific, this other factors ensured that this was not normally the case because “the credibility of instructions to move to city centres for safety was … diminished by the fact that the city centres themselves had been the subject of intense attacks during the air phase of the military operations” (United Nations 18-19). 20 Jean Bricmont refers to this kind of moral justification as “humanitarian imperialism”. 16 This pity may be a natural emotional reaction, yet it is unethical and immoral … Just as a crying baby who only elicits pity will continue to cry, the citizens of Gaza will continue to cry out to the world instead of taking matters into their own hands. As long as they are told that they are helpless victims or mere pawns at the hands of terrorists, Gazans will only see their suffering prolonged (Dvir). Both narratives decontextualize Israeli actions to justify massive military force in a way that Israeli national identity can reconcile with—a job facilitated by restricting media access to Gaza during the 2008/09 assault and banning Israelis from entering the territory altogether. In doing so, Israel avoids passing beyond the threshold of atrocity, which might otherwise compromise the credibility of its national mythology.21 Military strikes make up only one element of Israel’s post-disengagement strategy that undermines its liberal national myths however. Faced with the appalling consequences of prolonged closure policies in Gaza, Israel has adopted narratives similar to the ones used in the aftermath of the 2008/09 attacks: it either denies that a humanitarian crisis exists or pins Gaza’s plight entirely on Hamas. Although Gaza had been under tight control disengagement, Israel’s intensification of the economic embargo since the 2006 election of Hamas has caused what human rights groups have described as a “humanitarian implosion” (Amnesty International et al.). “Gaza is no longer approaching economic collapse,” al-Sarraj and Roy observe, “It has collapsed.” In addition, Israel has imposed policies difficult to justify as security measures, e.g. the destruction of schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure;22 restricting travel for Gazan students;23 and preventing seriously ill Gazans from seeking medical assistance outside of Gaza.24 Moreover, until recently, Israeli jets regularly carried out low- 21 Amy Kaplan argues that the United States has been able to benefit from its denial of imperial power. Perhaps a similar argument can be made of Israel’s refusal the refer to the Palestinian territories as “occupied”. After all, an occupier is one who tramples human rights and oppresses an occupied people, clearly contrary to Israel’s national mythology. 22 The record is filled with such instances, but during the 2008/09 attacks alone, Israel completely destroyed the American School of Gaza, bombed a UN compound and a Gazan hospital among numerous other civilian sites (see United Nations). 23 In one case, the United States nearly withdrew Fulbright grants awarded to Gazan students out of concern that Israel would not permit them to travel. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was forced to intervene and asked that Israel make a rare exception. (see Bronner, US Withdraws…; Bronner, State Dept…) 24 As a consequence of the economic embargo and Israel’s closure policies, Gazan hospitals are drastically undersupplied and thus lack the ability to treat a number of serious illnesses. Since 17 altitude sorties over Palestinian residential areas, intentionally causing powerful sonic booms that shatter windows and generally terrorize the civilian population.25 In short, Israel has deliberately created not only the worst economic and humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip since the occupation began in 1967, but has ensured that life in Gaza is unpredictable and terrifying. Last March, after a high profile visit to Gaza by the UN Secretary General, Israel’s chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi denied that Gaza is under siege and insisted that no humanitarian crisis exists (Hoffman). Ashkenazi was simply repeating what Israeli politicians have insisted for the past few years as the situation in Gaza has reached unprecedented lows: there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza and Hamas is responsible for any shortages caused by the blockade. As with the narratives forwarded in the wake of Israel 2008/09 attack, this kind of denial seeks to render the destruction of Gazan society palatable to Israeli national identity. Israeli nationalism, like other modern liberal democratic forms of nationalism, is tied up with generalized notions of human rights and tolerance under extraordinary conditions. It is commonly argued that Israel exercises commendable democratic restraint under circumstances of irrational terror. Israel never strikes first and only ever responds to violence perpetrated against it. The occupation is unfortunate, but Israel has no partner for peace—only the radical and fundamentally irrational spectral Palestinian. This collection of narratives colors even into the most heinous of actions with a hint of justice. As Hardt and Negri point out, “the concept of justice serves to universalize war beyond any particular interests to the interest of humanity as a whole” (15). All of these transactions between formal power and national society interact with the national self-image and are thus productive elements largely ignored in Foucault’s assessment. More than that, I would suggest that this universalizing function actually works to intensify the viciousness of racial oppression. Because it now occurs in isolation from feelings of national responsibility, the misery inflicted is allowed to reach unprecedented levels—a worrying trend that 2007, Israel has greatly reduced travel permission for terminally ill Gazans, causing many to die for lack of treatment. 25 At the time, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that “thousands of residents in southern Israel live in fear and discomfort, so I gave instructions that nobody will sleep at night in the meantime in Gaza” (cited in B’tselem). 18 invokes Agamben’s “state of exception”, but which I think more accurately reflects interaction of nationalism with formal power. 19 Conclusion Foucault restricts the outcomes of contemporary racism to the subdivision of population and the establishment of a biological relationship between subgroups, which in turn serve as normalizing mechanisms. The obsession with racial purity sits easily with contemporary particularistic notions of nationalism. Indeed, bio-power emerges virtually simultaneously with the rise of European nationalism; the aristocracy’s identification with the new concept of nation weakened vertical social hierarchies and undermined the sovereignty of the Prince by accepting his sovereign power solely as a mechanism of national protection. But although Foucault seems to have nationalism in mind when he discusses state racism, he fails to adequately consider the interaction between national identity and national atrocities. State racism is certainly not synonymous with nationalism; it is rather one potential expression of nationalism among many. The trend towards a nationalism that takes pride in generalized notions of human rights is worrying, for while national atrocities suggest national complicity, atrocities committed on behalf of human rights universalize responsibility—albeit predominantly in the eyes of the national subjects. Thus, removing national agency from the framework of national identity and attributing the consequences of Israeli policy to external universal goals prevents a breach of the threshold of atrocity. Foucault’s biopower and Mbembe’s necropolitics are both totalizing narratives, respectively embracing life and death no matter the consequences. The essay has attempted to demonstrate that there are potential consequences that must be reckoned with, consequences for national identity that must always be weighed against national actions. Although nationalism contributes to the sinister forces of racist oppression, it also shapes and constrains this violence—a possibility Foucault does not, I believe, account for in his analysis that I have only just begun to address in this short essay. 20 Bibliography Abdel-Nour, Farid. “National Responsibility.” Political Theory 31.5 (2003): 693719. Al-Sarraj, Eyad and Sara Roy. “Why Is This Acceptable? 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