Stumbling Toward Enlightenment

Like many other oppressive countries, Israel’s chief tools of control are through humiliation, degradation and terror.

Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from the Edward W. Said lecture given by Noam Chomsky in London on March 18, 2013.

The Swedish novelist Henning Mankell tells of an experience in Mozambique during the civil war horrors there 25 years ago, when he saw a young man walking toward him in ragged clothes.

“I noticed something that I will never forget for as long as I live,” Mankell says. “I looked at his feet. He had no shoes. Instead he had painted shoes on his feet. He had used the colors in the ground and in the roots to replace his shoes. He had come up with a way to keep his dignity.”

Such scenes will evoke poignant memories among those who have witnessed cruelty and degradation, which are everywhere. One striking case, though only one of a great many, is Gaza, which I was able to visit for the first time last October. There violence is met by the steady resistance of the “samidin” – those who endure, to borrow Raja Shehadeh’s evocative term in “The Third Way,” his memoir on Palestinians under occupation, 30 years ago. Greeting me on my return home were the reports of the Israeli assault on Gaza in November, supported by the United States and tolerated politely by Europe as usual.

Israel isn’t Gaza’s only adversary. Gaza’s southern border remains largely under the control of Egypt’s dreaded secret police, the Mukhabarat, which credible reports link closely to the CIA and the Israeli Mossad. Just last month a young Gaza journalist sent me an article describing the Egyptian government’s latest assault on the people of Gaza. A network of tunnels into Egypt is a lifeline for Gazans imprisoned under harsh siege and constant attack. Now the Egyptian government has devised a new way to block the tunnels: flooding them with sewage. Meanwhile the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reports on a new device that the Israeli army is using to counter the weekly nonviolent protests against Israel’s illegal Separation Wall – in reality an Annexation Wall.

The samidin have been ingenious in coping with tear gas so the army has escalated, spraying protesters and homes with jets of a liquid as noxious as raw sewage. These attacks provide more evidence that great minds think alike, combining criminal repression with humiliation.

The tragedy of Gaza traces back to 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled in terror or were forcibly expelled to Gaza by conquering Israeli forces. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion held that “The Arabs of the Land of Israel have only one function left to them – to run away.”

It is noteworthy that today the strongest support for Israel in the international arena comes from the United States, Canada and Australia, the so-called Anglosphere – settler-colonial societies based on extermination or expulsion of indigenous populations in favor of a higher race, and where such behavior is considered natural and praiseworthy.

For decades Gaza has been a showcase for violence of every kind. The record includes such carefully planned atrocities as Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 – “infanticide,” as it was called by Norwegian physicians Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse, who worked at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital with their Palestinian and Norwegian colleagues through the criminal assault. The word is apt, considering the hundreds of children massacred.

Violence ranges through just about every kind of cruelty that humans have used their higher mental faculties to devise, up to the pain of exile. The pain is particularly stark in Gaza, where older people can still look across the border toward the homes from which they were driven – or could if they were able to approach the border without being killed.

Like many other oppressive countries, Israel’s chief tools of control are through humiliation, degradation and terror.

One form of punishment has been to close off more of the Gazan side of the border, turning it into a buffer zone, including half of Gaza’s arable land, according to Harvard’s Sara Roy, a leading scholar on Gaza.

While a showcase for the human capacity for violence, Gaza is also an inspiring exemplar of the demand for dignity. Ghada Ageel, a young woman who escaped from Gaza to Canada, writes about her 87-year-old refugee grandmother, still trapped in the Gaza prison. Before her grandmother’s expulsion from a now-destroyed village, “she owned a house, farms and land and she enjoyed honor, dignity and hope.” Amazingly, like Palestinians generally, the elderly woman hasn’t given up hope.

“When I saw my grandmother in November 2012 she was unusually happy,” Ageel writes. “Surprised by her high spirits, I asked for an explanation. She looked me in the eye and, to my surprise, said that she was no longer worried about” her native village and the life of dignity that she has lost, for her irrevocably. The village, her grandmother told Ageel, “‘is in your heart, and I also know that you are not alone in your journey. Don’t be discouraged. We are getting there.”‘

The search for dignity is understood instinctively by those who hold the clubs, and who recognize that apart from violence, the best way to undermine dignity is by humiliation. That is second nature in prisons. The normal practice in Israeli prisons is once again under scrutiny. In February, Arafat Jaradat, a 30-year-old gas-station attendant, died in Israeli custody. The circumstances might yet spark another uprising.

Jaradat was arrested in his home at midnight (an appropriate hour to intimidate his family), and charged with having thrown stones and a Molotov cocktail a few months earlier, during Israel’s November attack on Gaza. Jaradat, healthy when arrested, was last seen alive in court by his lawyer, who describes him as “doubled over, scared, confused and shrunken.” The court remanded him to another 12 days of detention. Jaradat was found dead in his cell.

Journalist Amira Hass writes that “The Palestinians do not need an Israeli investigation. For them, Jaradat’s death is much bigger than the tragedy he and his family have suffered. From their experience, Jaradat’s death is â(euro) [proof that the Israeli system routinely uses torture.] From their experience, the goal of torture is not only to convict someone, but mainly to deter and subjugate an entire people.”

The means are humiliation, degradation and terror – familiar features of repression at home and abroad. The need to humiliate those who raise their heads is an ineradicable element of the imperial mentality. In the case of Israel-Palestine, there has long been a near-unanimous international consensus on a diplomatic settlement, blocked by the United States for 35 years, with tacit European acceptance.

Contempt for the worthless victims is no small part of the barrier to achieving a settlement with at least a modicum of justice and respect for human dignity and rights. It’s not beyond imagination that the barrier can be overcome by dedicated work, as has been done elsewhere.

Unless the powerful are capable of learning to respect the dignity of the victims, impassable barriers will remain, and the world will be doomed to violence, cruelty and bitter suffering.

© 2013 Noam Chomsky
Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate

Mexico’s most wanted journalist describes how Amnesty International saved her life (AS TOLD TO JUNGWON KIM)
[from Amnesty International's Spring/Summer magazine]

Mexican journalist and human rights defender Lydia Cacho has made powerfuI enemies in her fight to protect the rights of women and children. Cacho, the subject of several Amnesty International Urgent Action appeals, has focused her investigative reporting on gender violence in Mexico.

Her 2005 book, The Demons of Eden, exposed elite business leaders involved in a chiId sex-trafficking ring with the complicity of government officials-and provoked retaliation by her enemies, including her kidnapping, torture, and arrest. She was released following an immediate international outcry, including a global AI Urgent Action, and later cleared of charges. She continues her investigative work whiIe directing the crisis center and shelter she founded for victims of sex crimes and trafficking.

I think that some people really underestimate the power of organizations like Amnesty International. We started sending emails to Amnesty International, and when the members started sending all those letters, they put a lot of pressure on the government. Certain people within the government—those who are honest people, who believe in their job—used these letters as tools to protect us.

I remember one day [at the shelter] we were just so tired of the death threats, so tired of the stress. We had given, in just one year, 33,000 different attentions to women and children. We were so tired, with such burn-out. One day we were having a general meeting, and my voice kept breaking down.

I just started crying, and I said, “Listen, we have to cry, this is too hard. We will keep going, but I have to show you something.” I got this thing that one of my colleagues had put together-she had collected all the letters from Amnesty International members. I got them out and I started showing them. We saw Japanese, English, German, Italian. We cried together for an hour.

I told them, “This is it—we are working, protected by the entire world. People who don’t know us personally care and think this is important. If the government doesn’t care, if the local people in Cancun don’t care, we should concentrate on the power of what we are doing. This is a mission of life, this is not a job. And if we believe in our mission, we have to know that other people believe in it too.”

We still keep all those letters. They are so important to us, because each letter is a human being that is supporting us. It is not only support that is political, and moral, but it is emotional support. It lets you know that you matter in the world, that what you do is changing the world. What they do by sending the letters makes the world smaller.
In 2004, one little girl escaped from a sex-trafficking network. The owner of a five-star hotel was doing child pornography and sex tourism with kids from 4 years old to 13 years old. The little girl looked for me because she saw a TV program I did. I went to see her one night, and I talked to her. Then I started investigating the sex-trafficking network.

Once I had all the information, I understood that there were high-ranking politicians, even governors, involved in the sex-ring operation, and, obviously, foreigners and tourists. This guy was cutting deals in his hotel and using these kids for sexual purposes. He was taping everyone so he could have them in his pocket if they ever tried to do anything against him.

He knew even before I told anyone that I was investigating. He called me at my office and said, “If you keep going, I’m going to kill you.” I knew then that I had to publish a book, and I also knew we had to save all the other kids. We started rescuing the other kids, and we took them into the shelter. It was a hard time for everyone on the team be- cause we were on red-code security alert for months and months—everyone was threatening our shelter.

One day I was getting to my office. Back then, thanks to Amnesty International and other organizations that put a lot of pressure on the government, I had three federal agents and an armored car to protect me. I arrived at the office and my federal agents were arriving from breakfast, so I was driving myself in my car. All of the sudden, I saw a car on one side of the street and another one there, and I knew something was wrong. A gunman came out, and I thought they were going to kill me. He put a gun to my back and he said, ‘Don’t call your guards.’

My team was watching on video. They immediately started calling everyone we had on a list we had made a long time ago. My kidnappers put me in the car and drove me away for 20 hours, on a highway to go to another state, and they tortured me for 20 hours. The orders they had were to kill me if I didn’t agree to go to Puebla—the state where one of these mafia leaders live—and say that the contents of my book were lies.

I kept refusing. They stopped in the middle of the night, and they took me to the ocean and said, “You like the ocean, you like to swim.” They kept talking about my family, my husband, everyone in my family. They kept pulling my hair and holding me next to the ocean, in the dark.

All I could think of was the girls. Here you have a little girl who was abused and raped systematically by many powerful men—and she did not tell me for any other reason but to save other girls from these guys. That was the biggest lesson of my life. I was just in peace. I don’t know what happened to all the fear I felt before. “This is it, if they kill me in another way, I’m not going to take back anything,” I thought to myself. If I did that I would betray the girls: their pain, their past, and their future.

All of the sudden the cell phone of one of them rang. He just looked at the guy, and he said “Change of plans, we going in the car.” They took me back in the car, and I was so happy. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but I knew something happened. They were really angry, and I liked that, because I understood someone moved something.

I was on trial for a year for defamation. Five of my lawyers had to go, some of them because they had received death threats, and one of them because he sold himself to the mobsters. Finally I ended up with good lawyers, and I won the case one year after that.

I am waiting for the moment in which I can work with other people—not only women, but men and children—to help them understand that achieving their human rights is not a privilege, but a right. In order to do that I defend my rights, I protect my health, I enjoy my life, and I don’t ever let the bad guys take my happiness and my freedom away from me. The mobsters and the corrupt government officials feed off our fear. I wake up every day and say, “Today, I won’t feed them with my fear.” I am a free woman, and I will keep going. I dance salsa, I have some tequila, I enjoy life. I am not a martyr for human rights—I am an activist and a believer in human rights.

I spoke with my friend, Cathy Cade this morning and she told me a story of her being in his class at Spellman College. After being at Spellman for only three days (Cathy), she found herself being led in a classroom sit-in by Zinn. She later went on to write a paper for his class about the abuses of Chinese women…in 1962!

Check out his web site at Howard Zinn.org for many, many tributes, as well as this one from Democracy!Now:

We pay tribute to the late historian, writer and activist Howard Zinn, who died suddenly on Wednesday of a heart attack at the age of eighty-seven. Howard Zinn’s classic work A People’s History of the United States changed the way we look at history in America. It has sold over a million copies and was recently made into a television special called The People Speak. We remember Howard Zinn in his own words, and we speak with those who knew him best: Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein and Anthony Arnove.

Marwa al-Sherbini, a thirty-two year old pharmacist pregnant with her second child, was at a park in Germany one day and asked a man to leave a swing for her three year old. The man responded by calling her names including “terrorist” and tried to pull off her headscarf. She brought him to court, and won the case, resulting in a 750 euro fine for the perpetrator, simply identified as Alex W. He in turn brought the case to court to appeal, and at the courthouse, ran across the room and stabbed al-Sherbini eighteen times. Her husband Elwi Okaz is in critical condition after being attacked by Alex W., as well as mistakenly being shot at by a guard.

In al-Sherbini’s native Egypt there has been an outpouring of sympathy and mourning, with the local press hailing her as the “headscarf martyr” because of how she stood up for her Muslim identity by taking her attacker to court. According to Time, thousands appeared at her funeral in Alexandria, some with banners decrying European Islamophobia.

The Western media delayed in reporting the story, causing members of the Egyptian press to point out how the story is yet another example of “how hate crimes against Muslims are overlooked in comparison to those committed by Muslims against Westerners.” (Huffington Post). A columnist for the Daily News Egypt notes, “Had the Muslim been the aggressor as the guards initially thought, the story would have made headlines … It would have perfectly fitted into the promoted image of Muslims being aggressive, barbaric and uncivilized.” Eventually though, outlets such as the BBC and CNN picked up the story, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her condolences to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at the recent G-8 summit.

At the same time, some believe that the Egyptian government and press are exploiting the tragedy to distract is citizens from politics and human rights issues within Egypt. One Egyptian journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy claims, “The government is…trying to present itself as patriotic in defense of Egyptians abroad. What do they do for the Egyptians who are in the Gulf and who actually face similar treatment, if not worse?” A popular Egyptian blogger Mahmoud Salem comments, “It’s an opportunity to have fake outrage because it keeps Egyptians busy.”

Whatever the social and political implications may be, one cannot forget that Marwa al-Sherbini, a mother, daughter and wife, died a senseless and tragic death. May she rest in peace.