roachboy

overnight, israel rejected a un security council resolution calling for an immediate cease fire. for that to have passed, the americans would have had to at least abstain. the response from livni was an exact mirror of the bush administration's responses to the un over iraq.

but this is not a "solution" to anything, what is going on.
if the objective is to change the political context so that rocket attacks on israel will stop, this will have precisely the opposite effect.

i've been trying to figure this out, make it seem coherent somehow--what i think is playing out here is a consequence of the discourse of terrorism---i think it operates in a self-reinforcing cycle with the illusion of national survival---and that dyad seems to legitimate *anything*...to my mind, what israel is doing in gaza goes way beyond the bushwar in iraq and all the attendant problems...it is the same logic that enabled the administration to justify torture. it seems to me that once a state apparatus begins operating through the discourse of terrorism, it becomes what it claims to be opposing, and uses the illusion of survival begin at stake to rationalize its actions and repress what is dissonant with them. the discourse of terrorism operationalized results in a bureaucratic psychosis.

if this is accurate, then it seems to me clear that this dynamic runs nation-states to the very limits of their legitimacy and requires a rethinking of the relation of international institutions and law to nation states---it seems to me that this points to the requirement that limits be placed on national sovereignty as a check on the possibility of entry into a space of collective psychosis. this in principle, across the board. further it points to the need for a different type of international community, not the default version that presently exists, but a serious organization, something with the capacity to force nation-states into compliance.

this points to an obvious flaw with the entire international system that was set up after world war 2 in order to prevent repetitions of the worst aspects of world war 2. the difference is that the post world war 2 order was set up to provide a system of buffers that would kick in to limit the effects of economic crisis, which was understood as a generator of fascism, which was in turn understood as a playing out of the effects of economic crisis. one of the main limitations to this understanding was that it bracketed the problem of nationalism, of nation-states themselves---the discourse of terror and its consequences---which are not new, which have surfaced repeatedly since the algerian war---demonstrates that a discursive and political space exists where a relatively stable nation-state can come unhinged and move with a sense of justification entirely outside the legal and ethical order that allegedly holds the international community together---because the range of agreements that comprises that community has to do with norms even as its function has to do with resource transfers (which is another register at which the post world war 2 order has been shown to be obsolete).

in this kind of context, it is absurd to talk about military solutions. there can be no solution if, for example, the idf finds itself acting as if it were justified in gaza on hamas while the entire civilian population is trapped in place.
the idea of a solution in such a context is lunacy.
solutions to problems should not involve the murder of civilians.
and the murder of civilians is inevitable if they are trapped in place.
so the situation is itself psychotic and cannot be otherwise.
in this situation, the idf has no rational options---it can pursue what appear to be rational objectives, but because of the siege, that appearance is nothing more than that.
any error results in more civilian deaths.
and war is chaos. it is mostly error.


there is no solution within a logic conditioned by this. the solution is to change the situation itself and treat the disease. to my mind, things have reached that point.

internationalize this conflict---force a cease fire--put mechanisms into place that will bring israel to its knees economically if it does not comply---mechanisms that would undercut the rationale for hamas by instituting a process that would lead toward a meaningful two-state situation in the region regardless of what the israeli right thinks, wants or says. controls clamped on hamas itself. none of these mechanisms exist.

this is the theater of the impotence and obsolence of the post-1945 world--first at the economic level, now at the level of human rights.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite