"A. Melon" wrote:
[...snip...]
> Watching the news, I saw an article about Palestinian men being
> rounded up, en masse, from a village on the grounds that they all knew
> 'something' about 'someone'. This did not look to me like an
> investigation. It looked like a reprisal. Watching them as they were
> led around blindfolded, I remembered the mass detention camp hastily
> built in a football field.
It's what us Brits used to call a "punitive expedition" back in the old
Empire days. Except we didn't use to do them to our neighbours in the
next town. It goes along with "indirect rule". You appoint a local boss
to "keep order", but reserve the right to step in whenever something
goes wrong.
In the old British Empire a "colony" - which was administered by Brits &
usually had both some local democracy and some white settlers - was a
legally and practically distinct entity from other kinds of dependent
territory. Most dependent territories, for example all of India & nearly
all of West Africa, were subject to indirect rule by local kings or
chiefs. When, as amongst the Igbo or the Agikuyu, there were no local
kings or chiefs, the British invented them and appointed their own,
replacing small-scale village societies or oligarchic city-states with
foreign ideas of monarchy.
When things are going well, it is a cheap way of keeping order in the
conquered territory & also means that you can keep your imperial
possessions well insulated from any homeland notions of democracy or
welfare.
If anyone annoys you (say an "illegal" raid across the border that you
defined) you demand that the local boss suppress them. If he doesn't,
won't, or can't, you attack him. So he comes to seem as both a
collaborator and as impotent, so he can't act as a centre of resistance
to your rule. And you send a commando, or a gunboat, or by the 1920s a
squadron of bombers, to punish the perpetrators.
Anyone with a spare week could do worse than read "Frontiers" by Noel
Mostert, a huge history of the to-ing and fro-ing between the Cape
Colony (run by Brits) and the Eastern Cape ("indirect rule" by Xhosa
chiefs) in the 19th century. The chiefs were in an impossible
situation, unable to either rule or retire, incapable of exerting any
authority over the land they supposedly ruled, always afraid that their
own young men would stir up the Europeans who would come and drive them
out of yet another part of their land on some flimsy excuse, and
watching white settlers eat up the land. Of course they weren't nice
guys themselves. Many of them were brutal, bloodthirsty, murderers.
Sometimes it is a qualification for the job. And oppression and slavery
don't make people into better people.
That was the war that brought the word "extermination" into common use.
What they meant by it was driving people out of their lands, over the
borders ("terminus" being end or limit in Latin). The Colonial borders
would be extended into Xhosa lands, white settlers would move in, at the
first sign of trouble a commando raid would be sent out to drive the
Africans across the border. The usual tactics would be to kill steal
cattle and to burn houses, and to destroy crops. The economic warfare
forced the Africans out of their lands - "extermination" in the original
sense - and into either crowded camps where they were dependent on
charity or else the lands of other African nations, as often as not
their enemies. Many died, so "extermination" came to mean what we would
now call genocide.
Or read the novels of Chinua Achebe about the impossible positions
colonialism put people into. Or just do a web search for mention of Lord
Lugard.
> 'The Siege' was not a movie about a hypothetical attack on New York by
> Islamist Terrorists, and an equally hypothetical overreaction by the
> Executive Branch. 'The Siege' was about daily life for three-quarters
> of a million Palestinians, seventy percent of them refugees;
> metaphorically transplanted to America's doorstep in order to increase
> audience identification.
> Thank you, Mr Bruckheimer, for bringing the Intifada home.
Present Israeli government policy in Palestine is nothing to do with
either survival or religion. It is simple imperialism, a continuation of
the British Empire policy by a successor state. The main targets of the
policy are not really the Palestinians - they think they will get rid
of them over a generation or two by extending the settlements and
squeezing the Arabs economically - but the Israeli left and perhaps
foreigners who might support Israel but wouldn't go as far as the
extermination of the Palestinians. I'm not saying Sharon and his friends
want suicide bombs and terror in the streets. Or even that they want to
kill Arab children. But they think they will never be safe while there
are Arabs living amongst them. They know that most Israelis, most Jews,
and most Europeans and Americans who think of themselves as friends of
Israel cannot stomach that. So Sharon's government deliberately provokes
bloodshed. To them the bombings and the shellings and the murders are a
price worth paying to bring their Israeli and Jewish opponents to a
"realistic" and "practical" position.
And Dick Cheney turns up in Jordan in the middle of this and what does
he talk about? Nuke Iraq! No wonder so many Arabs hate us. No wonder so
many Muslims think there is a war between "the West" (whatever that is)
and Islam. If you live there it bloody well looks like that.
Ken Brown
