david on hostile intelligence
david graeber on hostile intelligence – Hostile Intelligence: Reflections from a Visit to the West Bank (july 2015)
via simona ferlini tweet [https://x.com/sonmi451it/status/1714558181580406902?s=20]:
If bullying is to be defined as a form of aggression designed to produce a reaction that can then be used as retroactive justification, then the Israeli Occupation has taken bullying and turned it into a principle of governance. https://rb.gy/08lx7
notes/quotes:
This what it feels like, to live in Palestine. The constant awareness of the existence of a ferocious, hostile intelligence that is organizing the terms of one’s existence, but which, ultimately, does not wish one well. One never sees them. But one knows what they must be like: a brain trust of extremely well educated and sophisticated men and women meeting in air-conditioned offices, presenting power-points, tabulating research, and developing sophisticated plans and scenarios; except, all you know is that these people are utterly inimical to your existence, and you have no idea what they say and do. You can only grasp at rumors and analogies.
The North Korean regime in the ‘50s developed a series of remarkably effective torture techniques, techniques that were so effective, in fact, that they were able to make captured American airmen admit to all sorts of atrocities they had not in fact committed, all the time, being convinced they had not, actually, been tortured. The techniques were quite simple. Just make the victim do something mildly uncomfortable—sit on the edge of chair, for example, or lean against a wall in a slightly awkward position—only, make them do it for an extremely long period of time. After eight hours the victim would be willing to do virtually anything to make it stop. But try going to the International Court of Justice at The Hague and tell them you’ve been made to sit on the edge of a chair all day. Even the victims were unwilling to describe their captors as torturers. When the CIA learned about these techniques—according to Korean friends of mine, they’re actually just particularly sadistic versions of classic Korean ways of punishing small children—they were intrigued, and, apparently, conducted extensive research on how they could be adopted for their own detention centers.
Again, sometimes, in Palestine, one feels one is in an entire country that’s being treated this way. Obviously, there is also outright torture, people who are actually being shot, beaten, tortured, or violently abused. But I’m speaking here even of the ones that aren’t. For most, it’s as if the very texture of everyday life has been designed to be intolerable—only, in a way that you can never quite say is exactly a human rights violation. There’s never enough water. Showering requires almost military discipline. You can’t get a permit. You’re always standing in line. If something breaks it’s impossible to get permission to fix it. Or else you can’t get spare parts. There are four different bodies of law that might apply to any legal situation (Ottoman, British, Jordanian, Israeli), it’s anyone’s guess which court will say what applies where, or what document is required, or acceptable. Most rules are not even supposed to make sense.. And you realize: you’re going to have to live like this forever. There is no “political process.” It will never end. Barring some kind of divine intervention, you can expect to be facing exactly this sort of terror and absurdity for the rest of your natural life.
structural violence.. hari present in society law
But when someone does snap under the pressure, and, say, stabs a soldier at a checkpoint, or joins a cell to shoot at settlers, there’s no one specific act one can point to that seems to justify what seems like an act of disproportionate madness.
The driving force behind the colonization of ’67 Palestine is not any sort of grand strategy; it’s a kind of terrible confluence of short-term political and economic advantage.
Settlements are, in their own way, giant engines for the production of right-wing consciousness. It is very difficult for someone placed in hostile territory, given training in automatic weapons and warned to be constantly on one’s guard against a local population seething over the fact that your next-door neighbors have been killing their sheep and destroying their olive trees, not to gradually see ethno-nationalism as common sense.
Again, it’s important to underline that the people designing Israeli policy in the West Bank are anything but idiots. Most are clearly extremely intelligent. Large proportions have advanced degrees, and are very well read in the history and sociology of military rule and the science of civil governance. They are well aware of the techniques that have been successfully applied by occupying powers in the past aiming to pacify and coopt a conquered population. It isn’t rocket science. There’s a standard playbook: cooptation, divide and rule, a certain carefully nuanced balance of carrot and stick, the application of certain strategies for the creation of dependencies and mixed allegiances… And it’s not as if those developing Israeli strategy don’t apply these techniques. But they seem determined to offer as small a carrot, and wield as large a stick, as they possibly can without sparking a major conflagration.
Settlements are engines for the production of a certain kind of ethno-nationalist consciousness, funded basically for political advantage. What sort of Palestinians, then, are the occupation authorities trying to create? Clearly not docile and obedient ones. There would be no reason to engineer a life of continual hardship, terror, and humiliation—to ensure, for instance that practically every Palestinian mother and father has to worry if their 12-year-old son or daughter will come home safely from school, or is already lying shackled and blindfolded in a concrete cell—if one were trying to pacify a former enemy. The only answer that makes sense is that the Israel forces want the Palestinians to seethe; they want there to be resistance; but the also want to ensure that political resistance is completely ineffective. They want a population that is compliant on a day-to-day basis, but that periodically explodes, individually or collectively, in a unstrategic and uncoordinated fashion that can represented to the outside world as irrational demonic madness.
And why would they wish to do this? Almost every Arab political analyst I talked to considered the answer self-evident. Israel’s economy has become largely dependent on the high-tech arms trade, and the supply of complex electronic “security” systems. Israel is today the world’s fourth largest arms exporter, after the US, Russia, and UK (it has recently pushed back France to #5).
If bullying is to be defined as, in its essence, a form of aggression designed to produce a reaction that can then be used as retroactive justification for the initial act of aggression itself, then the Israeli Occupation has taken bullying and turned it into a principle of governance. Everything is designed to provoke. The provocations are daily. They are ugly and humiliating. But they are also designed to fly just under the point of flagrant, undeniable aggression, where you can claim they were not even, precisely, an “attack,” but like the schoolyard bully who’s constantly subtly poking and jabbing and kicking his victim, hoping for some outraged burst of ineffective rage that can get the victim hauled before the principal.
david on bullying et al
I only came to fully understand the agony of the Palestinian situation when I came to understand that the entire point of life, in traditional Palestinian society, is put oneself in a position where you can be generous to strangers.
It was at the moment it suddenly occurred to me—someone who had grown up in a Jewish family in New York fed almost entirely on Zionist propaganda—exactly what things must look like from the other side. Wherever we went, Palestinians would tell us about all the different sorts of people they had historically welcomed to the Holy Land: Armenians, Greeks, Persians, Russians, Africans, Jews… They saw the Zionists as originally their house-guests. Yet they were the worst house-guests one could possibly imagine. Every act of hospitality, of welcome, is turned into license for appropriation, and the world’s most skillful propagandists leapt into action to try to convince the world that their hosts were depraved inhuman monsters who had no right to their own homes. In such a situation, what can you possibly do? Stop being generous? But then one is absolutely, existentially defeated. This is what people really meant when they talked about a life of calculated degradation..t People were being systematically deprived of the physical, the economic, and the political means to be magnanimous. And to be deprived of the means to make that kind of magnificent gesture is a kind of living death.
graeber violence in care law.. graeber violence/quantification law.. et al
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be you. 