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zenvirus.com "The Poisonous Fish" - an opinion piece on Israel, the Palestinians, terrorism and Iraq by Hugh Cook Essay written 2003 March 21 Friday (Japan time - Thursday in America), the second day of the George Bush war against Iraq, a war prosecuted with the stated aim of making America safe from terrorism.
The Poisonous Fish Israel. The topic reminds me of a brightly colored tropical fish which floats around decorated with poisonous spines. If you grab hold of the poisonous fish, you are probably going to be sorry. Even so, today I'm going to grab hold of the fish.
Today is the second day of the war which American president George Bush has launched against Iraq. One of the stated aims of the war is to make America safe from terrorism, and President Bush has also claimed (and perhaps believes) that a successful resolution of the war will bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
The American forces will undoubtedly win the war. That goes without saying. Saddam Hussein will presumably die. However, this will not make America safe from terrorism, nor will it bring peace to Israel.
The problems in Israel, which began long before I was born, and which have been continuing throughout my entire lifetime, stem from the simple fact that two groups of people desire the same piece of land.
The hostility which a certain number of Muslims feel towards the United States flows from the fact that the United States has supported the interests of the state of Israel against the interests of its Arab enemies.
American support for Israel has been in the form of economic aid, military aid (over US $46 billion since 1950), weapons sales, and (during the Yom Kippur war of 1973) military support in the form of airlifts.
The Arab enemies of the state of Israel, past and present, are and have been Muslims. The state of Israel is a Jewish state. Consequently, it is possible for a member of the Islamic faith to perceive the United States of America as being an enemy of Islam.
In this respect, it is unfortunate that throughout my lifetime the United States has had a strategic interest in controlling the production of oil, that much of the world's oil comes from Islamic nations, and that in 1953 the United States (aided by Britain) went so far as to organize the overthrow of the government of Iran in order to control Iranian oil.
It may reasonably be argued, and may reasonably be believed, that at no stage has any American administration ever set itself the goal of going to war with Islam. The idea that any American president would, either consciously or unconsciously, take up the position that "America is the enemy of Islam" may reasonably be denounced as demented.
Even so, it is a matter of documented historical record that American actions, however motivated, have impinged negatively upon the lives of a certain number of the world's Muslims, and the animosity of America's radical Islamic enemies is predicated upon this historical fact.
Unfortunately, America seems to be a nation in which the concept of history is unknown. This is particularly unfortunate because, above all else, history is the study of cause and effect.
Admittedly, the study of history is known to exist in the United States of America as an academic discipline. However, ever since the September 11th terrorist attacks of 2001, public discourse in America seems to have been operating in a historical vacuum.
Radical Islamic animosity, detached from its historical perspective, has been perceived in America as being either motiveless malignity or a reaction to the American lifestyle.
On the one hand, there is the hypothesis that evil men have attacked America because, and simply because, the evil men are evil. On the other hand, there is the notion that America has been attacked because the evil men are hostile to what they perceive as being the free-swinging lifestyle of the porn movie capital of planet Earth.
To an outsider, these ahistorical notions seem either stunningly naive or wilfully dishonest. However, by and large, it seems that these are the positions which America takes.
Because American reaction has not taken into account the machinery of cause and effect, radical Islamic terrorism has been perceived as unnatural, as an artificial product manufactured by evil men in specific centers of evil and subsequently exported to the world at large.
Consequently, America, as personified by its president, George Bush, has in practice taken the position that Islamic terrorism is something that can be bombed out of existence.
In the case of Iraq, George Bush seems to have chosen to bomb the wrong country, since there is no evidence that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the 9/11 terror attacks. However, let us not quibble over small details.
It is the contention of this essay that, regardless of how many countries George Bush bombs, he will not succeed in bombing terrorism out of existence, for the simple reason that terrorism is not necessarily an artificial product of the laboratories of evil but is, rather, perfectly capable of arising out of nowhere, as people grab whatever happens to be closest to hand in order to fashion a response to the objective conditions of existence.
An example of this kind of spontaneously arising terrorism comes from New Zealand history, though, to split hairs, the "terrorists" involved were not terrorists as we understand the word, but, rather, fanatical warriors primed to kill on religious grounds.
Early in the 1800s, white people started showing up in New Zealand. As was the custom of the times, their primary motive for being there was to take the land, and as the 1800s wore on the white people (the "Pakeha," in New Zealand parlance) succeeded in taking larger and larger chunks of the land from the indigenous inhabitants, the Maori.
However, when the white people came to New Zealand they brought with them a rather dangerous book, a book which George Bush has probably been reading recently, this book being the Bible. The white people taught the Maori the arts of both reading and writing (previously unknown in the land) and converted them to Christianity.
Now, there was in New Zealand a Maori by the name of Horopapera, later known as Te Au Haumene (born 1825, died 1866.) The angel Gabriel came to him in a vision and apparently charged him with a mission, which was to drive the Pakeha from the ancestral lands.
Drawing on the teachings of the Old Testament, Te Au Haumene founded his own religion, Pai Marire, and certain of the fanatical followers of this religion subsequently struck terror into the hearts of the Pakeha against whom they fought. The Hauhau, as these religious warriors came to be known, were fanatics who practiced cannibalism. They believed that they would be protected against bullets if they chanted "Paimarire, hau hau" during battle, which is why this movement is commonly referred to as the Hauhau movement.
The point here is that the Hauhau movement was an indigenous response to local conditions. No outside intervention was required, saving that of the archangel Gabriel, an entity whom the president of the United States is incapable of constraining. No evil book was required, only a Bible.
In New Zealand, the wars over land took place between 1843 and 1872 - about three decades of fighting and killing, the long and sorry history of which would take more than a day's telling. In the end, the armed conflict between the whites (the Pakeha) and the Maori was resolved by a series of compromising agreements which permitted the establishment of a makeshift peace, leaving the final resolution of the problems of the day to later generations.
(The most important of these compromising agreements was the establishment, in the heart of the North Island of New Zealand, of what was essentially a no-go area for whites, an area known as the King Country. Many years later, in more peaceful times, this area was reintegrated with the rest of New Zealand.)
Some years ago, I sat in the library of the University of Auckland, reading New Zealand history in preparation for the writing of a historical New Zealand novel, one of many projects which never came to fruition. In the course of this research, I encountered the history of the Hauhau movement.
Over the last few months, listening to the debate about religiously motivated terrorism, on occasion I have found myself thinking back to the history of the Hauhau movement. It is the belief that this history is relevant to the present moment which has, finally, persuaded me to add this droplet to the oceans of debate.
However, as I prepare to wrap up this essay, a rather bleak thought occurs to me, a thought which I will deliver myself of below, after something in the way of a preamble.
In New Zealand, the Pakeha confronted an enemy which, in military terms, was reasonably strong. Consequently, the Pakeha were incapable of annihilating the enemy, and eventually had to reach an accomodation with them.
Later generations were then forced to address the issue of how the Pakeha and the Maori were to live together in one and the same country, an issue which cannot be said to have been finally resolved to everyone's satisfaction, even though work on this issue has been going on all through my lifetime.
Looking at the world from the perspective of New Zealand history it seems natural to assume that it is possible for two disparate peoples to reach an accomodation and live together within the boundaries of one and the same nation state.
And one person who seems to have agreed was the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995 after taking some tentative steps along the road to a permanent peace in Israel.
As I am in most important respects a child of New Zealand, and a product of New Zealand history, it would seem to me to be axiomatic that, desiring to live in peace with the wider world, the United States should exert its efforts to bring about peace in Israel, even if the only peace which this century is capable of achieving proves to be the same kind of wary, makeshift, compromising peace which brought the New Zealand land wars to an end.
After all, addressing the objective realities on the ground would seem to be the most certain way of bringing terrorism to an end, and there must surely be at least some people in the United States who are capable of understanding this - after all, as mentioned above, it is a documented fact that history is, somewhere, taught as an academic subject in America.
However, the bleak thought which occurs to me as I wrap up my essay is that New Zealand history is not American history.
In New Zealand, as in America, the white people arrived in search of land, and brought with them weapons, and used those weapons when the quest for land brought them into conflict with the indigenous people.
In New Zealand, however, the terrain and the demographics favored the indigenous Maori, who were sufficiently numerous, sufficiently warlike and sufficiently well-organized to eventually force their enemies to accept a compromise.
In America, things were otherwise, so the American solution to the problem posed by the indigenous peoples who inhabited America was not compromise but genocide. And George Bush is a product of that history.
essay ends
A note on the King Country. There are various versions of this story, and I lack the resources (chiefly, the time) to establish exactly what the historical truth is, but the version of the story that I heard (which undoubtedly overlaps with the historical truth in many respects) goes something like this:-
Having fared badly in battle against the white settlers, the Maori tribes finally figured out (a little late in the day) that the basic problem was that the whites were organized under a single leader, Queen Victoria.
The Maori tribes reasoned that "If we all stop fighting each other and choose a king to rule over us, then we will be so powerful that the British will have no option but to deal with us."
The logic of this was compelling, so that is exactly what the Maori (or, at any rate, a substantial number of Maori in the Waikato area). They elected themselves a king.
Faced by a united Maori front, and being war-weary after years of fighting, the whites decided that, yes, it was wiser to do a deal rather than go on fighting. So some white surveyors came to the Maori King, bringing a big survey map with them, and they asked him, "How much land do you want?"
This, of course, was an unanswerable problem. However, if you are the leader of a people, then you must be able to answer unanswerable questions on behalf of your people. And that is what the king did.
The story goes (and I must stress that this is the version that I heard, and that there may well be more than one version) that the king took off his hat, placed it on the map, and drew the outline of the hat on the map, thus establishing the boundaries of his kingdom. This, in my opinion, was a stroke of political genius - the answer to the unanswerable question.
And so the King's Country (now referred to as "the King Country") came into existence. This version of the story, by the way, I heard on a tourist bus when I was traveling through the King Country a little over a year ago, briefly back in New Zealand as a tourist.
Documentation United States and arms sales: discussion on the www.fas.org site, the Federation of American Scientists site.
American airlifts during the Yom Kippur war: link to Israeli mention of this is here.
There is documentation on the Hauhau movement on this New Zealand site.
A simple way to find data on the Hauhau movement is to use Google (or some other search engine) to search for either "pai marire" or "pai maarire".
There is data on the land wars in New Zealand on the site www.newzealandwars.co.nz.
Israel: Chronology 70 BC. (or thereabouts): Israel (or a substantial chunk of what we think of today as "Israel") becomes a franchise of the Roman Empire.
40 AD: death of Herod Antipas, King of Judah, local franchisee of the Roman Empire. (There's not a one-to-one match between Judah and modern Israel, but, even so, thinking "Herod" provides a quick shortcut to the historical context.)
66 AD: Jewish rebellion against Roman rule.
70 AD: Romans force a large number of Jews to leave Judea. This is a traditional method of controlling an unruly population: shift the population. Later, in the Twentieth Century, Stalin did something similar to the Chechens.
638 AD: Palestine (as the area from which the Jews have been expelled has come to be known) is conquered by Islamic forces.
1516: Palestine becomes part of the Ottoman Empire (the surviving residue of which, in modern times, is Turkey.)
1870 (or thereabouts): Jews from Europe start emigrating to Israel.
1897: First World Zionist Congress, Basel. Convened by Theodor Herzel. The Zionist movement holds that the Jewish people must have their own homeland.
1917: Britain takes over Palestine, British rule replacing that of the Ottoman Empire.
1917: Balfour Declaration: Britain commits to the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. Subsequently, however, Britain backtracks on this as increasing Jewish immigration results in opposition from Arabs living in Palestine (hereafter, "Palestinians".)
1939-1945: World War Two. At this time there are about half a million Jewish people in Palestine. In Europe, systematic genocide organized by Adolf Hitler's regime results in the death of an estimated six million Jews, an event generally referred to as the Holocaust. This traumatic event conditions the subsequent history of Israel.
1946: Britain refuses to let 100,000 European Jews resettle in Palestine. In Palestine, Zionist terrorists wage war against the British.
1947, November 29: The United Nations takes the position that Palestine should be divided into a Jewish sector and an Arab (Palestinian) sector. Jerusalem will be controlled by international forces.
1947: Britain starts withdrawing from Palestine. The Jews and the Palestinians get ready for war.
1948 May 14: Israel declares independence. On this day, military forces from the Arab League nations attack Israel. The nations which attacked Israel were Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. The Arab League was established in 1945 and still exists today. A research resource is:-
www.al-bab.com/arab/docs/league.htm
This site has a link the the Jewish Virtual Library, which contains the Arab League Declaration on the Invasion of Palestine. This includes the statement "On the outbreak of the First World War, when the Allies declared that they were fighting for the liberation of peoples, the Arabs joined them and fought on their side with a view to realising their national aspirations and independence. England pledged herself to recognise the independence of the Arab countries in Asia, including Palestine."
So, from an Arab perspective, the struggle for an independent Palestine is a struggle for freedom, and one which was underway during the First World War, before the foundation of the state of Israel.
1949: Armistices between Israel and various Arab nations leaves Jordan in control of the West Bank and Egypt in control of Gaza. Large numbers of Palestinians leave Israel as refugees, ending up in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Many Jewish people from Arab countries move to Israel.
1956 October 29: Israel invades Egypt, taking advantage of the fact that Britain and France are at war with Egypt over the question of who owns the Suez Canal. Israel ends up in control of Gaza.
1967: Egypt reoccupies Gaza.
1967 June 5-10: the Six-Day War. The Israeli Defense Forces have data on the Six Day War. Faced with Arab troop buildups, the Israeli government "gave approval to the Israel Defense Forces" to undertake a "military offensive to eliminate the threat to Israel's existence." Israel regained control of Gaza and pushed on into Egypt as far as the Suez Canal. It also took control of the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem (both previously controlled by Jordan). Additionally, it seized the Golan Heights from Syria.
1973 October 6: on Yom Kippur, a Jewish holy day, Egypt and Syria attack Israel. The Soviet Union assists the Arab forces with airlifts. An Israeli source states that in this conflict "Following an Egyptian refusal to accept a cease-fire and a Soviet airlift to the Arab states, the U.S. sent an airlift to Israel enabling her to recover from earlier setbacks. Saudi Arabia then led the Arab world in an oil embargo imposed on the United States and other western nations."
1975-1976: Israel supports Christian militias during a civil war in neighboring Lebanon.
1978: Israel invades southern Lebanon. Subsequently, having withdrawn from Lebanon, Israel continues to support Christian militia forces in operations directed against Palestinian forces.
1979 March 26: Egypt and Israel sign a peace treaty.
1982: full-scale invasion of Lebanon by Israel.
1982 September 16: massacre of Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila. This massacre is carried out by Christian militia forces, the forces which Israel has been supporting in Lebanon.
1985 June: Israel withdraws from most of Lebanon.
1987: Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank clash with Israeli authorities in an uprising known as the intifada. Violence continues intermittently into 1991.
1993 September 13: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signs an agreement with PLO leader Yasir Arafat. They agree to a deal (in principle, at least). The Palestinians will recognize that Israel has a right to exist. Israel will grant limited autonomy to the Palestinians.
1995 Israeli forces begin to withdraw from parts of the West Bank.
1995 November 4: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin assassinated by a right-wing Israeli extemist.
Subsequently, the conflict inside Israel between Israelis and Palestinians grows more vicious, and by 2002 the Palestinians are making regular use of suicide bombers in terrorist attacks within Israel, and the Israeli forces are responding with military strikes against Palestinian areas in Israel.
This page is part of Hugh Cook's Japan-based website
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Israel Palestinians Terrorism Iraq - opinion piece by Hugh Cook - one of the topics which are part of Hugh Cook's diary.
Formal title of this essay: "The Poisoned Fish".
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