Buildings and Food

Palestinians are enraged by Israel’s brutal invasion of the Gaza Strip, in the months before Barack Obama’s inauguration. However, this was a reaction to epic increases in rockets fired from the Gaza Strip at Israeli citizens every year since Hamas was elected to lead Gaza. In response, it is pointed out that during the period of the 2008 ceasefire, the rocket attacks were cut to practically zero, while the Israelis did not stop the blockades of food and supplies to the Gaza Strip as they had promised. To that, Israel responds that ten (give or take) rocket and mortar attacks per month is hardly a ceasefire, and furthermore that Hamas has still not backed off from its claims that Israel is an illegitimate state that must not be allowed to survive. However, most Gaza citizens support Hamas not because they agree with its extreme anti-Israel position, but because of the corruption of their previous leadership. This leads us to a long series of conflicts that dotted the second half of the 20th century, resulting in a dramatic sequence of border changes, the 1967 border we often hear about being just one example.

How far back can these conflicts really be traced? Well, my initial research took me to the British Mandate of Palestine. Aha, I said, British colonization of the 19th and early 20th Century — here’s one other ongoing world problem we can attribute to it (hence the original title of this post). In 1948, Israel was established as a nation following the Holocaust. But in some sense this merely formalized what had already taken place. The Zionist movement began in the late 19th century, and between 1880 and 1914, the number of Jews living in Palestine doubled to about 60,000. Around this time anti-Semitism in Europe began to escalate, and the floodgates really opened.

While they were moving to the area peacefully and purchasing land to live on legally, the Jews attracted increasing hostility from the existing Arab population as their ambitions at political independence became increasingly apparent. This resulted in ongoing conflict, including a violent series of incidents in 1929.

So, when the Zionists talk about “returning” to Israel, what are they talking about? Well, we have Jewish Diaspora, an exodus from Israel in the first and second centuries during an occupation by the Romans. Before that, the 8th, 7th, and 6th centuries BC (!) saw a mass exodus with the destruction of the First Temple and the conquests of the ancient Jewish kingdoms. And, yeah, you’re pretty much back to the Biblical accounts, with all the clarity that brings.

Please note that this is just the result of some preliminary reading.

This episode of the Diane Rehm Show was billed as, “a look at how the Barack Obama administration may modify or dismantle anti-terror tools adopted under President Bush,” but ended up being a completely predictable discussion about torture. Mark Thiessen, a Bush staffer, argued that “the program” is completely responsible, the people behind it are “heroes,” that it was applied to an extremely small group of people, and that it saved thousands of American lives. Mike Posner, of Human Rights First, gave the canned “we don’t have to sacrifice our principles to keep ourselves safe” argument. And reporter Jess Bravin should have played referee, but was just a little too careful and didn’t have nearly enough to say.

What struck me was something that was never directly acknowledged in the conversation. All three commentators seemed happy to conflate two different questions: “Should we torture?” and “Does torture work?”

Thiessen claimes that in fact there are situations where standard interrogation techniques simply do not work, and in those cases the extended techniques often produced results. Posner claims, as do so many others, that in addition to all the other reasons for which they are deplorable, that the so-called extended techniques in fact do not produce results.

What became clear is that in fact the evidence is not conclusive about whether torture does, at least in some cases, get people to reveal information that they otherwise would not. This super-important point really ought to have been the pivot of the entire conversation, and future conversations about this should be framed thus:

• Is it effective? If it can be established that a particular technique does not produce results, then presumably nobody would want to use it, and the debate is settled.
• Is it ethical? If a particular technique can be effective, then we need to balance all the other arguments against using it specifically against its effectiveness.

There is a lot of stickiness about the legal definition of torture, and about just what exactly the US does and how often, and about what is routine and what is reserved for extreme cases, and it all gets unpleasant very fast. But the unpleasantness is no reason not to keep the issues straight, and to keep the argument clear. And in this we have been failing, and we need to try harder. We need to get some sort of definite handle on how effective different techniques are, and then move on resolutely to the ethical and practical issues.

* It’s interesting that these conversations often revolve around something that gets called the Jack Bauer exception, raising the separate issue of whether a situation presented not just in a hypothetical, but in an actually fictional account, ought to be relevant to this sort of national discourse.