Peace Talks For War

Taking time away from overseeing international butchery and suzerainty, President Obama has instigated what are illusively called “peace talks” between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Apart from the overt conflict inhering in the United States’ role as mediator (the U.S. allocating billions in military aid to Israel), the entire charade stands on the ridiculous idea that the world’s preeminent terrorist state is a fitting conduit for peace. It of course befits the unrepentantly hypocritical character of the state that, having subjected the entire region to the antipode of peace for years, the U.S. would arrogate to itself the moral authority to negotiate a ceasefire. The essence of the state — its defining core — is its duplicity, that tactic of, for example, inflicting terror on the world coincident with a supposed, worldwide “War on Terror.”

Artful practice of such legerdemain, as against the use of violence alone, is the source of the state’s power, distinguishing it from any other group of criminals. “[V]iolence,” Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained, “has nothing with which to cover itself up except the lie, and the lie has nothing to stand on but violence,” the two constituting the basis of a methodology that makes Hamas terrorists and the United States a liberating hero. But for the double standard, there could be no justification for the treatment of Israel, a state born of carnage and colonial occupation, as anything but completely illegitimate. Though as a matter of course all states are illegitimate, the ethos of anarchism, with its uniform application of moral standards, stands in stark contrast to that of statism, the ethics of which are based on Machiavellian expediency. The Department of Defense Dictionary of Military Terms defines terrorism as, “The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.” Fortunately for the state, since the parameters of positive law are its exclusive domain, its actions carry the imprimatur of legal validity perforce.

Contrastingly, it has been suggested that “terrorism” is in fact defined in terms of the sophistication of the weapons used, state of the art technology developed by defense contractors falling conveniently outside its definition. So when Arabs — who have inhabited what is today Israel for centuries — lash out in frenzied violence against a white, European colony planted upon them by a white, European state after World War I, they are condemned as terrorists. This is not to say that their unfocused violence accords with the narrow ethical requirement of self-defense, that it is in any way justifiable, but Israeli onslaughts have been undeviatingly more deadly, the Jewish State enjoying the appurtenances of a favored position in the United States’ retinue. Israel in many ways reifies the elements of statism, joining bellicose militarism with xenophobic nationalism, albeit the odd variant of religio-nationalism called Zionism. For a country of its size, Israel has been responsible for an inordinate amount of death, its creation plunging an already war torn region into decades of incessant confrontations.

When peace talks reemerge, from time to time, out of the detritus of bloodshed Israel has caused, the words of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, come to mind: “The Jewish people have always regarded, and will continue to regard Palestine as a whole, as a single country which is theirs in a national sense, and will become theirs again. No Jew accepts partition as a just and rightful solution.” By all accounts, Israel has not acquiesced in any measurable way since 1948, when British troops, who had protected the United Kingdom’s stolen demesne since the defeat of the Ottomans, handed Palestine off to the Zionists. In a world without state interference, peaceful Jewish immigration to Palestine, in and of itself, would have posed no moral problems. The right to move freely is essential to the recognition of individual rights, and arbitrarily imposed political boundaries should not interrupt the natural communication between cultures that comes with immigration.

The displacement and massacre of a people, however, carried out through institutionalized aggression, is repugnant to the fluid idea of free movement and to liberty. “[T]here can never be peace and stability in the region,” writes Markus Bergström, “as long as there is an Israeli government, nor can there ever be a ‘free Palestine’ as long as there is a Palestinian government. The only way to achieve prosperity is through peace and commerce, and that can only come through a stateless society.” The two-state solution is a misnomer in that it provides no solution at all, promoting the conventional, statist orthodoxy and avoiding the real, underlying problem of legitimized coercion. Anarchists offer the only authentic solution — the no-state solution.