Bernard Noël on Lebanon

French poet Bernard Noel just sent the essay below, which I translated, hopefully not too overhastily, as I thought it important to publish as quickly as possible.

INCURSIONS

In the latest France-Culture radio news bulletins, the word “incursion” serves to designate the Israeli military operations in Lebanon. This word arrests because it is original in relation to the vocabulary used by other broadcast outlets. According to Littré dictionary, “incursion is a race; consequently the one who performs it only passes over the terrain he ravages”. Although a century and a half old, this definition describes Israel’s action pretty well, except that on this occasion the “race” violates the air space and therefore the “ravages” fall principally from the sky.
Littré refers back to the Latin word “incursio” which it translates as “invasion”. The Gaffiot dictionary gives “shock, attack” for “incursio”, and “to thrown oneself upon” for “incursito” and “swoop down on, attack” for “incurso”. One must not confuse, says the Dictionnaire analogique, “incursion” , which is the act of momentarily penetrating into an area that is not one’s own, with “irruption”, which consists in penetrating with unmitigated force and settling in…
The air force is the perfect instrument for an “incursion” because it “throws itself upon” its objective and immediately returns to its base. Tanks, commandos, infantry, on the other hand, are forced to make an “irruption” even if officially their command does not have the intention of settling in. The Israeli army, called Tsahal, has for half a century clearly been combining “incursion” and “irruption” for the greater harm of its neighbors.
Indeed, the history of this period proves that the existence and behavior of Tsahal make of incursion and irruption a brutal method of intimidation the practice of which is continuously informed by acts of violence. This goes from the always arbitrary “sealing off” to the confiscation of land, from the destruction of olive groves and houses to targeted assassinations, from the bombing of civilian infrastructures to the shelling of civilians, from the kidnapping and sequestration of politicians to the imprisonment and torture of whoever has the misfortune to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. All this is done in the name of a right to self-defense and to security, which results in the creation of a generalized insecurity, not only around Israel but throughout the Middle East.
Faced with so many acts of violence whose only success is to call up and to recall other such acts with regrettable totalitarian references, it would seem that simple common sense should have led to ask of peace what war has not been able to provide. But no, the state of Israel persists in supporting oppression, fear and threats when it doesn’t commit acts that aim to terrorize an enemy whom, in reality, they create. Even so, today those actions reach a degree where their unjustifiability rivals their savagery. A savagery masked by the technology of war, which metamorphoses the killings into an inhuman affair the official communiqués call “collateral damage.”
Mankind no doubt needs the direct eye contact, or a one-to-one situation for the killer to be conscious of the power of life and death he wields. This may conceivably not be the case for a gunner or a pilot who shoot at a “target,” but how can such a mitigating circumstance be accorded to the generals, ministers and head of state of who the least one can expect is that they know what they are doing? When one compares the scale of the “damages” and the justification given for them by those Israelis in charge, one cannot but wonder if it is lies or racism that prevail in the overzealousness with which they drive to crime.
Of course a major part of their arrogance in the denial of the facts comes from the continuous aid and the exemplary behavior of their American supporters, who have so brilliantly succeeded in their democratization of Iraq and Afghanistan. The war crimes, the torture of prisoners, the massacres become something else as soon as they are called war against terrorism: this re-naming even acts as a sanctification. Moreover, the victims of this war clearly do not have a right to such a status: it is enough to label you a “terrorist” for you to stop being human.
For years now — and there is abundant evidence for this — one witnesses a growing rise of contempt in Israel. Contempt for the Palestinian, humiliated day after day at the check-points, deprived of work, deprived of water, electricity, food, manhandled for a yes or a no, imprisoned without judgment… And these are but the gentler forms of an oppression that does not hesitate to have recourse to shellings, to bombings, to the shootings in Gaza or to the famous “Wall” that is in the process of transforming the West Bank into a concentration camp.
The seriousness of the situation thus created is accompanied by dozens of deaths with a high percentage of women and children among them. All of this has been exposed in vain in many articles, documentaries and books, although nothing exposes the moral degradation that the regular exercise of oppression causes among the Israelis. If the gunner and pilot maybe do not see what they do, the oppressor sees it very well when he lets some wretch wait for hours for passage, when he breaks down doors, wrecks furniture, when he levels a house with his tank or bulldozer, when he shoots at children. To tolerate this face-to-face, one must have practiced contempt for a long time, one must even have cultivated it. How much one has to dehumanize the Other to treat him like an inferior being, is known.
The Israeli government organizes this dehumanization and the racist contempt that results from it. It is astonished by the resistance it encounters at the same time than it tries to do away with it. Thus this redoubling of violence, which proves a latent desire for genocide, and the rage at not daring to commit it. A rage that blinds Mr. Olmert and his clique as it makes them act exactly contrary to the interests of their people who are just as blinded by their propaganda. Thus on the fifteenth day of the destruction of Lebanon with American bombs and with the aim of provoking the rejection of the Hezbollah, the so-called cause of all this misery, a poll reveals today that 87% of the Lebanese see in the Hezbollah a resistance movement that gives them honor.
Political stupidity is criminal: one saw this in Iraq, in Afghanistan; one sees it, alas, in Palestine and in Lebanon. What is most terrible, is that this stupidity meets with no resistance in a West, which dishonors itself by finding respectable motifs for it. The Arab countries do not do any better, but at least they have the excuse, thanks again to the USA, of having governments that are estranged from their peoples’ aspirations. To treat resistance movements as terrorists is not new, but those who make use of this apparently hard-wearing rhetoric should know that it is dangerous to turn resistance into despair.
Honor has never been the strong point of diplomats or merchants, but for a long time it was the rule of the game for the military. What honor can there be in shelling a milk factory, the landing strips of a civil airport or the buildings of the Palestinian Authority? It is a shame that Tsahal and its generals never had to meditate on this classic, now proverbial, line: “By vanquishing without danger, one triumphs without glory.” The honor of Israel rests now only with a few “refuzniks” who refuse to massacre the innocent, but for Tsahal it is too late: this elite army is trained only to crush those weaker than itself and it has henceforth to be considered as the most cowardly in the world.

Bernard Noël.

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