Patrick Lawrence: What Is Said and What Is Done
U.S. Policy as Spectacle
Those Israelis: They are too honest sometimes, aren’t they? It is damnably inconvenient when they explain in perfectly plain terms that the Israel Defense Forces’ intent in Gaza is to ethnic-cleanse the territory of Palestinians, or that they think Palestinians—invoking the language of the Reich—are subhuman animals who ought to be slaughtered, or that the IDF’s brutality, referencing the violently forced removals of 1948, is meant to be Nakba 2.
You can’t, after all, go around saying what you mean if you want to work with the Americans, whose leadership cliques long ago took up the practice of obscuring what they mean and what they are doing. If these people are going to run an imperium their own citizens are not supposed to see, the last thing required is clarity.
Senior Israeli officials have made this mistake repeatedly since the Hamas incursion into southern Israel three months ago prompted the barbarity we now witness daily. As has been well reported, they made it again this week, when two of them came out and said the Gaza project is indeed an ethnic cleansing, the objective of which is to scatter the Gaza Strip’s 2 million–plus people to the winds.
Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, national security minister and finance minister respectively, are senior figures in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s freak-show coalition government. Here is some of what they said when addressing their far-far-far right parties on New Year’s Day. Ben-Gvir:
The war presents an opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza…. [This is] a correct, just, moral, and humane solution. We cannot withdraw from any territory we are in in the Gaza Strip. Not only do I not rule out Jewish settlement there, I believe it is also an important thing ….
And from Smotrich the same day:
The correct solution [is] to encourage the voluntary migration of Gaza’s residents to countries that will agree to take in the refugees…. Israel will permanently control the territory of the Gaza Strip, including through the establishment of settlements.
“Encouraging migration” and “voluntary migration” are preposterous phrases under the circumstances, the sort of language, say, Secretary of State Antony Blinken would favor under different circumstances. In this case these and other such phrases seem to have made matters only worse given the instant outrage. The two officials were describing an ethnic-cleansing operation comparable, indeed, with al–Nakba—a point not lost on the American secretary of state. Here is the statement issued by the State Department January 2, the day after Ben-Gvir and Smotrich spoke. It is brief and I will quote it in full:
The United States rejects recent statements from Israeli Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir advocating for the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza. This rhetoric is inflammatory and irresponsible. We have been told repeatedly and consistently by the Government of Israel, including by the Prime Minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government. They should stop immediately.
We have been clear, consistent, and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land, with Hamas no longer in control of its future and with no terror groups able to threaten Israel. That is the future we seek, in the interests of Israelis and Palestinians, the surrounding region, and the world.
We do not like inflammatory rhetoric, Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn’t either it is Gaza for Palestinians when this slaughter is over: This is the gist of the State Department response. The second of the above summaries is patently untrue, given Netanyahu has said things in line with the most racist of his ministers on numerous occasions. Israel is, indeed, reportedly negotiating resettlement agreements as we speak with Egypt and other nations in the region. As to the thought that Gaza “will remain Palestinian land,” it is cruelly nonsensical at this point.
We are left with, “The United States rejects recent statements” and, “They should stop immediately.” The significance here lies in what is not said. As the Biden regime continues to fund and supply Israel’s criminal conduct in Gaza, as it refuses even to call for a ceasefire (which 79 percent of the U.N. General Assembly recently endorsed), the State Department’s primary concern, we have to conclude, is with presentation. Keep doing what you are doing but stop talking so plainly about what you are doing: Is there another way to read State’s official response next to actual policy, text and subtext?
Tony “Guardrails” Blinken is now on his fourth journey to the Middle East and its surround since hostilities between Israel and Hamas broke out October 7. In Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and, of course, Israel, Blinken will attempt to get the Israelis to improve the aesthetics of its attacks and to keep the war-that-is-not-a-war from igniting a regional conflict. He will face “tough issues” and “difficult choices,” according to Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman who signed the January 2 statement. But he, Blinken, will not announce any shift in U.S. policy.
That will remain as it is. “Nothing will fundamentally change,” to borrow Joe Biden’s assurance to Wall Street during his 2020 campaign. America supports the Israelis as they ethnic-cleanse the Gaza Strip, but it wants a better presentation out of the Israelis and it wants others to accept this presentation quiescently. For all we know—consider Blinken’s itinerary—he could be assisting in resettlement negotiations between Israel and other nations.
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Six months into the Biden regime’s proxy war in Ukraine, by which time things were already going other than brilliantly for the Kyiv regime, those paying attention began to notice the widening discrepancies between the war as it was presented in Washington and in corporate media and the war as it actually was so far as one could make out by way of the reports of independent journalists. As 2022 drew to a close, I made this observation in a commentary headlined, “War as Presentation:”
It is open-and-shut evident at this point that we witness two wars as the Armed Forces of Ukraine face off with the Russian military. There is the presented war, the meta-war, you might say, and there is the waged war, the war taking place on the ground, nothing meta about it.
True enough, there is a long history of official misrepresentations in times of war. But as the late and missed John Pilger remarked in a speech delivered just after the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kyiv in 2014, “The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media—a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.” Pilger nailed something important with these observations: Some qualitative difference in the way the world is presented to us, such that we cannot easily discern it, has been increasingly evident over the past decade or so.
As I have thought about this weird condition at various times since reading Pilger’s speech, delivered at a California symposium, my mind has gone back repeatedly to none other than Guy Debord, whose The Society of the Spectacle, published a year before the 1968 événements in Paris, has proven since an enduring influence on a lot of people. Debord’s book was in essence a left-libertarian critique of consumer capitalism and the dreamlike state into which commodity fetishism leads us. He argued that late-stage capitalism had, already by the 1960s, turned people in the West into spectators and events into mere representations of reality—spectacle in his very useful term. Images were all, or nearly all:
All that was once directly lived has become mere representation…. The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.
Debord’s concerns ran to art, culture, society, theory (and drinking, he was pleased enough to note in Panegyric, a brief book he wrote late in life). He seems to have had no mind for foreign policy or foreign affairs altogether—although he designed and published a war game with his wife, Alice Becker–Ho, in the 1980s. Taking I hope not too much license, we find now that the theory of representation, of the spectacle, of the social and political centrality of image are very apt to those of us who follow international relations, war and, to get specific about it, late-imperial America.
Foreign policy as spectacle, as representation: I do not know fully the implications of this reality because I can hardly grasp its metaphysical aspect. America has a set of policies, which rest by and large on violence or the threat of it, on coercion, or on one or another form of bribery. And then we have the presentation of American policy, which rests on its dedication to human rights, the self-determination of all peoples, its commitment to democracy, and so on. Read again the State Department response to the Israeli officials’ truth-telling statements of Israel’s intent in Gaza: This is what you are reading. It is foreign policy as spectacle. Note the reference to “the international rules-based order”: This is the name Antony Blinken et al. put on their representation of American foreign policy.
If John Pilger announced a new era during which war is waged via information, we will see over time where this will lead us. Again, I am not yet certain about this. But the space between policy and its representation will grow ever wider, it seems to me, leaving ordinary citizens less and less able to discern what America does in the world, or events altogether, with any kind of clarity. The structure of the spectacle, as it increasingly obscures reality, will license the policy cliques to conduct America’s relations ever more objectionably. Of a piece with all this are the incessant intrusions into our minds in the name of “cognitive warfare,” which NATO, having coined the term, describes as “the battle for the human brain.”
A few days ago I edited a colleague’s piece on the famous commencement address President Kennedy delivered at American University on June 10, 1963. I was shocked as I read again his remarks on world peace not as some angelic ideal but as an achievable reality, by his vigorous argument that a violent, divided, disorderly world is not so inevitable as was commonly thought at the Cold War’s midpoint. Peruse the speech and see what you think: For me the true shock was the sheer reality of Kennedy’s thinking and his account of his thinking. There was no spectacle, no representation in it as I use this term.
Kennedy, then with five months to live, said what he meant, and as you read the speech you are dead certain he meant what he said. How far those who purport to lead us have strayed, how pitiful their minds, how formidable the work of recovery when there will be a chance to begin it.
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