Patrick Lawrence: Powerlessness

Let us begin with some facts of the cold, hard kind concerning conditions in Gaza and the West Bank after nearly a year of terrorist Israel’s daily assaults on the Palestinian populations in both places. These statistics derive from a World Bank report issued this month, Impacts of the Conflict in the Middle East on the Palestinian Economy. They cover conditions through March; we can confidently conclude things have since worsened. 

“Eleven months into the conflict in the Middle East, the Palestinian territories are nearing economic freefall, amidst a historic humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip,” the report begins. “Official data reveals a 35 percent decline in real GDP in the first quarter of 2024 for the Palestinian territories overall, marking its largest economic contraction on record. The conflict has brought Gaza’s economy to the brink of total collapse, with a staggering 86 percent contraction in Q1–2024.”

In Gaza, 1.9 million people have been displaced and more or less everyone now lives in poverty, the bank reports. We already know about the hospital bombings and the murders of administrators, doctors and nurses; now we learn that 80 percent of primary care centers no longer function. Up to 70 percent of farmland has been damaged or destroyed, “pushing nearly 2 million people to the edge of widespread famine.” The education system has collapsed. “All 625,000 school-aged children of Gaza have been out of school since October 7, 2023,” the World Bank says.  

As most Palestinians well and grimly understand, the Israelis intend to make the West Bank another Gaza and are simply attempting to attract less attention as they do so. The West Bank economy contracted by only—“only”—25 percent in this year’s first quarter. The bank puts unemployment at 35 percent, primarily because post–Oct. 7 checkpoints and roadblocks make getting to work difficult, if not impossible, and because Palestinians are now barred from commuting to jobs in Israel. Bezalel Smotrich, the Netanyahu regime’s fanatical finance minister, has taken to withholding tax funds Israel collects on the Palestinian Authority’s behalf, sending the West Bank into a deficit the bank predicts will come to nearly $2 billion this year.

What has any one of us been able to do to stop the rampage that has produced these conditions? This is my question. 

Gilles Paris, a longtime reporter and now columnist at Le Monde, considered the realities facing Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank in a commentary published this week under the headline, “The losers of the Gaza war are those whose powerlessness has become de facto acceptance.” Apart from all the World Bank stats, he also notes a U.N. Environment Program study published in June that concludes the Palestinians of Gaza now live under or atop 39 million metric tons of rubble and will need at least a decade to dig out of it.

The Gilles Paris piece caught my eye because the state of powerlessness has been much on my mind since Israel began its genocide Oct. 8. There is no question Israel’s inhuman conduct toward the Palestinian people has revealed, in rip-off-the-veil fashion, the impotence of many people and constituencies. But which people, which constituencies? And what can be done about it? Let us take care to consider these questions scrupulously.

As Gilles Paris sees it, the powerless losers in the current West Asia crisis are the American leadership—he names President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken and CIA Director William Burns—along with the European powers and the Arab regimes that signed the Abraham Accords four years ago hoping to normalize with the Zionist state. They have all suffered damaged images and reputations. None succeeded in stopping the Israelis’ atrocities. They have all suffered “humiliation upon humiliation,” as Paris puts it.  

Gilles Paris takes too much at face value, it seems to me, and so makes a critical error of judgment. It is true that Benjamin Netanyahu has emerged this past year as an out-of-control sociopath, and I am going by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the good old DSM. He is aggressive, given to violence, isolated, driven by irrational compulsions, indifferent to others, utterly lacking in empathy. If you study his face you detect the features of a crazed, maniacally possessed man. He has acted, since the events of Oct. 7, with near-total impunity. 

But the thought that Biden and his people “proved incapable of preventing the disaster,” as Gilles Paris puts it, is a preposterous fiction I would have thought a journalist of his standing could see as such. “The collective Biden”—a wonderful term the Russians have used since the president’s mental infirmities make it impossible to tell who is running the show—never had any intention of stopping the Israelis. All paying-attention people know this. 

As Brett Murphy at ProPublica reported this week, when two State Department reports concluded in the spring that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid from Gaza, Blinken went to Congress to testify, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.” The two official findings—from the Agency for International Development and the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration—should have required the Biden regime to freeze nearly $830 million in weapons aid to Israel. Blinken dumped his own people out of the limo. 

Is this a man or an administration trying and failing to prevent Israel’s campaign of terror? 

It is true, as Gilles Paris asserts, that the collective Biden has proved powerless even to attenuate Netanyahu’s madness, just as the Biden White House, whoever is making its decisions, will not moderate it now as Israeli aggression accelerates in the West Bank and lately against Lebanon. But it is vitally important to get this question of powerlessness right if we are to understand our predicament. 

America’s political elites are not powerless to restrain the rogue Israeli regime: They are powerless to act against the grotesque lobby, led by but not limited to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to which they have sold themselves. In the past week the Israelis have opened in Lebanon another theater in what Netanyahu describes as “the seven-front war” he plans. On Monday, Middle East Eye quoted Amichai Chikli, Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs, calling for the occupation of southern Lebanon on the argument that Beirut has “failed to exercise its sovereignty.” 

There is no sign the Biden regime will raise any objection as Israel aggresses in Lebanon, another of its wanton provocations. We must now consider whether “the Jewish state’s” near-total impunity, as it has appeared to date, is in fact limitless impunity—impunity without end. 

Once we grasp the extent to which the executive and legislative branches in Washington have sold U.S. policy to AIPAC and other influence-mongering groups serving in the Zionist state’s behalf, we are face to face with powerlessness as it is. 

The true powerlessness is ours. This is what we have to think about.  

■

From the comment thread appended to a randomly selected column, “The War Party Makes Its Plans,” published in this space and reproduced in Consortium News, I choose the remarks of a few readers representative of various shared views.

From Lois Gagnon, September 20, 2024 at 17:15:

At what point do the people of the U.S. and its colonies decide they’ve had enough of this insane brinkmanship and call for a national strike until these lunatics step back, concede defeat, call for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations? Nothing less is acceptable. They are terrorizing the whole of humanity to further their imperialist agenda that only benefits a tiny oligarchy.

From “Steve,” September 21, 2024 at 11:56, in response to Lois Gagnon:

Never.

FOMO is real. Fear of Missing Out on that next promotion, or that next invite to a cool kids’ party, or of being ostracized by people you thought were your friends has paralyzed Western society. Just look at what has happened with families and friends freezing out members because of political beliefs since 2016, or because of unwillingness to take a vaccine in 2020, or because of lack of support for war in Ukraine, or lack of support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Social media has driven the world mad over the last decade. People once used to be able to put political or religious differences aside, but now everything has to become a Manichean decision. You are either with me or I will cut you out of my life.

From Cypher Random, September 21, 2024 at 17:53:

I’d love to think it could happen, but we are about to have an election where, just like in the last election, well over 95% of Americans will vote for candidates that support war.

There’s not even a hint of a peace party in this country. The only thing that can be found is warmongers who tactically say that they are against a particular war. Or the Obama tactic of complaining that the war is being mismanaged and that they can do better. All such anti-war candidates would of course give even more money to the military. But, in America, a Partner for Peace is not anywhere in sight. When they tally the votes for this election, they will find War with about 98–99% and Peace with maybe 1%….

In an election with uncertainty about whether an even bigger war might erupt even before the computers announce the victor, that is how America is going to vote…. Nobody proposes big cuts to the military for prosperity at home. A candidate proposing Peace would get stoned by the mob….

President Kennedy once gave a Peace Speech. One can still find it on YouTube, or at least you could the last time I looked. The Dems might have classified it as Russian Propaganda by now. But he did make such a speech. JFK never got a chance to see if that might have been a popular way to run for re-election….

This is what powerlessness sounds like in America in the early autumn of 2024, less than two months before those who vote will choose a new president. It is by turns principled, determined, bitter, cynical, at times confused in its thinking, nostalgic for what once was but no longer is. These three, and I quote them because there are so many like them, look at the political landscape this autumn and see no one standing for election, other than honorable fringe candidates, who comes even close to representing their aspirations. 

I am sure there are many different views of the Gaza crisis, Israel and the Palestinians abroad among Americans. I am not sure how many people who still vote would choose an antiwar, anti-genocide president were one on the ballot this Nov. 5. I am absolutely sure that, setting aside the impossible prospect of a partner for peace, as Cypher Random would put it, whoever is elected in a few weeks’ time will take more or less no interest in the sentiments and aspirations of Americans as he or she proceeds with the business of making war. 

This is one of the realities of powerlessness in America. The nation’s political institutions and its political process are no longer responsive to those they are supposed to serve—those who own them, indeed. The elites purporting to lead the United States, and to speak and act in our name, have fully participated in Israel’s brutalities these past 11 months, and in so doing debase our morality and our very humanity—making us complicit, indeed, in war crimes. We have watched for nearly a year as the violence, torture, suffering and death have proceeded. And now, as dismal reminders of our impotence, we read of the results, the faits accomplis, in World Bank and U.N. reports. 

I have long thought, having lost faith in the political process many years ago, that ours is a time—and there have been many such times in America’s past—when people need to form genuine social and political movements well outside this process to find their ways forward. “A ’60s on steroids,” as a late friend from the old antiwar days once put it. Some of those readers quoted above seem to tilt in this direction. But then comes the pessimism: No, that sort of scene is not possible any longer. 

The New York Times ran a remarkable piece in this line in its Sept. 21 editions under the headline, “How the Powerful Outmaneuvered the American Protest Movement.” Zeynep Tufekci is a professor at Princeton, where she claims the study of social movements as her expertise. Reviewing the preparations universities now make to preclude protests and the ineffectual demonstrations at the Democratic convention in Chicago last month, she writes, “Protesting just doesn’t get results anymore. Not the way it used to. Not in that form. It can’t.”

And then:

Those in power have figured out how to outmaneuver protesters: by keeping peaceful demonstrators far out of sight, organizing an overwhelming police response that brings the threat of long prison sentences, and circulating images of the most disruptive outliers that makes the whole movement look bad.

It works. And the organizers have failed to keep up.

And a little further, Tufekci’s coup de grâce:

Hell, no, we won’t go! The whole world is watching! No justice, no peace! R.I.P. the era when big protest marches, civil disobedience and campus encampments so often changed the course of history. It was a good run, wasn’t it?

It is a good thing Professor Tufekci is not an organizer or a leader of anything of importance, so exuberantly does she celebrate what she takes to be the end-of-history triumph of power—power, the topic from which she flinches in the predictable way of most liberals, in this case power as repression. Tufekci’s training is in computer programming. There is no evidence in this piece, none, that she has any understanding of the dynamics of dissidence, as I may as well call it. Where would we be, I have to wonder, if some new university rules and more rows of police barricades were sufficient, as Tufekci seems to think, to extinguish any idea of worth, any commitment to a cause that insists on itself because its time is imminent?  

I credit Tufekci, though, for suggesting various social factors that make the impressive movements of the past seem so distant, impossible acts to follow. 

Consumer capitalism is vastly more advanced than it was during the “Hell, no” days. Neoliberal orthodoxies are far more prevalent, economic insecurities much greater. The “me decade,” so brilliantly explicated in the late Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (Norton, 1979), came but never went. Ours, in short, is a different and diminished consciousness. Our dependence on technological devices has advanced a social atomization that was evident well before Apple put its first iPhone on the market. Somewhere along the post–1960s line, people took on the idea that right-thinking social movements are not to countenance either hierarchy or authority. It is childish. Nothing gets done without both.   

These matters have a lot to do with what I take to be a sense of powerlessness prevalent among many of us as one violent crisis after another unfolds before our eyes, the worst of them threats to humanity itself, and no effective reply seems available. The sensation of powerlessness, as I have argued previously, is a primary source of depression. But it is almost always an illusion. To escape it one need only take the next logical step after an honest appraisal of circumstances as they are. This may be an advance of a few inches or of many miles. But with it, one is in motion, one has begun to act. One is still alive.