The Shalit Supremacy

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned that the Israel would strike down supporters of terrorism, saying that “None of them will be immune”. The Wall Street Journal reads this as a thinly veiled threat against Syria, but there have been more disturbing contours in Israel’s official rhetoric. The BBC reports that Olmert made the following remarks at the border town of Sderot, “This is a long war. It requires lots of patience, sometimes endless restraint. We have to know when to clench our teeth and to deal a decisive blow.” Similar remarks also surfaced from Cabinet minister Roni Bar-On, "It's safe to say…the sky will fall on them if Gilad Shalit is harmed…If he is killed, we will react in ways the Palestinians haven't seen before."

Militarization is a central component of state participation in the War on Terror, but it tends to manifest in very asymmetrical warfare, which obscures the problem with these incredibly violent statements by Israeli officials. The debate centers on Israel’s level of restraint, rather than asking how it is that an allegedly democratic state can distribute such high levels of violence despite any mitigating political process. In the same way that Lyndon Johnson’s America suffered urban warfare in exchange for a declining liberal dream, we have to ask what dreams have been thrown out or replaced to make Israel’s violent logic possible. Such widespread retaliation in the name of one soldier exposes (again) how Israeli politics has worn through its adopted liberal democratic values. Government intervention has shifted away from liberalism’s group-oriented framework to one that has the entire military apparatus publicly claiming its obsession with the fate of an individual Israeli GI.

As we pointed out in a previous post, the reoccupation of Gaza cannot be seen merely as an effort to rescue Corporal Shalit. Rather, with each new military sweep we can detect a broader logic of political militarization. This thinking has been in development for some time, but found its full expression in the War on Terror—and has taken this form as a way of registering its impact in the world against the failures of liberal democratic ideas. New formulae have surfaced to help us understand how individuals relate to one another politically in these conditions. Where the liberal tradition wanted to elevate the individual experience of freedom in terms of choice and cognition, what has taken over in liberalism’s decline is something far more bawdy: a political calculus expressed in units of persons, wherein the first principle is the state’s power to grant sanctity over life, or take away the conditions that make life possible. Political process is then subsumed by the need for a sanctioned political space protected by the state’s benevolent guarantees of life. Political claims and collective interests are shackled to state authority, as if the validity of political ideas were a matter of winning official confirmation of one’s (collectively held) demands. Without that confirmation, no such political safe-zone will be provided and out-of-bounds political demands will appear to directly challenge the state’s monopoly on violence, or its equally sinister monopoly on the provision of life-guarantees. Taken to its next step, this logic turns political contests into body-counts—and instead of mobilizing ideas we see efforts to prove the “worth” of an individual’s life relative to that of a political enemy. The resulting warfare looks like Clausewitz’s “politics by other means”, but is in fact warfare taking the place of politics altogether.

This reduces to a might-makes-right equation, in which the strong take on the trappings of morality because they have a better chance at guaranteeing life, regardless of the devastation to the weaker side. In this way the Palestinian ransom (1 Shalit = 1,000 Palestinians) proves exactly what the ratio says, that the political power of one Israeli soldier weighs as much as a thousand incarcerated Palestinians. The problem is not that Hamas demands too many Palestinian lives in exchange for Shalit, but that for the most part they have conceded to Israel’s political logic: to repay the attacks on Israeli soldiers one-thousand fold on the backs of Palestinians—and this same formula is what their ransom confirms. Sure, 1,000 released prisoners seems high. Israel’s officials have said the number is absurd, but it is they who authored this exchange-relation and they who set the prices in this sick market.