On this recent video from al-Jazeera we see among other things a pretty young Gazan girl, maybe 14, sobbing this lamentation:
I’m crying for the children of Gaza that have been thrown in the street. We have nothing to do with this. We don’t fire rockets. We don’t know what this war is about. Why should children be forced to drink dirty water? Why (sic) did we do wrong? Where is everyone?
But then listening this morning to the White House press secretary I did not hear an answer to the girl’s compelling question. Instead I heard the litany of platitudes by which the Bush administration has chosen to respond to the Israeli action in Gaza – "Hamas broke the truce," "no nation could allow a terrorist group to fire missiles at it," "we strongly urge Israel to protect civilians in Gaza," "we want a truce that can last," "Israel is doing this not only for itself but for the Palestinians as well."
But not only did the spokesperson's rote flat words not answer the young girl’s sobbed question, it did not begin to match the gravitas of the other dramatic video that I had been seeing on the media, the urgent pleas from doctors for humanitarian aid, the scenes of extreme destruction in Gaza, the children whose families had been killed, the horrors of daily life without electricity and water. Searching for what was missing in the official Bush declamation, I began to think about a slightly different but related topic, torture.
Americans have just gone through years of soul searching over torture. We have seen the disgusting photographic evidence of the dark arts – the waterboarding, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, detainees forced to wear panties over their heads, the use of attack dogs, and so forth. And we have seen the Ashcroft-Addington-Woo scriveners redefine the word so that none of these activities really are "torture" after all.
However, if we go beyond the Alice in Wonderland approach – "torture means precisely what I say it means, nothing more, nothing less" – we find that the word torture denotes such phenomena as "anguish, extreme mental distress;" "unbearable physical pain;" "agony: intense feelings of suffering, acute mental or physical pain." And this is just the garden variety of "torture," the kind that can result from losing your home, or losing your retirement savings or losing a loved one in an accident.
But what went on at Abu Ghraib was not accidental. There we saw the deliberate infliction of anguish, extreme mental distress, unbearable physical pain–all for a purpose. For that kind of torture we need a definition more like this: "The deliberate, systematic, or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons in an attempt to force another person to yield information or to make a confession or for any other reason."
The question posed here is whether a whole people can torture another people. For example in some senses the Nazis certainly tortured the Jews. They tortured the Jews not specifically to gain confessions but as part of a program of extermination. Thus the Nazis torture of the Jews was not "instrumental" (except when as with Dr. Mengele it was part of a "medical" research program). The Nazis were not trying to get their victims to do something or say something. Rather Nazi torture of the Jews was "existential" torture -- torture of the "other" because s/he is "other."
There is no evidence that this kind of "existential" torture is going on in Gaza. The Israelis have not formally declared a goal of exterminating the Palestinians or driving them from Gaza. Rather this current infliction of enormous and unbearable mental distress, physical pain, and acute mental horror, is "instrumental." It is designed to get something from Hamas, namely to get it to stop firing missiles into Israel.
Every nation has a right to self defense, but no nation has a right to torture. Nations do not even have the right to torture enemy soldiers, even when those soldiers are engaged in "asymmetrical" warfare or acts of terror. And certainly no nation has the right to torture the whole civilian population within which the enemy resides.
So as we watch medical doctors and medical supplies being turned away from the checkpoints, as we see hospitals deprived of electricity and medicine, as we see ordinary Gazans being penned in (detainees?) and not allowed to leave the scene of the fighting, as we see entire families, sometimes with more than a dozen members, slaughtered, as we see a whole generation of children deeply traumatized, the question inevitably arises: Is Israel defending itself according to the laws of war? Or do the Gazans deserve this because they elected Hamas? Or is this a case of a First World nation torturing a Third World civilian population in order to gain concessions from the terrorist enemy who resides within that population?