    When the skies rain death

    The culture of the fighter plane is the culture of annihilation

    Azmi Bishara

    -------------------------------------------------------------------------

    The fighter plane is the quintessence of modern civilisation, the modern
    goddess. It is the product of the collective input of all the sciences
    and the neutralisation of all morals and values. In it converge the
    laser, micro-optics, microelectronics and high-tech aerodynamics,
    allowing for precision flying, hairline fine guidance, dead-on targeting
    and surgical destruction. It is hygienic and ultra-precise and its
    factories, hangars and assembly plants are as tall and spacious
    cathedrals. These planes are only manufactured in the most industrially
    developed states, assembled by huge corporations whose employees inhabit
    equality-oriented societies and receive high salaries. They can only be
    piloted by highly qualified individuals. They are simultaneously the
    product of absolute individualism and institutionalised collective
    labour. The employees who contribute to their manufacture embody
    societies that have achieved much; they are the elite, a cut above the
    rest, the chosen ones, the new Aryan race.

    As with any goddess of consumerist society it has a built-in
    obsolescence; a new plane has to be produced every two or three years in
    order to keep up with demand, incorporating the latest technological
    developments and scientific discoveries in order to preserve her
    superiority over the gods of other people.

    The fighter plane makes the immoral moral. It soars above good and evil,
    a celestial goddess with an insatiable thirst for sacrificial tribute.
    The pilot does not see the blood; he doesn't see the bayonet or the
    bullet piercing through the body of the victim. He does not get dirty
    because he does not have to crawl. Or see the eyes of his victims. Nor
    does he break the commandment thou shalt not kill. All he does is press
    a button from a long way away.

    All the victims hear is the screech of the oncoming missile. Then the
    world shakes around them and they topple over, without so much as
    swaying Perhaps they feel excruciating pain before passing into
    nothingness. All people are helpless before the fighter planes; no
    father or mother can protect their child. Children are torn to pieces,
    or buried beneath the rubble of buildings that collapse with an echoing
    groan that blends with the sound of limbs being torn. Stones, planks of
    wood, shreds of steel crash into human bone and pulverise skulls -- all
    in the twinkling of an eye

    Meanwhile, from up there in the pilot's seat, all that can be seen are a
    plume of smoke and a cloud of dust. "Mission accomplished," radios the
    pilot to the base, as he executes a neat turn overhead in skies beyond
    the sea of morals. Then he lands, jumps out of the plane and heads to
    the barracks, helmet tucked under his arm like a motorcyclist. He goes
    for coffee in the cafeteria, exchanges jokes with his fellow pilots,
    with the female staff on the base, and with the mechanics who will be
    getting his plane ready for another sortie of death. Then he heads home.
    On his way he listens to some music, clowns around with some children
    and, maybe, engages in a conversation about politics. He might be
    earnest, or indifferent or incensed. He could be a leftist or a
    rightist, in support of gay rights or against them, a self- acclaimed
    dove or a rabid hawk. But these are not the criteria that qualified him
    to push the button. All such thoughts and criteria fade into
    meaninglessness in the religion of the fighter bomber.

    The peoples of the world are divided into the haves and have-nots of
    F-15s and F-16s.

    The haves are divided into countries that own these planes and countries
    that are possessed by them. The Arabs are divided not only into the
    have-nots, but those who don't have and yet have made the planes into
    golden cows.

    These fighter planes are omnipresent. They can be visible or invisible
    But there is no escaping their venom, nowhere to hide from their
    missiles. The planes remain in the air but their missiles will swoop
    down on the passengers of a fleeing car, a bus, an ambulance, and they
    will bore through the ceilings of bunkers and shelters until they reach
    the tender bodies within. Human flesh stands no chance against a missile
    flying toward it from a fighter plane. The body stands naked before the
    goddess who roams the heavens as edifices of stone and reinforced cement
    crumble before her.

    ----------------------------------------------------------------

    The planes wreak massive destruction, but they cannot resolve the battle
    against those who have right on their side. To do that the goddess's
    followers have to fight a ground war. But once the inhabitants of that
    civilisation start fighting on the ground, they start to die and begin
    to cry. This phenomenon has given rise to a curious belief, which is
    that while their soldiers have the right to kill, others do not have the
    right to kill their soldiers, even in war. This is why when one of their
    soldiers is struck they are overcome by shock and why when their armies
    suffer a defeat at the hands of the forces of the weak and oppressed
    they take it as an affront to the prestige of their army and their
    military superiority At such a point Israel stealthily withdraws the
    ground forces and unleashes the F-16s to bomb "terrorist" locations, be
    they homes or villages. It is a cowardly and vindictive way to behave,
    open to those who possess an air force which enable them to become
    arrogant airborne tyrants. On the ground they are human beings like
    everyone else: fragile and brittle. But in the air, with the protection
    of their goddess, they can stomp around, invisible to the naked eye but
    certain to make their thunder heard as they pass overhead, taking full
    advantage of the fragility of those who are left on the ground without
    planes, and even those who have taken refuge in the holes in the ground.
    They avenge themselves not just because they have the will to do so --
    they hold no monopoly on will -- but because their goddess makes it
    possible for them to do so.

    It is destructive power that fills them with pride... the sort that
    comes before the fall. The death of a child, two children, three; the
    death of a woman or two; the destruction of an ambulance -- when does
    brute force against innocent people become unacceptable? Thirty
    children? Fifty? In front of the cameras? How many when there are no
    cameras at hand? At what point do the scales tip? Cameras, incidentally,
    do not transmit the putrid odor of bodies crushed beneath the rubble.

    It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the cup slips out of the hand
    of an Arab or western official as he stares at the television screen.
    Which image of dying children got through to him? Did his mouth drop
    agape as his cup crashed to the floor? Did he choke on the food he was
    eating? Does he think that he should have listened to his aides sooner
    and called for an immediate ceasefire? Does he groan at the horror of
    the crimes committed by Israel or slump in despair at Israel's folly in
    forfeiting yet another opportunity?

    ----------------------------------------------------------------

    Israel was built on targeting civilians. In 1948 it targeted them in
    order to displace them and usurp their land. It targeted entire villages
    that it alleged were fedayeen -- resistance fighter -- bases. The
    "strategy" was founded upon two tenets: the need to deter civilians from
    supporting the resistance, which is to say to repress the _expression of
    any political or social position, and the need to feed and quench the
    Israeli thirst for revenge. This two- pronged military creed was
    epitomised by Unit 101, led by Ariel Sharon in the early 1950s. It
    raided villages, blew up houses and slaughtered the residents. Among the
    most notorious fruits of this philosophy were the massacres of Qubya,
    Nahalin and Al-Bureij in the fifties, and the massacres of Jabalya, Beit
    Hanoun, Al-Shajaiya, Qasba in Nablus and Jenin in more recent times. To
    perform these deeds Israel needed butchers, though it called them
    "legendary warriors". It was a hands-on approach. It did not involve
    F-16s. With these all that are needed are spoiled youths of the
    appropriate religious affiliation and with their hearts set on an
    American consumerist lifestyle.

    Israel is deliberately targeting civilians in Lebanon, capitalising on
    an expedient moment. Its aims are to punish anyone who might have
    supported the resistance, to displace civilians northward in order to
    aggravate sectarian tensions in the country and to quench its barbaric
    thirst for revenge. The current attack, in all its ferocity and with its
    toll of innocent victims, was planned well in advance, with malice
    aforethought. Israel is a terrorist state. The diabolical logic of this
    state is actively supported by another terrorist state led by George
    Bush, a very dangerous, pathologically violent and sadistic man
    surrounded by a gang of cool and calculating Machiavellians and
    apologists for state terrorism. They ardently believe that civilians who
    don't own fighter planes are so far down the rungs of the ladder in the
    survival of the fittest that if they die well that's their own fault, a
    result of their own lack of realism.

    This logic has one flaw that makes it unpardonable, a curse that will
    haunt that civilization, a permanent indictment of its control of the
    skies: how can children be expected to be "realistic"? How can anyone
    blame them for their own death?

    It is wrong to sing the praises of dead children as if they were heroes,
    a disgrace to put their bodies on display. These children were not
    warriors. They were not in the resistance. They did not die in order to
    achieve a victory for others who didn't die and who hadn't put their
    lives on the line. These children died because they couldn't escape in
    time or manage to hide from the planes. They are the victims of the
    criminally barbaric civilization of fighter planes. Their murderers must
    be brought to account and the resistance against the aggression must be
    sustained.