Unspeak

by Steven Poole

  If those living on a piece of land are not really ‘a people’, or legally not actually there, the land may be considered ripe for ‘settlement’, another well-entrenched term of Unspeak. Settlement conjures an idea of virgin, unpopulated territory: an image of building log cabins in the wilderness. But the fortified and heavily guarded towns called ‘settlements’ that Israel built on territory it had occupied since the 1967 war were not all founded on vacant sand dunes. Some began life as purely military outposts;45 and from 1977 onwards ‘settlements’ began to be deliberately constructed for strategic purposes in ‘heavily populated Palestinian areas’, a decision that former Prime Minister Ehud Barak characterised in 2002 as ‘a major historical wrong turn’ for Israel.46 The Modern Hebrew term for the ‘settlements’ in the West Bank and Gaza was hitnakhlut, ‘a word of biblical origin which means roughly “settling down on one’s patrimony”’.47 The official Arabic term for the ‘settlements’ was musTawtanaat, a neutral term for a collection of dwellings, though some Arabic speakers preferred to call them Must’amaraat, which has the sense of colonies established by invaders.48

  ‘Settlement’ also has a useful secondary sense of ‘agreement’, but Israeli settlements were deemed illegal by the UN Security Council49 and the International Court of Justice,50 opinions that Israel itself, and post-Carter US administrations, refused to accept. While still governor of Texas, George W. Bush had returned from a 1998 helicopter tour of East Jerusalem ‘settlements’ in the company of Ariel Sharon and said: ‘What struck me is the tiny distance between enemy lines and Israel’s population centers.’51 He apparently did not understand that the ‘population centers’ (another item on the rich menu of euphemism) had been deliberately built that close to ‘enemy lines’; that Sharon as foreign minister was telling ‘settlers’ to ‘run, grab hills’.52 In 2002, attempts were made in the Israeli and US media to delete the shop-soiled euphemism ‘settlements’ from the lexicon entirely and replace it with the even more euphemistic ‘neighbourhoods’, where you might indeed expect to see white picket fences.53

  Road map

  A freeze on ‘all settlement activity’ by the Israelis, as well as a halt to acts of terrorism by the Palestinians, were among the acts demanded of both sides in Phase 1 of the ‘road map’ to a projected final peace, first so dubbed by George W. Bush in June 2002 and elaborated in an April 2003 document by the quartet of the EU, the US, Russia, and the UN.54 The course of subsequent events, during which neither side hurried to fulfil its obligations, made clear the way in which this curious metaphor of a ‘road map’ was all too accurate. For a road map describes a particular territory but does not commit you to going in any particular direction. It does not prevent you from driving around in circles, or stopping off for a prolonged break at a motorway service restaurant. ‘Road map’ quickly became a general term for any projected solution to a problem. Meanwhile, Palestinians continued to kill Israeli civilians in suicide bombings and rocket attacks, and Israelis continued to shoot stone-throwing teenagers55 and fire missiles from helicopters in the rough direction of Hamas leaders.56

  The road map was also sometimes pictured as a vehicle itself. And so, everyone having rapidly agreed that the road map was ‘stalled’,57 like a recalcitrant Citroën (‘we hit a bump in the road,’ Bush later improvised),58 Ariel Sharon’s government unveiled in 2004 a unilateral plan of ‘disengagement’ from Gaza and a small part of the West Bank. This would entail the evacuation of 9000 ‘settlers’ from a total of 240,000.59 The neutral sense of the English ‘disengagement’ mirrored the Modern Hebrew term, hitnatkut, although Sharon had originally referred to the plan as tochnit ha-hafrada, or ‘the separation plan’, before realising that ‘separation sounded bad, particularly in English, because it evoked apartheid’.60 During the ‘disengagement’ in August 2005, all 1500 vacated Israeli homes in Gaza were demolished61 (though Ehud Barak had promised Yasser Arafat in 1999 that any settlements emptied under a peace agreement would be available to house Palestinians).62 Israel maintained, meanwhile, that it would keep control over Gaza’s airspace, offshore waters, and the majority of its border crossings.63 Separation would indeed be the effect.

  US Department of State spokesman Adam Ereli claimed that the ‘disengagement’ would be ‘a real step forward in advancing the road map’.64 However, a former chief of Mossad reported that it was ‘a way to bypass the road map’.65 No one, it seemed, could quite agree where this car was heading. In 2004, Sharon’s aide Dubi Weissglas had reassured the ‘settler’ contingent by describing the Gaza plan in the Israeli press as a ‘bottle of formaldehyde’: ‘It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.’66 The image of formaldehyde, in which dead tissue is preserved, implied the death or erasure of the road map rather than its ‘advancement’. Riffing further on the road-map metaphor, Weissglas said: ‘The American term is to park conveniently.’ Before that interview appeared in full, Weissglas had responded to criticism occasioned by advance publication of some of his comments by changing his story, telling Israel Radio: ‘There is no intent […] to freeze the political process. There is a definite intent not to have a peace process with the Palestinian Authority in its present state, with those engaged in mad terror.’67 But the question of when the Palestinian Authority would no longer be ‘in its present state’, and so qualify as a negotiating partner, was put off into an indefinite future. The replacement of Yasser Arafat with Mahmoud Abbas as president in January 2005 did not elicit any official acknowledgment that this ‘state’ had changed, only the lament that ‘Abu Mazen is a disappointment’.68

  Meanwhile, preparing for the Gaza ‘disengagement’, Israel cemented its presence in the West Bank by continuing to build new houses there for its Jewish citizens,69 appealing to a concept of ‘natural growth of settlements’, as though bulldozers, cranes, and concrete were part of a fertile ecosystem, and even though such ‘natural growth’ was explicitly disallowed by the road map. According to one Israeli commentator, the problem was that, even by April 2005, ‘in Sharon’s mind the road map has not yet kicked in, and indeed will not kick in until the Palestinians take the steps they are called upon to take; namely, ending violence and dismantling the terrorist infrastructure’.70 Israel considered itself in a ‘pre-road map’ phase,71 and the Palestinians had to meet all their road-map requirements before Israel met any of its own.72 After the Gaza ‘disengagement’, the New York Times saluted Sharon’s ‘statesmanship’, expressing the hope that he had given ‘a sign of readiness to negotiate’.73 In fact Sharon had reiterated that he would not halt new building in the West Bank.74 The road map, it appeared, was still in formaldehyde.

  Sir Harold Walker, former UK ambassador to Iraq, explains further: ‘Sharon, very often when he says he’s committed to the road map, says “We are committed to the road map,” then he says, “according to its sequence.” Now, that is code. It may mean nothing to the person listening, who thinks it means “We’re committed to the road map according to its sequence”, but what it means for Sharon is “We’re not committed to it; we don’t have to do a thing about it, until the Palestinians control their terrorists.”’75 And so the road map became a satiric tango of faux-politeness: you first; no, you first. Another useful application, then, of the road-map metaphor: for you may even sit in your car with the engine off, looking sceptically at your road map, before deciding to drive somewhere else entirely.

  Sacred space

  All this is often justified by a leap into the realm of metaphysics. After the Six-Day War in 1967, one Rabbi Kook Jr. referred to the land occupied by Israel as ‘liberated’, and explained: ‘We are returning to our home, to the inheritance of our ancestors. There is no Arab land here, only the inheritance of our God.’76 In 2003, Pat Robertson repeated the idea for an American audience: ‘God promised the land of Israel to the Jews thousands of years ago. He won’t let anyone take it away.’77 Well now, what can compete with the promise
s of God? Only, perhaps, the promises of another God. And so it goes. American scholar of the Middle East Juan Cole wrote in 2005 that the route of the barrier through Jerusalem constituted ‘land theft on a massive scale […] theft on a stage of sacred space that affects the sentiments of over a billion people. Whether Westerners like it or not, Jerusalem is considered by Muslims their third holiest city, and Israeli theft of the whole thing drives a lot of them up the wall.’78

  It is unclear whether the image of Muslims being driven up the wall was a heavy joke about refusing to call the barrier a ‘fence’; what is more notable is that Cole, in writing approvingly of Muslims’ ‘sacred space’, somehow forgot to mention that the space is allegedly just as ‘sacred’ to Israel. This kind of talk is just a playground game of My-God-Is-Better-Than-Your-God. Rational observers should have no business endorsing one side’s claims of what is ‘sacred’ in preference to another’s. In its most vicious form, this encourages, for example, the resurgence in the Arab Middle East of the blood-libel of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,79 or the following words from a 2001 sermon by Rabbi Ovadia Osef: ‘May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them […] It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones.’80 It would be better to refuse to encourage the cynical exploitation of mythic fictions by demagogues on all sides. The reader, however, may not care to hold her breath until this phenomenon ceases.

  Competing myths of what is sacred tend, further, to encourage the view that a conflict is ‘ancient’ and so insoluble, as in this exchange about Israel between Dick Cheney and Larry King:

  Cheney: You don’t want to be pollyannish about it. President Clinton’s right, this is a very, very tough nugget. These issues go back for generations.

  King: Centuries.

  Cheney: Absolutely.81

  Centuries? Why not go the whole hog and say millennia? In fact, the ‘issues’ of land and occupation go back much less far, most of them having taken their present form in the second half of the twentieth century. But to acknowledge that might be to acknowledge the possibility of a political solution. Best to say it is tragic, epic, sacred, ancient. The associated concept of a ‘cycle of violence’, according to which an atrocity by one side is always represented as a ‘reprisal’ or ‘retaliation’ for a previous atrocity by the other, evinces a similar attitude of helplessness: in the face of an infinite historical regress, when there is always an event further back in the past to cite as justification, one may feel unable to come to any judgement as to what should be done now. The media collude in a rhetorical presentation of the problem as ‘intractable’.82 It is just ‘a self-perpetuating tragedy’,83 and so one’s only duty is to express noble sympathy.

  This, indeed, has been a much-exploited rhetorical strategy by those wishing to do nothing. It has proved useful in many other situations than Israel-Palestine. Also tragic and with ancient roots, for example, were developments in the Balkans in the 1990s, which gave to the world one of the most repugnant terms of Unspeak yet invented.

  Ethnic cleansing

  The enemy are filth: removing them is an act of hygiene. So the Nazis spoke when calling the deportations and mass murders of Jews by the name Säuberungsaktion, ‘cleaning process’. Areas thus voided of Jews were termed Judenrein:’cleaned’ or ‘purified’ of Jews. The organisation which supplied gas to the death camps was called the German Association for the Extermination of Vermin.84 Similar metaphors were used by others: the fascist Croatian commander Viktor Gutić, in a speech to Franciscan friars in 1941, referred to ‘the prearranged, well-calculated plan for cleaning our Croatia of unwanted elements’,85 and a month later referred to ‘Serbian dirt’.86 The verb that Gutić used for ‘cleaning’, cisjenje, was the same as in the Serbo-Croat phrase etnicko ciscenje, which was fatefully translated into English in August 1991, when it was reported that Croatian leaders declared that Serbia’s aim under Slobodan Milosevic was ‘the ethnic cleansing of the critical areas that are to be annexed to Serbia’.87

  ‘Ethnic cleansing’, as the phrase rapidly spread in English, accomplishes several rhetorical tasks. Firstly it reifies a notion of easily distinguishable ‘ethnicity’; then it implies that some ethnicities are dirtier or more corrupted than others, that they constitute infectious filth or vermin. The use of ‘cleansing’, rather than the more normal ‘cleaning’, has an extra connotation in English of spiritual and not just physical purification. Thomas Cranmer’s 1548 Communion Prayer-Book, for example, asked God to ‘cleanse the thoughts of our hearts’,88 and it is probably this implication of virtue that leads modern cosmetics companies to advertise ‘cleansing products’: washing one’s face is next to godliness. This imputation is made clearer still in one of the French versions of the euphemism, purification ethnique, where ‘purifying’ has an inescapably metaphysical aspect. Thus to engage in ‘ethnic cleansing’ is an act of not just physical but also moral hygiene.

  To use the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’ oneself is to acquiesce in each hateful stage of this argument. To call ‘ethnic cleansing’ the mass murders, rapes, concentration camps, and other horrors of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s was to reinforce the perpetrators’ scheme of self-justification. So much was evident to some observers very early on. Jean de Courten of the Red Cross referred carefully to ‘so-called “ethnic cleansing”’ in an address to the UN in 1992.89 Shortly afterwards, the UN General Assembly made its position clear, referring in a resolution to the ‘ethnic cleansing’ committed by Serb forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina, using the phrase always in scare quotes, and culminating in a reference to ‘the abhorrent policy of “ethnic cleansing”, which is a form of genocide’.90

  Genocide was the elephant in the room that the US and Britain, along with many other countries, did not want to acknowledge. For signatories to the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, in which the word was first legally defined, were bound immediately to intervene, with force if necessary, when genocide was determined to be occurring. Such intervention in the former Yugoslavia was considered politically undesirable by those most able to perform it. And so it was necessary to deny that genocide was happening. Luckily, there was this phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’ lying around: so the enemy euphemism was blithely adopted and used regularly by the Bush and then Clinton administrations, and the Major government, in order to express a certain amount of disapproval while justifying the decision to do nothing to stop it.91 The adoption of the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’, in short, constituted verbal collaboration in mass murder.

  This was made easier by a widespread misunderstanding, or deliberate falsification, of what ‘genocide’ actually meant. It was regularly assumed or stated that it meant nothing less than a programme of mass killing on the scale of the Holocaust: that millions of murders, systematically performed, were necessary to justify the label of ‘genocide’. This was simply false, as anyone knew who actually consulted the text of the Genocide Convention. Its Article 2 reads:

  [G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

  (a) Killing members of the group;

  (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

  (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

  (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

  (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.92

  The clear intent of ‘in whole or in part’, as well as the enumeration of crimes that were not murders, was that genocide did not mean only monstrous acts on the scale of the Holocaust: indeed, if the signatory nations were to wait until millions of killings had been committed, the Convention would be useless, since its function was explicitly to ‘prevent’ genocide from happening. This, moreover, is th
e reason why the term ‘genocide’ itself was chosen by the Convention’s drafters instead of another proposed term, ‘extermination’, because the latter would have, as one of the framers noted, ‘limit[ed] the prohibited crime to circumstances where every member of the group was killed’.93 General Radislav Krstic, one of the Bosnian Serb commanders who oversaw the deliberate massacre of more than 7000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995, did not succeed in killing every Bosnian Muslim man, woman, and child; nevertheless, he was convicted of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The conviction was later reduced to that of ‘aiding and abetting in genocide’, owing to legal tergiversations over the concept of ‘intent’; but the word ‘genocide’ remained.94