By William A. Cook, PhD

There are those who condemn Israel’s siege of Gaza, penning plaintive polemics against the inhumane behavior exhibited by the IDF forces as they seal the inhabitants behind cement walls that would be the envy of Edgar Allen Poe had he lived to see this day. How paltry his stories appear now when placed in opposition to the technological advancements the Israelis have employed.

Contrast the mealy mouthed weeping of the narrator of “The Black Cat” who fulminates about the affect alcohol produced in him as he cements his loving wife behind his wall having struck her a savage blow with his hatchet or the vengeful narrator of “The Cask of Amontillado” who tricks his friend into the basement wine cellar where he is likewise entombed behind a brick wall; contrast those childish attempts to rouse the deepest emotions of fear in the reader with the horror our advanced civilization has achieved by entombing 1.5 million, in full view of the civilized western world that sits transfixed before their television sets in envious wonder and watch the slow calculated decimation of Palestinians achieved through scientifically designed experiments that are used to sell the newest technologically advanced military ordinance, state of the art surveillance equipment, and psychologically tested torture techniques to the highest bidder.   

One can only marvel at the entrepreneurial efforts the Israeli government takes to ensure an economic future for its nascent companies that must compete with older industrial nations many of whom are subsidized by socialist governments or by corporate tax incentives. One need only recall how inferior and uncivilized the efforts of our forebears were in dealing with the problems associated with extermination of their enemies to recognize the superiority of the Israeli government’s actions: mark how the early Israelites surrounded the city of Jericho anxiously awaiting with great trepidation God’s word to tear down its walls and savage every living thing inside, women, children, ox and ass; or how the renowned doctors of the Roman Catholic Church in its earliest years attempted to exterminate the heretical Gnostics who preached that Jesus did not demand allegiance to an organized church to be saved, an obvious and blatant error since it did not uphold the exclusivity of the chosen, and for those crimes they were routinely burned at the stake; or how Innocent the III created the Albigensian Crusade to exterminate the Cathar sect from Provencal and Bosnia and Tuscany in the first decade of the 13th century lest their condemnation of the corruption of the church be taken seriously, for which errors they, too, were burned at the stake or tortured and made to suffer a brutal and prolonged death; or, more recently, the efforts of the Nazi regime in the fourth decade of the 20th century to eradicate the Jewish population, Gypsies, and political dissidents beginning in 1938 at Kristolnacht with the forceful takeover of businesses, expulsions, and incarceration in ghettoes, efforts that resulted in death by disease, starvation, or slaughter by German soldiers, a grizzly and totally unacceptable savagery.

Such were the primitive methods employed to force compliance and eventual extermination of those questioning the will of the state.

Fortunately, these less than civilized methodologies have been superseded by the progressive methods enjoyed by our democratic brethren in Israel. It will be noted that the above cases required a frontal engagement with the offending people putting the innocent soldiers in danger of their lives should the citizens of Jericho fight back or the Gnostics join in an alliance to counter the church’s move to eradicate them or the Cathars enlist the protection of favorable Lords and Dukes. Needless to say in all cases, the extent of the action could not be hidden from public view since each required armies of considerable size, 50,000 peasant soldiers in the case of the Crusade, to destroy the enemy.

By contrast, Israel uses unmanned drones and computer driven bulldozers to wage its devastation on the Palestinians, ensuring that no Israeli soldier is put in harms way. Satellite photography serves to record the outcomes of the drones’ effectiveness so that client states seeking to understand the virtues of this modern method of stabilization of errant populations can be satisfied. The same might be said of the electronic fencing and the electrification of the 25 foot cement monoliths that serve as the imprisoning wall. Since the soldiers are housed in towers that oversee the people incarcerated and have available computer monitors that scan the walls’ parameters, there is no danger for the Israeli soldiers although they are in a commanding position to kill at will. And it goes without saying that the modern torture techniques, done at undisclosed locations behind closed doors efficiently and surreptitiously, are also recorded for client viewing. All of these methodologies improve on the older more savage, uncivilized procedures cited above. No Israeli is placed in a compromising position, yet the ability of the IDF to control the populace and impose its will on a defenseless species is absolute.

Nowhere else in the world has a nation a like situation, one so perfectly designed to provide for a world in a state of fear caused by the rise of “terrorism,” that can be used as an experimental playpen to record human behavior under siege whether it is elicited by the sudden presence of the silent drones that hurl missiles into buildings and streets purporting to assassinate a known militant, or a trained sniper, from the security of his armored protected tower, that kills children or women who get too close to the wall, or IDF soldiers that serve as interrogators or torturers or observers that record the behavior of the persons tortured. No other state is so advanced in its design of security measures tested on a population that has no means of fighting back except in the futile act of suicide brought on by despair and hopelessness.

Consider, then, the bravery of the Israeli government as it publicly promotes its siege of Gaza to an astonished world. Heretofore, Israel had maintained a shroud of silence over its efforts to subdue and ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their homeland. Indeed, the world hardly noticed that it had annexed all but 14% of the original Palestinian land since 1967, a slow, tedious and costly process that could unravel at any moment.

Two pressing events have intervened that enabled the government to advance its cleansing policy despite the negative sentiments expressed by the liberal press. With the American President in his last year in office, the desirability of cleansing Gaza of all Palestinians became evident even though that same President had called for a peace initiative by the end of his term. Since no one expected anyone to pay attention to the lame duck President, now was the time to advance actions that would make life unbearable for Palestinians and force them to leave or die. The government assumed that Egypt could be induced to take the remnants of the population into the Sinai and let Israel annex Gaza.

The second event ensured that little interest would be devoted to the suffering of the Palestinians since the economic collapse of the U.S. dollar and its reverberation throughout the world would take priority in the press and main stream media, especially in the U.S., England and Europe. The impending instability caused by the recession and probable depression would require states to redouble their efforts to control their own people through tighter security; that in turn provides Israel with the opportunity to demonstrate to the world at large the virtues of its unmanned drones used for surveillance and missile attacks on unsuspecting people, the electronic monitoring of government secured buildings, military training grounds, industrial complexes, and prison facilities, and lastly, the scientifically researched psychological procedures used to elicit confessions from enemy combatants, techniques designed by government supported and funded professionals.

Consider the carefully calculated research that designed this progressive set of procedures to avoid the pitfalls of prior methodologies of extermination. A review of the most recent atrocity, the Nazi regimes brutal attempt to eliminate the Jewish people from Europe, will suffice. Two distinct failures resulted from the Nazi experience: swiftness of execution results in observable blunders, the most obvious of which is exposure of the methodologies to the general public, and, secondly, to experiment with extermination without scientifically caging the species under experiment in sealed, controlled areas of investigation invites criticism and eventual condemnation.

Analysis of the Nazi efforts disclosed that the experiment should not be undertaken until the species is adequately isolated and the procedures can be appropriately monitored. To advance the experiment by moving across borders that have not been cleansed of foreign elements, as was the case when the SS set up the Warsaw Ghetto in a foreign country, was doomed to failure even though cautionary procedures were taken to ensure success like the utilization of IDs, confinement, transportation infrastructures, sub camps and labor camps. It should be noted that establishment of each of these measures imposed a heavy and unnecessary economic burden on the civilized state requiring constant monitoring. Under proper procedures, the isolation of the experiment can result in a complete eradication of the species without those expenditures. None of these procedures could contain the purpose of the experiment from outside observation, indeed most of them achieved the opposite result. However, research established that a sealed enclosure controlled by the experimenter would ensure that outside observation would likewise be controlled by the experimenter. It followed as well, that swiftness of execution, eight years in the case of Nazi Germany, forced the effort into the public domain before the experiment could be brought to completion.

Consequently, as we observe the process utilized by the Sharon and Olmert governments in Palestine, we note the recognized need to erect an appropriate enclosure that seals off the intended species of the experiment into enclaves behind 25 foot walls or electrified chain link fences patrolled by the IDF as described above. Since it is the experimenters that control both egress and ingress to the sealed off experiment area, interference by outside observers is minimized and on-going recording of behavior inside the experimental cage is ensured.

Of particular benefit to the experiment is the elimination of accomplishing its goals in an abbreviated period of time. Swiftness of execution is removed as a necessity since no one not engaged in the experiment knows what is happening to the species under examination. Indeed, by slowing down the process, more extensive research into human behavior suffering from prolonged exposure to loss of health – sickness, distemper, indisposition, qualms, nausea, dyspepsia, malnutrition, seasickness, prostration, consumption, paralysis, shock, shaking palsy, ague, famine fever, scabies, cankers, shingles, infections, prickly heat, indigestion, loathing, aversion, isolation, despair, and hopelessness – contributes to our scientifically observed ailments and psychologically examined behaviors thus providing cures for those suffering such maladies within the dominant society responsible for carrying out the experiments, a benefit that lifts this contemporary methodology far above the primitive experiments itemized above.        

Perhaps the most significant experiments, and no doubt the most useful to client states, are those being developed in the advanced areas of mind control, obedience development and information transferal resulting from the new scientific empirical processes developed for systemized excruciation.

Suffice it to say that the Israeli experimenters have premised their research on the most current scientific theories, most especially “Living Systems Theory.” Clearly, Israeli scientists recognized that the enclosed cage provided a unique opportunity to witness, over a prolonged period of time, the consequences of systematic deprivation of life sustaining subsystems that support living organisms interacting within their environment. Living Systems Theory cites supranatural organizations like the European Economic Community as illustrative of the outcomes that can result by manipulation of subsystems within complex species that depend on their sustenance for survival.

Noting that the essence of life is process, the Israeli experimenters have calculatingly and gradually removed the required subsystems from the Gaza species beginning with the elimination of electricity that maintained the flow of energy to businesses and households thus impairing the use of refrigerators, ovens, lights, furnaces, automobiles and sanitation systems. Observation of the reaction by the species to this interference in the normal process of societal operation revealed some anticipated but also some unanticipated outcomes: for example, people resorted to ancient and/or obsolete utilities to offset the destruction of their infrastructure, i.e. the use of candles, kerosene, and donkeys; health conditions deteriorated as sewage systems were made inoperable causing outbreaks of diarrhea, dyspepsia, and acidity; and, unexpectedly, symptoms arose that suggested an outbreak of indisposition, distemper, and acute anger among numerous of the species.

Having duly recorded these observations, the experimenters interfered with a second process of the 20 needed subsystems that sustain the living, self-organizing system that constitutes the Palestinian community at Gaza: they sealed off all egress and ingress from the strip forcing the complete closure of all economic traffic that provided access to goods and services to the people. Observation of the reaction by the species to this interference in the normal process resulted in the following postulates: complete obstruction of required subsystems results in (1) a transference of the normal negative reaction of the people to the experimenters, heretofore seen as colonialist occupiers, to the agents of the community’s governing group since there is no other outlet for their desperate plight; (2) the community assumes a gradual, yet perceivable degradation of personal health as the hospitals run out of necessary supplies to care for the sick and injured; and (3) symptoms of frustration, hypertension, distemper, hysteria, neuroses, delusional dreams of love, and near insanity gradually surface and gain in intensity as the weeks pass. These outcomes of the experiment were encouraging signs that the modifications made in the Nazi processes of extermination would ensure positive results in time.

The last and most provocative disruption of the living system followed, the complete severance of food supplies to the species. Observation confirmed the anticipated consequences of this interference, malnutrition, disease, consumption, and death by starvation. However, one unanticipated consequence surfaced: people broke through the barriers that sealed them into their cage. Experimenters were forced to note that total interference with the living system forces the species to resort to instinctive reactions like self-survival to overcome the interference and, perhaps as importantly, forces the experimenters to record the impact of that instinct on the external community that could observe the desperate actions taken by the laboratory specimens resulting in an expressed sympathy for the victims. Conclusion: individuals, even those contained within a controlled extermination experiment, cannot be made indifferent to their condition and will by force, in face of personal danger or even death, choose to fight the experimenters. Corollary: the will to endure, in time, conquers the conqueror.

Strange how the most civilized of the world in their time carry on experiments in extermination of their brothers and sisters, not as conquerors, but as victims of an evil they define. Stranger still how the most civilized find justice for their behavior in the words of the God they created, the only real and true God, whose beneficence to them justifies their indifference to their enemies even as it makes sacred the theft of that enemies’ land. Yet more strange is the sanctimonious efforts that follow their extermination and conquest to establish, with all those who watched the butchery, a document that testifies to the equality of all humans, a universal declaration of human rights to ensure that it will never, never, never, ever happen again – until more land is needed and God’s word, newly interpreted, justifies yet another extermination of the infidel.   

-William A. Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of Tracking Deception: Bush’s Mideast Policy. He can be reached at: cookb@ulv.edu. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.