War Against the People

Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification

Jeff Halper

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781849649735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Diritti umani

* Shortlisted for the Palestine Book Awards 2016* Modern warfare has a new form. The days of international combat are fading. So how do major world powers maintain control over their people today? This book is a disturbing insight into the new ways world powers such as the US, Israel, Britain and China forge war today. It is a subliminal war of surveillance and whitewashed terror, conducted through new, high-tech military apparatuses, designed and first used in Israel against the Palestinian population. Including nano-technology, hidden camera systems, information databases on civilian activity, automated targeting systems and unmanned drones, it is used to control the very people the nation's leaders profess to serve. Jeff Halper reveals that this practice is much more insidious than was previously thought. As Western governments claw back individual liberties, War Against the People is a reminder that fundamental human rights are being compromised for vast sections of the world, and that this is a subject that should concern everyone.

Part I

The Global Pacification Industry

1

Enforcing Hegemony: Securocratic Wars in Global Battlespace

We are witnessing today the rise of a new kind of war, “securocratic war.” For centuries, as transnational capitalism steadily expanded over the entire world, corporate and political elites have had to secure their hegemony against endemic resistance. At the dawn of the twentieth century, which marked the high point of classical imperialism, the gap between the per capita GDP of the poorest and richest nation was a ratio of 22:1; by 2000 it stood at 267:1.¹ While a few get rich and a substantial middle class arises primarily in the Global North, the experience of the vast majority of people worldwide becomes one of impoverishment, marginality, exploitation, dislocation and violence. This “surplus humanity,” increasingly alienated from even its own resources and cultures, inhabits what Mike Davis calls “a planet of slums.”²

Under capitalism, accumulation of resources, capital and profits by some comes at the expense of many others. The Global North, sometimes called “the West,” lies at the “core” of this world-system. It is here that the transnational corporate class is concentrated, and from here it coordinates the management of globalized circuits of resource flow, globalized production, marketing, financing and, in the end, capital accumulation. As such, the transnational capitalist class represents a hegemonic power within hegemonic powers, capable of mobilizing the power of core states and supranational institutions when necessary to protect and advance its interests.³

The “core” of the world-system, the Global North, both dominates world politics and economy and stands in fundamental opposition to the countries and peoples of its peripheries, the so-called “developing world” or “Third World.” Occupying a kind of middle ground are the stronger states of the semi-periphery, particularly those of the BRICS/MINT bloc: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, followed by Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey.⁴ The division is not strictly geographical by any means. Elites allied to those of the core—what I call lower-level hegemons—are found in “core nodes” of global commodity chains throughout the world. By contrast, the poor and marginalized of the Global North constitute extensions of the peripheries into the core itself.

Once the capitalist system had spread throughout the world eliminating all competing systems, it could no longer expand and, taking the form of endocolonialism, began feeding off itself. Eventually, this gave rise in the mid-1970s to the virulent neoliberalism we know today, characterized by what Harvey has termed “accumulation by dispossession.”⁵ Under this totalizing form of transnational capitalism,

•	Land is commodified and peasant populations forcefully expelled. In cities this takes the form of gentrification, the displacement of poor and working-class populations by real estate developers.
•	Rights to the commons, once public or indigenous lands accessible to all, are suppressed as their assets, including natural resources, become the property of the state or commercial interests, often ruining the environment as well.
•	Property rights and public services are privatized. Once commonly used, collectively owned, or the products of small-scale tenure, they become the exclusive province of states, corporations and wealthy individuals.
•	Unions and other forms of social solidarity are weakened or destroyed as labor is commodified. Production is outsourced to the cheap unprotected labor of the periphery. More humane alternative forms of production and consumption, whether indigenous or cooperative, are suppressed. Impoverishment, job insecurity (even of the middle classes) and huge income gaps come to characterize the world-system.
•	Social services and welfare are reduced or removed, basic public services such as education and health care are under-funded, and government policy, embedded in public-private “partnerships,” comes to reflect corporate interests.
•	Exchange and taxation are monetized, particularly concerning land, but extending into all areas of life, including cultural production.
•	Various forms of exploitation and usury come to dominate social and economic relations. Poorer countries are forced into debt, thereby leveraging them into the neoliberal system and into economic and political dependency upon the core. By the same token, the credit system extracts maximum capital from families and individuals while locking them into a consumer economy. Even criminal activities such as the slave trade, and particularly traffic in women, assume unheard-of proportions and economic/political clout.
•	Though promoting electoral regimes and an abstract commitment to “democracy,” neoliberal regimes actually distance the people from exercising any democratic control over state policies.
•	Cultural identities, histories, symbols and communities are destroyed or appropriated, a form of cultural genocide. Atomized individuals are idealized as the most fitting expression of “freedom.” Basic social solidarity is destroyed.

And in order to enforce accumulation by dispossession,

•

Core militaries, security agencies, police forces and prison systems assume a central role. They not only secure vital resources and transportation routes between the peripheries and the core, but also protect the ruling classes and their middle-class allies from endemic unrest and resistance. And not only in the core: core-supplied militaries and security forces play an instrumental role in shoring up comprador elites of the peripheries—client-state leaders, local strongmen and warlords, even selected non-state actors such as the Taliban at particular times and other useful “insurgents.” True to the spirit of accumulation, these securitization agents also constitute an enormously profitable industry.^6

“Securing insecurity,” then, has always been capital’s overriding preoccupation, and accumulation by dispossession was and continues to be a violent process. In the history of accumulation, noted Marx in Capital, “it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part.”⁷ Inevitably, the process of coercing core capital accumulation out of Europe’s far-off colonies gave rise to an integrated “military-capitalist complex.”⁸ By the mid-sixteenth century, Spain and Portugal were using the term “pacification” to gloss their conquests.⁹ The place we have now reached, where post-war capitalist endocolonialism has morphed into neoliberalism, has brought the issue of pacification back as the dominant force of capitalist rule, far more totalizing than conventional inter-state warfare. For neoliberal securitization is indeed total, constituting nothing less than “pure war” and the endless preparation for war.¹⁰ It has given rise to human-security states driven by the quest for total security, their security logic resting on what Glover calls “the logic of ‘The War on ____ [poverty, crime, drugs, terrorism, etc.].’”¹¹

The new forms of war police these endemic insecurities. Despite their different names—“securocratic wars,”¹² “wars amongst the people,”¹³ “resource wars,”¹⁴ or counterinsurgencies¹⁵—they share a common goal: pacification in the name of enforcing the hegemony of transnational capital. Pacification of the world-system as a whole, of its peripheries, even of its victims in the core. Pacification that secures the world-system against threats from counterhegemons (including you and me if the reactions to the anti-globalization or Occupy movements are an indicator), or from anti-systemic forces.

Members of the Anti-Security Project advocate for re-appropriating the term “pacification” as a way of exposing the seemingly self-evident justifications of “security.”¹⁶ “Security” is something we all want but, asks Rigakos plaintively, do we really want to be pacified?¹⁷ Pacification, he continues,

… uncovers what security seeks to mask: that the entire premise of security is based first and foremost on the security, extension and imposition of property relations and that these property relations are the manifestations of brute force … Pacification, therefore, is not passive. Security pretends to be. To study pacification makes it clear that we are studying the fabrication of a social order.¹⁸

The very term “pacification” raises a slew of critical questions. Who is being pacified, and by whom? Why are they being pacified and what are they resisting—or are perceived as resisting? Whose interests are being served by pacification and to what ends? And in what ways are we being pacified?¹⁹ These are the sorts of questions this book is trying to address.

A Global Pacification System

I have already suggested why we are being pacified: to ensure the hegemony of transnational capital over the entire world-system. Who is pacifying us is more complex. The short answer would be the core hegemons, although their hegemony is dispersed and shared among a number of actors: the transnational elites themselves, both economic and political, acting through their corporations and states, the latter charged with advancing the interests and capacities of the business sector while protecting its circuits of production and marketing; supranational institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, the OECD, the EU, various “free trade” pacts, world courts and, if necessary, NATO—all backed up by a military-industrial complex that provides the how of pacification even as it feeds into the core’s industries.

This is not to imply that a closed and limited set of individuals runs the global system in some conspiratorial form, or that disagreement and even conflicts do not exist among the core hegemons. Indeed, deep-seated differences and divergent interests can be found within their ranks. It does imply, however, a certain identifiable logic running through the political economy of the world-system, one that gives coherency and direction to the agency of the dominant transnational actors. That logic trickles down to groups and individuals in society through institutions, laws, cultures, ideologies and religions, shared experiences, framings, education and other channels. Together they form a total system of social control, what Foucault calls “governmentality,” which has both local and global expressions.²⁰

The best way to portray the underlying logic of the capitalist world-system, the policies and practices imposed by core power, the unseen but disciplining hand of governmentality and the dynamic skein of relationships that actually comprises the world-system’s workings at all its levels is through the concept of hegemony. Like “pacification,” “hegemony” is not a common term, perhaps because it represents fluid, often elusive social relations, which is precisely what gives it the ability to capture the fluid agency of power among so many actors at different levels of the world-system. It is the agent of governmentality, enforcing those norms and behaviors, but also relations of power, through which the transnational elites and their lower-level allies run the world-system.

Another reason why hegemony is so elusive is that it hides its coercive governmentality behind a benign façade of consensus, democracy and seemingly technical but necessary laws and regulations. Hegemony implies hierarchy and domination, of course, but also indirect rule—even the ability to deny one is actually calling the shots. This is crucial when trying to dominate a world otherwise characterized by great geographical, historical, cultural and ideological diversity, when class, religious, gender, ethnic and national divisions constantly engender multiple sources of opposition, resistance and counterhegemony. Hegemony is thus a social structure, an economic structure and a political structure which lays down general rules of behavior for states and for those forces of civil society that act across national boundaries—rules which support the dominant mode of production.²¹

But it can also be enforced. When the ruling classes feel their domination being threatened or challenged, they have at their disposal powerful instruments of outright coercion: armies, paramilitaries, special forces, security agencies, the police and prison services. In particular, their dominion depends on how well they execute three overarching “hegemonic tasks”:

1.

Core hegemons must be able to maintain their overall domination over the world-system despite challenges from potential counterhegemons (China in particular, but also the emerging bloc of BRICS/MINT countries) and forces seeking to dismantle the capitalist world-system entirely, such as the Islamic State or anti-globalization movements, as well as confronting other systemic threats such as the effects of climate change or new military technologies.

2.

Core hegemons must be able to maintain their hegemony over the peripheries...