While the bombs fall in
Lebanon, I’m teaching a two-week course in permaculture: regenerative,
ecological design, with a schedule so demanding that I find it hard to check
email every day, let alone watch the news. But it comes in, between lesser
messages about leaks in the watering system in the garden and flight cancellations:
pictures of dead children on the road. I feel horrified, angry, frustrated,
powerless…all the things I’m used to feeling about the situation,
but more so. I try to write something in the spare moments when my teaching
partner Penny is covering rain catchment or graywater systems, but all I keep
writing, over and over, is “Killing children is wrong.” That
sees so self-evident and banal that I can’t quite bring myself to send
it out. Or rather, it doesn’t seem to add much to a discussion in
which the decision makers are so convinced that killing our children is very,
very wrong, but killing their children is the Path of Righteousness.
While the Congress and Senate are voting their support for Israel’s actions,
I am teaching systems theory and strategy, including an essay by Donella Meadows,
“Nine Ways to Intervene in a System (in increasing order of effectiveness.)
The least effective way, she says, is by changing amounts. Please,
General, can we drop fewer bombs? Can we keep it proportional? Could we scale
down to killing just maybe two of their children for every one of ours, instead
of ten?
The situation itself is a perfect example of what she calls a positive feedback
loop. I find the term confuses people, as there is often nothing positive
about it. I call it a self-reinforcing cycle. Whichever, it means
a situation in which the more you have of something the more you get, and the
more you need. You kill some of my children so I kill more of yours, so
you kill more of mine, so I kill even more of yours.
Self-reinforcing cycles are engines of change, for better or worse. They
get more and more extreme, until either some new constraint enters to impose
a new equilibrium, or they crash. Hurricanes suck up energy from the heat
in the sea, and grow bigger, sucking more energy, which makes them bigger still,
until they hit land and blow themselves out. Addicts keep taking more of what
they’re addicted to, until they hit bottom, whether the addiction is to
alcohol or heroin or military intervention.
This quality of systems does not bode well—either for the children of
Beirut or those of Haifa. Europe and the UN might make some weak attempts
to intervene, but as long as the U.S. is cheering the Israeli government on,
no serious constraints will be imposed. And why shouldn’t we cheer
them on, when Israel’s addiction to force as a solution is the mirror
of ours? We’re the big guy and the small guy, standing each other
drinks at the pub and throwing the chairs at anyone who threatens us, until
we smash the place.
It is this very self-reinforcing cycle that keeps power in the hands of the
neo-cons, whose answer to every fear and insecurity is more force. Force
which creates more fear, which generates more violence, which requires more
force to keep down. It’s an inherent aspect of being caught in this
sort of system that as it begins to spiral out of control, and starts to break
apart, the only solution you can see is more of the same. An alcoholic
gets fired for drinking on the job, and drinks more to forget. Iraq is not working
out well for Bush and the neocons, so bring in more troops, or expand the war—Lebanon,
Syria, Iran.
You can’t change a self-reinforcing system by changing amounts.
Recovering alcoholics know this, generals and politicians don’t. Try
to limit yourself to one drink before dinner, and somehow you still end up behind
the wheel of the car that careens into the bus full of schoolchildren on the
road. Tell yourself that you are using a measured, limited response
for well-thought out political aims, and you still end up with blackened torsos
and the severed limbs of infants in smoking piles on the motorway.
Here’s some other things we know about these cycles—they are expensive.
They consume resources. Drinking up the children’s milk money
down at the local. Starving every social program to fund our military.
And when they crash, they often fall hardest on the undeserving. The drunk
behind the wheel rolls out of the crushed car, unharmed, while the family of
five lies dead. The policy makers are not cringing in tenements as bombs
fall, or crying over the bleeding body of their most beloved child. Nor
are most of those who support the policies. Yet.
To change the system, you need to change the paradigm, the way you frame the
situation and think about it, the deep assumptions that shape your viewpoint.
That’s Donella Meadows’ most effective way to intervene—changing
the world view and the constructs that support the system. It’s
also, generally, a hard and painful process.
A new paradigm, a new construct of self and world, goes against everything we
know and believe. If I’m telling myself that I’m a fun-loving,
party kind of a gal—how painful to instead admit that I’m an alcoholic!
If I’m justifying the deaths of children by telling myself that
I’m bringing democracy to the region, or safeguarding my sister’s
children in Hadera, or fulfilling God’s plan, how painful to look at the
broken bodies on the pavement and say, “I did that. I have blood
on my hands.”
I’m thinking about one of the many fruitless arguments I’ve had
about the issue, this one with an ultra-Orthodox rabbi’s wife, shortly
after I’d returned from doing solidarity work with the nonviolent Palestinian
resistance in Gaza and the West Bank. I tried to describe to her what
I’d seen in that bullet-riddled, shell-shocked land, the ongoing, everyday
horrors and humiliations and frustrations, the houses bulldozed, the farmlands
confiscated, the lives blunted and stunted and blasted into oblivion, and at
the end she said to me:
“But we’re good. So if we’re doing it, it must be good.”
That’s one hard paradigm to shift, because there is nowhere to go from
that pinnacle but down, no change we can make that doesn’t require us
to face the possibility that maybe we are bad, or at the very least, that we
are good people doing some bad things. From that vantage point, of course
any critique, no matter how measured, seems anti-Semitic, an assault on that
basic self-definition of Essential Goodness.
While the killing escalates, I am teaching about soil. How to feed the
life of the soil, how to encourage and nurture the worms and the beneficial
bacteria and fungi and other soil organisms. How a healthy soil will grow
healthy plants, that can resist pests.
Industrial agriculture, in contrast, is based in the same exact paradigm as
our Iraq policy, one that was succinctly expressed in a bumper sticker my first
husband applied to his van shortly before we broke up: “Force, It Works!”
So, if corn borers are attacking your crop, blast it with insecticides. Kill
the bastards! Are there weeds among the fields? Zap them with roundup.
Root feeding nematodes, perchance, below ground? Blanket the whole thing
in plastic, and gas it with methyl bromide.
Force—it works, for a while, perhaps for short term goals. But force
is costly. And, whether we’re employing force against bugs or bacteria
or human beings, force breeds resistance.
And so insects that survive the onslaught of the pesticides breed young that
are not affected. We up the doses, and breed more and more resistant pests,
which require more insecticides to kill, in another self-reinforcing cycle.
The helpful insects, the predators that might have kept the pests in balance,
are wiped out. And the residues of poison remain, in the soil and in the
crops themselves.
Human beings are not insects or bacteria. The human resistance that force
breeds is not in the genes, but in hearts and minds. And so the bombing
of Beirut breeds rockets falling on Haifa and airplane bombers in London, and
all the assaults on South Lebanon, the bombs and blown-up bridges and armed
teenage boys in uniform on the ground will breed more rockets yet, more suicide
bombs of the future, more death in retaliation.
And the devotion to force is itself a toxin, poisoning the soil of Israeli society,
starving its own social programs, warping the very soul and ethics of the religion
it purports to defend.
How do we get out of this mess? What would a regenerative paradigm look
like as a policy? If compost, worm castings and plants that feed beneficial
bugs are the gardening alternative to chemical warfare, what would be the political
parallel?
From a purely self-interested, Israeli point of view, a policy maker coming
from a regenerative paradigm might say:
“We can never stamp our hatred, but let us not create habitat that favors
its growth. Instead, let us nurture health wherever we find it, and create
conditions that let flourish those who favor peace.”
So, in the nineties, Israel could have said, “We have a small window
here, when the Palestinians have settled for less than they could have demanded.
Let us move quickly to establish a Palestinian state, with true areas
of self determination for its people. If the Occupation is a running sore, inflaming
rage and hatred throughout the Arab world and undermining our moral credibility,
how do we swiftly end it and transform the region into a place of opportunity
and hope? Where can we support people’s legitimate dreams and aspirations?
How do we support the health of the region’s actual soil, the vitality
of its crops, the abundance of its markets, the excellence of its Universities?
How do we create such flourishing abundance that this region becomes
a shining model for the whole Middle East?”
Instead, Israel built settlements, began a long term program of encroachment
on the tiny territory allocated to the Palestinians, and maintained an Occupation
backed by force.
When Abbas was elected, Israel could have said, “How do we give him victories
and real gains that will strengthen his own people’s allegiance? And
if corruption runs rampant in the Palestinian Authority, then where are there
leaders of integrity we can ally with? And if Hammas is winning over the
people with its social programs, how do we feed a healthy economy so that they
become unnecessary?”
Instead, Israel continued to build a wall which confiscates huge amounts of
Palestinian land without compensation, destroys the very communities which historically
have been most friendly to Israel, unilaterally ‘withdrew’ from
Gaza while keeping it surrounded, an isolated, open-air prisons with its resources
destroyed and its factions inflamed—creating a perfect breeding habitat
for yet more violence.
There are a hundred other missed opportunities. And there will be more.
But the longer the cycle goes on, the more damage is done, and the harder
it is to stop.
Am I ‘blaming’ Israel unfairly? Couldn’t Hezbollah just
stop shooting rockets, and the Palestinian factions stop bombing?
Yes, certainly they could, and it would be good if they did. Children
would live who otherwise would die.
When we’re caught in a self-reinforcing cycle, it’s a fairly useless
exercise to ask, “Who started it?” Or to debate whether one
side or the other has the ‘right to defend itself’ by continuing
the cycle. Far better to ask, “Who is in position to stop this cycle?”
And it is Israel, the occupier of the territory, the fourth largest military
power in the world, that sets the conditions of the region, that has the power
to create a habitat where violence flourishes, or peace is favored.
And I admit that I want Israel to act as the moral agent it claims to be. I’m
a Jew who was raised with the dream of Israel, as a safe place after the Holocaust,
as a refuge in that visa-denying world which sent boatloads of my people back
to their deaths, as a place where we could finally, after two thousand years,
be ourselves, in our own home. Among the many casualties of this war is all
that was good in that dream.
Because of the pennies I saved as a child to buy trees for the promised land,
because of the songs I grew up singing, because of the deep well that was carved
in my heart for that dream that now spews anguish and blood, I have the right
ot an accounting from those who have replaced the God of Justice with the God
of Force.
The place has a history of great prophets and lousy kings. There is nothing
more Jewish than thundering at the policy makers, saying “Jahweh and Allah
and all good-hearted people agree: killing children is wrong. Just
plain wrong, and when you do it you have left the Path of Righteousness. The
cost of force is too high—it includes your soul.”
Even as the bombs fall, there are people choosing to come from new assumptions.
They are the Palestinians of the villages where the wall is confiscating their
farmland, choosing nonviolent means of struggle, returning day after day to
demonstrations in which they get beaten, tear-gassed, arrested. They are the
Israelis and internationals who cross borders to stand with them, saying, “We
are not ‘Palestinians’ and “Israelis’, we are people
together struggling against injustice. They are the Women in Black, who stand
in silent vigil for peace, year after year, fleeing Katusha rockets and returning
back to their stand for peace. They are organizers of cross-cultural dialogues,
soldiers who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories or to kill civilians,
youth who refuse to don the explosives belt.
That these people still exist, that they somehow grow out of the blasted, toxic
soil of the Middle East, gives us some reason to hope. In spite of the
million missed opportunities, the oceans of spilled blood, the escalation of
stupid policies, the situation is not yet utterly without hope.
But what can we do, we who are not policy makers or generals or Queens of the
Middle East, who are simply ordinary people of compassion, wringing our hands
in front of the TV set. Every day, I hear people ask, “What can
we do that will be effective?”
And for once, I can’t think of a damn thing. Never has political
action felt so futile.
But I think about the advice the great war journalist Robert Fisk received,
for surviving decades in Lebanon and other war zones. “Do something,”
he was told. “Don’t do nothing.”
So do something. While we’re waiting for the effective thing, do
something even if it seems small and futile.
Write your representatives. Go to the demonstration, or organize one.
Educate yourself more deeply, then talk to someone who has less information.
Stand in vigil with the Women in Black. Some of the founders of
the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine are organizing nonviolent
civil resistance in Lebanon. Join them, or support them. Pray to
those Gods who may secretly resent being cast as child killers.
Do something. We don’t know what the effective thing will be, may
never know. But if we do nothing, we will surely have no impact.
And what do we say? How do you stop a vicious cycle? Just stop.
Stop now. Don’t wait until the enemy is utterly defeated,
because your every effort to defeat them strengthens the forces that created
them. Just stop. Not tomorrow, when our position is stronger. Not
the day after, when you have neutralized more territory. The longer the
cycle continues, the worse the crash will be. Just stop. Stop now.
Come from a new paradigm. Feed the soil of the Holy Land with something
other than blood. Cherish all children, ours and theirs.
Feel free to post, forward,
and reprint this article for non-commercial purposes. All other rights
reserved.
Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of The Earth Path, Webs of
Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, The Fifth Sacred Thing
and other books on feminism, politics and earth-based spirituality. She teaches
Earth Activist
Trainings that combine permaculture design and activist skills, www.earthactivisttraining.org
and works with the RANT trainer’s collective, www.rantcollective.net
that offers training and support for mobilizations around global justice and
peace issues.
Some other good websites to check out:
International Solidarity Movement:
www.palsolidarity.org
Women in Black
www.coalitionofwomen.org
Jewish Voice For Peace
www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org
For on the spot reports from Lebanon:
http://www.leftturn.org/Articles/SpecialCollections/GazaLebanon.aspx
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/diaries.shtml