Summary
"The truth is I love this mess-I enjoy it. It is like being on drags," one soldier told them. Another said, "What is great is that you don't have to follow any law or rule. You feel you are the law, you decide. Once you go into the Occupied Territories, you are God."
Occupation is only possible if the occupied are reduced to a category that places them outside the boundaries of a shared humanity So the Iraqis becomes "Hajji," just as two generations ago the Vietnamese became "slopes." The Israeli right routinely refers to the Palestinians as "cockroaches."Those are the "algebraical factors" of occupation, and as [Lawrence] concludes, "against them perfections of means and spirit straggle quite in vain." ?See the full content of this document
Extract
The Algebra of Occupation
In 1805, the French Army outmaneuvered, outsmarted and out-fought the combined armies of Russia and Austria at Austerlitz. Three years later it would founder against a rag-tag collection of Spanish guerrillas.
In 1967 it took six days for the Israeli Army to smash Egypt, Jordan and Syria and seize the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. In 2...See the full content of this document
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