Letter: Unequal Exchange (of Fire)

July 31, 2025

Abel Bisrat responds to US House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' recent refusal to support a defense appropriations bill amendment aimed at cutting funding for Israel’s Iron Dome.

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Much discussion has followed the recent disgraceful attempt by AOC to excuse her refusal to sign on, with her colleagues Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, to a defense appropriations bill amendment proposed by Marjorie Taylor Greene that would have cut funding for Israel’s Iron Dome. Many serious arguments, by Dylan Saba among others, have been forwarded demonstrating conclusively that the distinction between “offensive” and “defensive” weapons that AOC attempts to draw in defense of her decision, in a colonial context, is in fact illusory. One questionable assumption critical to this distinction that is worth interrogating is the question of what exactly constitutes “safety” in a world where wealth and power are unequally distributed, particularly along national lines. Certainly “security,” something that in international law is universally viewed as guaranteed to civilians without discrimination, has an objective component. But the fact is that as Israel has grown in military strength, influence, and wealth it has become more expansionist and less concerned with immediate questions of defense. Its collective sense of its own unsafety, however, has not subsided, despite the fact that in the past twenty years not a single Arab state has fired a shot in Israel’s direction and of course many are open and willing collaborators. It exercises more and more control of the territory of the “bad neighborhood” it supposedly lives in, again with the consent of many of the other owners that live there. But its sense of resentment and fear has not abated one iota and, in fact, has arguably accelerated.

And of course why would such fears go away? Colonialism begets colonialism—classic colonialism begins, of course, with the establishment of claims on access to or outright ownership of the resources, labor, and land of foreign peoples. But this is not a mandate that is self justifying or evidently valid to those making competing claims, be they native or foreign. So their claims have to be propped up by force—“we only care to set up a small port in the Red Sea or the Eastern Mediterranean crucial to providing our workers cheap foodstuffs necessary for their survival ,vital to our economic health and safety, and certainly no luxury. The natives find this unacceptable and of course the Ottomans, practitioners of a kind of colonialism far more avaricious and rapacious than ours, would never take kindly to our stepping on their turf so it looks like we’ll need allies on the ground maybe even of a local variety, some rival kingdom or aggrieved minority. Now they’re under attack, ah, alas, we must intervene, reluctantly of course. Perhaps it’s in the interest of the poor benighted natives that we exert more direct control and relieve them of the burden of administration, we know they struggle with such higher order executive functions and it may lead them to harbor all sorts of funny ideas about their ‘rights’ and ‘dignity’ that make them vulnerable to manipulation by other empires (the bad kind). Oh dear! The territory we control is much greater than we anticipated. We can't leave it wide open vulnerable to attack—we need some elbow room, some buffer zone in any case there is probably some economic sanity in making our disparate territories more contiguous.”

To the naive critic, willful or otherwise, it may seem that expansion comes into conflict with security, and certainly a tension exists to some extent, but what every liberal foreign policy realist of good faith must come to reckon with is that this balancing act can be managed for quite some time, as it is not a contradiction the colonizer is ever forced to reckon with until the very end and the posture of liberals like AOC is in no small part why. The fact that in the Israeli context the colonists are settlers in a way mystifies this underlying dynamic, but the logic is the same. The impetus for the 1967 war, for example, lies partly in Israel’s dispute with Syria over the armistice line that was established in the aftermath of the war in 1948, which had left a somewhat large “no man's land.” Ilan Pappe, in The Biggest Prison on Earth, notes that Israel “encouraged its farmers to cultivate the land there, and the inevitable Syrian fire directed at those farmers escalated quickly into an artillery duel and at times into air raids from both sides”—these escalations, in addition to the fear of Egyptian retaliation on behalf of their allies, were the proximate cause for Israel’s preemptive bombing raids on Syria and Egypt that marked the beginning of the 1967 war. Fixating on the point at which Syria directed fire at Israel is a convenient way to avoid what sort of acts are being consecrated by sending “defensive” aid.

Providing Israel with endless money and weapons, then, even for “defense,” doesn’t make its citizens any safer but in fact raises the threshold of what is required for them to feel safe beyond what is reasonable. Here, then, it is worth relating “safety” to Arghiri Emmanuel, who following Marx, is relevant, noting that “subsistence” is not wholly objectively determined but in fact contains a certain “moral and historical” component. It’s no coincidence, then, that one can't help feel upon listening to the initial reactions to Al Aqsa Flood, wherein Zionist pundits calculated the number of 9/11s that October 7th was equivalent to, that one was watching some sort of perverse Ricardian exercise take place in real time, where it became clear what exactly the exchange values of Palestinian and Jewish lives are. Global relations of power reinforce the differential valuing of the lives of Palestinians and Israelis in the same way they ossify the polarization of the North and South generally. In this way the safety of Jewish Israeli lives and Palestinian lives are not only not intertwined by the whole paradigm of Jewish innocence, and safetyism, in fact, perpetuates this state of glaring inequality.

Israeli “security” discourse is of a qualitatively different character than that occurring in Gaza currently. While Palestinians dodge bullets scrounging for food, have their bloodlines stamped out of history by Israel, and watch helplessly as those responsible for their health and civil defense receive an extra tap as punishment for daring to abide by their sworn duty to protect and aid their brethren, Israeli “security” discourse is entirely in the language of abstractions like “demographic threats,” “strategic depth,” and “qualitative edge” that, upon inspection, reveal an even more startling asymmetry than the immediate disparity in the gravity of concerns suggests. As the Syrian example makes clear it is the right to colonize uninhibited that is presented as a defensive right. And of course it only works in one direction—the war with Hezbollah, with its stated goal of returning settlers to the North, is ostensibly defensive but the initial volleys were directed at land that was regarded by all,except as Lebanese. It was taken for granted that Israel could not “defend” itself by halting its genocide, even though it was clear that the barrages by Hezbollah and Yemen, and thereby the immediate threat faced by Israel, would stop and that, in fact, it needed all sorts of high tech weapon systems that innoculate it from any consequences (even as they create new “threats” and imperil the lives of innocent Arab civilians). Some liberal Zionists and their allies like AOC may reject some or all such notions or say we can do both, but they mistake what security means in this context: “safety from” not “safety of.” Keeping to the logic of the “bad neighborhood,” it would be as if upon observing that the residents of Beverly Hills not Compton are actually the ones most fearful of “sketchy areas” and insisting that “well actually everyone should have Ring cameras and police protection!” None of this to say that the various Israeli anxieties surrounding, for example, Arab birth rates aren’t sincerely felt by those that exhibit them, but rather that we have an obligation not to dignify them.

Though the consequences are less stark, there are echoes of this in the US context as well—in an interview on the Breakfast Club and in his book Nobody Marc Lamont Hill observes that, in the heat of the moment, it is certainly possible that the armed adult men in Florida and Ferguson, deputized to use force at the drop of the hat, as well as the white juries that defend them when the dust settles, really did and do perceive teenaged black men as threats to their lives. But that doesn’t mean it was reasonable for them to feel that way in the first place. By agreeing to support Israel’s Iron Dome AOC implicitly reinforces hierarchies of worth and value stratified by nationality and race. This is underscored by the reality that she would never support a bill that funds Iranian air defense systems or even perhaps, if the vulnerabilities in Iran’s internal security appear as credible as is believed by some observers, funding for Iranian counterintelligence or secret police.

-Abel Bisrat

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