Fateful Triangle

Israel and Palestine: Historical Backgrounds235defense of torture to have appeared in the West * apart from the ravingsof the ultra-right in France during the Algerian war.No less interesting was the response of the Israeli judiciary. AmnestyInternational raised the question whether the remarkably high level ofconfessions of Arab prisoners might suggest inhumane treatment. Tothis, Israeli Supreme Court Justice Moshe Etzioni responded that “theArabs in any case—if they are arrested—do not take much time beforethey confess. It’s part of their nature”—a comment that we may placealongside of Martin Peretz’s “Arabs exaggerate” and others of the sameilk concerning Jews and other oppressed peoples over the years. It isperhaps of some interest to note that the genetic defect of Arabs notedby Justice Etzioni appears to be somehow contagious, since by nowJewish prisoners are confessing to crimes that they did not commit afterpolice interrogation, including cases of interrogation by police*See also Michael Levin, “The Case for Torture,” Newsweek, June 7, 1982. Aprofessor of philosophy at City College of New York, Levin plays a game familiarfrom every Phil. 1 course, constructing an outlandish case where torture mightbe “morally mandatory” (a terrorist has hidden an atomic bomb on ManhattanIsland, etc.), then noting that “once you concede that torture is justified inextreme cases, you have admitted that the decision to use torture is a matter ofbalancing innocent lives against the means needed to save them”; finally, headvocates torture “as an acceptable measure for preventing future evils,”rejecting talk about “terrorists’ ‘rights’,” assuring us that Western democracieswill not “lose their way if they choose to inflict pain as one way of preservingorder,” etc. This should be understood in the context of the hysteria beingwhipped up at the time concerning “international terrorism,” defined so as toinclude “retail terrorism” conducted by enemies but not “wholesale (or retail)terrorism” conducted by friends (or by us). On this matter, see Herman, TheReal Terror Network.Classics in Politics: The Fateful TriangleNoam Chomsky