What is liberalism? It is the political theory that holds that the basic political unit is the sovereign individual--whether an individual person or an individual collective (an individual collective being a sovereign state, controlled absolutely by a government and having an absolute unity of interest among its unified citizens).

Liberalism conceives of this individual unit, at whatever level, as existing in a state of permanent competition/violence with other individuals. This competition, the natural state of relationship between individuals, can be controlled only by law: the law of contract. Contract regulates competition between individuals. Contract is also the basis of collectivity--individuals give up their sovereign rights (to aggrandize themselves) to a state that protects them from other self-aggrandizing individuals. And at the international level, law mediates the relations between sovereign states.

Now, liberalism is the basis of the world political system, and it is no worse than many other political systems. One cannot "oppose" liberalism. But unfortunately, liberals like Michael Walzer and John Rawls confuse liberalism as a necessary mode of political organization with an ontological account of the nature of reality itself. Thus it is assumed that human beings, as such, are first and foremost "individuals" in a state of life-and-death competition; that violence is the default relationship between individuals; that love--as the miraculous power of humans to see and even to enjoy the presence of the other as other--cannot be described and has no place in systematic accounts of morality.

These assumptions--based on a confusion of the pragmatics of political organization with the nature of humanity and moral life--lead in turn to the obscenity of "liberal intellectuals" speaking as if the state itself, the sovereign protector of sovereign individuals--is itself the sole arbiter of morality. Any morality that does not comport with the exigencies of state power is effaced from the consciense of such "intellectuals."

A prime example is a recent open letter from Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman, three darlings of the Israeli intelligentsia, celebrated relentlessly in the New York Times and other organs of the American liberal establishment. These three good men have seen fit, after a month of uncritically supporting Ehud Olmert and Dan Halutz, to publish a letter in Ha'aretz calling for an end to "hostilities."

As the historian Tom Segev notes (also in Ha'aretz, where the debate is infinitely more diverse and intelligent than in the Times):

The three writers worded their ad as though they were working in the legal department of the Foreign Ministry: The aggression of Hezbollah "was carried out inside Israeli territory," they emphasized; Israel's reaction "was in accordance with international legitimization of self-defense in the face of the aggression of an enemy country." Also, the Lebanese casualties were addressed as a legal entity - as "many citizens of the enemy country" - and not as human beings, first and foremost.

As befits a self-respecting government, the three recognize only Lebanon, not Hezbollah. Hezbollah operates "under the aegis of the Lebanese authorities," they wrote, stating: "The Lebanese people has no right to demand that its sovereignty be recognized if it refuses to take full responsibility for all its citizens and all its territory."

It is not clear how the trio discovered that someone had asked the "Lebanese people" whether it wanted to "take full responsibility" for Hezbollah and when exactly it "refused" to do so...

This is the logic of the liberal pseudo-morality of the state. The state has not only the right but the obligation to defend its citizens against any and all violence. It must fulfill this obligation by any means necessary, including but most certainly not limited to indiscriminate bombing of civilians; displacement of one million people; bombing of fleeing columns of refugees; the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of square miles of foreign territory; the transformation of this territory into a cratered and smoking free-fire zone.

Committing these crimes is the duty of the state to its citizens. And what about the victims? First and foremost--the state is not obliged to protect them, as they are not its citzens.

But second and more horrifyingly--these victims appear to have surrendered any and all "human rights" (that dispensable trinket adorning the machine of state power)--they have surrendered all rights, they have surrendered their very humanity, because their "state" has attacked Israel. They are not people but individual units of the enemy state.

And it does not matter that Lebanon has no control over Hizballah, that it never has and that everyone knows it, that the people of northern Lebanon actually strongly disliked Hizballah (until this war, when they began to see the Party as their sole defender). Legally speaking, the residents of Lebanon are all citizens of this state, which makes them all equally guilty of whatever comes from within its borders.

Of course, this whole way of talking is a charade, dissimulating the real logic of state power: Lebanon is not really a state; it cannot control its sovereign territory, and so the residents of this territory find themselves in a legal no-man's land. Quite literally--they are not "men" (or "women") with "rights" but part of a state-less area that needs to be "cleaned up" by being incorporated into a zone controlled by a more effectively sovereign state.

The IDF has been spewing this obscenity since the start of the war, and here we see that its liberal supporters also speak the language of militaristic state power, as a way of disavowing the reality of what their state has done. We were told by Olmert that the Hizballah attack came from Lebanon, a sovereign state, and that the state would have to be held accountable. And this is what we are told today about the new "cease-fire": Olmert says that all violations will be laid at the door of the state of Lebanon. Which he knows is not sovereign, does not really exist, has never existed. Which will only make more urgent the inevitable future necessity of Israeli "discipline" in the area.

And perhaps now we can see how this logic applies even more cruelly in the case of the Palestinians. Israel must--by the exigencies the of law and "morality"--stop the terrorists; conversely, any violence emanating from the unconstituted vortices of the territories cannot be legitimate; it can only be terrorism. Thus the U.S. "State" Department says that acts of violence committed against occupying Israeli soldiers in the West Bank are formally classifiable as "terrorism," that they are as terroristic as a suicide-bombing in Tel Aviv. Because the perpetrators are "non-state actors."

That the U.S. "State" Department and the IDF would apply this obscene bureacratic chop-logic is not, perhaps, suprising. Is it surprising that the guardians of enlightened "morality" in Israel and the U.S. speak the same way?

Update: today Consortiumnews issues a report, in line with Hersh's New Yorker piece, suggesting that at a May 23 meeting, Bush and Olmert planned a process of gradual escalation in Gaza and Lebanon designed to give Israel a pretext for an invasion of Lebanon. Bush even urged Olmert to invade Syria, as was reported late last month in the Jerusalem Post. The Israelis, apparently suffering from severe stupidity but still remaining on this side of a psychotic break, dismissed the "invade Syria" idea as "nuts," but thought that the Lebanon proposal was spot-on. Now, amid the calls for Olmert's resignation, military types are blaming Bush for egging Olmert into this catastrophe.