12 April 2012, Gush Shalom גוש שלום http://zope.gush-shalom.org (Israel)
Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי
STOP ME if I have told you this joke before:
Somewhere in the US, a demonstration takes place. The police arrive and beat the protesters mercilessly.
“Don’t hit me,” someone shouts, “I am an anti-communist!”
“I couldn't give a damn what kind of a communist you are!” a policeman answers as he raises his baton.
THE FIRST time I told this joke was when a German group visited the Knesset and met with German-born members, including me.
They went out of their way to praise Israel, lauding everything we had been doing, condemning every bit of criticism, however harmless it might be. It became downright embarrassing, since some of us in the Knesset were very critical of our government’s policy in the occupied territories.
For me, this extreme kind of pro-Semitism is just disguised anti-Semitism. Both have a basic belief in common: that Jews – and therefore Israel – are something apart, not to be measured by the standards applied to everybody else.
What is an anti-Semite? Somebody who hates a Jew because he is a Jew. He does not hate him for what he is as a human being, but for his origin. A Hebrew or a Shebrew (to quote a joke from Ambrose Bierce) may be good or bad, nice or nasty, rich or poor – for being Jewish, they must be hated.
This is of course true for any kind of prejudice, including sexism, Islamophobia, chauvinism and whatever.
Germans, as is their wont, are a bit more thorough here than others. The term “Antisemitismus” was invented by a German (a few years before the terms Zionism and Feminism), and anti-Semitism was the official ideology of Germany during the Nazi years. Now the official German ideology is pro-Semitism, again going to extremes.
Another Nazi word was “Sonderbehandlung”, meaning ‘”special treatment”. It was an euphemism for something abhorrent: the killing of prisoners. But special treatment can also mean the opposite: according people and countries especially nice treatment, not because of what they do, but because of what they are - Jewish, say.
Well, I don’t like it, even when I am on the receiving end. I like to be praised when I have done something good, I am ready to be blamed when I have done something bad. I don’t like to be praised (or blamed, for that matter) because I happen to have been born a Jew.
THIS BRINGS us, of course, to Günter Grass.
Disclosure: I met him only once, when we were both invited to a conference of the German PEN Club in Berlin. During an interval I met him in a very good restaurant. I told him, quite truthfully, that I like his books very much, especial the anti-Nazi novel “The Tin Drum”, and that I like his later political activity. That was all.
I did not meet him during his many visits to Israel. On at least one of them he acquired a girl-friend, a well-known writer.
Now Grass has done the unthinkable: he has openly criticized the State of Israel! And he a German!!!
The reaction was automatic. He was at once branded as an anti-Semite. Not just a run-of-the-mill anti-Semite, but as a crypto-Nazi, who could easily have served as a henchman of Adolf Eichmann! This was shown by the fact that at age 17, near the end of World War II, he was recruited to the Waffen-SS like tens of thousands of others and then – oddly enough – kept the fact hidden for many years. So there you are.
Israeli and German politicians and commentators vied with each other in cursing the writer, with the Germans easily trumping the Israelis. Though our Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, may have garnered the individual championship by declaring Grass persona non grata and banning him from entering Israel for all eternity (at least).
Yishai is a political hack, who has never written a line worth remembering. He is the leader of the Orthodox Shas party, not by virtue of being elected, but as a sidekick of the party’s strongman, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. The powerful State Comptroller is accusing him of gross incompetence in connection with a giant fire on Mount Carmel and so his career is in danger. Grass came just at the right time to save his skin.
SO WHAT did Grass actually say? In a poem of 69 lines – actually a polemic in the guise of a poem – under the headline “What Has To Be Said”, Grass attacks Israeli policy concerning the atom bomb.
The ferocious counter-attack was focused almost completely on the axiom that a German has no right to criticize Israel, under any circumstances.
Let’s ignore this “argument” and look at the poem itself, not necessarily as a literary masterpiece.
Grass’ basic theme is that Israel already has a “nuclear potential”, and that it is therefore hypocrisy to blame Iran for perhaps wanting to acquire one, too. In particular he denounced the German government for supplying another submarine to Israel.
Looked at rationally, do his arguments make sense?
Grass assumes that Israel is planning a “first strike” preventive war against Iran, in which the Iranian people could be “wiped out”. This possibility only makes sense if Grass assumes that the Israeli “first strike” would be an attack with nuclear bombs. Indeed, the term “first strike” belongs solely to the lexicon of nuclear war.
It is in this context that he condemns the German government for giving Israel another (sixth) submarine with the capability of launching nuclear bombs. Such submarines are designed for delivering a “second strike” by a nation hit in the “first strike”. It is basically a weapon of deterrence.
He deplores the fact that nobody in Germany (and in the Western world) dares even to mention Israel's possession of nuclear weapons, and that it is practically forbidden to “call that particular country by name” in this context.
He then asserts that “the Atomic Power Israel endangers the fragile peace of the world”.
To avert this danger, he proposes that “Israel’s atomic potential and Iran’s atomic installations” be put under an unfettered and permanent international inspection regime with the agreement of both governments.
At the end, he also mentions the Palestinians. Only this way, he says, can the Israelis and the Palestinians, and all the other inhabitants of this “region occupied by madness”, be helped.
WELL, I did not fall off my chair when I read this. The text can and must be criticized, but there is nothing there that demands stern condemnation.
As I said before, I see no reason for Germans to abstain from criticizing Israel. There is nothing in this text that de-legitimizes the State of Israel, On the contrary, he declares his solidarity with Israel. He explicitly mentions the Holocaust as an indelible crime. He also calls the Iranians “a people enslaved by a “bigmouth”.
That said, Grass’ idea that Israel might “wipe out” the Iranian people in a preventive “first strike” is wildly exaggerated.
I have already stated several times that all the Israeli and American blabbering about an Israeli attack on Iran is a part of the US-led psychological warfare to press the Iranian leaders to give up their (presumed) nuclear ambitions. It is totally impossible for Israel to attack Iran without express prior American agreement, and it is totally impossible for America to attack - or let Israel attack - because of the catastrophic consequences – a collapse of the world economy and a long and costly war.
Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that the Israeli government indeed decides to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. This would not “wipe out” the Iranian people, or even a part of it. Only madmen would use nuclear bombs for this purpose. Israeli leaders, whatever one may think of them, are not mad.
Even if Israel had (or obtained from the US) tactical nuclear bombs with limited power and radius, the world reaction to their use would be catastrophic.
By the way, it is not by their own choice that Israeli governments have a policy of nuclear non-transparency. If they could, our leaders would brag about our nuclear might from the rooftops. It’s the US that insists on opaqueness, so as not to be obliged to do something about it.
Grass’ contention that Israel endangers “world peace” is, therefore, a bit of an overstatement.
As for Glass’ practical proposal to subject both Israeli and Iranian nuclear installations to international inspection – I think this merits serious consideration. If both our countries freeze the nuclear status quo, it may not be a bad idea at all.
In the end, though, we need a nuclear-free region as part of a general regional peace that will include Israel, Palestine, the Arab League, Turkey and Iran.
AS FOR Günter Grass, I shall be happy to meet him again, this time for a good meal in Tel Aviv.
Mostrando postagens com marcador Gush Shalom גוש שלום. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Gush Shalom גוש שלום. Mostrar todas as postagens
sexta-feira, 13 de abril de 2012
segunda-feira, 9 de abril de 2012
“POUR OUT YOUR WRATH!”
6 April 2012, Gush Shalom גוש שלום http://zope.gush-shalom.org (Israel)
Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי
I AM writing this on Friday night, the eve of Passover. At this moment, all over the world, millions of Jews are gathered around the family table, observing the Seder, reading aloud from the same book: the Haggadah, which tells the story of the Exodus from Egypt.
The impact of this book on Jewish life is immense. Every Jew takes part in this ceremony from earliest childhood and plays an active part in the ritual. Wherever a Jewish man or woman goes in later life, they will take with them a memory of the warmth and togetherness of the family, the magical atmosphere – and the overt and subliminal message conveyed by the text.
Whoever invented the Seder (“order”) ritual, many centuries ago, was a genius. All human senses are involved: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting. It includes eating a ritualized meal, drinking four glasses of wine, touching various symbolic objects, playing a game with the children (searching for a hidden piece of Matzo). It ends with singing several religious songs together. The accumulated effect is magical.
More than any other Jewish text, the Haggadah forms the Jewish conscious – or, rather, unconscious - mind today, as in the past, influencing our collective behavior and Israeli national policy.
There are many different ways to view this book.
LITERATURE: As a literary work, the Haggadah is rather inferior. The text is devoid of beauty, full of repetitions, platitudes and banalities.
This may cause wonderment. The Hebrew Bible – the Bible in Hebrew – is a work of unique beauty. In many places, its beauty is intoxicating. The peaks of Western culture – Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy – are not its equal. Even the later Jewish religious texts – Mishnah, Talmud and so forth – while not so uplifting, contain passages of literary merit. The Haggadah has none. It is a text devised purely for indoctrination.
HISTORY: It’s not. Though it claims to tell history, the Haggadah has nothing to do with real history.
There can no longer be the slightest doubt that the Exodus never happened. Neither the Exodus, nor the wandering in the desert, nor the conquest of Canaan.
The Egyptians were obsessive chroniclers. Many tens of thousands of tablets have already been deciphered. It would have been impossible for an event like the exodus to pass without being reported at length. Not if 600,000 people left, as the Bible tells it, or 60,000, or even 6000. Especially if during the flight a whole Egyptian army contingent, including war chariots, was drowned.
The same goes for the Conquest. Because of acute security concerns, after being invaded once from there, the Egyptians employed a host of spies, - travelers, merchants and others - to follow closely the events in neighboring Canaan, in every single one of its towns and at all times. An invasion of Canaan, even a minor one, would have been reported. Except for the periodic incursions of Bedouin tribes, nothing was recorded.
Moreover, the Egyptian towns mentioned in the Bible did not exist at the time the event is supposed to have happened. They did exist, however, when the Bible was written, in the first or second century BC.
There is no need to point out that after a hundred years of frantic archaeological searching by devout Christians and Zionist zealots, not a shred of concrete evidence for the conquest of Canaan has been found (nor that the Kingdoms of Saul, David or Salomon ever existed).
But is this really important? Not a bit of it!
The Passover story does not derive its immense power from any claim to be history. It is a myth that grips the human imagination, a myth that is the basis of a great religion, a myth that directs the behavior of people to this very day. Without the Exodus story, there would probably be no State of Israel today – and certainly not in Palestine.
THE GLORY: One can read the Exodus story as a shining example of all that is good and inspiring in the annals of humanity.
Here is the story of a small and powerless people that rises up against a brutal tyranny, throws off its chains and gains a new homeland, creating a revolutionary new moral code on the way.
Seen in this way, the Exodus is a victory of the human spirit, an inspiration for all downtrodden peoples. And indeed, it has served this purpose many times in the past. The Pilgrim Fathers, the founders of the American nation, were inspired by it, and so were many rebels throughout history.
THE OTHER SIDE: When one reads the Biblical text attentively , without religious blinkers, some aspects gives us food for other thoughts.
Let’s take the Ten Plagues. Why were the entire Egyptian people punished for the misdeeds of one tyrant, Pharaoh? Why did God, like a divine Security Council, levy on them cruel sanctions, polluting their water with blood, destroying their livelihood with hail and locusts? And, even more gruesome, how could a merciful God send his angels to murder every single Egyptian firstborn child?
On leaving Egypt, the Israelites were encouraged to steal their neighbors’ property. It is rather curious that the Biblical story-teller, who was certainly deeply religious, did not omit this detail. And this just a few weeks before the Ten Commandments were handed down to the Israelites by God personally, including “Thou Shalt Not Steal”.
No one seems ever to have given much thought to the ethical side of the conquest of Canaan. God promised the Children of Israel a land which was the home of other peoples. He told them to kill these peoples, expressly commanding them to commit genocide. For some reason, He singled out the people of Amalek, ordering the Israelites to eradicate them altogether. Later, the glorious King Saul was dethroned by His prophet because he showed mercy and did not murder his Amalekite prisoners-of-war, men, women and children.
Of course, these texts were written by people living in times long past, when the ethics of individuals and nations were different, as were the rules of war. But the Haggadah is recited - today as before - uncritically, without any reflection on these horrible aspects. Especially in religious schools in Israel today , the commandment to commit genocide against the non-Jewish population of Palestine is taken by many teachers and pupils quite literally.
INDOCTRINATION: This is the real point of these reflections.
There are two sentences in the Haggadah that always had – and still have – a profound impact on the present.
One is the central idea on which almost all Jews base their historical outlook: “In every generation they rise against us to destroy us”.
This does not apply to a specific time or to a specific place. It is regarded as an eternal truth that applies to all places, all times. ”They” is the entire outside world, all non-Jews everywhere. Children hear this on Seder evening on their father’s knee, long before they are able to read and write, and from then on they hear or recite it every year for decades. It expresses the total conscious or unconscious conviction of almost all Jews, whether in Los Angeles, California, or in Lod, Israel. It certainly directs the policy of the State of Israel.
The second sentence, which complements the first, is a cry to God: “Pour out your wrath upon the nations that do not know you…for they have devoured Jacob and desolated his home…Pour out your wrath on them! May your blazing anger overtake them! Pursue them from under the heavens of the Lord!…”
The word “nations” in this text has a double meaning. The Hebrew word is “goyim”, an ancient Hebrew term for “peoples”. Even the ancient Children of Israel were called a “Holy Goy”. But over the centuries, the word has taken on another meaning, and is understood to refer to all non-Jews, in a very derogatory way. (As in the Yiddish song “Oy, Oy, Oy, / Drunk is the Goy.”)
To understand this text properly, one has to remember that it was written as a cry from the heart of a defenseless, persecuted people who had no means to take revenge on their torturers. To raise their spirits on the joyful Seder evening, they had to put their trust in God, crying out to Him that he should take revenge in their stead.
(During the Seder ritual, the door is always left open. Officially, that is to allow the Prophet Elias to enter, if he should miraculously rise from the dead. In reality it was to allow the Goyim to look in, so as to disprove the anti-Semitic libel that Jews baked their unleavened Pesach bread with the blood of kidnapped Christian children.)
THE LESSON: In the Diaspora, this craving for revenge was both understandable and ineffective. But the founding of the State of Israel has changed the situation completely. In Israel, Jews are far from being defenseless. We don’t have to rely on God to take revenge for the evils done unto us, past or present, real or imagined. We can pour out our wrath ourselves, on our neighbors, the Palestinians and other Arabs, on our minorities, on our victims.
That is the real danger of the Haggadah, as I see it. It was written by and for helpless Jews living in perpetual danger. It raised their spirits once a year, when they felt safe for a moment, protected by their God, surrounded by their families.
Taken out of this context and applied to a new, completely different situation, it can set us on an evil course. Telling ourselves that everybody is out to destroy us, yesterday and most certainly tomorrow, we consider the grandiloquent bombast of an Iranian bigmouth as a living proof of the validity of the old maxim. They are out to kill us, so we must – according to another ancient Jewish injunction – kill them first.
So, on this Seder evening, let our feelings be guided by the noble, inspiring part of the Haggadah , the part about the slaves who rose up against tyranny and took their fate in their own hands – and not the part about pouring out our wrath.
Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי
I AM writing this on Friday night, the eve of Passover. At this moment, all over the world, millions of Jews are gathered around the family table, observing the Seder, reading aloud from the same book: the Haggadah, which tells the story of the Exodus from Egypt.
The impact of this book on Jewish life is immense. Every Jew takes part in this ceremony from earliest childhood and plays an active part in the ritual. Wherever a Jewish man or woman goes in later life, they will take with them a memory of the warmth and togetherness of the family, the magical atmosphere – and the overt and subliminal message conveyed by the text.
Whoever invented the Seder (“order”) ritual, many centuries ago, was a genius. All human senses are involved: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting. It includes eating a ritualized meal, drinking four glasses of wine, touching various symbolic objects, playing a game with the children (searching for a hidden piece of Matzo). It ends with singing several religious songs together. The accumulated effect is magical.
More than any other Jewish text, the Haggadah forms the Jewish conscious – or, rather, unconscious - mind today, as in the past, influencing our collective behavior and Israeli national policy.
There are many different ways to view this book.
LITERATURE: As a literary work, the Haggadah is rather inferior. The text is devoid of beauty, full of repetitions, platitudes and banalities.
This may cause wonderment. The Hebrew Bible – the Bible in Hebrew – is a work of unique beauty. In many places, its beauty is intoxicating. The peaks of Western culture – Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy – are not its equal. Even the later Jewish religious texts – Mishnah, Talmud and so forth – while not so uplifting, contain passages of literary merit. The Haggadah has none. It is a text devised purely for indoctrination.
HISTORY: It’s not. Though it claims to tell history, the Haggadah has nothing to do with real history.
There can no longer be the slightest doubt that the Exodus never happened. Neither the Exodus, nor the wandering in the desert, nor the conquest of Canaan.
The Egyptians were obsessive chroniclers. Many tens of thousands of tablets have already been deciphered. It would have been impossible for an event like the exodus to pass without being reported at length. Not if 600,000 people left, as the Bible tells it, or 60,000, or even 6000. Especially if during the flight a whole Egyptian army contingent, including war chariots, was drowned.
The same goes for the Conquest. Because of acute security concerns, after being invaded once from there, the Egyptians employed a host of spies, - travelers, merchants and others - to follow closely the events in neighboring Canaan, in every single one of its towns and at all times. An invasion of Canaan, even a minor one, would have been reported. Except for the periodic incursions of Bedouin tribes, nothing was recorded.
Moreover, the Egyptian towns mentioned in the Bible did not exist at the time the event is supposed to have happened. They did exist, however, when the Bible was written, in the first or second century BC.
There is no need to point out that after a hundred years of frantic archaeological searching by devout Christians and Zionist zealots, not a shred of concrete evidence for the conquest of Canaan has been found (nor that the Kingdoms of Saul, David or Salomon ever existed).
But is this really important? Not a bit of it!
The Passover story does not derive its immense power from any claim to be history. It is a myth that grips the human imagination, a myth that is the basis of a great religion, a myth that directs the behavior of people to this very day. Without the Exodus story, there would probably be no State of Israel today – and certainly not in Palestine.
THE GLORY: One can read the Exodus story as a shining example of all that is good and inspiring in the annals of humanity.
Here is the story of a small and powerless people that rises up against a brutal tyranny, throws off its chains and gains a new homeland, creating a revolutionary new moral code on the way.
Seen in this way, the Exodus is a victory of the human spirit, an inspiration for all downtrodden peoples. And indeed, it has served this purpose many times in the past. The Pilgrim Fathers, the founders of the American nation, were inspired by it, and so were many rebels throughout history.
THE OTHER SIDE: When one reads the Biblical text attentively , without religious blinkers, some aspects gives us food for other thoughts.
Let’s take the Ten Plagues. Why were the entire Egyptian people punished for the misdeeds of one tyrant, Pharaoh? Why did God, like a divine Security Council, levy on them cruel sanctions, polluting their water with blood, destroying their livelihood with hail and locusts? And, even more gruesome, how could a merciful God send his angels to murder every single Egyptian firstborn child?
On leaving Egypt, the Israelites were encouraged to steal their neighbors’ property. It is rather curious that the Biblical story-teller, who was certainly deeply religious, did not omit this detail. And this just a few weeks before the Ten Commandments were handed down to the Israelites by God personally, including “Thou Shalt Not Steal”.
No one seems ever to have given much thought to the ethical side of the conquest of Canaan. God promised the Children of Israel a land which was the home of other peoples. He told them to kill these peoples, expressly commanding them to commit genocide. For some reason, He singled out the people of Amalek, ordering the Israelites to eradicate them altogether. Later, the glorious King Saul was dethroned by His prophet because he showed mercy and did not murder his Amalekite prisoners-of-war, men, women and children.
Of course, these texts were written by people living in times long past, when the ethics of individuals and nations were different, as were the rules of war. But the Haggadah is recited - today as before - uncritically, without any reflection on these horrible aspects. Especially in religious schools in Israel today , the commandment to commit genocide against the non-Jewish population of Palestine is taken by many teachers and pupils quite literally.
INDOCTRINATION: This is the real point of these reflections.
There are two sentences in the Haggadah that always had – and still have – a profound impact on the present.
One is the central idea on which almost all Jews base their historical outlook: “In every generation they rise against us to destroy us”.
This does not apply to a specific time or to a specific place. It is regarded as an eternal truth that applies to all places, all times. ”They” is the entire outside world, all non-Jews everywhere. Children hear this on Seder evening on their father’s knee, long before they are able to read and write, and from then on they hear or recite it every year for decades. It expresses the total conscious or unconscious conviction of almost all Jews, whether in Los Angeles, California, or in Lod, Israel. It certainly directs the policy of the State of Israel.
The second sentence, which complements the first, is a cry to God: “Pour out your wrath upon the nations that do not know you…for they have devoured Jacob and desolated his home…Pour out your wrath on them! May your blazing anger overtake them! Pursue them from under the heavens of the Lord!…”
The word “nations” in this text has a double meaning. The Hebrew word is “goyim”, an ancient Hebrew term for “peoples”. Even the ancient Children of Israel were called a “Holy Goy”. But over the centuries, the word has taken on another meaning, and is understood to refer to all non-Jews, in a very derogatory way. (As in the Yiddish song “Oy, Oy, Oy, / Drunk is the Goy.”)
To understand this text properly, one has to remember that it was written as a cry from the heart of a defenseless, persecuted people who had no means to take revenge on their torturers. To raise their spirits on the joyful Seder evening, they had to put their trust in God, crying out to Him that he should take revenge in their stead.
(During the Seder ritual, the door is always left open. Officially, that is to allow the Prophet Elias to enter, if he should miraculously rise from the dead. In reality it was to allow the Goyim to look in, so as to disprove the anti-Semitic libel that Jews baked their unleavened Pesach bread with the blood of kidnapped Christian children.)
THE LESSON: In the Diaspora, this craving for revenge was both understandable and ineffective. But the founding of the State of Israel has changed the situation completely. In Israel, Jews are far from being defenseless. We don’t have to rely on God to take revenge for the evils done unto us, past or present, real or imagined. We can pour out our wrath ourselves, on our neighbors, the Palestinians and other Arabs, on our minorities, on our victims.
That is the real danger of the Haggadah, as I see it. It was written by and for helpless Jews living in perpetual danger. It raised their spirits once a year, when they felt safe for a moment, protected by their God, surrounded by their families.
Taken out of this context and applied to a new, completely different situation, it can set us on an evil course. Telling ourselves that everybody is out to destroy us, yesterday and most certainly tomorrow, we consider the grandiloquent bombast of an Iranian bigmouth as a living proof of the validity of the old maxim. They are out to kill us, so we must – according to another ancient Jewish injunction – kill them first.
So, on this Seder evening, let our feelings be guided by the noble, inspiring part of the Haggadah , the part about the slaves who rose up against tyranny and took their fate in their own hands – and not the part about pouring out our wrath.
segunda-feira, 2 de abril de 2012
THE NEW MANDELA
31 March 2012/ Gush Shalom גוש שלום http://zope.gush-shalom.org (Israel)
Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי
MARWAN BARGHOUTI has spoken up. After a long silence, he has sent a message from prison.
In Israeli ears, this message does not sound pleasant. But for Palestinians, and for Arabs in general, it makes sense.
His message may well become the new program of the Palestinian liberation movement.
I FIRST met Marwan in the heyday of post-Oslo optimism. He was emerging as a leader of the new Palestinian generation, the home-grown young activists, men and women, who had matured in the first Intifada.
He is a man of small physical stature and large personality. When I met him, he was already the leader of Tanzim (“organization”), the youth group of the Fatah movement.
The topic of our conversations then was the organization of demonstrations and other non-violent actions, based on close cooperation between the Palestinians and Israeli peace groups. The aim was peace between Israel and a new State of Palestine.
When the Oslo process died with the assassinations of Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, Marwan and his organization became targets. Successive Israeli leaders – Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon – decided to put an end to the two-state agenda. In the brutal “Defensive Shield operation (launched by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, the new leader of the Kadima Party) the Palestinian Authority was attacked, its services destroyed and many of its activists arrested.
Marwan Barghouti was put on trial. It was alleged that, as the leader of Tanzim, he was responsible for several “terrorist” attacks in Israel. His trial was a mockery, resembling a Roman gladiatorial arena more than a judicial process. The hall was packed with howling rightists, presenting themselves as “victims of terrorism”. Members of Gush Shalom protested against the trial inside the court building but we were not allowed anywhere near the accused.
Marwan was sentenced to five life sentences. The picture of him raising his shackled hands above his head has become a Palestinian national icon. When I visited his family in Ramallah, it was hanging in the living room.
IN PRISON, Marwan Barghouti was immediately recognized as the leader of all Fatah prisoners. He is respected by Hamas activists as well. Together, the imprisoned leaders of Fatah and Hamas published several statements calling for Palestinian unity and reconciliation. These were widely distributed outside and received with admiration and respect.
(Members of the extended Barghouti family, by the way, play a major role in Palestinian affairs across the entire spectrum from moderate to extremist. One of them is Mustapha Barghouti, a doctor who heads a moderate Palestinian party with many connections abroad, whom I regularly meet at demonstrations in Bilin and elsewhere. I once joked that we always cry when we see each other – from tear gas. The family has its roots in a group of villages north of Jerusalem.)
NOWADAYS, MARWAN Barghouti is considered the outstanding candidate for leader of Fatah and president of the Palestinian Authority after Mahmoud Abbas. He is one of the very few personalities around whom all Palestinians, Fatah as well as Hamas, can unite.
After the capture of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, when the prisoner exchange was discussed, Hamas put Marwan Barghouti on top of the list of Palestinian prisoners whose release it demanded. This was a very unusual gesture, since Marwan belonged to the rival – and reviled - faction.
The Israeli government struck Marwan from the list right away, and remained adamant. When Shalit was finally released, Marwan stayed in prison. Obviously he was considered more dangerous than hundreds of Hamas “terrorists” with “blood on their hands”.
Why?
Cynics would say: because he wants peace. Because he sticks to the two-state solution. Because he can unify the Palestinian people for that purpose. All good reasons for a Netanyahu to keep him behind bars.
SO WHAT did Marwan tell his people this week?
Clearly, his attitude has hardened. So, one must assume, has the attitude of the Palestinian people at large.
He calls for a Third Intifada, a non-violent mass uprising in the spirit of the Arab Spring.
His manifesto is a clear rejection of the policy of Mahmoud Abbas, who maintains limited but all-important cooperation with the Israeli occupation authorities. Marwan calls for a total rupture of all forms of cooperation, whether economic, military or other.
A focal point of this cooperation is the day-to-day collaboration of the American-trained Palestinian security services with the Israeli occupation forces. This arrangement has effectively stopped violent Palestinian attacks in the occupied territories and in Israel proper. It guarantees, In practice, the security of the growing Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Marwan also calls for a total boycott of Israel, Israeli institutions and products in the Palestinian territories and throughout the world. Israeli products should disappear from West Bank shops, Palestinian products should be promoted.
At the same time, Marwan advocates an official end to the charade called “peace negotiations”. This term, by the way, is never heard anymore in Israel. First it was replaced with “peace process”, then “political process”, and lately “the political matter”. The simple word “peace” has become taboo among rightists and most “leftists” alike. It’s political poison.
Marwan proposes to make the absence of peace negotiations official. No more international talk about “reviving the peace process”, no more rushing around of ridiculous people like Tony Blair, no more hollow announcements by Hillary Clinton and Catherine Ashton, no more empty declarations of the “Quartet”. Since the Israeli government clearly has abandoned the two-state solution – which it never really accepted in the first place – keeping up the pretense just harms the Palestinian struggle.
Instead of this hypocrisy, Marwan proposes to renew the battle in the UN. First, apply again to the Security Council for the acceptance of Palestine as a member state, challenging the US to use its solitary veto openly against practically the whole world. After the expected rejection of the Palestinian request by the Council as a result of the veto, request a decision by the General Assembly, where the vast majority would vote in favor. Though this would not be binding, it would demonstrate that the freedom of Palestine enjoys the overwhelming support of the family of nations, and isolate Israel (and the US) even more.
Parallel to this course of action, Marwan insists on Palestinian unity, using his considerable moral force to put pressure on both Fatah and Hamas.
TO SUMMARIZE, Marwan Barghouti has given up all hope of achieving Palestinian freedom through cooperation with Israel, or even Israeli opposition forces. The Israeli peace movement is not mentioned anymore. “Normalization” has become a dirty word.
These ideas are not new, but coming from the No. 1 Palestinian prisoner, the foremost candidate for the succession of Mahmoud Abbas, the hero of the Palestinian masses, it means a turn to a more militant course, both in substance and in tone.
Marwan remains peace oriented – as he made clear when, in a rare recent appearance in court, he called out to the Israeli journalists that he continues to support the two-state solution. He also remains committed to non-violent action, having come to the conclusion that the violent attacks of yesteryear harmed the Palestinian cause instead of furthering it.
He wants to call a halt to the gradual and unwilling slide of the Palestinian Authority into a Vichy-like collaboration, while the expansion of the Israeli “settlement enterprise” goes on undisturbed.
NOT BY accident did Marwan publish his manifesto on the eve of “Land Day”, the world-wide day of protest against the occupation.
“Land Day” is the anniversary of an event that took place in 1976 to protest against the decision of the Israeli government to expropriate huge tracts of Arab-owned land in Galilee and other parts of Israel. The Israeli army and police fired on the protesters, killing six of them. (The day after, two of my friends and I laid wreaths on the graves of the victims, an act that earned me an outbreak of hatred and vilification I have seldom experienced.)
Land day was a turning point for Israel’s Arab citizens, and later became a symbol for Arabs everywhere. This year, the Netanyahu government threatened to shoot anybody who even approaches our borders. It may well be a harbinger for the Third Intifada heralded by Marwan.
For some time now, the world has lost much of its interest in Palestine. Everything looks quiet. Netanyahu has succeeded in deflecting world attention from Palestine to Iran. But in this country, nothing is ever static. While it seems that nothing is happening, settlements are growing incessantly, and so is the deep resentment of the Palestinians who see this happening before their eyes.
Marwan Barghouti’s manifesto expresses the near-unanimous feelings of the Palestinians in the West Bank and elsewhere. Like Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa, the man in prison may well be more important than the leaders outside.
Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי
MARWAN BARGHOUTI has spoken up. After a long silence, he has sent a message from prison.
In Israeli ears, this message does not sound pleasant. But for Palestinians, and for Arabs in general, it makes sense.
His message may well become the new program of the Palestinian liberation movement.
I FIRST met Marwan in the heyday of post-Oslo optimism. He was emerging as a leader of the new Palestinian generation, the home-grown young activists, men and women, who had matured in the first Intifada.
He is a man of small physical stature and large personality. When I met him, he was already the leader of Tanzim (“organization”), the youth group of the Fatah movement.
The topic of our conversations then was the organization of demonstrations and other non-violent actions, based on close cooperation between the Palestinians and Israeli peace groups. The aim was peace between Israel and a new State of Palestine.
When the Oslo process died with the assassinations of Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, Marwan and his organization became targets. Successive Israeli leaders – Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon – decided to put an end to the two-state agenda. In the brutal “Defensive Shield operation (launched by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, the new leader of the Kadima Party) the Palestinian Authority was attacked, its services destroyed and many of its activists arrested.
Marwan Barghouti was put on trial. It was alleged that, as the leader of Tanzim, he was responsible for several “terrorist” attacks in Israel. His trial was a mockery, resembling a Roman gladiatorial arena more than a judicial process. The hall was packed with howling rightists, presenting themselves as “victims of terrorism”. Members of Gush Shalom protested against the trial inside the court building but we were not allowed anywhere near the accused.
Marwan was sentenced to five life sentences. The picture of him raising his shackled hands above his head has become a Palestinian national icon. When I visited his family in Ramallah, it was hanging in the living room.
IN PRISON, Marwan Barghouti was immediately recognized as the leader of all Fatah prisoners. He is respected by Hamas activists as well. Together, the imprisoned leaders of Fatah and Hamas published several statements calling for Palestinian unity and reconciliation. These were widely distributed outside and received with admiration and respect.
(Members of the extended Barghouti family, by the way, play a major role in Palestinian affairs across the entire spectrum from moderate to extremist. One of them is Mustapha Barghouti, a doctor who heads a moderate Palestinian party with many connections abroad, whom I regularly meet at demonstrations in Bilin and elsewhere. I once joked that we always cry when we see each other – from tear gas. The family has its roots in a group of villages north of Jerusalem.)
NOWADAYS, MARWAN Barghouti is considered the outstanding candidate for leader of Fatah and president of the Palestinian Authority after Mahmoud Abbas. He is one of the very few personalities around whom all Palestinians, Fatah as well as Hamas, can unite.
After the capture of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, when the prisoner exchange was discussed, Hamas put Marwan Barghouti on top of the list of Palestinian prisoners whose release it demanded. This was a very unusual gesture, since Marwan belonged to the rival – and reviled - faction.
The Israeli government struck Marwan from the list right away, and remained adamant. When Shalit was finally released, Marwan stayed in prison. Obviously he was considered more dangerous than hundreds of Hamas “terrorists” with “blood on their hands”.
Why?
Cynics would say: because he wants peace. Because he sticks to the two-state solution. Because he can unify the Palestinian people for that purpose. All good reasons for a Netanyahu to keep him behind bars.
SO WHAT did Marwan tell his people this week?
Clearly, his attitude has hardened. So, one must assume, has the attitude of the Palestinian people at large.
He calls for a Third Intifada, a non-violent mass uprising in the spirit of the Arab Spring.
His manifesto is a clear rejection of the policy of Mahmoud Abbas, who maintains limited but all-important cooperation with the Israeli occupation authorities. Marwan calls for a total rupture of all forms of cooperation, whether economic, military or other.
A focal point of this cooperation is the day-to-day collaboration of the American-trained Palestinian security services with the Israeli occupation forces. This arrangement has effectively stopped violent Palestinian attacks in the occupied territories and in Israel proper. It guarantees, In practice, the security of the growing Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Marwan also calls for a total boycott of Israel, Israeli institutions and products in the Palestinian territories and throughout the world. Israeli products should disappear from West Bank shops, Palestinian products should be promoted.
At the same time, Marwan advocates an official end to the charade called “peace negotiations”. This term, by the way, is never heard anymore in Israel. First it was replaced with “peace process”, then “political process”, and lately “the political matter”. The simple word “peace” has become taboo among rightists and most “leftists” alike. It’s political poison.
Marwan proposes to make the absence of peace negotiations official. No more international talk about “reviving the peace process”, no more rushing around of ridiculous people like Tony Blair, no more hollow announcements by Hillary Clinton and Catherine Ashton, no more empty declarations of the “Quartet”. Since the Israeli government clearly has abandoned the two-state solution – which it never really accepted in the first place – keeping up the pretense just harms the Palestinian struggle.
Instead of this hypocrisy, Marwan proposes to renew the battle in the UN. First, apply again to the Security Council for the acceptance of Palestine as a member state, challenging the US to use its solitary veto openly against practically the whole world. After the expected rejection of the Palestinian request by the Council as a result of the veto, request a decision by the General Assembly, where the vast majority would vote in favor. Though this would not be binding, it would demonstrate that the freedom of Palestine enjoys the overwhelming support of the family of nations, and isolate Israel (and the US) even more.
Parallel to this course of action, Marwan insists on Palestinian unity, using his considerable moral force to put pressure on both Fatah and Hamas.
TO SUMMARIZE, Marwan Barghouti has given up all hope of achieving Palestinian freedom through cooperation with Israel, or even Israeli opposition forces. The Israeli peace movement is not mentioned anymore. “Normalization” has become a dirty word.
These ideas are not new, but coming from the No. 1 Palestinian prisoner, the foremost candidate for the succession of Mahmoud Abbas, the hero of the Palestinian masses, it means a turn to a more militant course, both in substance and in tone.
Marwan remains peace oriented – as he made clear when, in a rare recent appearance in court, he called out to the Israeli journalists that he continues to support the two-state solution. He also remains committed to non-violent action, having come to the conclusion that the violent attacks of yesteryear harmed the Palestinian cause instead of furthering it.
He wants to call a halt to the gradual and unwilling slide of the Palestinian Authority into a Vichy-like collaboration, while the expansion of the Israeli “settlement enterprise” goes on undisturbed.
NOT BY accident did Marwan publish his manifesto on the eve of “Land Day”, the world-wide day of protest against the occupation.
“Land Day” is the anniversary of an event that took place in 1976 to protest against the decision of the Israeli government to expropriate huge tracts of Arab-owned land in Galilee and other parts of Israel. The Israeli army and police fired on the protesters, killing six of them. (The day after, two of my friends and I laid wreaths on the graves of the victims, an act that earned me an outbreak of hatred and vilification I have seldom experienced.)
Land day was a turning point for Israel’s Arab citizens, and later became a symbol for Arabs everywhere. This year, the Netanyahu government threatened to shoot anybody who even approaches our borders. It may well be a harbinger for the Third Intifada heralded by Marwan.
For some time now, the world has lost much of its interest in Palestine. Everything looks quiet. Netanyahu has succeeded in deflecting world attention from Palestine to Iran. But in this country, nothing is ever static. While it seems that nothing is happening, settlements are growing incessantly, and so is the deep resentment of the Palestinians who see this happening before their eyes.
Marwan Barghouti’s manifesto expresses the near-unanimous feelings of the Palestinians in the West Bank and elsewhere. Like Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa, the man in prison may well be more important than the leaders outside.
sexta-feira, 24 de fevereiro de 2012
segunda-feira, 20 de fevereiro de 2012
THOU SHALT NOT KILL (THYSELF)
18 February 2012, Gush Shalom גוש שלום (Israel)
Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי
AFTER THE founding of Israel, God appeared to David Ben-Gurion and told him: “You have created a state for my chosen people in my holy land. This merits a great reward. Tell me what you wish, and I will grant it.”
Ben-Gurion answered: “Almighty God, I wish that every person in Israel shall be wise, honest and a member of the Labor Party.”
“Dear me,” said God, “That is too much even for the Almighty. But I decree that every Israeli shall be two of the three.”
Since then, if a wise Israeli is a member of the Labor party, he is not honest. If an honest Israeli is a member of the Labor party, he is not wise. If he is wise and honest, he is not a member of the Labor Party.
THIS JOKE was popular in the 1950s. After 1967, another much less funny formula took its place.
It goes like this: many Israelis ask God for their state to be Jewish and democratic, and that it will include the entire country between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. That is too much even for the Almighty. So he asks them to choose between a state that is Jewish and democratic but only in part of the country, or a state in all the country that is Jewish but not democratic, or a state in the entire country that is democratic but not Jewish. To which I would add a fourth option: A Jewish and democratic state in the entire country, but only after driving out all the Arabs – some 5.5 million at this point, and growing quickly.
This is the choice facing us today as it did almost 45 years ago. It has only become more sharply defined.
For any foreseeable future, the fourth alternative can be excluded. The circumstances which led, in 1948, to the expulsion of more than half the Palestinian people from the territory that became Israel were unique, and not likely to return in the coming decades. So we must deal with the present demographic reality.
The current government is determined to prevent any peace that would compel it to give up any part of the occupied territories (22% of pre-1948 Palestine). There is no one around who would compel them to do so.
What remains?
A state that is either non-democratic or non-Jewish.
As things stand, the first possibility is certain to be realized, or, rather, to realize itself. This needs no conscious decision, since it is the default situation that already exists de facto.
This means, to use the popular catch phrase, an apartheid state: a state in which every instrument of power is in the hands of the Jewish-Israeli majority (some 6.5 million people), with limited rights for the 1.5 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. The Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, some four million, are granted no rights whatsoever - neither national, nor human nor civil.
The present state of “temporary” occupation can last forever, and is therefore ideal for this purpose. However, a future Israeli government, an even more nationalist one, could change the formal situation by annexing these territories to Israel. That would make, in practice, no difference.
As many Israelis see it, this situation could go on forever. The official slogan is: “We have no partner for peace”.
But can it really last? The Palestinian population throughout the country is growing rapidly, soon enough it will constitute the majority. The idealists who embrace this as the “One-state Solution” believe that the Apartheid State will slowly turn into a “state of all its citizens”.
If, after decades of oppression, civil war, atrocities and other plagues this really came into being, it would quickly turn into a Palestinian state, with a Jewish minority, like the Whites in present South Africa. It would be a negation of the whole Zionist enterprise, whose core purpose was to have one place in the world where Jews would be a majority. Most Jewish Israelis would probably emigrate.
For an Israeli, this would mean national suicide. Yet it is the inevitable outcome if the state continues on its present course.
IF A person wants to kill himself, as is his right, he has many ways to do so: poisoning, shooting, hanging, jumping from the roof etc. As a state, Israel also has several options.
Apart from the external ticking bomb (the “One-state Solution”), Israel also has an internal ticking bomb, which may be even more dangerous. Like the first option, the second one is already well on its way. If the first option depends at least partly on outside factors, the second is entirely self-made.
When Israel came into being, Orthodox Jews were a small minority. Since Ben-Gurion needed them for his coalition, he gave them some privileges which looked cheap to him. The Orthodox got their own education system, financed by the state, and were exempted from army service.
Some 60 years later, these privileges have grown to gigantic dimensions. To compensate for the lives lost in the Holocaust, and to increase the Jewish population, the Israeli government has encouraged natural increase by generous children’s subsidies. Since the religious of all shades have reproduced much more than any other Israelis (except Muslim Arabs), their part in the population has grown by leaps and bounds.
Orthodox families generally have 8-10 children. All these go to religious schools, where they study exclusively religious texts and don’t acquire any skills useful for working in a modern society. They don’t need them, since they do not work at all, devoting their entire lives to the study of the Talmud. They don’t need to interrupt their studying of the dead texts, because they don’t serve in the army.
If these were marginal phenomena in the early days of the state, they are now rapidly leading to a national emergency. Right from the beginning, almost all government coalitions have relied on the religious parties, because no party has ever won an overall majority in the Knesset. Almost all governing parties had to bribe their religious partners with ever increasing subsidies for children and adults, thus encouraging the growth of a population which neither serves in the army nor does any work.
The absence of the Orthodox from the labor force has severe effects on the economy, attested to by world financial institutions. Their absence from the army – as well as the absence of the Arab citizens, who are not drafted for obvious reasons – means that soon almost half the male population will not serve. This compels all the others to serve three full years, and then to do reserve duty for many more years.
Also, very soon, half the first grade pupils in Israel will be religious children, destined for a life without work, without paying taxes or serving in the army – all this paid for by the taxes of the diminishing number of the non-Orthodox.
Recently, after deepening unrest between religious and non-religious in Bet Shemesh, 25 km west of Jerusalem, the secularists demanded that the town be divided into two, one half Orthodox and the other secular. The Interior Minister, himself a leader of an Orthodox party, rejected this outright. As he candidly explained. since the Orthodox do not work and cannot pay municipal taxes, they cannot sustain a town of their own. They need the secular to work and pay.
This grotesque situation exists throughout the state. One can calculate when the whole edifice will come crashing down. International financial institutions as well as Israeli experts foretell disaster. Yet our political system does not make any change possible. The hold of the religious parties is as strong as ever.
Another method of suicide.
A THIRD method is less dramatic. Israel is rapidly becoming a state in which normal people just may not want to live.
In his monumental opus on the Crusades, the late British historian Steven Runciman maintained that the Crusader state did not collapse because of its military defeat, but because too many of its inhabitants just packed up and went back to Europe. Though many of them belonged to the 4th and even 8th generation of crusaders, the Crusader state had lost its attraction for them. The state of perpetual war and inner stagnation drove them out. The state collapsed when many more went away than came to join.
The Crusaders felt a stronger sense of belonging to Christendom than to the local Kingdom of Jerusalem. Today, many Israelis feel themselves first of all as Jews, belonging to a world-wide people, and only in second place Israelis.
That makes emigration easier.
A state without democracy, without equality, condemned by itself to an endless war, dominated by religious fanatics, with the gap between the abject poor and a handful of immensely rich growing from year to year – such a state will look less and less attractive to bright young people, who can easily find a better life elsewhere, while retaining their Jewish identity.
That, too, is a kind of national suicide.
I AM not, by nature, a prophet of doom. Quite the contrary.
We can easily avert all these dangers. But first of all we must recognize them and see where they are leading us.
I believe that the people of Israel – the Israeli nation – have the will to survive. But in order to survive, they must wake up from their apathetic stupor and change course – turning towards peace based on the two-state solution, separating the state from religion and building a new social order.
In the Jewish religion, suicide is a sin. It would be ironic if future historians were to conclude that the “Jewish State” committed suicide.
Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי
AFTER THE founding of Israel, God appeared to David Ben-Gurion and told him: “You have created a state for my chosen people in my holy land. This merits a great reward. Tell me what you wish, and I will grant it.”
Ben-Gurion answered: “Almighty God, I wish that every person in Israel shall be wise, honest and a member of the Labor Party.”
“Dear me,” said God, “That is too much even for the Almighty. But I decree that every Israeli shall be two of the three.”
Since then, if a wise Israeli is a member of the Labor party, he is not honest. If an honest Israeli is a member of the Labor party, he is not wise. If he is wise and honest, he is not a member of the Labor Party.
THIS JOKE was popular in the 1950s. After 1967, another much less funny formula took its place.
It goes like this: many Israelis ask God for their state to be Jewish and democratic, and that it will include the entire country between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. That is too much even for the Almighty. So he asks them to choose between a state that is Jewish and democratic but only in part of the country, or a state in all the country that is Jewish but not democratic, or a state in the entire country that is democratic but not Jewish. To which I would add a fourth option: A Jewish and democratic state in the entire country, but only after driving out all the Arabs – some 5.5 million at this point, and growing quickly.
This is the choice facing us today as it did almost 45 years ago. It has only become more sharply defined.
For any foreseeable future, the fourth alternative can be excluded. The circumstances which led, in 1948, to the expulsion of more than half the Palestinian people from the territory that became Israel were unique, and not likely to return in the coming decades. So we must deal with the present demographic reality.
The current government is determined to prevent any peace that would compel it to give up any part of the occupied territories (22% of pre-1948 Palestine). There is no one around who would compel them to do so.
What remains?
A state that is either non-democratic or non-Jewish.
As things stand, the first possibility is certain to be realized, or, rather, to realize itself. This needs no conscious decision, since it is the default situation that already exists de facto.
This means, to use the popular catch phrase, an apartheid state: a state in which every instrument of power is in the hands of the Jewish-Israeli majority (some 6.5 million people), with limited rights for the 1.5 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. The Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, some four million, are granted no rights whatsoever - neither national, nor human nor civil.
The present state of “temporary” occupation can last forever, and is therefore ideal for this purpose. However, a future Israeli government, an even more nationalist one, could change the formal situation by annexing these territories to Israel. That would make, in practice, no difference.
As many Israelis see it, this situation could go on forever. The official slogan is: “We have no partner for peace”.
But can it really last? The Palestinian population throughout the country is growing rapidly, soon enough it will constitute the majority. The idealists who embrace this as the “One-state Solution” believe that the Apartheid State will slowly turn into a “state of all its citizens”.
If, after decades of oppression, civil war, atrocities and other plagues this really came into being, it would quickly turn into a Palestinian state, with a Jewish minority, like the Whites in present South Africa. It would be a negation of the whole Zionist enterprise, whose core purpose was to have one place in the world where Jews would be a majority. Most Jewish Israelis would probably emigrate.
For an Israeli, this would mean national suicide. Yet it is the inevitable outcome if the state continues on its present course.
IF A person wants to kill himself, as is his right, he has many ways to do so: poisoning, shooting, hanging, jumping from the roof etc. As a state, Israel also has several options.
Apart from the external ticking bomb (the “One-state Solution”), Israel also has an internal ticking bomb, which may be even more dangerous. Like the first option, the second one is already well on its way. If the first option depends at least partly on outside factors, the second is entirely self-made.
When Israel came into being, Orthodox Jews were a small minority. Since Ben-Gurion needed them for his coalition, he gave them some privileges which looked cheap to him. The Orthodox got their own education system, financed by the state, and were exempted from army service.
Some 60 years later, these privileges have grown to gigantic dimensions. To compensate for the lives lost in the Holocaust, and to increase the Jewish population, the Israeli government has encouraged natural increase by generous children’s subsidies. Since the religious of all shades have reproduced much more than any other Israelis (except Muslim Arabs), their part in the population has grown by leaps and bounds.
Orthodox families generally have 8-10 children. All these go to religious schools, where they study exclusively religious texts and don’t acquire any skills useful for working in a modern society. They don’t need them, since they do not work at all, devoting their entire lives to the study of the Talmud. They don’t need to interrupt their studying of the dead texts, because they don’t serve in the army.
If these were marginal phenomena in the early days of the state, they are now rapidly leading to a national emergency. Right from the beginning, almost all government coalitions have relied on the religious parties, because no party has ever won an overall majority in the Knesset. Almost all governing parties had to bribe their religious partners with ever increasing subsidies for children and adults, thus encouraging the growth of a population which neither serves in the army nor does any work.
The absence of the Orthodox from the labor force has severe effects on the economy, attested to by world financial institutions. Their absence from the army – as well as the absence of the Arab citizens, who are not drafted for obvious reasons – means that soon almost half the male population will not serve. This compels all the others to serve three full years, and then to do reserve duty for many more years.
Also, very soon, half the first grade pupils in Israel will be religious children, destined for a life without work, without paying taxes or serving in the army – all this paid for by the taxes of the diminishing number of the non-Orthodox.
Recently, after deepening unrest between religious and non-religious in Bet Shemesh, 25 km west of Jerusalem, the secularists demanded that the town be divided into two, one half Orthodox and the other secular. The Interior Minister, himself a leader of an Orthodox party, rejected this outright. As he candidly explained. since the Orthodox do not work and cannot pay municipal taxes, they cannot sustain a town of their own. They need the secular to work and pay.
This grotesque situation exists throughout the state. One can calculate when the whole edifice will come crashing down. International financial institutions as well as Israeli experts foretell disaster. Yet our political system does not make any change possible. The hold of the religious parties is as strong as ever.
Another method of suicide.
A THIRD method is less dramatic. Israel is rapidly becoming a state in which normal people just may not want to live.
In his monumental opus on the Crusades, the late British historian Steven Runciman maintained that the Crusader state did not collapse because of its military defeat, but because too many of its inhabitants just packed up and went back to Europe. Though many of them belonged to the 4th and even 8th generation of crusaders, the Crusader state had lost its attraction for them. The state of perpetual war and inner stagnation drove them out. The state collapsed when many more went away than came to join.
The Crusaders felt a stronger sense of belonging to Christendom than to the local Kingdom of Jerusalem. Today, many Israelis feel themselves first of all as Jews, belonging to a world-wide people, and only in second place Israelis.
That makes emigration easier.
A state without democracy, without equality, condemned by itself to an endless war, dominated by religious fanatics, with the gap between the abject poor and a handful of immensely rich growing from year to year – such a state will look less and less attractive to bright young people, who can easily find a better life elsewhere, while retaining their Jewish identity.
That, too, is a kind of national suicide.
I AM not, by nature, a prophet of doom. Quite the contrary.
We can easily avert all these dangers. But first of all we must recognize them and see where they are leading us.
I believe that the people of Israel – the Israeli nation – have the will to survive. But in order to survive, they must wake up from their apathetic stupor and change course – turning towards peace based on the two-state solution, separating the state from religion and building a new social order.
In the Jewish religion, suicide is a sin. It would be ironic if future historians were to conclude that the “Jewish State” committed suicide.
quarta-feira, 15 de fevereiro de 2012
STORM OVER HEBRON
11 February 2012, Gush Shalom גוש שלום (Israel)
Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי
THERE SEEMS to be no limit to the troubles caused by the town of Hebron.
This time, the reason is as innocent as can be: the organized visits of schoolchildren to the Cave of Machpelah, where our patriarchs are supposed to be buried.
By rights, Hebron should be a symbol of brotherhood and conciliation. It is the town associated with the legendary figure of Abraham, the common ancestor of both Hebrews and Arabs. Indeed, the name itself connotes friendship: the Hebrew name Hebron stems from the same root as “haver”, friend, comrade, while the town’s Arab name - al-Halil - means “friend”. Both names refer to Abraham being the friend of God.
Abraham’s firstborn, Ishmael, was the son of the concubine Hagar, who was driven out into the desert to die there, when the legitimate son, Isaac, was born to Sarah. Ishmael, the patriarch of the Arabs, and Isaac, the patriarch of the Jews, were enemies, but when their father died, they came together to bury him: “Then Abraham gave up the ghost and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years (175), and was gathered to his people. And his two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, buried him in the cave of Machpelah…” (Genesis, 25)
IN RECENT times, Hebron has acquired a very different reputation.
For centuries, a small Jewish community lived there in peace, in perfect harmony with the Muslim inhabitants. But in 1929, something awful happened. A group of Jewish fanatics staged an incident in Jerusalem, when they tried to change the delicate status quo at the Western Wall. Religious riots broke out throughout the country. In Hebron, Muslims massacred 59 Jews, men, women and children, an event that left an indelible mark on Jewish memory. (Less well known is the fact that 263 Jews were saved by their Arab neighbors.)
Shortly after the occupation of the West Bank in the Six-day War, a group of fanatical messianic Jews infiltrated Hebron by stealth and founded the first Jewish settlement. This grew into a veritable nest of extremism, including some out and out fascists. One of them was the mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein, who slaughtered 29 Muslims at prayer in the Cave of Machpelah – actually no cave at all, but a fortress-like building, perhaps built by King Herod.
Since then, there has been endless trouble between the 500 or so Jewish settlers in the city, who enjoy the protection of the army, and the 165,000 Arab inhabitants, who are completely at their mercy, devoid of any human or civil rights.
IF THE schoolchildren had been sent there to listen to both sides and learn something about the complexity of the conflict, that would be fine. But this was not the intention of the Minister of Education, Gideon Sa’ar.
Personally, Sa’ar (the name means “storm”) is a nice person. In fact, he started his career in my magazine, Haolam Hazeh. However, he is a fanatical right-winger, who believes that his job is to cleanse Israeli children of the rotten cosmopolitan liberalism that he imagines their teachers are steeped in, and to turn them into uniform, loyal patriots, ready to die for the fatherland. He is sending army officers to preach in the classrooms, demands that teachers instill “Jewish values” (i.e. nationalist religiosity) even in secular schools, and now wants to send them to Hebron and other “Jewish” places, so their “Jewish roots” grow more robust.
The children sent there see the “Jewish” Cave of Machpelah (which was for 13 centuries a mosque), the settlers, the streets that have become empty of Arabs, and listen to the indoctrination of patriotic guides. No contact with Arabs, no other side, no others at all.
When a rebellious school invited members of the peace-oriented ex-soldiers’ group “Breaking the Silence” to accompany them and show them the other side, police intervened and prevented them from visiting the town. Now some 200 teachers and principals have signed an official protest against the Education Minister's project and demanded its cancellation.
Sa’ar is upset. With flaming eyes behind his glasses, he fervently denounced the teachers. How could such traitors be allowed to educate our precious children?
ALL THIS reminded me of my late wife, Rachel. I may have told the story before. If so, I must ask for indulgence. I just can’t help recounting it again.
Rachel was for many years a teacher of the first and second grade. She believed that after that, nothing further could be done to mould the character of a human being.
Like me, Rachel loved the Bible – not as a religious text or a book of history (which it most decidedly is not) but as a superb literary work, unequalled in its beauty.
The Bible tells how the mythological Abraham bought the Cave of Machpelah to bury his wife, Sarah. It is a wonderful story, and, as was her wont, Rachel had the children play it in class. This not only brought the story to life, but also allowed her to push forward timid boys and girls who lacked self-confidence. When they were chosen for an important role in one of these improvised plays, they would gain self-respect and suddenly bloom. Some had their whole life changed (as they confided to me decades later).
The Bible (Genesis 23) has it that Abraham asked the people of Hebron for a plot to bury his wife, when she died at the ripe old age of 127. All the Hebronites offered their fields for free. But Abraham wanted to buy the field of Ephron, the son of Zohar, “for as much money as it is worth”.
Ephron, however, refused to accept any money and insisted on giving the honored guest the field as a gift. After much exchange of pleasantries, Ephron finally came to the point: “My lord, hearken unto me: the land is worth four hundred shekels of silver, what is that betwixt you and me?”
The scene was duly enacted, with one 7-year old boy with a long beard playing Abraham and another playing Ephron, with the rest of the class as the people of Hebron, who were the witnesses to the transaction, as Abraham had requested.
Rachel explained to the children that this was an ancient way of conducting business, not coming straight to the crass matter of money, but first exchanging polite words and protestations, and then gradually working towards a compromise. She added that this civilized procedure is still followed in the Arab world, and especially among the Bedouins, even in Israel. For the children, who had probably never heard a good word about Arabs before, this was a revelation.
Afterwards, Rachel asked the teacher of the parallel class how she had told the same story. “What do you mean,” the woman replied, “I told them the truth, that Arabs always lie and cheat. If Ephron wanted 400 shekels, why didn’t he say so straight away, instead of pretending to be ready to give it as a gift?”
IF TEACHERS like Rachel could take their children to Hebron and show them around, letting them visit the Arab spice market and the workshops which for centuries have been producing the unique blue Hebron glass, it would be wonderful. If children could speak with Arabs and Jews, including even the fanatics of both sides, it could be highly educational. Visiting the tombs of the patriarchs (which, most serious archaeologists believe, are actually the graves of Muslim Sheiks) which are sacred to both Muslims and Jews, could convey a message. Jewish Israelis are quite unaware that Abraham also figures as a prophet in the Koran.
Before conquering Jerusalem and declaring it his capital, the mythological King David (also revered as a prophet in Islam) had his capital in Hebron. Indeed, the town, which is located 930 meters above sea level, enjoys wonderful air and agreeable temperatures in both summer and winter.
This whole episode brings me back to an old hobbyhorse of mine: the need for all Israeli schoolchildren, Jews and Arabs, to learn the history of the country.
This seems self-evident, but is not. Far from it. Arab children in Israel learn Arab history, starting with the birth of Islam in far-away Mecca. Jewish children learn Jewish history, which played no significant role in this country for almost 2000 years. Big chunks of the country’s history are unknown to one side or to both. Jewish pupils know nothing about the Mamluks and next to nothing about the Crusaders (except that they butchered the Jews in Germany on their way here), Arab pupils know very little about the Canaanites and the Maccabees.
Learning the history of the country in its entirety, including its Jewish and Muslim phases, would create a unified common view which would bring the two peoples much closer to each other, and make peace and reconciliation easier. But this prospect is as distant today as it was 40 years ago, when I raised it for the first time in the Knesset, earning the nickname “the Mamluk” from the then Education Minister, Zalman Aran of the Labor Party.
In a different atmosphere, Hebron would be seen as it should be: a fascinating town, sacred to both peoples, the second most holy city of Judaism (after Jerusalem) and one of the four sacred cities of Islam (with Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem). With mutual tolerance and without the fanatics of both sides, what a wonderful place that could be for children to visit!
Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי
THERE SEEMS to be no limit to the troubles caused by the town of Hebron.
This time, the reason is as innocent as can be: the organized visits of schoolchildren to the Cave of Machpelah, where our patriarchs are supposed to be buried.
By rights, Hebron should be a symbol of brotherhood and conciliation. It is the town associated with the legendary figure of Abraham, the common ancestor of both Hebrews and Arabs. Indeed, the name itself connotes friendship: the Hebrew name Hebron stems from the same root as “haver”, friend, comrade, while the town’s Arab name - al-Halil - means “friend”. Both names refer to Abraham being the friend of God.
Abraham’s firstborn, Ishmael, was the son of the concubine Hagar, who was driven out into the desert to die there, when the legitimate son, Isaac, was born to Sarah. Ishmael, the patriarch of the Arabs, and Isaac, the patriarch of the Jews, were enemies, but when their father died, they came together to bury him: “Then Abraham gave up the ghost and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years (175), and was gathered to his people. And his two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, buried him in the cave of Machpelah…” (Genesis, 25)
IN RECENT times, Hebron has acquired a very different reputation.
For centuries, a small Jewish community lived there in peace, in perfect harmony with the Muslim inhabitants. But in 1929, something awful happened. A group of Jewish fanatics staged an incident in Jerusalem, when they tried to change the delicate status quo at the Western Wall. Religious riots broke out throughout the country. In Hebron, Muslims massacred 59 Jews, men, women and children, an event that left an indelible mark on Jewish memory. (Less well known is the fact that 263 Jews were saved by their Arab neighbors.)
Shortly after the occupation of the West Bank in the Six-day War, a group of fanatical messianic Jews infiltrated Hebron by stealth and founded the first Jewish settlement. This grew into a veritable nest of extremism, including some out and out fascists. One of them was the mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein, who slaughtered 29 Muslims at prayer in the Cave of Machpelah – actually no cave at all, but a fortress-like building, perhaps built by King Herod.
Since then, there has been endless trouble between the 500 or so Jewish settlers in the city, who enjoy the protection of the army, and the 165,000 Arab inhabitants, who are completely at their mercy, devoid of any human or civil rights.
IF THE schoolchildren had been sent there to listen to both sides and learn something about the complexity of the conflict, that would be fine. But this was not the intention of the Minister of Education, Gideon Sa’ar.
Personally, Sa’ar (the name means “storm”) is a nice person. In fact, he started his career in my magazine, Haolam Hazeh. However, he is a fanatical right-winger, who believes that his job is to cleanse Israeli children of the rotten cosmopolitan liberalism that he imagines their teachers are steeped in, and to turn them into uniform, loyal patriots, ready to die for the fatherland. He is sending army officers to preach in the classrooms, demands that teachers instill “Jewish values” (i.e. nationalist religiosity) even in secular schools, and now wants to send them to Hebron and other “Jewish” places, so their “Jewish roots” grow more robust.
The children sent there see the “Jewish” Cave of Machpelah (which was for 13 centuries a mosque), the settlers, the streets that have become empty of Arabs, and listen to the indoctrination of patriotic guides. No contact with Arabs, no other side, no others at all.
When a rebellious school invited members of the peace-oriented ex-soldiers’ group “Breaking the Silence” to accompany them and show them the other side, police intervened and prevented them from visiting the town. Now some 200 teachers and principals have signed an official protest against the Education Minister's project and demanded its cancellation.
Sa’ar is upset. With flaming eyes behind his glasses, he fervently denounced the teachers. How could such traitors be allowed to educate our precious children?
ALL THIS reminded me of my late wife, Rachel. I may have told the story before. If so, I must ask for indulgence. I just can’t help recounting it again.
Rachel was for many years a teacher of the first and second grade. She believed that after that, nothing further could be done to mould the character of a human being.
Like me, Rachel loved the Bible – not as a religious text or a book of history (which it most decidedly is not) but as a superb literary work, unequalled in its beauty.
The Bible tells how the mythological Abraham bought the Cave of Machpelah to bury his wife, Sarah. It is a wonderful story, and, as was her wont, Rachel had the children play it in class. This not only brought the story to life, but also allowed her to push forward timid boys and girls who lacked self-confidence. When they were chosen for an important role in one of these improvised plays, they would gain self-respect and suddenly bloom. Some had their whole life changed (as they confided to me decades later).
The Bible (Genesis 23) has it that Abraham asked the people of Hebron for a plot to bury his wife, when she died at the ripe old age of 127. All the Hebronites offered their fields for free. But Abraham wanted to buy the field of Ephron, the son of Zohar, “for as much money as it is worth”.
Ephron, however, refused to accept any money and insisted on giving the honored guest the field as a gift. After much exchange of pleasantries, Ephron finally came to the point: “My lord, hearken unto me: the land is worth four hundred shekels of silver, what is that betwixt you and me?”
The scene was duly enacted, with one 7-year old boy with a long beard playing Abraham and another playing Ephron, with the rest of the class as the people of Hebron, who were the witnesses to the transaction, as Abraham had requested.
Rachel explained to the children that this was an ancient way of conducting business, not coming straight to the crass matter of money, but first exchanging polite words and protestations, and then gradually working towards a compromise. She added that this civilized procedure is still followed in the Arab world, and especially among the Bedouins, even in Israel. For the children, who had probably never heard a good word about Arabs before, this was a revelation.
Afterwards, Rachel asked the teacher of the parallel class how she had told the same story. “What do you mean,” the woman replied, “I told them the truth, that Arabs always lie and cheat. If Ephron wanted 400 shekels, why didn’t he say so straight away, instead of pretending to be ready to give it as a gift?”
IF TEACHERS like Rachel could take their children to Hebron and show them around, letting them visit the Arab spice market and the workshops which for centuries have been producing the unique blue Hebron glass, it would be wonderful. If children could speak with Arabs and Jews, including even the fanatics of both sides, it could be highly educational. Visiting the tombs of the patriarchs (which, most serious archaeologists believe, are actually the graves of Muslim Sheiks) which are sacred to both Muslims and Jews, could convey a message. Jewish Israelis are quite unaware that Abraham also figures as a prophet in the Koran.
Before conquering Jerusalem and declaring it his capital, the mythological King David (also revered as a prophet in Islam) had his capital in Hebron. Indeed, the town, which is located 930 meters above sea level, enjoys wonderful air and agreeable temperatures in both summer and winter.
This whole episode brings me back to an old hobbyhorse of mine: the need for all Israeli schoolchildren, Jews and Arabs, to learn the history of the country.
This seems self-evident, but is not. Far from it. Arab children in Israel learn Arab history, starting with the birth of Islam in far-away Mecca. Jewish children learn Jewish history, which played no significant role in this country for almost 2000 years. Big chunks of the country’s history are unknown to one side or to both. Jewish pupils know nothing about the Mamluks and next to nothing about the Crusaders (except that they butchered the Jews in Germany on their way here), Arab pupils know very little about the Canaanites and the Maccabees.
Learning the history of the country in its entirety, including its Jewish and Muslim phases, would create a unified common view which would bring the two peoples much closer to each other, and make peace and reconciliation easier. But this prospect is as distant today as it was 40 years ago, when I raised it for the first time in the Knesset, earning the nickname “the Mamluk” from the then Education Minister, Zalman Aran of the Labor Party.
In a different atmosphere, Hebron would be seen as it should be: a fascinating town, sacred to both peoples, the second most holy city of Judaism (after Jerusalem) and one of the four sacred cities of Islam (with Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem). With mutual tolerance and without the fanatics of both sides, what a wonderful place that could be for children to visit!
quarta-feira, 21 de dezembro de 2011
“WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE…”
17 December 2011, Gush Shalom גוש שלום (Israel)
Uri Avnery
MY GOD, what a bizarre lot these Republican aspirants for the US presidency are!
What a sorry bunch of ignoramuses and downright crazies. Or, at best, what a bunch of cheats and cynics! (With the possible exception of the good doctor Ron Paul).
Is this the best a great and proud nation can produce? How frightening the thought that one of them may actually become the most powerful person in the world, with a finger on the biggest nuclear button!
BUT LET’S concentrate on the present front-runner. (Republicans seem to change front-runners like a fastidious beau changes socks.)
It’s Newt Gingrich. Remember him? The Speaker of the House who had an extra-marital affair with an intern while at the same time leading the campaign to impeach President Bill Clinton for having an affair with an intern.
But that’s not the point. The point is that this intellectual giant – named after Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist ever – has discovered a great historical truth.
The original Newton discovered the Law of Gravity. Newton Leroy Gingrich has discovered something no less earth-shaking: there is an “invented” people around, referring to the Palestinians.
To which a humble Israeli like me might answer, in the best Hebrew slang: “Good morning, Eliyahu!” Thus we honor people who have made a great discovery which, unfortunately, has been discovered by others long before.
FROM ITS very beginning, the Zionist movement has denied the existence of the Palestinian people. It’s an article of faith.
The reason is obvious: if there exists a Palestinian people, then the country the Zionists were about to take over was not empty. Zionism would entail an injustice of historic proportions. Being very idealistic persons, the original Zionists found a way out of this moral dilemma: they simply denied its existence. The winning slogan was “A land without a people for a people without a land.”
So who were these curious human beings they met when they came to the country? Oh, ah, well, they were just people who happened to be there, but not “a” people.
Passers-by, so to speak. Later, the story goes, after we had made the desert bloom and turned an arid and neglected land into a paradise, Arabs from all over the region flocked to the country, and now they have the temerity – indeed the chutzpah – to claim that they constitute a Palestinian nation!
For many years after the founding of the State of Israel, this was the official line. Golda Meir famously exclaimed: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people!”
(To which I replied in the Knesset: “Mrs. Prime Minister, perhaps you are right. Perhaps there really is no Palestinian people. But if millions of people mistakenly believe that they are a people, and behave like a people, then they are a people.”)
A huge propaganda machine – both in Israel and abroad – was employed to “prove” that there was no Palestinian people. A lady called Joan Peters wrote a book (“From Time Immemorial”) proving that the riffraff calling themselves “Palestinians” had nothing to do with Palestine. They are nothing but interlopers and impostors. The book was immensely successful – until some experts took it apart and proved that the whole edifice of conclusive proofs was utter rubbish.
I myself have spent many hundreds of hours trying to convince Israeli and foreign audiences that there is a Palestinian people and that we have to make peace with them. Until one day the State of Israel recognized the PLO as the sole representative of the “Palestinian people”, and the argument was laid to rest.
Until Newt came along and, like a later-day Jesus, raised it from the dead.
OBVIOUSLY, HE is much too busy to read books. True, he was once a teacher of history, but for many years now he has been very busy speakering the Congress, making a fortune as an “adviser” of big corporations and now trying to become president.
Otherwise, he would probably have come across a brilliant historical book by Benedict Anderson, “Imagined Communities”, which asserts that all modern nations are invented.
Nationalism is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. When a community decides to become a nation, it has to reinvent itself. That means inventing a national past, reshuffling historical facts (and non-facts) in order to create a coherent picture of a nation existing since antiquity. Hermann the Cherusker, member of a Germanic tribe who betrayed his Roman employers, became a “national” hero. Religious refugees who landed in America and destroyed the native population became a “nation”. Members of an ethnic-religious Diaspora formed themselves into a “Jewish nation”. Many others did more or less the same.
Indeed, Newt would profit from reading a book by a Tel Aviv University professor, Shlomo Sand, a kosher Jew, whose Hebrew title speaks for itself: “When and How the Jewish People was Invented?”
Who are these Palestinians? About a hundred years ago, two young students in Istanbul, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the future Prime Minister and President (respectively) of Israel, wrote a treatise about the Palestinians. The population of this country, they said, has never changed. Only small elites were sometimes deported. The towns and villages never moved, as their names prove. Canaanites became Israelites, then Jews and Samaritans, then Christian Byzantines. With the Arab conquest, they slowly adopted the religion of Islam and the Arabic Culture. These are today’s Palestinians. I tend to agree with them.
PARROTING THE straight Zionist propaganda line – by now discarded by most Zionists – Gingrich argues that there can be no Palestinian people because there never was a Palestinian state. The people in this country were just “Arabs” under Ottoman rule.
So what? I used to hear from French colonial masters that there is no Algerian people, because there never was an Algerian state, there was never even a united country called Algeria. Any takers for this theory now?
The name “Palestine” was mentioned by a Greek historian some 2500 years ago. A “Duke of Palestine” is mentioned in the Talmud. When the Arabs conquered the country, they called it “Filastin”, as they still do. The Arab national movement came into being all over the Arab world, including Palestine – at the same time as the Zionist movement – and strove for independence from the Ottoman Sultan.
For centuries, Palestine was considered a part of Greater Syria (the region known in Arabic as 'Sham'). There was no formal distinction between Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians and Jordanians. But when, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the European powers divided the Arab world between them, a state called Palestine became a fact under the British Mandate, and the Arab Palestinian people established themselves as a separate nation with a national flag of their own. Many peoples in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America did the same, even without asking Gingrich for confirmation.
It would certainly be ironic if the members of the “invented” Palestinian nation were expected to ask for recognition from the members of the “invented” Jewish/Israeli nation, at the demand of a member of the “invented” American nation, a person who, by the way, is of mixed German, English, Scottish and Irish stock.
Years ago, there was short-lived controversy about Palestinian textbooks. It was argued that they were anti-Semitic and incited to murder. That was laid to rest when it became clear that all Palestinian schoolbooks were cleared by the Israeli occupation authorities, and most were inherited from the previous Jordanian regime. But Gingrich does not shrink from resurrecting this corpse, too.
All Palestinians – men, women and children – are terrorists, he asserts, and Palestinian pupils learn at school how to kill us poor and helpless Israelis. Ah, what would we do without such stout defenders as Newt? What a pity that this week a photo of him, shaking the hand of Yasser Arafat, was published.
And please don’t show him the textbooks used in some of our schools, especially the religious ones!
IS IT really a waste of time to write about such nonsense?
It may seem so, but one cannot ignore the fact that the dispenser of these inanities may be tomorrow’s President of the United States of America. Given the economic situation, that is not as unlikely as it sounds.
As for now, Gingrich is doing immense damage to the national interests of the US. At this historic juncture, the masses at all the Tahrir Squares across the Arab world are wondering about America’s attitude. Newt’s answer contributes to a new and more profound anti-Americanism.
Alas, he is not the only extreme rightist seeking to embrace Israel. Israel has lately become the Mecca of all the world’s racists. This week we were honored by the visit of the husband of Marine Le Pen, leader of the French National Front. A pilgrimage to the Jewish State is now a must for any aspiring fascist.
One of our ancient sages coined the phrase: “Not for nothing does the starling go to the raven. It’s because they are of the same kind”.
Thanks. But sorry. They are not of my kind.
To quote another proverb: With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Uri Avnery
MY GOD, what a bizarre lot these Republican aspirants for the US presidency are!
What a sorry bunch of ignoramuses and downright crazies. Or, at best, what a bunch of cheats and cynics! (With the possible exception of the good doctor Ron Paul).
Is this the best a great and proud nation can produce? How frightening the thought that one of them may actually become the most powerful person in the world, with a finger on the biggest nuclear button!
BUT LET’S concentrate on the present front-runner. (Republicans seem to change front-runners like a fastidious beau changes socks.)
It’s Newt Gingrich. Remember him? The Speaker of the House who had an extra-marital affair with an intern while at the same time leading the campaign to impeach President Bill Clinton for having an affair with an intern.
But that’s not the point. The point is that this intellectual giant – named after Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist ever – has discovered a great historical truth.
The original Newton discovered the Law of Gravity. Newton Leroy Gingrich has discovered something no less earth-shaking: there is an “invented” people around, referring to the Palestinians.
To which a humble Israeli like me might answer, in the best Hebrew slang: “Good morning, Eliyahu!” Thus we honor people who have made a great discovery which, unfortunately, has been discovered by others long before.
FROM ITS very beginning, the Zionist movement has denied the existence of the Palestinian people. It’s an article of faith.
The reason is obvious: if there exists a Palestinian people, then the country the Zionists were about to take over was not empty. Zionism would entail an injustice of historic proportions. Being very idealistic persons, the original Zionists found a way out of this moral dilemma: they simply denied its existence. The winning slogan was “A land without a people for a people without a land.”
So who were these curious human beings they met when they came to the country? Oh, ah, well, they were just people who happened to be there, but not “a” people.
Passers-by, so to speak. Later, the story goes, after we had made the desert bloom and turned an arid and neglected land into a paradise, Arabs from all over the region flocked to the country, and now they have the temerity – indeed the chutzpah – to claim that they constitute a Palestinian nation!
For many years after the founding of the State of Israel, this was the official line. Golda Meir famously exclaimed: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people!”
(To which I replied in the Knesset: “Mrs. Prime Minister, perhaps you are right. Perhaps there really is no Palestinian people. But if millions of people mistakenly believe that they are a people, and behave like a people, then they are a people.”)
A huge propaganda machine – both in Israel and abroad – was employed to “prove” that there was no Palestinian people. A lady called Joan Peters wrote a book (“From Time Immemorial”) proving that the riffraff calling themselves “Palestinians” had nothing to do with Palestine. They are nothing but interlopers and impostors. The book was immensely successful – until some experts took it apart and proved that the whole edifice of conclusive proofs was utter rubbish.
I myself have spent many hundreds of hours trying to convince Israeli and foreign audiences that there is a Palestinian people and that we have to make peace with them. Until one day the State of Israel recognized the PLO as the sole representative of the “Palestinian people”, and the argument was laid to rest.
Until Newt came along and, like a later-day Jesus, raised it from the dead.
OBVIOUSLY, HE is much too busy to read books. True, he was once a teacher of history, but for many years now he has been very busy speakering the Congress, making a fortune as an “adviser” of big corporations and now trying to become president.
Otherwise, he would probably have come across a brilliant historical book by Benedict Anderson, “Imagined Communities”, which asserts that all modern nations are invented.
Nationalism is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. When a community decides to become a nation, it has to reinvent itself. That means inventing a national past, reshuffling historical facts (and non-facts) in order to create a coherent picture of a nation existing since antiquity. Hermann the Cherusker, member of a Germanic tribe who betrayed his Roman employers, became a “national” hero. Religious refugees who landed in America and destroyed the native population became a “nation”. Members of an ethnic-religious Diaspora formed themselves into a “Jewish nation”. Many others did more or less the same.
Indeed, Newt would profit from reading a book by a Tel Aviv University professor, Shlomo Sand, a kosher Jew, whose Hebrew title speaks for itself: “When and How the Jewish People was Invented?”
Who are these Palestinians? About a hundred years ago, two young students in Istanbul, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the future Prime Minister and President (respectively) of Israel, wrote a treatise about the Palestinians. The population of this country, they said, has never changed. Only small elites were sometimes deported. The towns and villages never moved, as their names prove. Canaanites became Israelites, then Jews and Samaritans, then Christian Byzantines. With the Arab conquest, they slowly adopted the religion of Islam and the Arabic Culture. These are today’s Palestinians. I tend to agree with them.
PARROTING THE straight Zionist propaganda line – by now discarded by most Zionists – Gingrich argues that there can be no Palestinian people because there never was a Palestinian state. The people in this country were just “Arabs” under Ottoman rule.
So what? I used to hear from French colonial masters that there is no Algerian people, because there never was an Algerian state, there was never even a united country called Algeria. Any takers for this theory now?
The name “Palestine” was mentioned by a Greek historian some 2500 years ago. A “Duke of Palestine” is mentioned in the Talmud. When the Arabs conquered the country, they called it “Filastin”, as they still do. The Arab national movement came into being all over the Arab world, including Palestine – at the same time as the Zionist movement – and strove for independence from the Ottoman Sultan.
For centuries, Palestine was considered a part of Greater Syria (the region known in Arabic as 'Sham'). There was no formal distinction between Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians and Jordanians. But when, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the European powers divided the Arab world between them, a state called Palestine became a fact under the British Mandate, and the Arab Palestinian people established themselves as a separate nation with a national flag of their own. Many peoples in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America did the same, even without asking Gingrich for confirmation.
It would certainly be ironic if the members of the “invented” Palestinian nation were expected to ask for recognition from the members of the “invented” Jewish/Israeli nation, at the demand of a member of the “invented” American nation, a person who, by the way, is of mixed German, English, Scottish and Irish stock.
Years ago, there was short-lived controversy about Palestinian textbooks. It was argued that they were anti-Semitic and incited to murder. That was laid to rest when it became clear that all Palestinian schoolbooks were cleared by the Israeli occupation authorities, and most were inherited from the previous Jordanian regime. But Gingrich does not shrink from resurrecting this corpse, too.
All Palestinians – men, women and children – are terrorists, he asserts, and Palestinian pupils learn at school how to kill us poor and helpless Israelis. Ah, what would we do without such stout defenders as Newt? What a pity that this week a photo of him, shaking the hand of Yasser Arafat, was published.
And please don’t show him the textbooks used in some of our schools, especially the religious ones!
IS IT really a waste of time to write about such nonsense?
It may seem so, but one cannot ignore the fact that the dispenser of these inanities may be tomorrow’s President of the United States of America. Given the economic situation, that is not as unlikely as it sounds.
As for now, Gingrich is doing immense damage to the national interests of the US. At this historic juncture, the masses at all the Tahrir Squares across the Arab world are wondering about America’s attitude. Newt’s answer contributes to a new and more profound anti-Americanism.
Alas, he is not the only extreme rightist seeking to embrace Israel. Israel has lately become the Mecca of all the world’s racists. This week we were honored by the visit of the husband of Marine Le Pen, leader of the French National Front. A pilgrimage to the Jewish State is now a must for any aspiring fascist.
One of our ancient sages coined the phrase: “Not for nothing does the starling go to the raven. It’s because they are of the same kind”.
Thanks. But sorry. They are not of my kind.
To quote another proverb: With friends like these, who needs enemies?
sexta-feira, 9 de dezembro de 2011
ISRAELI VETERAN ACTIVIST WARNS AGAINST 'NEO-FASCIST' LEGISLATION
9 december 2011, Haaretz הארץ (Israel)
Uri Avnery, whose Haolam Hazeh magazine was the target of past anti-libel legislation, says the current 'anti-democratic' wave of bills will affect all levels of society, and the media aren't doing much to help the situation
By Ofra Edelman
When Israel's so-called Libel Law was passed in 1965, Uri Avnery, editor of the weekly Haolam Hazeh, declared war from the pages of his decidedly left-leaning magazine.
"It's either go to the Knesset or go to jail," he wrote. As in any other war, he added, "this editorial staff has operated as a journalistic commando squad for 15 years, with commando techniques, in the spirit of commandos. Now, we are being compelled to act as political commandos. We will make our way into the electoral system as commandos. We will operate as commandos in the Knesset."
Avnery, who was born in Germany in 1923, decided to run for a Knesset seat in the hope he could win diplomatic immunity for both himself and his magazine against libel suits.
"The Libel Law ... has been passed because Haolam Hazeh threatens the regime's existence," he wrote. "If they are saying that there is no room in one country for both this regime and Haolam Hazeh, and thus we have to liquidate Haolam Hazeh, then we have to reply: Correct, there is no room in one country for this regime and for Haolam Hazeh, so we have to liquidate this regime. And we are going to liquidate it."
Sitting in the living room of his home in Tel Aviv this week, Avnery shared his recollections of that time.
"The law was adopted on the final day of the Fifth Knesset, in the summer of 1965, and the press, the media in general, woke up to the matter only at the last minute," he says. "They did not take it seriously. Nobody thought that such a thing could even pass."
Avnery recalls that he "had decided beforehand that if this law passed, I would form a party to run for Knesset. We listened to the news and when it became clear that the Knesset had adopted the defamation law, I said, that's it, I'm going to the Knesset. We launched a war against the law."
The 1965 statute, which has been changed to some extent over the years by legislative amendments, toughened the demands placed on media outlets that are sued for defamation: It required them to prove conclusively that their publication of certain information served the public interest. It expanded the definitions of libel, mentioning the specific position-holders in the media who would be held responsible for acts of defamation. This section of the law specifically named the "head of the editorial staff," a position that Avnery says existed at the time only at Haolam Hazeh.
The clause made Avnery think the law was directed at his publication, and that it was the latest in a series of attempts to silence him. These included an ad boycott of Haolam Hazeh by the state and the Histadrut labor federation; complaints against the weekly, which sometimes published nude photographs of women, based on obscenity laws; and physical assaults on staff members.
In elections to the Sixth Knesset, Avnery mustered about 14,000 votes, enough to pass the threshold and gain a seat for himself.
'Competition of insanity'
"Lethal," is how Avnery describes the current amendment to the bill drafted by MKs Meir Sheetrit (Kadima) and Yariv Levin (Likud), which would broaden the scope of compensation set in the 1965 law from NIS 50,000 to NIS 300,000 without need to prove damage.
Avnery says the threat of monetary damages can be much more damning to journalism than the threat of jail.
"Everyone has an editor and the editor has a publisher and the publisher has an owner," he says. "What this means is that no one will publish a story that has even the slightest doubt. Please don't think I am against defamation laws. Absolutely, the press can be reckless, just like every other body. Democratic defamation laws are not improper - on the contrary," he adds. "Yet on the other hand, the more esteemed and exalted you are, the weaker the defamation laws should be. Anyone who wants to change that legislation always claims he is doing it for the little guy. But his true intentions are always aimed at the big guys. No one cares what happens to the little guy."
Avnery says the new law is part what he calls a "neo-fascist anti-democratic" wave of legislation meant to stifle dissent.
In your opinion, what is this wave of legislation stemming from?
"Today, before the Likud primary, it is intended to draw attention. After all, what is the object of a Knesset member? I say this from experience: From the moment a Knesset member is elected, he has one objective in life - to be reelected - and he dedicates four years to that end. That is why he needs to get into the media, and that is why, short of killing his own mother, he is willing to do anything and everything.
"A person comes, tries to have a totally insane legislative bill passed, while his sole objective is to get a headline the next day, with a big photo of him. Haaretz comes out the next day, giving him a quarter-page with a dazzling picture - and, hey, you are encouraging him to do it. Another MK sees that and thinks: Why, I'll propose something even more monstrous ... So there is this sort of competition of insanity, of gluttony."
But if a newspaper didn't report on such a legislative bill, you would scream bloody murder, that it failed to fill its function.
"However, it is also possible to run the story in a different, not so grandiose, manner. Not with a flattering photo. The obligation to report exists, but not to award a prize to someone. This is how a suicidal media operates.
"Subconsciously, the normal reader is influenced not only by what is written, but also by the intensiveness of the emotion invested in the article. Is this thing good, or is it not very nice, or is it something terrible and tragic that serves those who would destroy Israel? What I am missing here is a moral emotionalism, condemning these new laws."
What, in your opinion, should journalists do? Does everyone have to run for Knesset to receive immunity?
"It helps. That's what I did."
That's a pretty big step to take.
"I exploited it infrequently, but when I did exploit it, I did so in full. I am in favor of personal sanctions against anyone who proposes these laws: not running a photo [of them] or anything flattering in a paper, and not allowing media interviews. This is something that should be thought of more often. It wouldn't harm freedom of reporting, but it would make it possible to punish people.
"Nevertheless, the first thing that should have been done is to call a strike. That is clear, so that the public would begin to understand ... The public only knows there is some sort of argument going on over some sort of law, it doesn't understand and neither is it all that interested. Most certainly, it doesn't think that it affects the public. And if the press itself is not taking measures to make it clear to the reader or the viewer that this is important or serious, why should someone else think so? The first thing that should have been done is to call a strike, as happened then.
"We have to organize a very broad front, to rescue democracy, and the front should start with the idea that the public at large doesn't even understand why this affects it. The public thinks: So it'll be this judge and not that judge, what's the difference? The media? So they will be a little more careful, that would be very good, right? The nongovernmental organizations? Who even needs them? Taking money from abroad? A scandal. Social protest? Okay, it happened, now we've moved on. People don't understand that it pertains to their lives, to their wages. Today's generation in Israel never lived under a nondemocratic regime.
"Can anyone even imagine what it means to live under a regime in which if you do not sign a declaration in favor of a certain party and you are the chief physician in a brain-surgery department - the next day you are washing windows? Can anyone even imagine such a thing that journalists are being killed in the street, as is happening in Russia? ... People don't get it, they don't make the connection.
"First, you have to explain to the public that it affects them. It's not a matter of 'the higher-ups' quarreling among themselves. ... It is that tomorrow the police arrest you for a crime you did not commit, and there won't be a newspaper that will publish the story, because the papers will be banned from publicizing the arrests of individuals, and people will begin to disappear from the street and might disappear completely, as happened in Argentina ... on the pretext that it protects the citizens. This affects every person in the country. It is not something abstract, not some theoretical disagreement between the parliamentarians and the judges."
In a column that you wrote, you draw a link between present-day legislation and the collapse of the Weimar republic.
"I was nine when the Nazis came to power, and as a child in a very political household I was very much aware of what happened. Especially when the child sees what is going on, in a very visual way: the uniforms, the parades, the music. So I know how the republic fell. I was aware of it, stage by stage, one small step followed by another small step, and then the whole thing collapsed. Collapsed because the public did not understand why it was important. The public did not summon up from within the emotional strength to oppose.
"When I see the first sign, that first red light goes on for me. I wake up a little earlier than the others. Others are waking up, too, but it takes time. At the beginning they said to us: How can you make a comparison to Nazi Germany? How could you even compare the two? So it doesn't have to be Nazi Germany, which truly was unique in human history ... It doesn't have to be Hitler - what about Mussolini? And if not Mussolini, how about Franco? Or Pinochet in Chile? Or the colonels in Greece? And if not any of these, how about Ceausescu, or Putin now? There are so many levels - from the very worst to the less worst, but each of them creates hell."
And where are we in the hierarchal ranking you described?
"We are past the first step. We are far from the last step, but in my opinion it is the first step that determines where it will head. The barricades have fallen. Things that are not to be believed are being believed. Things that it would have been impossible to imagine are imaginable, and that is one small step, but a very decisive step. Our nerve endings are beginning to be dulled. But civil rights aren't 'left.' They don't have to do with 'left'. Civil rights affect every individual.
"How do you impart to the common citizen that the struggle is his struggle? That the freedom of expression is his? That the High Court of Justice is his? That the democracy is his? This is where you need a public campaign the likes of which there's never been. Ultimately, we are speaking of Israel's future, the future of our lives. An undemocratic state won't last, it's as simple as that."
Avnery paraphrases the famous poem by German pacifist Martin Niemoller, "First they came..." about public silence in the face of encroaching fascism, as describing what is happening in Israel today.
"This is one of the most profound statements," he explains. "And you could translate it into today's reality: First they came to destroy the court, then they came to destroy the media, then they came to destroy the NGOs, I was silent - in the end, when I will want to protest, I will not be able to, because there will not be anyone before whom I can do so ... and that will be dangerous. People don't understand."
Uri Avnery, whose Haolam Hazeh magazine was the target of past anti-libel legislation, says the current 'anti-democratic' wave of bills will affect all levels of society, and the media aren't doing much to help the situation
By Ofra Edelman
When Israel's so-called Libel Law was passed in 1965, Uri Avnery, editor of the weekly Haolam Hazeh, declared war from the pages of his decidedly left-leaning magazine.
"It's either go to the Knesset or go to jail," he wrote. As in any other war, he added, "this editorial staff has operated as a journalistic commando squad for 15 years, with commando techniques, in the spirit of commandos. Now, we are being compelled to act as political commandos. We will make our way into the electoral system as commandos. We will operate as commandos in the Knesset."
Avnery, who was born in Germany in 1923, decided to run for a Knesset seat in the hope he could win diplomatic immunity for both himself and his magazine against libel suits.
"The Libel Law ... has been passed because Haolam Hazeh threatens the regime's existence," he wrote. "If they are saying that there is no room in one country for both this regime and Haolam Hazeh, and thus we have to liquidate Haolam Hazeh, then we have to reply: Correct, there is no room in one country for this regime and for Haolam Hazeh, so we have to liquidate this regime. And we are going to liquidate it."
Sitting in the living room of his home in Tel Aviv this week, Avnery shared his recollections of that time.
"The law was adopted on the final day of the Fifth Knesset, in the summer of 1965, and the press, the media in general, woke up to the matter only at the last minute," he says. "They did not take it seriously. Nobody thought that such a thing could even pass."
Avnery recalls that he "had decided beforehand that if this law passed, I would form a party to run for Knesset. We listened to the news and when it became clear that the Knesset had adopted the defamation law, I said, that's it, I'm going to the Knesset. We launched a war against the law."
The 1965 statute, which has been changed to some extent over the years by legislative amendments, toughened the demands placed on media outlets that are sued for defamation: It required them to prove conclusively that their publication of certain information served the public interest. It expanded the definitions of libel, mentioning the specific position-holders in the media who would be held responsible for acts of defamation. This section of the law specifically named the "head of the editorial staff," a position that Avnery says existed at the time only at Haolam Hazeh.
The clause made Avnery think the law was directed at his publication, and that it was the latest in a series of attempts to silence him. These included an ad boycott of Haolam Hazeh by the state and the Histadrut labor federation; complaints against the weekly, which sometimes published nude photographs of women, based on obscenity laws; and physical assaults on staff members.
In elections to the Sixth Knesset, Avnery mustered about 14,000 votes, enough to pass the threshold and gain a seat for himself.
'Competition of insanity'
"Lethal," is how Avnery describes the current amendment to the bill drafted by MKs Meir Sheetrit (Kadima) and Yariv Levin (Likud), which would broaden the scope of compensation set in the 1965 law from NIS 50,000 to NIS 300,000 without need to prove damage.
Avnery says the threat of monetary damages can be much more damning to journalism than the threat of jail.
"Everyone has an editor and the editor has a publisher and the publisher has an owner," he says. "What this means is that no one will publish a story that has even the slightest doubt. Please don't think I am against defamation laws. Absolutely, the press can be reckless, just like every other body. Democratic defamation laws are not improper - on the contrary," he adds. "Yet on the other hand, the more esteemed and exalted you are, the weaker the defamation laws should be. Anyone who wants to change that legislation always claims he is doing it for the little guy. But his true intentions are always aimed at the big guys. No one cares what happens to the little guy."
Avnery says the new law is part what he calls a "neo-fascist anti-democratic" wave of legislation meant to stifle dissent.
In your opinion, what is this wave of legislation stemming from?
"Today, before the Likud primary, it is intended to draw attention. After all, what is the object of a Knesset member? I say this from experience: From the moment a Knesset member is elected, he has one objective in life - to be reelected - and he dedicates four years to that end. That is why he needs to get into the media, and that is why, short of killing his own mother, he is willing to do anything and everything.
"A person comes, tries to have a totally insane legislative bill passed, while his sole objective is to get a headline the next day, with a big photo of him. Haaretz comes out the next day, giving him a quarter-page with a dazzling picture - and, hey, you are encouraging him to do it. Another MK sees that and thinks: Why, I'll propose something even more monstrous ... So there is this sort of competition of insanity, of gluttony."
But if a newspaper didn't report on such a legislative bill, you would scream bloody murder, that it failed to fill its function.
"However, it is also possible to run the story in a different, not so grandiose, manner. Not with a flattering photo. The obligation to report exists, but not to award a prize to someone. This is how a suicidal media operates.
"Subconsciously, the normal reader is influenced not only by what is written, but also by the intensiveness of the emotion invested in the article. Is this thing good, or is it not very nice, or is it something terrible and tragic that serves those who would destroy Israel? What I am missing here is a moral emotionalism, condemning these new laws."
What, in your opinion, should journalists do? Does everyone have to run for Knesset to receive immunity?
"It helps. That's what I did."
That's a pretty big step to take.
"I exploited it infrequently, but when I did exploit it, I did so in full. I am in favor of personal sanctions against anyone who proposes these laws: not running a photo [of them] or anything flattering in a paper, and not allowing media interviews. This is something that should be thought of more often. It wouldn't harm freedom of reporting, but it would make it possible to punish people.
"Nevertheless, the first thing that should have been done is to call a strike. That is clear, so that the public would begin to understand ... The public only knows there is some sort of argument going on over some sort of law, it doesn't understand and neither is it all that interested. Most certainly, it doesn't think that it affects the public. And if the press itself is not taking measures to make it clear to the reader or the viewer that this is important or serious, why should someone else think so? The first thing that should have been done is to call a strike, as happened then.
"We have to organize a very broad front, to rescue democracy, and the front should start with the idea that the public at large doesn't even understand why this affects it. The public thinks: So it'll be this judge and not that judge, what's the difference? The media? So they will be a little more careful, that would be very good, right? The nongovernmental organizations? Who even needs them? Taking money from abroad? A scandal. Social protest? Okay, it happened, now we've moved on. People don't understand that it pertains to their lives, to their wages. Today's generation in Israel never lived under a nondemocratic regime.
"Can anyone even imagine what it means to live under a regime in which if you do not sign a declaration in favor of a certain party and you are the chief physician in a brain-surgery department - the next day you are washing windows? Can anyone even imagine such a thing that journalists are being killed in the street, as is happening in Russia? ... People don't get it, they don't make the connection.
"First, you have to explain to the public that it affects them. It's not a matter of 'the higher-ups' quarreling among themselves. ... It is that tomorrow the police arrest you for a crime you did not commit, and there won't be a newspaper that will publish the story, because the papers will be banned from publicizing the arrests of individuals, and people will begin to disappear from the street and might disappear completely, as happened in Argentina ... on the pretext that it protects the citizens. This affects every person in the country. It is not something abstract, not some theoretical disagreement between the parliamentarians and the judges."
In a column that you wrote, you draw a link between present-day legislation and the collapse of the Weimar republic.
"I was nine when the Nazis came to power, and as a child in a very political household I was very much aware of what happened. Especially when the child sees what is going on, in a very visual way: the uniforms, the parades, the music. So I know how the republic fell. I was aware of it, stage by stage, one small step followed by another small step, and then the whole thing collapsed. Collapsed because the public did not understand why it was important. The public did not summon up from within the emotional strength to oppose.
"When I see the first sign, that first red light goes on for me. I wake up a little earlier than the others. Others are waking up, too, but it takes time. At the beginning they said to us: How can you make a comparison to Nazi Germany? How could you even compare the two? So it doesn't have to be Nazi Germany, which truly was unique in human history ... It doesn't have to be Hitler - what about Mussolini? And if not Mussolini, how about Franco? Or Pinochet in Chile? Or the colonels in Greece? And if not any of these, how about Ceausescu, or Putin now? There are so many levels - from the very worst to the less worst, but each of them creates hell."
And where are we in the hierarchal ranking you described?
"We are past the first step. We are far from the last step, but in my opinion it is the first step that determines where it will head. The barricades have fallen. Things that are not to be believed are being believed. Things that it would have been impossible to imagine are imaginable, and that is one small step, but a very decisive step. Our nerve endings are beginning to be dulled. But civil rights aren't 'left.' They don't have to do with 'left'. Civil rights affect every individual.
"How do you impart to the common citizen that the struggle is his struggle? That the freedom of expression is his? That the High Court of Justice is his? That the democracy is his? This is where you need a public campaign the likes of which there's never been. Ultimately, we are speaking of Israel's future, the future of our lives. An undemocratic state won't last, it's as simple as that."
Avnery paraphrases the famous poem by German pacifist Martin Niemoller, "First they came..." about public silence in the face of encroaching fascism, as describing what is happening in Israel today.
"This is one of the most profound statements," he explains. "And you could translate it into today's reality: First they came to destroy the court, then they came to destroy the media, then they came to destroy the NGOs, I was silent - in the end, when I will want to protest, I will not be able to, because there will not be anyone before whom I can do so ... and that will be dangerous. People don't understand."
quinta-feira, 8 de dezembro de 2011
THE KING’S SPEECH
3 December 2011, Gush Shalom גוש שלום http://zope.gush-shalom.org (Israel)
Uri Avnery Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי
IN THE middle of the '80s, a German diplomat conveyed to me a surprising message. A member of the Jordanian Royal family would like to speak with me in Amman. At the time, Jordan was still officially at war with us.
IN THE middle of the '80s, a German diplomat conveyed to me a surprising message. A member of the Jordanian Royal family would like to speak with me in Amman. At the time, Jordan was still officially at war with us.
Somehow I obtained official permission from the Israeli government. The Germans generously provided me with a passport that was not strictly accurate, and so, with much turning of blind eyes, I arrived in Amman and was lodged in the best hotel.
The news of my presence spread quickly, and after some days it became an embarrassment to the Jordanian government. So I was politely asked to leave, and very quickly, please.
But before that, a high-ranking official invited me to dinner in a very elegant restaurant. He was a well educated, very cultured person, who spoke beautiful English. To my utter amazement, he told me that he was a Bedouin, a member of an important tribe. All my ideas about Bedouins were shattered in that moment.
This dinner stuck in my memory because, in (literally) ten minutes, I learned more about Jordan than in decades of reading. My host took a paper napkin and drew a rough map of Jordan. “Look at our neighbors,” he explained. “Here is Syria, a radical secular Ba’athist dictatorship. Then there is Iraq, with another Ba’athist regime that hates Syria. Next there is Saudi Arabia, a very conservative, orthodox country. Next is Egypt, with a pro-Western military dictator. Then there is Zionist Israel. In the occupied Palestinian territories, radical, revolutionary elements are in the ascent. And almost touching us, there is fragmented, unpredictable Lebanon.”
“From all these countries,” he continued, “refugees, agents and ideological influences stream into Jordan. We have to absorb all of them. We have to perform a very delicate balancing act. If we come too close to Israel, the next day we must appease Syria. If one day we embrace Saudi Arabia, we must kiss Iraq the next. We must not ally ourselves with any one.”
Another impression I took with me - the Palestinians in Jordan (excluding the refugees, whom I did not meet) are perfectly content with the status quo, dominating the economy, getting rich and praying for the stability of the regime.
I WISH that all influential Israelis had received such an eye-opening lesson, because in Israel, the most grotesque ideas about Jordan were – and still are - in vogue.
The general picture is that of a ridiculous little country, ruled by fierce and primitive Bedouin tribes, while the majority consists of Palestinians who are continually plotting to overthrow the monarchy and assume power.
(Which reminds me of another conversation – this time in Cairo with the – then - acting Foreign Minister, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a Copt and one of the most intelligent persons I’ve ever met. “Israeli experts in Arab affairs are among the best in the world,” he told me, “they have read everything, they know everything, and they understand nothing. That’s because they have never lived in an Arab country.”)
Until the Oslo agreement, the entire Israeli elite subscribed to the “Jordanian Option”. The idea was that only King Hussein was able and ready to make peace with us and that he would give us East Jerusalem and parts of the West Bank as a present. Hiding behind this misconception was the traditional Zionist resolve to ignore the existence of the Palestinian people and to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state at all costs.
Another version of this idea rests on the slogan “Jordan is Palestine”. It was explained to me by Ariel Sharon, nine months before Lebanon War I. “We shall throw the Palestinians out of Lebanon into Syria. The Syrians will push them South into Jordan. There they shall overthrow the king and turn Jordan into Palestine. The Palestinian problem will disappear, and the remaining conflict will become a normal disagreement between two sovereign states, Israel and Palestine.”
“But what about the West Bank?” I queried.
“We shall achieve a compromise with Jordan,” he answered, “perhaps joint rule, perhaps some kind of functional division.”
This idea pops up time and again. This week one of the hyperactive and mentally handicapped right wing parliamentary thugs submitted another of those bills. It is called “Jordan – the Nation-State of the Palestinian People”.
Apart from the curiosity of one country enacting a law to define the character of another country, it was politically embarrassing. Yet instead of just throwing it out, it was transferred to a sub-committee where the deliberations, such as they are, are secret.
HIS MAJESTY, king Abdullah II, is worried. He has good reasons to be.
There is the democratic Arab Spring, which may spill over into his autocratic kingdom. There is the uprising in neighboring Syria, which may push refugees southwards. There is the growing influence of Shiite Iran, which does not look good for his stoutly Sunni monarchy.
But all this is nothing compared to the growing threat from radical, rightist Israel.
The most immediate danger, from his point of view, is the growing Israeli oppression and colonization of the West Bank. One of these days, it may push masses of Palestinian refugees to cross the Jordan into his kingdom, upsetting the strained demographic balance between locals and Palestinians in his country.
It was this fear that caused his father, King Hussein, during the first intifada, to cut all connections with the West Bank, which had been annexed by his grandfather after the 1948 war. (The very term “West Bank” is Jordanian, to distinguish it from the East Bank, the original Transjordanian territory of the kingdom.)
If “Jordan is Palestine”, then there is no reason for Israel not to annex the West Bank, expropriate Palestinian lands, enlarge the existing settlements and create new ones, and in general “convince” Palestinians to find a better life east of the river.
With this in mind, the king voiced his anxiety in a much-publicized interview this week. In it, he raised the possibility of a federation between Jordan and the (still occupied) State of Palestine in the West Bank, obviously to forestall Israeli designs. Perhaps he also wants to convince the Palestinians that such a move would help them to terminate the occupation, facilitate their application for UN membership and prevent a US veto. (I don’t believe this offer will find many Palestinian takers.)
THE INITIATORS of the Israeli bill make it clear that their main purpose is Hasbarah (“explaining”), the Hebrew euphemism for propaganda. Their idea, they believe, will put an end to the isolation and delegitimization of Israel. The world will accept that the State of Palestine already exists, beyond the Jordan, so that there is no need for a second one in the West Bank.
If His Majesty suspects that there is a much more sinister dimension to the propaganda ploy, he is quite right. Obviously he is thinking about much more profound long-term possibilities.
This goes back to the basic dilemma of the Israeli right, a dilemma that seems well-nigh insoluble.
The Israeli Right has never really given up the idea of a Greater Israel (which in Hebrew is called “the whole of Eretz-Israel”). This means the total rejection of the Two-State solution in all its forms and the creation of a Jewish state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.
However, in such a state there would be living, as of today, some 6 million Israeli Jews and about 5.5 million Arab Palestinians (2.5 in the West Bank, 1.5 in the Gaza Strip, 1.5 in Israel proper.) Some demographers believe that the number is even larger.
According to all demographic forecasts, the Palestinians will quite soon constitute the majority in this geographic entity. What then?
Some idealists believe (or delude themselves) that, faced with stern international disapproval, Israel will have to grant citizenship to all the inhabitants, turning the entity into a bi-national or multi-national or non-national state. Without taking a survey one can say with certainty that 99.999% of Jewish Israelis would oppose this idea with all their strength. It is the total negation of everything Zionism stands for.
The other possibility would be that this entity would become an apartheid state, not only partly, not only in practice, but entirely and officially. The great majority of Jewish Israelis would not like that at all. This, too, is a negation of basic Zionist values.
There is no solution to this dilemma. Or is there?
THE KING seems to think that there is. It is, actually, implicit in the dream of a Greater Israel.
That solution is a repeat of 1948: a naqba of vastly larger dimensions, which Israelis euphemistically call “transfer”.
This means that at some time, when international conditions are opportune – some huge international disaster that rivets attention to some other part of the world, a big war, or such – the government will drive out the non-Jewish population. Where to? Geography dictates the answer: to Jordan. Or, rather, to the future State of Palestine in what was once Jordan.
I would suggest that almost every Israeli who supports the Greater Israel idea has this – at least unconsciously – in mind. Perhaps not as a plan for action in the near future, but certainly as the only solution in the long term.
MORE THAN 80 years ago, Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism and the spiritual forefather of Binjamin Netanyahu, wrote some verses that were sung by the Irgun (to which I belonged when I was very young.)
It is a nice song with a nice melody. The refrain goes like this: “The Jordan has two banks / The one belongs to us, the other one, too.”
Jabotinsky, an ardent admirer of the Italian 19th century risorgimento, was an ultra-nationalist and a sincere liberal. One verse of the poem says: “The son of Arabia, the son of Nazareth and my own son / Will find there happiness and plenty / Because my flag, a flag of purity and honesty / Will cleanse both sides of the Jordan.”
The official emblem of the Irgun consisted of a map that included Transjordan, with a rifle superimposed. This emblem was inherited by Menachem Begin’s Herut (“Freedom”) Party, the mother of the Likud.
This party has long since given up the ideal of the three sons, purity and honesty. The slogan “Jordan is Palestine” means that it has also given up the claim to the East bank of the Jordan.
Or has it?
Uri Avnery Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי
IN THE middle of the '80s, a German diplomat conveyed to me a surprising message. A member of the Jordanian Royal family would like to speak with me in Amman. At the time, Jordan was still officially at war with us.
IN THE middle of the '80s, a German diplomat conveyed to me a surprising message. A member of the Jordanian Royal family would like to speak with me in Amman. At the time, Jordan was still officially at war with us.
Somehow I obtained official permission from the Israeli government. The Germans generously provided me with a passport that was not strictly accurate, and so, with much turning of blind eyes, I arrived in Amman and was lodged in the best hotel.
The news of my presence spread quickly, and after some days it became an embarrassment to the Jordanian government. So I was politely asked to leave, and very quickly, please.
But before that, a high-ranking official invited me to dinner in a very elegant restaurant. He was a well educated, very cultured person, who spoke beautiful English. To my utter amazement, he told me that he was a Bedouin, a member of an important tribe. All my ideas about Bedouins were shattered in that moment.
This dinner stuck in my memory because, in (literally) ten minutes, I learned more about Jordan than in decades of reading. My host took a paper napkin and drew a rough map of Jordan. “Look at our neighbors,” he explained. “Here is Syria, a radical secular Ba’athist dictatorship. Then there is Iraq, with another Ba’athist regime that hates Syria. Next there is Saudi Arabia, a very conservative, orthodox country. Next is Egypt, with a pro-Western military dictator. Then there is Zionist Israel. In the occupied Palestinian territories, radical, revolutionary elements are in the ascent. And almost touching us, there is fragmented, unpredictable Lebanon.”
“From all these countries,” he continued, “refugees, agents and ideological influences stream into Jordan. We have to absorb all of them. We have to perform a very delicate balancing act. If we come too close to Israel, the next day we must appease Syria. If one day we embrace Saudi Arabia, we must kiss Iraq the next. We must not ally ourselves with any one.”
Another impression I took with me - the Palestinians in Jordan (excluding the refugees, whom I did not meet) are perfectly content with the status quo, dominating the economy, getting rich and praying for the stability of the regime.
I WISH that all influential Israelis had received such an eye-opening lesson, because in Israel, the most grotesque ideas about Jordan were – and still are - in vogue.
The general picture is that of a ridiculous little country, ruled by fierce and primitive Bedouin tribes, while the majority consists of Palestinians who are continually plotting to overthrow the monarchy and assume power.
(Which reminds me of another conversation – this time in Cairo with the – then - acting Foreign Minister, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a Copt and one of the most intelligent persons I’ve ever met. “Israeli experts in Arab affairs are among the best in the world,” he told me, “they have read everything, they know everything, and they understand nothing. That’s because they have never lived in an Arab country.”)
Until the Oslo agreement, the entire Israeli elite subscribed to the “Jordanian Option”. The idea was that only King Hussein was able and ready to make peace with us and that he would give us East Jerusalem and parts of the West Bank as a present. Hiding behind this misconception was the traditional Zionist resolve to ignore the existence of the Palestinian people and to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state at all costs.
Another version of this idea rests on the slogan “Jordan is Palestine”. It was explained to me by Ariel Sharon, nine months before Lebanon War I. “We shall throw the Palestinians out of Lebanon into Syria. The Syrians will push them South into Jordan. There they shall overthrow the king and turn Jordan into Palestine. The Palestinian problem will disappear, and the remaining conflict will become a normal disagreement between two sovereign states, Israel and Palestine.”
“But what about the West Bank?” I queried.
“We shall achieve a compromise with Jordan,” he answered, “perhaps joint rule, perhaps some kind of functional division.”
This idea pops up time and again. This week one of the hyperactive and mentally handicapped right wing parliamentary thugs submitted another of those bills. It is called “Jordan – the Nation-State of the Palestinian People”.
Apart from the curiosity of one country enacting a law to define the character of another country, it was politically embarrassing. Yet instead of just throwing it out, it was transferred to a sub-committee where the deliberations, such as they are, are secret.
HIS MAJESTY, king Abdullah II, is worried. He has good reasons to be.
There is the democratic Arab Spring, which may spill over into his autocratic kingdom. There is the uprising in neighboring Syria, which may push refugees southwards. There is the growing influence of Shiite Iran, which does not look good for his stoutly Sunni monarchy.
But all this is nothing compared to the growing threat from radical, rightist Israel.
The most immediate danger, from his point of view, is the growing Israeli oppression and colonization of the West Bank. One of these days, it may push masses of Palestinian refugees to cross the Jordan into his kingdom, upsetting the strained demographic balance between locals and Palestinians in his country.
It was this fear that caused his father, King Hussein, during the first intifada, to cut all connections with the West Bank, which had been annexed by his grandfather after the 1948 war. (The very term “West Bank” is Jordanian, to distinguish it from the East Bank, the original Transjordanian territory of the kingdom.)
If “Jordan is Palestine”, then there is no reason for Israel not to annex the West Bank, expropriate Palestinian lands, enlarge the existing settlements and create new ones, and in general “convince” Palestinians to find a better life east of the river.
With this in mind, the king voiced his anxiety in a much-publicized interview this week. In it, he raised the possibility of a federation between Jordan and the (still occupied) State of Palestine in the West Bank, obviously to forestall Israeli designs. Perhaps he also wants to convince the Palestinians that such a move would help them to terminate the occupation, facilitate their application for UN membership and prevent a US veto. (I don’t believe this offer will find many Palestinian takers.)
THE INITIATORS of the Israeli bill make it clear that their main purpose is Hasbarah (“explaining”), the Hebrew euphemism for propaganda. Their idea, they believe, will put an end to the isolation and delegitimization of Israel. The world will accept that the State of Palestine already exists, beyond the Jordan, so that there is no need for a second one in the West Bank.
If His Majesty suspects that there is a much more sinister dimension to the propaganda ploy, he is quite right. Obviously he is thinking about much more profound long-term possibilities.
This goes back to the basic dilemma of the Israeli right, a dilemma that seems well-nigh insoluble.
The Israeli Right has never really given up the idea of a Greater Israel (which in Hebrew is called “the whole of Eretz-Israel”). This means the total rejection of the Two-State solution in all its forms and the creation of a Jewish state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.
However, in such a state there would be living, as of today, some 6 million Israeli Jews and about 5.5 million Arab Palestinians (2.5 in the West Bank, 1.5 in the Gaza Strip, 1.5 in Israel proper.) Some demographers believe that the number is even larger.
According to all demographic forecasts, the Palestinians will quite soon constitute the majority in this geographic entity. What then?
Some idealists believe (or delude themselves) that, faced with stern international disapproval, Israel will have to grant citizenship to all the inhabitants, turning the entity into a bi-national or multi-national or non-national state. Without taking a survey one can say with certainty that 99.999% of Jewish Israelis would oppose this idea with all their strength. It is the total negation of everything Zionism stands for.
The other possibility would be that this entity would become an apartheid state, not only partly, not only in practice, but entirely and officially. The great majority of Jewish Israelis would not like that at all. This, too, is a negation of basic Zionist values.
There is no solution to this dilemma. Or is there?
THE KING seems to think that there is. It is, actually, implicit in the dream of a Greater Israel.
That solution is a repeat of 1948: a naqba of vastly larger dimensions, which Israelis euphemistically call “transfer”.
This means that at some time, when international conditions are opportune – some huge international disaster that rivets attention to some other part of the world, a big war, or such – the government will drive out the non-Jewish population. Where to? Geography dictates the answer: to Jordan. Or, rather, to the future State of Palestine in what was once Jordan.
I would suggest that almost every Israeli who supports the Greater Israel idea has this – at least unconsciously – in mind. Perhaps not as a plan for action in the near future, but certainly as the only solution in the long term.
MORE THAN 80 years ago, Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism and the spiritual forefather of Binjamin Netanyahu, wrote some verses that were sung by the Irgun (to which I belonged when I was very young.)
It is a nice song with a nice melody. The refrain goes like this: “The Jordan has two banks / The one belongs to us, the other one, too.”
Jabotinsky, an ardent admirer of the Italian 19th century risorgimento, was an ultra-nationalist and a sincere liberal. One verse of the poem says: “The son of Arabia, the son of Nazareth and my own son / Will find there happiness and plenty / Because my flag, a flag of purity and honesty / Will cleanse both sides of the Jordan.”
The official emblem of the Irgun consisted of a map that included Transjordan, with a rifle superimposed. This emblem was inherited by Menachem Begin’s Herut (“Freedom”) Party, the mother of the Likud.
This party has long since given up the ideal of the three sons, purity and honesty. The slogan “Jordan is Palestine” means that it has also given up the claim to the East bank of the Jordan.
Or has it?
quarta-feira, 30 de novembro de 2011
A DAY IN NOVEMBER
THIS TUESDAY will be the 64th anniversary of a fateful day for our lives
26 November 2011, Gush Shalom גוש שלום http://zope.gush-shalom.org (Israel)
Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי
A day in November. A day to remember.
On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted, by 33 votes against 13 (with 10 abstentions), the Palestine Partition Plan.
This event has become a subject of endless debates, misinterpretations and outright falsifications. It may be worthwhile to peel away the myths and see it as it was.
BY THE end of 1947, there were in the country – then officially named Palestine - about 1.2 million Arabs and 635 thousand Jews. The gap between the two population groups had turned into an abyss. Though geographically intertwined, they lived on two different planets. With very few exceptions, they considered each other as mortal enemies.
This was the reality that the UN commission, charged with proposing a solution, found on the ground when it visited the country.
One of the great moments of my life is connected with this UNSCOP (“United Nations Special Committee on Palestine”). On the Carmel mountain chain, near kibbutz Daliah, I was attending the annual folk dance festival. Folk dances played a major role in the new Hebrew culture we were consciously striving to create. Most of these dances were somewhat contrived, even artificial, like many of our efforts, but they reflected the will to create something new, fresh, rooted in the country, entirely different from the Jewish culture of our parents. Some of us spoke about a new “Hebrew nation”.
In a huge natural amphitheater, under a canopy of twinkling summer stars, tens of thousands of young people, boys and girls, had gathered to cheer on the many amateur groups performing on the stage. It was a joyous affair, imbued with camaraderie, radiating feelings of strength and self-confidence.
No one of us could have guessed that within a few months we would meet again in the fields of a deadly war.
In the middle of the performance, an excited voice announced on the loudspeaker that several members of UNSCOP had come to visit. As one, the huge crowd stood up and started to sing the national anthem, Hatikvah (“the Hope”). I never liked this song very much, but at that moment it sounded like a fervent prayer, filling the space, rebounding from the hills of the Carmel. I suppose that almost all of the 6000 Jewish youngsters who gave their lives in the war were assembled for the last time on that evening, singing with profound emotion.
IT WAS in this atmosphere that the members of UNSCOP, representing many different nations, had to find a solution.
As everybody knows, the commission adopted a plan to partition Palestine between an independent “Arab” and an independent “Jewish” state. But that is not the whole story.
Looking at the map of the 1947 partition resolution, one must wonder at the borders. They resemble a puzzle, with Arab pieces and Jewish pieces put together in an impossible patchwork, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem as a separate unit. The borders look crazy. Both states would have been totally indefensible.
The explanation is that the committee did not really envision two totally independent and separate states. The plan explicitly included an economic union. That would have necessitated a very close relationship between the two political entities, something akin to a federation, with open borders and free movement of people and goods. Without it, the borders would have been impossible.
That was a very optimistic scenario. Immediately after the committee’s plan was adopted by the General Assembly, after much cajoling by the Zionist leadership, war broke out with sporadic Arab attacks on Jewish traffic on the vital roads.
When the first shot was fired, the partition plan was dead. The foundation, on which the whole edifice rested, broke apart. No open borders, no economic union, no chance for a union of any kind. Only abyssal, deadly, enmity.
THE PARTITION plan would never have been adopted in the first place if it had not been preceded by a historical event that seemed at the time beyond belief.
The Soviet delegate to the UN, Andrei Gromyko, suddenly made what can only be described as a fiery Zionist speech. He contended that after the terrible suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust, they deserved a state of their own.
To appreciate the utter amazement with which this speech was received, one must remember that until that very moment, Communists and Zionists had been irreconcilable foes. It was not only a clash of ideologies, but also a family affair. In Tzarist Russia, Jews were persecuted by an anti-Semitic government, and young Jews, both male and female, were in the vanguard of all the revolutionary movements.
An idealistic young Jew had the choice between joining the Bolsheviks, the social-democratic Jewish Bund or the Zionists. The competition was fierce and engendered intense mutual hatred. Later, in the Soviet Union, Zionists were mercilessly persecuted. In Palestine, local Communists, Jewish and Arab, were accused of collaborating with the Arab militants who attacked Jewish neighborhoods.
What had brought about this sudden change in Soviet policy? Stalin did not turn from an anti-Semite into a philo-Semite. Far from it. But he was a pragmatist. It was the era of medium-range missiles, which threatened Soviet territory from all sides. Palestine was in practice a British colony and could easily have become a Western missile base, threatening Odessa and beyond. Better a Jewish and an Arab state, than that.
In the following war, almost all my weapons came from the Soviet bloc, mainly from Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union recognized Israel de jure long before the United States.
The end of this unnatural honeymoon came in the early fifties, when David Ben-Gurion decided to turn Israel into an inseparable part of the Western bloc. At the same time, Stalin recognized the importance of the new pan-Arab nationalism of Gamal Abd-al-Nasser and decided to ride on that wave. His paranoid anti-Semitism came again to the fore. All over Eastern Europe Communist veterans were executed as Zionist-imperialist-Trotskyite spies, and his Jewish doctors were accused of attempting to poison him. (Luckily for them, Stalin died just in time and they were saved.)
TODAY, THE partition resolution is remembered in Israel mainly because of two words: “Jewish state”.
No one in Israel wants to be reminded of the borders of 1947, which gave the Jewish minority in Palestine “only” 55% of the country. (Though half of this consisted of the Negev desert, most of which is almost empty even now.) Nor do Jewish Israelis like to be reminded that almost half the population of the territory allotted to them was Arab.
At the time, the UN resolution was accepted by the Jewish population with overflowing enthusiasm. The photos of the people dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv belong to this day, and not – as is often falsely claimed, to the day the State of Israel was officially founded. (At that time we were in middle of a bloody war and nobody was in the mood for dancing.)
We know now that Ben-Gurion did not dream of accepting the partition plan borders, and even less the Arab population within them. The famous army “Plan Dalet” early in the war was a strategic necessity, but it was also a solution to the two problems: it added to Israel another 22% of the country and it drove the Arab population out. Only a small remnant of the Arab population remained – and by now it has grown to 1.5 million.
But all that is history. What concerned the future are the words “Jewish state”. Israeli rightists, who abhor the partition resolution in any other context, insist that it provides the legal basis to Israel’s right to be recognized as a “Jewish state” – meaning in practice, that the state belongs to all the Jews around the world, but not to its Arab citizens, whose families have been living here for at least 13 centuries, if not far longer (depends who does the counting).
But the UN used the word “Jewish” only for lack of any other definition. During the British Mandate, the two peoples in the country were called in English “Jews” and “Arabs”. But we ourselves spoke about a “Hebrew” State (medina Ivrit). In newspaper clippings of the time, only this term can be seen. People of my age-group remember dozens of demonstrations in which we invariably chanted “Free Immigration – Hebrew State”. The sound of it still rings in our ears.
The UN did not deal with the ideological makeup of the future states. It certainly assumed that they would be democratic, belonging to all their inhabitants. Otherwise they would hardly have drawn borders that left a substantial Arab population in the “Jewish” state.
Israel’s declaration of independence bases itself on the UN resolution. The relevant sentence reads: “…AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, (WE) HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.”
The ultra-rightists who now dominate the Knesset want to use these words as a pretext for replacing democracy with a doctrine of Jewish nationalist-religious supremacy. A former Shin-Bet chief and present Kadima party MK has submitted a bill that would abolish the equality of the two terms “Jewish” and “democratic” in the official legal doctrine, and state clearly that the “Jewishness” of the state has precedence over its “democratic” character. This would deprive the Arab citizens of any remnant of equality. (At the last moment, in face of the public reaction, the Kadima party compelled him to withdraw the bill.)
THE 1947 partition plan was an exceptionally intelligent document. Its details are obsolete now, but its basic idea is as relevant today as it was 64 years ago: two nations are living in this country, they cannot live together in one state without a continuous civil war, they can live together in two states, the two states must establish close ties between each other.
Ben-Gurion was determined to prevent the founding of the Arab Palestinian state, and with the help of King Abdallah of Transjordan he succeeded in this. All his successors, with the possible exception of Yitzhak Rabin, have followed this line, now more than ever. We have paid – and are still paying – a heavy price for this folly.
On the 64th anniversary of this historic event, we must go back to its basic principle: Israel and Palestine, Two States for Two Peoples.
26 November 2011, Gush Shalom גוש שלום http://zope.gush-shalom.org (Israel)
Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי
A day in November. A day to remember.
On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted, by 33 votes against 13 (with 10 abstentions), the Palestine Partition Plan.
This event has become a subject of endless debates, misinterpretations and outright falsifications. It may be worthwhile to peel away the myths and see it as it was.
BY THE end of 1947, there were in the country – then officially named Palestine - about 1.2 million Arabs and 635 thousand Jews. The gap between the two population groups had turned into an abyss. Though geographically intertwined, they lived on two different planets. With very few exceptions, they considered each other as mortal enemies.
This was the reality that the UN commission, charged with proposing a solution, found on the ground when it visited the country.
One of the great moments of my life is connected with this UNSCOP (“United Nations Special Committee on Palestine”). On the Carmel mountain chain, near kibbutz Daliah, I was attending the annual folk dance festival. Folk dances played a major role in the new Hebrew culture we were consciously striving to create. Most of these dances were somewhat contrived, even artificial, like many of our efforts, but they reflected the will to create something new, fresh, rooted in the country, entirely different from the Jewish culture of our parents. Some of us spoke about a new “Hebrew nation”.
In a huge natural amphitheater, under a canopy of twinkling summer stars, tens of thousands of young people, boys and girls, had gathered to cheer on the many amateur groups performing on the stage. It was a joyous affair, imbued with camaraderie, radiating feelings of strength and self-confidence.
No one of us could have guessed that within a few months we would meet again in the fields of a deadly war.
In the middle of the performance, an excited voice announced on the loudspeaker that several members of UNSCOP had come to visit. As one, the huge crowd stood up and started to sing the national anthem, Hatikvah (“the Hope”). I never liked this song very much, but at that moment it sounded like a fervent prayer, filling the space, rebounding from the hills of the Carmel. I suppose that almost all of the 6000 Jewish youngsters who gave their lives in the war were assembled for the last time on that evening, singing with profound emotion.
IT WAS in this atmosphere that the members of UNSCOP, representing many different nations, had to find a solution.
As everybody knows, the commission adopted a plan to partition Palestine between an independent “Arab” and an independent “Jewish” state. But that is not the whole story.
Looking at the map of the 1947 partition resolution, one must wonder at the borders. They resemble a puzzle, with Arab pieces and Jewish pieces put together in an impossible patchwork, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem as a separate unit. The borders look crazy. Both states would have been totally indefensible.
The explanation is that the committee did not really envision two totally independent and separate states. The plan explicitly included an economic union. That would have necessitated a very close relationship between the two political entities, something akin to a federation, with open borders and free movement of people and goods. Without it, the borders would have been impossible.
That was a very optimistic scenario. Immediately after the committee’s plan was adopted by the General Assembly, after much cajoling by the Zionist leadership, war broke out with sporadic Arab attacks on Jewish traffic on the vital roads.
When the first shot was fired, the partition plan was dead. The foundation, on which the whole edifice rested, broke apart. No open borders, no economic union, no chance for a union of any kind. Only abyssal, deadly, enmity.
THE PARTITION plan would never have been adopted in the first place if it had not been preceded by a historical event that seemed at the time beyond belief.
The Soviet delegate to the UN, Andrei Gromyko, suddenly made what can only be described as a fiery Zionist speech. He contended that after the terrible suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust, they deserved a state of their own.
To appreciate the utter amazement with which this speech was received, one must remember that until that very moment, Communists and Zionists had been irreconcilable foes. It was not only a clash of ideologies, but also a family affair. In Tzarist Russia, Jews were persecuted by an anti-Semitic government, and young Jews, both male and female, were in the vanguard of all the revolutionary movements.
An idealistic young Jew had the choice between joining the Bolsheviks, the social-democratic Jewish Bund or the Zionists. The competition was fierce and engendered intense mutual hatred. Later, in the Soviet Union, Zionists were mercilessly persecuted. In Palestine, local Communists, Jewish and Arab, were accused of collaborating with the Arab militants who attacked Jewish neighborhoods.
What had brought about this sudden change in Soviet policy? Stalin did not turn from an anti-Semite into a philo-Semite. Far from it. But he was a pragmatist. It was the era of medium-range missiles, which threatened Soviet territory from all sides. Palestine was in practice a British colony and could easily have become a Western missile base, threatening Odessa and beyond. Better a Jewish and an Arab state, than that.
In the following war, almost all my weapons came from the Soviet bloc, mainly from Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union recognized Israel de jure long before the United States.
The end of this unnatural honeymoon came in the early fifties, when David Ben-Gurion decided to turn Israel into an inseparable part of the Western bloc. At the same time, Stalin recognized the importance of the new pan-Arab nationalism of Gamal Abd-al-Nasser and decided to ride on that wave. His paranoid anti-Semitism came again to the fore. All over Eastern Europe Communist veterans were executed as Zionist-imperialist-Trotskyite spies, and his Jewish doctors were accused of attempting to poison him. (Luckily for them, Stalin died just in time and they were saved.)
TODAY, THE partition resolution is remembered in Israel mainly because of two words: “Jewish state”.
No one in Israel wants to be reminded of the borders of 1947, which gave the Jewish minority in Palestine “only” 55% of the country. (Though half of this consisted of the Negev desert, most of which is almost empty even now.) Nor do Jewish Israelis like to be reminded that almost half the population of the territory allotted to them was Arab.
At the time, the UN resolution was accepted by the Jewish population with overflowing enthusiasm. The photos of the people dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv belong to this day, and not – as is often falsely claimed, to the day the State of Israel was officially founded. (At that time we were in middle of a bloody war and nobody was in the mood for dancing.)
We know now that Ben-Gurion did not dream of accepting the partition plan borders, and even less the Arab population within them. The famous army “Plan Dalet” early in the war was a strategic necessity, but it was also a solution to the two problems: it added to Israel another 22% of the country and it drove the Arab population out. Only a small remnant of the Arab population remained – and by now it has grown to 1.5 million.
But all that is history. What concerned the future are the words “Jewish state”. Israeli rightists, who abhor the partition resolution in any other context, insist that it provides the legal basis to Israel’s right to be recognized as a “Jewish state” – meaning in practice, that the state belongs to all the Jews around the world, but not to its Arab citizens, whose families have been living here for at least 13 centuries, if not far longer (depends who does the counting).
But the UN used the word “Jewish” only for lack of any other definition. During the British Mandate, the two peoples in the country were called in English “Jews” and “Arabs”. But we ourselves spoke about a “Hebrew” State (medina Ivrit). In newspaper clippings of the time, only this term can be seen. People of my age-group remember dozens of demonstrations in which we invariably chanted “Free Immigration – Hebrew State”. The sound of it still rings in our ears.
The UN did not deal with the ideological makeup of the future states. It certainly assumed that they would be democratic, belonging to all their inhabitants. Otherwise they would hardly have drawn borders that left a substantial Arab population in the “Jewish” state.
Israel’s declaration of independence bases itself on the UN resolution. The relevant sentence reads: “…AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, (WE) HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.”
The ultra-rightists who now dominate the Knesset want to use these words as a pretext for replacing democracy with a doctrine of Jewish nationalist-religious supremacy. A former Shin-Bet chief and present Kadima party MK has submitted a bill that would abolish the equality of the two terms “Jewish” and “democratic” in the official legal doctrine, and state clearly that the “Jewishness” of the state has precedence over its “democratic” character. This would deprive the Arab citizens of any remnant of equality. (At the last moment, in face of the public reaction, the Kadima party compelled him to withdraw the bill.)
THE 1947 partition plan was an exceptionally intelligent document. Its details are obsolete now, but its basic idea is as relevant today as it was 64 years ago: two nations are living in this country, they cannot live together in one state without a continuous civil war, they can live together in two states, the two states must establish close ties between each other.
Ben-Gurion was determined to prevent the founding of the Arab Palestinian state, and with the help of King Abdallah of Transjordan he succeeded in this. All his successors, with the possible exception of Yitzhak Rabin, have followed this line, now more than ever. We have paid – and are still paying – a heavy price for this folly.
On the 64th anniversary of this historic event, we must go back to its basic principle: Israel and Palestine, Two States for Two Peoples.
domingo, 20 de novembro de 2011
WEIMAR REVISITED
19 november 2011, Gush Shalom גוש שלום http://zope.gush-shalom.org (Israel)
Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי
“YOU AND your Weimar!” a friend of mine once exclaimed in exasperation, ”just because you experienced the collapse of the Weimar Republic as a child, you see Weimar behind every corner.”
The accusation was not unjustified. In 1960, during the Eichmann trial, I wrote a book about the fall of the German Republic. Its last chapter was called: “It can happen here” Since then I have come back to this warning time and again.
But now I am not alone anymore. During the last few weeks, the word Weimar has popped up in the articles of many commentators.
It should be sprayed in huge letters on the walls.
ISRAELI DEMOCRACY is under siege. No one can ignore this anymore. It is the main topic in the Knesset, which is leading the attack, and the media, who are among the victims.
This does not happen in the occupied territories. There, democracy never existed. Occupation is the very opposite of democracy: a denial of all human rights, the right to life, liberty, movement, fair trial and free expression, not to mention national rights.
No, I mean Israel proper, the Israel inside the Green Line, The Only Democracy In The Middle East.
The attackers are members of Binyamin Netanyahu’s government coalition, which includes semi-fascist and openly fascist elements. Netanyahu himself tries to remain discreetly in the background, but there can be no doubt that every single detail has been orchestrated by him.
In the first two years of this coalition, attacks were sporadic. But now they are determined, systematic and coordinated.
At this moment, the anti-democratic forces are attacking on a wide front, The three main pillars of democracy – the courts, the media and the human rights organizations – are under simultaneous, deadly assault. (Remember Weimar?)
THE SUPREME COURT is the bastion of democracy. Israel has no constitution, the Knesset majority is totally unbridled, only the court can (if reluctantly) check the adoption of anti-democratic laws.
I am not a blind admirer of the court. In the occupied territories, it is an arm of the occupation, devoted to “national security”, approving of some of the worst incidents. Only in rare cases has it come out against the worst practices. But in Israel proper, it is a stout defender of civil rights.
The extreme rightists in the Knesset are resolved to put an end to this. Their front man is the Minister of Justice, who was appointed by Avigdor Lieberman. He is pushing a series of scandalous ad hominem bills. One of them is designed to change the composition of the public committee that appoints the judges, with the undisguised intention of bringing about the appointment of a particular right-wing judge to the Supreme Court.
Another bill has the undisguised purpose of changing the existing court rules in order to put a certain “conservative” judge in the chair of Chief Justice. The declared purpose is to abolish the rule of an independent court which dares, though only in rare cases, to block “anti-constitutional” laws enacted by the Knesset majority. They want the court to “represent the will of the people”. (Remember Weimar?)
Until now, since the first day of the state, the justices have been, in practice, chosen by cooptation. This has functioned perfectly for 63 years. Israel’s Supreme Court is the envy of many countries. Now this system is in mortal danger.
Another bill, which would have compelled candidates for the Supreme Court to undergo grilling by a Knesset Committee chaired by another Lieberman appointee, and obtain their approval, was withheld at the last moment by Netanyahu himself, He had already given his approval, but shrank back after the almost universal condemnation – and is now posing as the defender of democracy from his own underlings.
The chairman of the Judicial Committee of the Knesset, another Lieberman appointee, is rushing these laws through his committee, contrary to established procedures. In a stormy session this week, a female member called him “a coarse thug”. He replied: “You are not even a beast”.
A minimal purpose of these bills is to terrorize any judges considering vetoing the other anti-democratic bills that are being enacted. Some say that the effects are already being felt.
In several famous cases, the government openly flouts the Supreme Court’s orders, especially concerning the evacuation of “settlements outposts” built on lands belonging to Palestinian farmers.
Who will defend the court? The former Chief Justice, Aharon Barak, who was hated by the rightists because of his pioneering “judicial activism”, once told me: “The Court has no army divisions. Its power rests solely on the support of the public.”
THE ASSAULT on the media started some time ago when the American casino baron, Sheldon Adelson, a close friend of Netanyahu, started a daily tabloid paper with the express purpose of helping Netanyahu. It is being distributed for free and now has the biggest circulation in the country, threatening the existence of all the others (but also bribing them by giving them huge printing orders.) Money is no object. Huge sums are being spent.
That was only the beginning.
In 1965 the Labor party government enacted a new libel law (called literally “the Law of the Evil Tongue”) which was then clearly designed to muzzle “Haolam Hazeh”, the mass-circulation news magazine I was editing, which had introduced investigative reporting to Israel. I appealed to the public to send me to the Knesset in protest, and 1.5% of the voters were incensed enough to do so.
Now the right-wing gang in the Knesset wants to sharpen this anti-media law even more. The new amendment grants up to $135,000 damages to anyone claiming to be hurt by the media, without their having to prove any damage at all. For newspapers and TV channels, which are already in a precarious financial position, this means that they better give up all investigative reporting and any criticism of influential politicians and tycoons.
The new winds are already being felt. Journalists and TV editors are cowed. This week, a program on Channel 10, considered the most liberal, gave five minutes to a song glorifying the late “Rabbi” Meir Kahane, who was branded by the Supreme Court as a fascist, and whose organization was outlawed for advocating what the court called “Nuremberg laws”. An avowed member of this organization, which is alive and kicking under another name, is now a vocal member of the Knesset. (Remember Weimar?)
A major purge of TV journalists is already underway. One by one, directors of all TV channels are being replaced by confirmed rightists. It was openly admitted that the government would force the closure of Channel 10 by calling in outstanding debts if a certain journalist were not fired. Though generally an establishment type, this reporter had irked Netanyahu by exposing his and his wife’s luxurious traveling style at government expense.
AT THE same time, human rights and peace NGOs are under heavy attack. The Knesset gang is producing bill after bill to silence them.
One bill already under way forbids human rights associations to receive donations from foreign governments and “state-like organizations”, such as the UN and the EU. Right-wing organization receive, of course, huge sums of money from Jewish American billionaires, who fund the settlements (which are also indirectly financed by the US treasury, which gives tax-exempt status to the so-called “charitable organizations” that fund the settlements.)
The law which levies huge indemnities on organizations and individuals who advocate a boycott on the products of the settlements is already in force. The hearing of an application submitted by Gush Shalom to the Supreme Court against this suppression of political protest has been postponed by the court again and again and again.
This parliamentary terrorism is accompanied by the accelerating violence of fascist gangs from the settlements. These SA-like gangs call their actions “Price Tag”. Usually, they react to the isolated cases of the army demolishing a few “illegal” buildings in a settlement by attacking a neighboring Palestinian village, setting fire to a mosque or carrying out what can only be described as a pogrom. (Remember Weimar?)
MARTIN NIEMÖLLER, a German U-boat captain and later pacifist pastor, who was thrown into a concentration camp by the Nazis, coined the famous lament: “When the Nazis came to take the Communists, I was silent. After all, I was no Communist. When they took the Jews, I was silent. I am no Jew. When they arrested the Social Democrats, I was silent. I was no Social Democrat. When they came to take me, there was no one left to protest.”
What we are witnessing now are not isolated attacks on one or another human right – what we are seeing is a general attack on democracy as such. Perhaps only people who have experienced life under a fascist dictatorship can fully realize what that means.
Of course, the similarity between the collapse of the German republic and the processes in today’s Israel does not mean that the same events must follow. Nazism was unique in many ways. The end of real democracy may be followed by different systems. There are many models to choose from: Ceausescu, Franco, Putin.
Certainly, there is no similarity between the small German town called Weimar and Tel Aviv. Except perhaps the fact that many houses in Tel Aviv were designed according to the Bauhaus architectural school - which originated in Weimar.
Weimar was once a cultural center, where geniuses like Goethe and Schiller produced their masterpieces. The German republic which was founded in 1919, after World War I, was called by this name after the national assembly which framed its very progressive constitution there.
On these lines, the endangered democratic State of Israel, whose Declaration of Independence was signed in 1948 in Tel Aviv, could rightly be called the Tel Aviv Republic.
We are not yet in 1932. The Storm Troopers are not yet roaming our streets. We still have time to mobilize the public against the looming danger. This week's demonstration that will take place in Tel Aviv against the de-democratization of Israel may mark a turning point.
Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי
“YOU AND your Weimar!” a friend of mine once exclaimed in exasperation, ”just because you experienced the collapse of the Weimar Republic as a child, you see Weimar behind every corner.”
The accusation was not unjustified. In 1960, during the Eichmann trial, I wrote a book about the fall of the German Republic. Its last chapter was called: “It can happen here” Since then I have come back to this warning time and again.
But now I am not alone anymore. During the last few weeks, the word Weimar has popped up in the articles of many commentators.
It should be sprayed in huge letters on the walls.
ISRAELI DEMOCRACY is under siege. No one can ignore this anymore. It is the main topic in the Knesset, which is leading the attack, and the media, who are among the victims.
This does not happen in the occupied territories. There, democracy never existed. Occupation is the very opposite of democracy: a denial of all human rights, the right to life, liberty, movement, fair trial and free expression, not to mention national rights.
No, I mean Israel proper, the Israel inside the Green Line, The Only Democracy In The Middle East.
The attackers are members of Binyamin Netanyahu’s government coalition, which includes semi-fascist and openly fascist elements. Netanyahu himself tries to remain discreetly in the background, but there can be no doubt that every single detail has been orchestrated by him.
In the first two years of this coalition, attacks were sporadic. But now they are determined, systematic and coordinated.
At this moment, the anti-democratic forces are attacking on a wide front, The three main pillars of democracy – the courts, the media and the human rights organizations – are under simultaneous, deadly assault. (Remember Weimar?)
THE SUPREME COURT is the bastion of democracy. Israel has no constitution, the Knesset majority is totally unbridled, only the court can (if reluctantly) check the adoption of anti-democratic laws.
I am not a blind admirer of the court. In the occupied territories, it is an arm of the occupation, devoted to “national security”, approving of some of the worst incidents. Only in rare cases has it come out against the worst practices. But in Israel proper, it is a stout defender of civil rights.
The extreme rightists in the Knesset are resolved to put an end to this. Their front man is the Minister of Justice, who was appointed by Avigdor Lieberman. He is pushing a series of scandalous ad hominem bills. One of them is designed to change the composition of the public committee that appoints the judges, with the undisguised intention of bringing about the appointment of a particular right-wing judge to the Supreme Court.
Another bill has the undisguised purpose of changing the existing court rules in order to put a certain “conservative” judge in the chair of Chief Justice. The declared purpose is to abolish the rule of an independent court which dares, though only in rare cases, to block “anti-constitutional” laws enacted by the Knesset majority. They want the court to “represent the will of the people”. (Remember Weimar?)
Until now, since the first day of the state, the justices have been, in practice, chosen by cooptation. This has functioned perfectly for 63 years. Israel’s Supreme Court is the envy of many countries. Now this system is in mortal danger.
Another bill, which would have compelled candidates for the Supreme Court to undergo grilling by a Knesset Committee chaired by another Lieberman appointee, and obtain their approval, was withheld at the last moment by Netanyahu himself, He had already given his approval, but shrank back after the almost universal condemnation – and is now posing as the defender of democracy from his own underlings.
The chairman of the Judicial Committee of the Knesset, another Lieberman appointee, is rushing these laws through his committee, contrary to established procedures. In a stormy session this week, a female member called him “a coarse thug”. He replied: “You are not even a beast”.
A minimal purpose of these bills is to terrorize any judges considering vetoing the other anti-democratic bills that are being enacted. Some say that the effects are already being felt.
In several famous cases, the government openly flouts the Supreme Court’s orders, especially concerning the evacuation of “settlements outposts” built on lands belonging to Palestinian farmers.
Who will defend the court? The former Chief Justice, Aharon Barak, who was hated by the rightists because of his pioneering “judicial activism”, once told me: “The Court has no army divisions. Its power rests solely on the support of the public.”
THE ASSAULT on the media started some time ago when the American casino baron, Sheldon Adelson, a close friend of Netanyahu, started a daily tabloid paper with the express purpose of helping Netanyahu. It is being distributed for free and now has the biggest circulation in the country, threatening the existence of all the others (but also bribing them by giving them huge printing orders.) Money is no object. Huge sums are being spent.
That was only the beginning.
In 1965 the Labor party government enacted a new libel law (called literally “the Law of the Evil Tongue”) which was then clearly designed to muzzle “Haolam Hazeh”, the mass-circulation news magazine I was editing, which had introduced investigative reporting to Israel. I appealed to the public to send me to the Knesset in protest, and 1.5% of the voters were incensed enough to do so.
Now the right-wing gang in the Knesset wants to sharpen this anti-media law even more. The new amendment grants up to $135,000 damages to anyone claiming to be hurt by the media, without their having to prove any damage at all. For newspapers and TV channels, which are already in a precarious financial position, this means that they better give up all investigative reporting and any criticism of influential politicians and tycoons.
The new winds are already being felt. Journalists and TV editors are cowed. This week, a program on Channel 10, considered the most liberal, gave five minutes to a song glorifying the late “Rabbi” Meir Kahane, who was branded by the Supreme Court as a fascist, and whose organization was outlawed for advocating what the court called “Nuremberg laws”. An avowed member of this organization, which is alive and kicking under another name, is now a vocal member of the Knesset. (Remember Weimar?)
A major purge of TV journalists is already underway. One by one, directors of all TV channels are being replaced by confirmed rightists. It was openly admitted that the government would force the closure of Channel 10 by calling in outstanding debts if a certain journalist were not fired. Though generally an establishment type, this reporter had irked Netanyahu by exposing his and his wife’s luxurious traveling style at government expense.
AT THE same time, human rights and peace NGOs are under heavy attack. The Knesset gang is producing bill after bill to silence them.
One bill already under way forbids human rights associations to receive donations from foreign governments and “state-like organizations”, such as the UN and the EU. Right-wing organization receive, of course, huge sums of money from Jewish American billionaires, who fund the settlements (which are also indirectly financed by the US treasury, which gives tax-exempt status to the so-called “charitable organizations” that fund the settlements.)
The law which levies huge indemnities on organizations and individuals who advocate a boycott on the products of the settlements is already in force. The hearing of an application submitted by Gush Shalom to the Supreme Court against this suppression of political protest has been postponed by the court again and again and again.
This parliamentary terrorism is accompanied by the accelerating violence of fascist gangs from the settlements. These SA-like gangs call their actions “Price Tag”. Usually, they react to the isolated cases of the army demolishing a few “illegal” buildings in a settlement by attacking a neighboring Palestinian village, setting fire to a mosque or carrying out what can only be described as a pogrom. (Remember Weimar?)
MARTIN NIEMÖLLER, a German U-boat captain and later pacifist pastor, who was thrown into a concentration camp by the Nazis, coined the famous lament: “When the Nazis came to take the Communists, I was silent. After all, I was no Communist. When they took the Jews, I was silent. I am no Jew. When they arrested the Social Democrats, I was silent. I was no Social Democrat. When they came to take me, there was no one left to protest.”
What we are witnessing now are not isolated attacks on one or another human right – what we are seeing is a general attack on democracy as such. Perhaps only people who have experienced life under a fascist dictatorship can fully realize what that means.
Of course, the similarity between the collapse of the German republic and the processes in today’s Israel does not mean that the same events must follow. Nazism was unique in many ways. The end of real democracy may be followed by different systems. There are many models to choose from: Ceausescu, Franco, Putin.
Certainly, there is no similarity between the small German town called Weimar and Tel Aviv. Except perhaps the fact that many houses in Tel Aviv were designed according to the Bauhaus architectural school - which originated in Weimar.
Weimar was once a cultural center, where geniuses like Goethe and Schiller produced their masterpieces. The German republic which was founded in 1919, after World War I, was called by this name after the national assembly which framed its very progressive constitution there.
On these lines, the endangered democratic State of Israel, whose Declaration of Independence was signed in 1948 in Tel Aviv, could rightly be called the Tel Aviv Republic.
We are not yet in 1932. The Storm Troopers are not yet roaming our streets. We still have time to mobilize the public against the looming danger. This week's demonstration that will take place in Tel Aviv against the de-democratization of Israel may mark a turning point.
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