12 August 2011, Jerome Slater http://www.jeromeslater.com (USA)
It is very hard for an outsider to know what to make of the current wave of populist protest in Israel which, though advocating “social justice” in Israel has nothing to say about the occupation and repression of the Palestinians.
Over 300,000 people have come out into the streets in support of the goals of the movement, which were initially motivated by the unavailability or unaffordability of adequate housing but which have broadened to include the crippling overall cost of living, the growing inequality of wealth within Israeli society, and what the Israeli journalist Dimi Reider has described as “the parenting costs, the free-fall in the quality of public education, the overworked, unsustainable healthcare system, the complete and utter detachment of most politicians, on most levels, from most of the nation.”
Remarkably, polls show that up to 90% of the Israeli general public support the demands for economic reform, including many working-class hardline nationalists and Likud activists. In its broadest form, as the Israeli activist Jeff Halper writes, “the demonstrations currently roiling Israel constitute a grassroots challenge to Israel’s neo-liberal regime. Beginning as an uprising of the middle classes….it has spread to the working class, the poor and the Arab communities as well.”
Last Monday the leaders of the protest movement, as well as student leaders and representatives of various social organizations, issued a joint statement setting forth the movement’s goals in more detail. “For a number of decades, the various governments of Israel have opted for an economic policy of privatization that leaves the free market without reins…making our daily existence a war for survival to subsist with dignity,” the document begins. It goes on to demand that social inequalities be minimized; that the cost of living be lowered; that full employment be achieved; that action be taken to meet “the essential needs of the weaker population in the country, with an emphasis on the handicapped, the elderly and the sick;” and that the state invest in public education, health, transportation, and public infrastructures.
A most admirable set of demands. Indeed, they could be transplanted to this country with very few modifications—which is not at all surprising, since the triumph of the right in Israel and its Likudist “neo-liberal” economics is closely modeled on the greed-is-good and the devil-take-the-hindmost raw plutocracy of the Republican party hereabouts.
The problem is that the leaders of the protest movement have made a conscious decision not to include the demand that the occupation and repression of the Palestinians be brought to an end; indeed, even the demand that the various forms of discrimination against the Arab citizens of Israel be ended has the potential to badly split the movement. As the Haaretz columnist Akiva Eldar has recently caustically observed: “social justice, and justice in general, ends for a considerable number of the demonstrators at the outskirts of Umm al-Fahm [the largest Israeli Arab city]. Never mind the gates of Nablus.”
As might be expected, the decision to focus only on social justice for Israelis rather than on justice for the Palestinians has caused some division within the Israeli left, as illustrated by the contrasting positions taken by two of Israel’s most astute, outspoken, and morally admirable young analysts and journalists, Dimi Reider and Joseph Dana. Reider has made a powerful case:
“It should be admitted…that the Israeli left has utterly and abjectly failed to [persuade] Israelis in the project of ending the occupation. There was never a choice between a social struggle focused on the occupation and a social struggle temporarily putting the conflict aside, because the first attempt would have flopped. There was nothing to be gained by trying the same thing again for the Nth time.”
Dana concedes that “The sad reality is that if Israelis discuss Palestinian rights and specifically the rights of Palestinians under Israeli occupation they very quickly lose public support.…Had protesters connected their struggle for social justice to the occupation, many fewer Israelis would have joined the protests.” Even so, he is very uneasy about the strategy chosen by the protest leaders: “The protesters’ working definition of ‘social justice’ is unclear and full of contradictions. The rights of Israelis are inextricably tied with the rights of Palestinians, both inside the 1967 borders and in the Occupied Territories. The protesters, like most of Israeli society, are operating under the assumption that they are disconnected from the Palestinians who live under Israeli military occupation. But the fact is that one regime rules the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and any discussion of the allocation of resources, not to mention social justice, must take into account the rights of everyone who lives under the regime.”
The moral as well as practical dilemma for the Israeli left is acute. Many of Israel’s bravest and most admirable opponents of the occupation—people like Halper, Bernie Avishai, Gideon Levy, Yitzhak Laor, and others—are enthusiastic about the protest movement. Others, like Akiva Eldar, Amira Hass, and Uri Avnery, while of course strongly supporting the social justice goals, are uneasy about the decision to exclude the occupation or skeptical about the likely outcome. For example, Hass writes: “In the coming months, as the movement grows, it will split. Some will continue to think and demand ‘justice’ within the borders of one nation, always at the expense of the other nation that lives in this land. Others, however, will understand that this will never be a country of justice and welfare if it is not a state of all its citizens.”
In light of divisions within the Israeli left and the persuasive arguments on both sides of the debate, an outsider is in no position to reach a confident assessment about the issue. Yet, I can’t help feeling uncomfortable about the current strategy of the protest leaders. First, there is an important difference between the social justice protests and the last mass protests in Israel, which were over Israel’s complicity in the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacres in Lebanon. The latter was unambiguously driven by moral considerations; the former, while certainly containing a moral component, is also driven simply by economic self-interest, especially since it has become a populist movement linking the Israeli right with the left. For that reason, there is little reason to be hopeful that the movement signals a moral transformation of Israeli society.
Social injustice in Israel is inextricably linked to the occupation. In the first instance, as a number of the protest leaders and their supporters have pointed out, the enormous public resources devoted to the settlements and the armed forces necessary to protect them are resources that are not available for the rest of society. Even more fundamentally, the occupation and repression of the Palestinians is so morally poisonous that it is impossible to imagine that a truly just society can be created –even if only for the Jews themselves—until it has ended.
Mostrando postagens com marcador Uri Avinery. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Uri Avinery. Mostrar todas as postagens
segunda-feira, 15 de agosto de 2011
quarta-feira, 3 de agosto de 2011
Israël : l’éternel combattant de la paix Uri Avnery garde espoir
2 août 2011, Association France Palestine Solidarité (AFPS) http://www.france-palestine.org (France)
Jerusalem (AFP) — Uri Avnery, figure emblématique du camp de la paix en Israël, garde l’espoir chevillé au corps à 87 ans, bien que l’ultra nationalisme ait le vent en poupe, que les perspectives d’accord avec les Palestiniens s’éloignent et que la gauche perde élection après élection.
"Je reste optimiste car je crois à la capacité de ce peuple (israélien) de changer de cap", confie Uri Avnery.
En revanche, cet octogénaire ne mâche pas ses mots contre les dirigeants politiques, dont il dénonce l’intransigeance aussi bien envers les Palestiniens que dans le domaine social.
Il décèle dans la lutte populaire contre la hausse vertigineuse des prix du logement "la naissance d’une nouvelle gauche, très différente de celle d’antan".
"Quand des gens descendent dans la rue en scandant +le peuple veut la justice sociale+, en reprenant des slogans de la place Tahrir du Caire, leur lutte va bien au-delà de la question de l’habitat", souligne-t-il, en référence aux révoltes dans le monde arabe.
Peu importe, selon lui, que ce mouvement ne lie pas la lutte sociale à celle pour la paix : "en fin de compte, il y viendra, car nous dilapidons des sommes astronomiques pour entretenir la machine de guerre et la colonisation".
Dès le lendemain de la première guerre israélo-arabe de 1948, ce journaliste a fait campagne pour la création d’un Etat palestinien aux côtés d’Israël. Si plus de six décennies plus tard, cet Etat n’a toujours pas vu le jour, M. Avnery n’estime pas pour autant avoir prêché dans le désert.
"Nous n’étions pas plus de cent à travers le monde en 1949 à promouvoir cette idée. Aujourd’hui, le monde entier la soutient et c’est même le cas de la majorité des Israéliens".
Dans ce contexte, il souhaite ardemment une reconnaissance en septembre de l’ONU sous une forme ou une autre d’un Etat palestinien.
Il juge "capital un soutien de la France" et plus largement de l’Europe à cette initiative, quand bien même "elle buttera sur un veto américain au Conseil de sécurité".
Il refuse de voir dans la colonisation juive "un fait accompli irréversible" et se dit convaincu que l’immense majorité des Israéliens optera pour le démantèlement des colonies en échange d’une "paix véritable", malgré l’implantation de plus d’un demi-million d’Israéliens en Cisjordanie et à Jérusalem-Est.
Cultivant le paradoxe, ce militant de la paix, qui se définit comme "post-sioniste", est un patriote israélien, qui a longtemps éprouvé un véritable amour envers l’armée israélienne.
Mais, souligne-t-il, "c’était quand Tsahal était une armée du peuple qui n’avait pas été corrompue par l’occupation". Aujourd’hui il s’inquiète de la montée en puissance au sein du corps des officiers "de nationalistes religieux qui prennent leurs ordres de rabbins".
Il est atterré par les changements qui se sont produits dans la société israélienne : "l’ultra capitalisme régnant, le pouvoir concentré dans 20 familles, des services publics (santé et éducation) qui se dégradent".
Né en 1923 en Allemagne, Uri Avnery a immigré à l’âge de dix ans en Palestine avec sa famille, fuyant le nazisme.
En 1950, il fonde un hebdomadaire indépendant Haolam Hazeh, dont il sera le rédacteur durant quarante ans. Ce journal anti-conformisme, seul à l’époque à ne pas être organe d’un parti, aura une influence considérable sur la presse israélienne.
En 1969, il est élu à la Knesset sur une liste indépendante. Il y siègera huit ans. En 1982, il fait scandale en rencontrant le chef historique palestinien Yasser Arafat, à Beyrouth, assiégé par l’armée israélienne.
Dans sa jeunesse, il a appartenu à l’Irgoun, organisation clandestine de droite qui menait à coups de bombes la lutte contre les Britanniques et les Arabes.
Il ne regrette rien : "Je luttais pour la liberté de mon peuple contre l’occupant britannique. Pour les mêmes motifs, j’ai toujours pensé que les Palestiniens ont droit à leur indépendance".
Jerusalem (AFP) — Uri Avnery, figure emblématique du camp de la paix en Israël, garde l’espoir chevillé au corps à 87 ans, bien que l’ultra nationalisme ait le vent en poupe, que les perspectives d’accord avec les Palestiniens s’éloignent et que la gauche perde élection après élection.
"Je reste optimiste car je crois à la capacité de ce peuple (israélien) de changer de cap", confie Uri Avnery.
En revanche, cet octogénaire ne mâche pas ses mots contre les dirigeants politiques, dont il dénonce l’intransigeance aussi bien envers les Palestiniens que dans le domaine social.
Il décèle dans la lutte populaire contre la hausse vertigineuse des prix du logement "la naissance d’une nouvelle gauche, très différente de celle d’antan".
"Quand des gens descendent dans la rue en scandant +le peuple veut la justice sociale+, en reprenant des slogans de la place Tahrir du Caire, leur lutte va bien au-delà de la question de l’habitat", souligne-t-il, en référence aux révoltes dans le monde arabe.
Peu importe, selon lui, que ce mouvement ne lie pas la lutte sociale à celle pour la paix : "en fin de compte, il y viendra, car nous dilapidons des sommes astronomiques pour entretenir la machine de guerre et la colonisation".
Dès le lendemain de la première guerre israélo-arabe de 1948, ce journaliste a fait campagne pour la création d’un Etat palestinien aux côtés d’Israël. Si plus de six décennies plus tard, cet Etat n’a toujours pas vu le jour, M. Avnery n’estime pas pour autant avoir prêché dans le désert.
"Nous n’étions pas plus de cent à travers le monde en 1949 à promouvoir cette idée. Aujourd’hui, le monde entier la soutient et c’est même le cas de la majorité des Israéliens".
Dans ce contexte, il souhaite ardemment une reconnaissance en septembre de l’ONU sous une forme ou une autre d’un Etat palestinien.
Il juge "capital un soutien de la France" et plus largement de l’Europe à cette initiative, quand bien même "elle buttera sur un veto américain au Conseil de sécurité".
Il refuse de voir dans la colonisation juive "un fait accompli irréversible" et se dit convaincu que l’immense majorité des Israéliens optera pour le démantèlement des colonies en échange d’une "paix véritable", malgré l’implantation de plus d’un demi-million d’Israéliens en Cisjordanie et à Jérusalem-Est.
Cultivant le paradoxe, ce militant de la paix, qui se définit comme "post-sioniste", est un patriote israélien, qui a longtemps éprouvé un véritable amour envers l’armée israélienne.
Mais, souligne-t-il, "c’était quand Tsahal était une armée du peuple qui n’avait pas été corrompue par l’occupation". Aujourd’hui il s’inquiète de la montée en puissance au sein du corps des officiers "de nationalistes religieux qui prennent leurs ordres de rabbins".
Il est atterré par les changements qui se sont produits dans la société israélienne : "l’ultra capitalisme régnant, le pouvoir concentré dans 20 familles, des services publics (santé et éducation) qui se dégradent".
Né en 1923 en Allemagne, Uri Avnery a immigré à l’âge de dix ans en Palestine avec sa famille, fuyant le nazisme.
En 1950, il fonde un hebdomadaire indépendant Haolam Hazeh, dont il sera le rédacteur durant quarante ans. Ce journal anti-conformisme, seul à l’époque à ne pas être organe d’un parti, aura une influence considérable sur la presse israélienne.
En 1969, il est élu à la Knesset sur une liste indépendante. Il y siègera huit ans. En 1982, il fait scandale en rencontrant le chef historique palestinien Yasser Arafat, à Beyrouth, assiégé par l’armée israélienne.
Dans sa jeunesse, il a appartenu à l’Irgoun, organisation clandestine de droite qui menait à coups de bombes la lutte contre les Britanniques et les Arabes.
Il ne regrette rien : "Je luttais pour la liberté de mon peuple contre l’occupant britannique. Pour les mêmes motifs, j’ai toujours pensé que les Palestiniens ont droit à leur indépendance".
segunda-feira, 11 de julho de 2011
INSTILLED MEMORY, AND TEN LITTLE BOATS
8 July 2011, Palestine Chronicle http://palestinechronicle.com (USA)
Let the little boats go to Gaza.
By Uri Avnery
For Several weeks now, our army and navy have been in a state of high alert, bravely facing a deadly threat to our very existence: ten little boats trying to reach Gaza. These vessels are carrying a dangerous gang of vicious terrorists, in the form of elderly veterans of peace campaigns.
Binyamin Netanyahu has affirmed our unshakable determination to defend our country: We shall not let anyone break the blockade to smuggle rockets to the terrorists in Gaza, who will then launch them to kill our innocent children.
This is a kind of record even for Netanyahu: not a single word is true. The flotilla is not carrying any weapons – the representatives of respected international media in the boats provide assurance of this. Also, I think we can rely on the Mossad to plant at least one agent in every boat. (After all, what am I paying my taxes for?) Hamas has not launched rockets for a long time – it has very good reasons of its own to keep the unofficial “Tahdiyeh” (“Quiet”) agreement.
If the flotilla had been allowed to reach Gaza, it would have been news for a few hours, and that would have been that. Israel’s total mobilization, the training of the naval commandos for capturing the boats, the acts of sabotage carried out in Greek ports, the immense political pressure exerted by Israel and the US on the poor, bankrupt Greek government – all this has kept this minor initiative in the news for weeks now, drawing attention to the blockade of the Gaza Strip.
What is this blockade for? There is no ascertainable reason for it now, if there ever was one. To terrorize the Gaza people into overthrowing the Hamas government, the victor in democratic elections? Well, it didn’t work, did it? To compel Hamas to change its terms for a prisoner exchange which would release Gilad Shalit? That didn’t either. To prevent the smuggling of arms into the Strip? The arms are flowing freely through a hundred tunnels from Egypt, if we are to believe what our army tells us. So what purpose does the blockade serve? Nobody seems to know. But it is the rock of our existence. That much is clear.
As a result of world pressure following last year’s flotilla, the blockade was eased considerably. But Gaza manufacturers are still prevented from getting their products out of the Gaza Strip – thus condemning most of the population to unemployment and abject poverty.
The same goes for the disgusting trade in human remains. Netanyahu promised to turn over the remains of 84 “terrorists” (both Fatah and Hamas) to Mahmoud Abbas as a gift. At the last moment, he reneged. His people make believe that these remains, by now hardly identifiable, may serve as bargaining chips in the game for releasing Gilad Shalit.
The same goes for the actions against yesterday’s fly-in of international peace activists though Ben-Gurion airport. All they wanted was to go to Bethlehem and Gaza, which can only be reached by crossing Israeli territory. Almost a thousand police officers were mobilized to meet that threat.
All of these unthinking knee-jerk reactions: We must be strong. Everywhere there lurk mortal dangers. Israel must defend itself. Otherwise there will be a second Holocaust.
This is an interesting phenomenon: people see innocent-looking elderly human-rights activists on their TV screens and believe they are seeing dangerous provocateurs, because the government and most of the media tell them so. Sinister “Arab and Muslim” individuals are hiding in the boats. An Arab American on one boat has been unmasked as somebody who has collected money for a Hamas social institution. A dangerous terrorist! How absolutely awful!
The phenomenon of people seeing something and thinking they are seeing something else has always intrigued me. How can people not believe their own eyes but believe the eyes of others?
This week I got an e-mail message from a man who remembered something from the time he was a pupil of my late wife, Rachel, in first grade.
Rachel asked him to raise his right hand. When the boy did so, Rachel said: “No, no. That is your left hand!” She turned to the other children and asked them, which hand it was. Following their teacher, they shouted in unison: “The left! The left!” Seeing this, the first boy started to waver. In the end he conceded: “Yes. It is the left hand.”
“No, you were right in the first place,” Rachel assured him. “Let this be a lesson to all of you: if you are sure that you are right, insist on it. Never change your view because other people say the opposite.”
Quite by chance, straight after reading this testimony, I saw on TV the results of a scientific investigation by Israeli researchers into “instilled memory”. Their experiments show that people who have seen something with their own eyes, but are told by everybody else that they have seen something else, start to suppress their own memory and “remember” that they saw what the others had allegedly seen. Neurological research then showed that this is can actually be seen happening in the brain: the imagined memory replaces the real. Social pressure has done its work: the instilled memory has become real memory.
I believe that this is even truer for an entire nation, which is, of course, composed of individuals. I have seen this many times.
For example, for 11 months before Lebanon War I, not a single shot was fired from Lebanon into Israel. Against all expectation, Yasser Arafat had succeeded in enforcing a total cease-fire even on his Palestinian opponents. Yet after Ariel Sharon started the war, practically all Israelis clearly “remembered” that the Palestinians had shot across the border every single day, turning life in Israel into hell.
I call this “Parkinson in reverse” – while advanced Parkinson patients do not remember things that happened, these patients do remember things which never happened.
There is a mental disorder called “paranoia vera”. Patients adopt a crazy assumption – e.g. “everybody hates me” – and then build an elaborate structure around it. Every bit of information which seems to support it is eagerly absorbed, every item that contradicts it is suppressed. Everything is interpreted so as to reinforce the initial assumption. The pattern is strictly logical – indeed, the more complete and the more logical the structure, the more serious is the disease.
Among the accompanying symptoms are belligerent behavior, recurrent suspicions, disconnection from the real world, conspiracy theories and narcissism.
It seems that whole nations can fall victim to this illness. Ours certainly appears to have.
The whole world is against us. Everybody is out to destroy us. Every move is a threat to our very existence. Everyone critical of Israeli policy is an anti-Semite or self-hating Jew.
Indeed, even when we do a good thing, it is turned against us.
Witness: We left the Gaza Strip and even dismantled our settlements there, and what did we get in return? Qassam rockets!”
(Never mind that Sharon refused to turn the Strip over to any Palestinian body, leaving a void. He cut it off from the world and turned it into one big prison camp.)
Witness: “After Oslo we armed Arafat’s security forces, and they turned their arms against us!”
(Never mind that we never quite fulfilled our commitments under the Oslo agreements, that the occupation got more oppressive and that the settlements on Palestinian land increased by leaps and bounds. Also, the Palestinian security services never actually acted against Israel.)
Witness: “We withdrew from South Lebanon and what did we get? Hizbollah and Lebanon War II!”
(Never mind that Hizbollah was born in reaction to our 18-year occupation there, and that we ourselves chose to launch the second Lebanon War after a minor border incident.)
It has been said that paranoiacs also have real-life enemies. The trouble is that the paranoid by their offensive and distrustful behavior, create more and more real-life enemies.
The slogan “All the world is against us” may easily function as a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Israel is not the only country to suffer from this affliction. At some time, the Germans have been afflicted. So have the Serbs. So, to some extent, has the US and many others. Unfortunately, the costs of paranoia are very high.
So let us start to behave like sane people. Let the little boats go to Gaza. Let arrivals at Ben-Gurion airport go to the Palestinian territories and pick olives, if that’s what they want.
Even if we do behave like a normal nation, Israel will continue to exist. Really!
- Uri Avnery is an Israeli peace activist and a former Knesset member. He is the founder of Gush Shalom. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
Let the little boats go to Gaza.
By Uri Avnery
For Several weeks now, our army and navy have been in a state of high alert, bravely facing a deadly threat to our very existence: ten little boats trying to reach Gaza. These vessels are carrying a dangerous gang of vicious terrorists, in the form of elderly veterans of peace campaigns.
Binyamin Netanyahu has affirmed our unshakable determination to defend our country: We shall not let anyone break the blockade to smuggle rockets to the terrorists in Gaza, who will then launch them to kill our innocent children.
This is a kind of record even for Netanyahu: not a single word is true. The flotilla is not carrying any weapons – the representatives of respected international media in the boats provide assurance of this. Also, I think we can rely on the Mossad to plant at least one agent in every boat. (After all, what am I paying my taxes for?) Hamas has not launched rockets for a long time – it has very good reasons of its own to keep the unofficial “Tahdiyeh” (“Quiet”) agreement.
If the flotilla had been allowed to reach Gaza, it would have been news for a few hours, and that would have been that. Israel’s total mobilization, the training of the naval commandos for capturing the boats, the acts of sabotage carried out in Greek ports, the immense political pressure exerted by Israel and the US on the poor, bankrupt Greek government – all this has kept this minor initiative in the news for weeks now, drawing attention to the blockade of the Gaza Strip.
What is this blockade for? There is no ascertainable reason for it now, if there ever was one. To terrorize the Gaza people into overthrowing the Hamas government, the victor in democratic elections? Well, it didn’t work, did it? To compel Hamas to change its terms for a prisoner exchange which would release Gilad Shalit? That didn’t either. To prevent the smuggling of arms into the Strip? The arms are flowing freely through a hundred tunnels from Egypt, if we are to believe what our army tells us. So what purpose does the blockade serve? Nobody seems to know. But it is the rock of our existence. That much is clear.
As a result of world pressure following last year’s flotilla, the blockade was eased considerably. But Gaza manufacturers are still prevented from getting their products out of the Gaza Strip – thus condemning most of the population to unemployment and abject poverty.
The same goes for the disgusting trade in human remains. Netanyahu promised to turn over the remains of 84 “terrorists” (both Fatah and Hamas) to Mahmoud Abbas as a gift. At the last moment, he reneged. His people make believe that these remains, by now hardly identifiable, may serve as bargaining chips in the game for releasing Gilad Shalit.
The same goes for the actions against yesterday’s fly-in of international peace activists though Ben-Gurion airport. All they wanted was to go to Bethlehem and Gaza, which can only be reached by crossing Israeli territory. Almost a thousand police officers were mobilized to meet that threat.
All of these unthinking knee-jerk reactions: We must be strong. Everywhere there lurk mortal dangers. Israel must defend itself. Otherwise there will be a second Holocaust.
This is an interesting phenomenon: people see innocent-looking elderly human-rights activists on their TV screens and believe they are seeing dangerous provocateurs, because the government and most of the media tell them so. Sinister “Arab and Muslim” individuals are hiding in the boats. An Arab American on one boat has been unmasked as somebody who has collected money for a Hamas social institution. A dangerous terrorist! How absolutely awful!
The phenomenon of people seeing something and thinking they are seeing something else has always intrigued me. How can people not believe their own eyes but believe the eyes of others?
This week I got an e-mail message from a man who remembered something from the time he was a pupil of my late wife, Rachel, in first grade.
Rachel asked him to raise his right hand. When the boy did so, Rachel said: “No, no. That is your left hand!” She turned to the other children and asked them, which hand it was. Following their teacher, they shouted in unison: “The left! The left!” Seeing this, the first boy started to waver. In the end he conceded: “Yes. It is the left hand.”
“No, you were right in the first place,” Rachel assured him. “Let this be a lesson to all of you: if you are sure that you are right, insist on it. Never change your view because other people say the opposite.”
Quite by chance, straight after reading this testimony, I saw on TV the results of a scientific investigation by Israeli researchers into “instilled memory”. Their experiments show that people who have seen something with their own eyes, but are told by everybody else that they have seen something else, start to suppress their own memory and “remember” that they saw what the others had allegedly seen. Neurological research then showed that this is can actually be seen happening in the brain: the imagined memory replaces the real. Social pressure has done its work: the instilled memory has become real memory.
I believe that this is even truer for an entire nation, which is, of course, composed of individuals. I have seen this many times.
For example, for 11 months before Lebanon War I, not a single shot was fired from Lebanon into Israel. Against all expectation, Yasser Arafat had succeeded in enforcing a total cease-fire even on his Palestinian opponents. Yet after Ariel Sharon started the war, practically all Israelis clearly “remembered” that the Palestinians had shot across the border every single day, turning life in Israel into hell.
I call this “Parkinson in reverse” – while advanced Parkinson patients do not remember things that happened, these patients do remember things which never happened.
There is a mental disorder called “paranoia vera”. Patients adopt a crazy assumption – e.g. “everybody hates me” – and then build an elaborate structure around it. Every bit of information which seems to support it is eagerly absorbed, every item that contradicts it is suppressed. Everything is interpreted so as to reinforce the initial assumption. The pattern is strictly logical – indeed, the more complete and the more logical the structure, the more serious is the disease.
Among the accompanying symptoms are belligerent behavior, recurrent suspicions, disconnection from the real world, conspiracy theories and narcissism.
It seems that whole nations can fall victim to this illness. Ours certainly appears to have.
The whole world is against us. Everybody is out to destroy us. Every move is a threat to our very existence. Everyone critical of Israeli policy is an anti-Semite or self-hating Jew.
Indeed, even when we do a good thing, it is turned against us.
Witness: We left the Gaza Strip and even dismantled our settlements there, and what did we get in return? Qassam rockets!”
(Never mind that Sharon refused to turn the Strip over to any Palestinian body, leaving a void. He cut it off from the world and turned it into one big prison camp.)
Witness: “After Oslo we armed Arafat’s security forces, and they turned their arms against us!”
(Never mind that we never quite fulfilled our commitments under the Oslo agreements, that the occupation got more oppressive and that the settlements on Palestinian land increased by leaps and bounds. Also, the Palestinian security services never actually acted against Israel.)
Witness: “We withdrew from South Lebanon and what did we get? Hizbollah and Lebanon War II!”
(Never mind that Hizbollah was born in reaction to our 18-year occupation there, and that we ourselves chose to launch the second Lebanon War after a minor border incident.)
It has been said that paranoiacs also have real-life enemies. The trouble is that the paranoid by their offensive and distrustful behavior, create more and more real-life enemies.
The slogan “All the world is against us” may easily function as a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Israel is not the only country to suffer from this affliction. At some time, the Germans have been afflicted. So have the Serbs. So, to some extent, has the US and many others. Unfortunately, the costs of paranoia are very high.
So let us start to behave like sane people. Let the little boats go to Gaza. Let arrivals at Ben-Gurion airport go to the Palestinian territories and pick olives, if that’s what they want.
Even if we do behave like a normal nation, Israel will continue to exist. Really!
- Uri Avnery is an Israeli peace activist and a former Knesset member. He is the founder of Gush Shalom. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
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