Sunday, September 20, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Uri Avnery: Yes, You Can!
July 26, 2009
FIRST, AN honest disclosure: I loved the Shepherd hotel very much.
In the first years after the Six-Day War, I was a frequent guest there. My work in the Knesset demanded that I stay in Jerusalem at least two nights every week, and after the war I switched from the hotels of West Jerusalem to those in the Eastern part of the city. My favorite was the Shepherd. I felt at home there.
The charm of the place lay in its special atmosphere. It is located in the middle of that ancient Arab town which itself aroused my intense curiosity. Its rooms have high ceilings and old furniture, and it was run by remarkable people - two elderly Arab ladies who were educated in Beirut and steeped in Palestinian-Lebanese culture.
The area surrounding the hotel is the neighborhood of the al-Husseini clan. The holdings of this vast extended family, with more than 5000 members, comprise the greater part of the Sheikh Jarrah quarter, which also includes the legendary Orient House.
The al-Husseini family is one of the handful of aristocratic Jerusalemite families, and perhaps the most respected one (its members certainly think so). For centuries the family has filled at least one of the three most important positions in the town: those of Grand Mufti, mayor and the notable in charge of the Islamic shrines. Shepherd was built by Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti who led the Arab Rebellion in the 1930s and became the Arab the Hebrew community most loved to hate.
I spent hours in conversation with the two ladies, learnt a lot from them and grew very attached to the place. It was a sad day for me when it was closed.
I don’t know how this property fell into the hands of the American millionaire, the Bingo king whose declared intention is to set up Jewish settlements all over the Arab town. Now he wants to build a housing project in the grounds of the Shepherd.
But that’s enough of him. My business is with Binyamin Netanyahu.
NETANYAHU’S AIM is to Judaize Jerusalem. This week he boasted that in his last term in office, ten years ago, he had set up the fortified Jewish neighborhood of Har Homa.
To Har Homa – whose real name is Jebel Abu Ghneim, Mountain of the Father of Sheep – I also have a sentimental attachment. I spent many days and nights in the struggle to prevent the creation of the monstrous housing project that looms there now.
The leader in this struggle was another Husseini – the unforgettable Feisal. I held him in high esteem. I don’t hesitate to say that I loved him. He was a nobleman in the real sense of the word: a scion of nobility but modest in his manners, generous and approachable, a man of peace but fearless in his confrontations with the occupation troops, a real Palestinian patriot, moderate in his opinions, wise and courageous. He was the son of Abd-al-Kader al-Husseini, the leader of the Arab fighters in the Jerusalem district in the 1948 war, who was killed in the battle for the “Castel” near the city. I had no part in that battle, but I passed by a few hours later in a relief convoy for the besieged Jewish part of Jerusalem. Like most of my comrades, I respected him as an honorable enemy.
The site of Har Homa, for those who have already forgotten, used to be a unique place of beauty between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, a rounded hill covered with a dense wood. The destroyers of Jerusalem – that brutal coalition of real estate sharks, fanatical Zionists, American millionaires and religious mystics – had decided to eliminate that last spot of beauty in order to build a dense, fortified and particularly ugly Jewish settlement. Under the leadership of Feisal and Ta’amri, the former husband of a Jordanian princess, a tent camp was set up. When the bulldozers started to cut down the trees and level the top of the hill, we held dozens of demonstrations and vigils. In one of them I suffered a hemorrhage and would have ended my life there and then, if a Palestinian ambulance had not succeeded in reaching me in that road-less stone desert and got me to the hospital in time. So I have a sentimental attachment to the place.
THE SHEPHERD provocation is a part of the tireless effort to “Judaize” Jerusalem. In simple words: to carry out ethnic cleansing. This campaign has been going on for 42 years already, from the first day of the occupation of East Jerusalem, but the timing of this particular operation results from tactical considerations.
Netanyahu is facing heavy American pressure to freeze the settlements in the West Bank. He is quite unable to do so, as long as he remains at the head of the coalition he himself chose, which consists of Rightists, religious zealots, settlers and outright fascists. He has offered several “compromises”, all based on various fraudulent ploys, but the Americans have learnt the lessons of the past and did not fall into any of his traps.
His Siamese twin, Ehud Barak, is busy leaking to the media “news” about a grandiose operation: at any moment, with one stroke, like Alexander and the Gordian knot, the dozens of settlement “outposts” that have been set up since 2001 with secret government support will be uprooted. But except for the media people themselves, hardly anyone believes that this will really happen. Certainly not the settlers, judging by their knowing smiles.
So what to do in order to avoid having to dismantle the outposts? Netanyahu, the King of Spin, has a solution: a new provocation to draw attention away from the last one. The Shepherd hotel is now diverting the world’s attention away from the hills of “Judea and Samaria”. When you have a toothache, you forget about your bellyache.
What, he says, the Goyim want to stop us building in Jerusalem, our Holy City?! Our eternal capital, which has been reunited for all eternity?! What Chutzpah! Will they prohibit Jews from building in New York?! Will they forbid Englishmen to build in London?!
Netanyahu really hit his stride when he declared that any Arab can live in West Jerusalem, so why should a Jew not build a home in East Jerusalem?
Clear and to the point – and absolutely false. When Netanyahu says things like that, it is hard to know whether he is spreading lies consciously (though they can easily be exposed), or if he believes his falsehoods himself. Thus, for example, he claimed to remember the British soldiers in front of his home when he was a child – when the last British soldier left the country a year before he was born.
The truth is that with extremely rare exceptions, no Arab can acquire an apartment in West Jerusalem, not to mention building a house there – though large sections of the Western part of the city consist of former Arab neighborhoods, whose inhabitants fled or were driven out during the 1948 war. The former owners of the houses in these quarters (including Talbiya, Katamon, Dir Yassin), who found refuge in East Jerusalem, were not allowed to return to their homes when Jerusalem was “united” in 1967, neither were they paid compensation (as I proposed in the Knesset).
But Netanyahu does not care so much whether people believe him or not. This week, like every other week since he returned to power, he was fully occupied with survival. In order to survive, the coalition must remain intact. To achieve this, he must show that he does not “fold” under American pressure. No better place to prove this than Jerusalem.
About Jerusalem, as official spokesmen never tire of telling us, about Jerusalem there is a national consensus. From wall to wall. From left to extreme right.
However, this myth is long dead. No such consensus exists. Right now, most Israelis are ready to return the Arab quarters of East Jerusalem to Palestinian rule in return for real peace. I know of no Jewish mother who is ready to sacrifice her son in a war for the Shepherd hotel.
I BEG to contradict yet another myth that is being propagated relentlessly by our media: that a national consensus against President Obama is forming.
As we say in classical Hebrew: No bears and no forest. Or more colloquially: No birds and no shoes.
Many Israelis, very many, hope that Barack Obama will do for them what seems impossible without him: bring them peace. They have despaired of our political system, of both the coalition and the opposition, of both Right and Left. They are convinced that only an outside force can realize this hope.
If indeed Obama does clash with Netanyahu over his refusal to freeze the settlements in the West Bank and his insistence on continuing to build in East Jerusalem, it is for Obama’s victory that many Israelis will be praying. They know that in this battle, it is not Netanyahu but Obama who represents the true interests of Israel.
The question is whether Obama has the power to follow through, as no preceding president since Dwight Eisenhower has done.
Netanyahu does not believe so. His American partners – the defeated Republicans, the Neocons who are now in hiding, the almost-silent Evangelical preachers – this defeated camp is hoping to recover its fortunes by encouraging the Jewish lobby and the Israeli government to provoke Obama. Netanyahu, who has mobilized Congress against the White House in the past, believes that he can do it once again.
Our newspapers are gleefully reporting, with charts and graphs to bear them out, that Obama’s standing in America is sinking. It is not hard to divine that most of this information emanates from Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign Office, the same source that is feeding the American media with reports of the growing opposition of the Israeli public against Obama. Soon the American media will show Israeli protesters waving posters with Obama in SS uniform, as happened with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin before him.
The battle is not about 20 outposts, nor about 20 apartments in the grounds of the Shepherd hotel. Every house in every West Bank settlement serves one supreme purpose: to destroy any possibility for peace. Every Israeli house in East Jerusalem serves the same sublime aim. The opponents of peace know that no Arab leader will ever sign a peace agreement that does not designate East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, and no Arab leader will ever sign a peace agreement that does not assign all of the West Bank to the State of Palestine.
A historic responsibility rests on the shoulders of Barack Obama: not to fold, not to give in, not to “compromise”. To insist on the total freeze of the settlements, as a first and necessary step towards peace. For his sake, and for ours too.
As an Israeli, I feel like calling out to him: Yes, You Can!
_____________________
Uri Avnery is a former member of the Knesset and a leader of Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc.
FIRST, AN honest disclosure: I loved the Shepherd hotel very much.
In the first years after the Six-Day War, I was a frequent guest there. My work in the Knesset demanded that I stay in Jerusalem at least two nights every week, and after the war I switched from the hotels of West Jerusalem to those in the Eastern part of the city. My favorite was the Shepherd. I felt at home there.
The charm of the place lay in its special atmosphere. It is located in the middle of that ancient Arab town which itself aroused my intense curiosity. Its rooms have high ceilings and old furniture, and it was run by remarkable people - two elderly Arab ladies who were educated in Beirut and steeped in Palestinian-Lebanese culture.
The area surrounding the hotel is the neighborhood of the al-Husseini clan. The holdings of this vast extended family, with more than 5000 members, comprise the greater part of the Sheikh Jarrah quarter, which also includes the legendary Orient House.
The al-Husseini family is one of the handful of aristocratic Jerusalemite families, and perhaps the most respected one (its members certainly think so). For centuries the family has filled at least one of the three most important positions in the town: those of Grand Mufti, mayor and the notable in charge of the Islamic shrines. Shepherd was built by Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti who led the Arab Rebellion in the 1930s and became the Arab the Hebrew community most loved to hate.
I spent hours in conversation with the two ladies, learnt a lot from them and grew very attached to the place. It was a sad day for me when it was closed.
I don’t know how this property fell into the hands of the American millionaire, the Bingo king whose declared intention is to set up Jewish settlements all over the Arab town. Now he wants to build a housing project in the grounds of the Shepherd.
But that’s enough of him. My business is with Binyamin Netanyahu.
NETANYAHU’S AIM is to Judaize Jerusalem. This week he boasted that in his last term in office, ten years ago, he had set up the fortified Jewish neighborhood of Har Homa.
To Har Homa – whose real name is Jebel Abu Ghneim, Mountain of the Father of Sheep – I also have a sentimental attachment. I spent many days and nights in the struggle to prevent the creation of the monstrous housing project that looms there now.
The leader in this struggle was another Husseini – the unforgettable Feisal. I held him in high esteem. I don’t hesitate to say that I loved him. He was a nobleman in the real sense of the word: a scion of nobility but modest in his manners, generous and approachable, a man of peace but fearless in his confrontations with the occupation troops, a real Palestinian patriot, moderate in his opinions, wise and courageous. He was the son of Abd-al-Kader al-Husseini, the leader of the Arab fighters in the Jerusalem district in the 1948 war, who was killed in the battle for the “Castel” near the city. I had no part in that battle, but I passed by a few hours later in a relief convoy for the besieged Jewish part of Jerusalem. Like most of my comrades, I respected him as an honorable enemy.
The site of Har Homa, for those who have already forgotten, used to be a unique place of beauty between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, a rounded hill covered with a dense wood. The destroyers of Jerusalem – that brutal coalition of real estate sharks, fanatical Zionists, American millionaires and religious mystics – had decided to eliminate that last spot of beauty in order to build a dense, fortified and particularly ugly Jewish settlement. Under the leadership of Feisal and Ta’amri, the former husband of a Jordanian princess, a tent camp was set up. When the bulldozers started to cut down the trees and level the top of the hill, we held dozens of demonstrations and vigils. In one of them I suffered a hemorrhage and would have ended my life there and then, if a Palestinian ambulance had not succeeded in reaching me in that road-less stone desert and got me to the hospital in time. So I have a sentimental attachment to the place.
THE SHEPHERD provocation is a part of the tireless effort to “Judaize” Jerusalem. In simple words: to carry out ethnic cleansing. This campaign has been going on for 42 years already, from the first day of the occupation of East Jerusalem, but the timing of this particular operation results from tactical considerations.
Netanyahu is facing heavy American pressure to freeze the settlements in the West Bank. He is quite unable to do so, as long as he remains at the head of the coalition he himself chose, which consists of Rightists, religious zealots, settlers and outright fascists. He has offered several “compromises”, all based on various fraudulent ploys, but the Americans have learnt the lessons of the past and did not fall into any of his traps.
His Siamese twin, Ehud Barak, is busy leaking to the media “news” about a grandiose operation: at any moment, with one stroke, like Alexander and the Gordian knot, the dozens of settlement “outposts” that have been set up since 2001 with secret government support will be uprooted. But except for the media people themselves, hardly anyone believes that this will really happen. Certainly not the settlers, judging by their knowing smiles.
So what to do in order to avoid having to dismantle the outposts? Netanyahu, the King of Spin, has a solution: a new provocation to draw attention away from the last one. The Shepherd hotel is now diverting the world’s attention away from the hills of “Judea and Samaria”. When you have a toothache, you forget about your bellyache.
What, he says, the Goyim want to stop us building in Jerusalem, our Holy City?! Our eternal capital, which has been reunited for all eternity?! What Chutzpah! Will they prohibit Jews from building in New York?! Will they forbid Englishmen to build in London?!
Netanyahu really hit his stride when he declared that any Arab can live in West Jerusalem, so why should a Jew not build a home in East Jerusalem?
Clear and to the point – and absolutely false. When Netanyahu says things like that, it is hard to know whether he is spreading lies consciously (though they can easily be exposed), or if he believes his falsehoods himself. Thus, for example, he claimed to remember the British soldiers in front of his home when he was a child – when the last British soldier left the country a year before he was born.
The truth is that with extremely rare exceptions, no Arab can acquire an apartment in West Jerusalem, not to mention building a house there – though large sections of the Western part of the city consist of former Arab neighborhoods, whose inhabitants fled or were driven out during the 1948 war. The former owners of the houses in these quarters (including Talbiya, Katamon, Dir Yassin), who found refuge in East Jerusalem, were not allowed to return to their homes when Jerusalem was “united” in 1967, neither were they paid compensation (as I proposed in the Knesset).
But Netanyahu does not care so much whether people believe him or not. This week, like every other week since he returned to power, he was fully occupied with survival. In order to survive, the coalition must remain intact. To achieve this, he must show that he does not “fold” under American pressure. No better place to prove this than Jerusalem.
About Jerusalem, as official spokesmen never tire of telling us, about Jerusalem there is a national consensus. From wall to wall. From left to extreme right.
However, this myth is long dead. No such consensus exists. Right now, most Israelis are ready to return the Arab quarters of East Jerusalem to Palestinian rule in return for real peace. I know of no Jewish mother who is ready to sacrifice her son in a war for the Shepherd hotel.
I BEG to contradict yet another myth that is being propagated relentlessly by our media: that a national consensus against President Obama is forming.
As we say in classical Hebrew: No bears and no forest. Or more colloquially: No birds and no shoes.
Many Israelis, very many, hope that Barack Obama will do for them what seems impossible without him: bring them peace. They have despaired of our political system, of both the coalition and the opposition, of both Right and Left. They are convinced that only an outside force can realize this hope.
If indeed Obama does clash with Netanyahu over his refusal to freeze the settlements in the West Bank and his insistence on continuing to build in East Jerusalem, it is for Obama’s victory that many Israelis will be praying. They know that in this battle, it is not Netanyahu but Obama who represents the true interests of Israel.
The question is whether Obama has the power to follow through, as no preceding president since Dwight Eisenhower has done.
Netanyahu does not believe so. His American partners – the defeated Republicans, the Neocons who are now in hiding, the almost-silent Evangelical preachers – this defeated camp is hoping to recover its fortunes by encouraging the Jewish lobby and the Israeli government to provoke Obama. Netanyahu, who has mobilized Congress against the White House in the past, believes that he can do it once again.
Our newspapers are gleefully reporting, with charts and graphs to bear them out, that Obama’s standing in America is sinking. It is not hard to divine that most of this information emanates from Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign Office, the same source that is feeding the American media with reports of the growing opposition of the Israeli public against Obama. Soon the American media will show Israeli protesters waving posters with Obama in SS uniform, as happened with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin before him.
The battle is not about 20 outposts, nor about 20 apartments in the grounds of the Shepherd hotel. Every house in every West Bank settlement serves one supreme purpose: to destroy any possibility for peace. Every Israeli house in East Jerusalem serves the same sublime aim. The opponents of peace know that no Arab leader will ever sign a peace agreement that does not designate East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, and no Arab leader will ever sign a peace agreement that does not assign all of the West Bank to the State of Palestine.
A historic responsibility rests on the shoulders of Barack Obama: not to fold, not to give in, not to “compromise”. To insist on the total freeze of the settlements, as a first and necessary step towards peace. For his sake, and for ours too.
As an Israeli, I feel like calling out to him: Yes, You Can!
_____________________
Uri Avnery is a former member of the Knesset and a leader of Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc.
Uri Avnery: One Foot on the Moon
London Review of Books, June 25, 2009
Last month, the Knesset voted 47 to 34 to pass the preliminary reading of a bill that threatens imprisonment for anyone who questions Israel’s claim to be a Jewish and democratic state. The private member’s bill, proposed by Zevulun Orlev of the Jewish Home party, calls for up to one year’s imprisonment for anyone who publishes ‘a call that negates the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state’, if it might lead to ‘actions of hate, contempt or disloyalty against the state or the institutions of government or the courts’.
You can see what comes next. Israel’s million and a half Arab citizens cannot be expected to recognise the country as a ‘Jewish and democratic state’. They want it to be a state for all its citizens, not just Jews. They also claim, with reason, that Israel discriminates against them, and therefore is not really democratic. There are Jews too who don’t want Israel to be defined as a Jewish state in which non-Jews have the status, at best, of tolerated outsiders. The prisons will not be able to hold all those convicted. And if that happens, more stringent steps will have to be taken, such as revoking the citizenship of the democracy-deniers and deporting them, together with Jewish leftists and all other enemies of the Jewish democracy.
The bill now goes to the legal committee of the Knesset, which will prepare it for its first reading. Within a few weeks or months, it will become law. The bill does not even need to single out Arabs: everyone who voted for it understood that it is aimed at them. It also prohibits Jews from advocating any change in the definition of the state, or the creation of a binational state in historic Palestine, or disseminating any other such unconventional ideas.
The bill does not stand out at all in today’s political landscape. The new government has already adopted a bill sanctioning three years’ imprisonment for anyone who mourns the Naqba. That bill’s sponsors expect Arab citizens to realise that any unpleasantness was just a by-product of the foundation of our state: now we must forget the Naqba and mark the Independence Day of the Jewish and democratic state with joy in our hearts. The bill was passed by the Ministerial Commission for Legal Matters, and was about to be submitted to the Knesset, but several ministers appealed against the decision and the committee will have to reconsider. It is extremely likely, however, that their original decision will stand, and that since the rightist government commands a majority in the Knesset, the bill will be adopted almost automatically.
All this takes me back to the 1960s, when the weekly magazine I edited, Haolam Hazeh, published an Arabic edition. One of its employees was a young man called Rashed Hussein from the village of Musmus, a gifted poet with a promising future. He told me that some years earlier he had been summoned by the military governor of his area. At the time, Arabs in Israel were ruled over by a military authority which controlled their lives in all matters big and small. Without a permit, an Arab citizen could not leave his village or town even for a few hours, get a job as a teacher, buy a tractor or dig a well. The governor offered Rashed coffee and paid lavish compliments to his poetry. Then he came to the point: in a month’s time it would be Independence Day, and the governor was going to hold a big reception for the Arab ‘notables’; he asked Rashed to write a poem for the occasion. Rashed explained to the governor that Independence Day wasn’t a joyful day for him, since his relatives had been driven from their homes and most of the land belonging to his village had been expropriated.
When Rashed arrived back in Musmus a few hours later, he could not help noticing that his neighbours were looking at him in a peculiar way. When he went into his house, he found his family sitting on the floor, the women wailing at the top of their voices, the children huddling fearfully in a corner. His first thought was that somebody had died.
‘What have you done to us?’ one of the women cried. ‘What did we do to you?’ ‘You have destroyed the family,’ another shouted. ‘You have finished us!’ The governor had called his family and told them that Rashed had refused to fulfil his duty to the state. The threat was clear: the extended family, one of the largest in the village, would be on the military government’s blacklist. Rashed gave in and wrote the poem. But something inside him was broken. A few years later he emigrated to the US, got a job at the PLO office there and died tragically: he was burned alive in his bed after going to sleep, it appears, while smoking a cigarette.
There were many stormy demonstrations against military rule before it was finally abolished in 1966. As a newly elected member of the Knesset, I voted for its abolition. Since then the fearful and subservient Arab minority that amounted to some 200,000 has recovered its self-esteem. A second and third generation has grown up, and today the Arab population is 1.5 million. But the attitude towards it of the Jewish right has not changed for the better. On the contrary.
In the bakery that is the Knesset (the Hebrew word for ‘bakery’ is mafia) new delicacies are being prepared. One of them stipulates that anyone applying for Israeli citizenship must declare loyalty to ‘the Jewish, Zionist and democratic state’, and undertake to serve in the army or a civilian alternative. Its sponsor is David Rotem of Israel Is Our Home, who also happens to be chairman of the Knesset law committee. A declaration of loyalty to the state and its laws is reasonable. But loyalty to the Zionist state? Zionism is an ideology, and in a democratic state the ruling ideology can change from time to time. It would be like declaring loyalty to a capitalist US, a rightist Italy, a leftist Spain, a Catholic Poland or a nationalist Russia. The tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews in Israel who reject Zionism won’t need to worry about this, since Jews will not be affected by this law: they are given citizenship automatically on arrival.
Another bill waiting its turn before the ministerial committee proposes to change the declaration that every new Knesset member has to make. Instead of loyalty ‘to the state of Israel and its laws’, he or she will be required to declare loyalty ‘to the Jewish, Zionist and democratic state of Israel, its symbols and its values’. That would exclude any Arab Knesset member, since if they declared loyalty to the Zionist state no Arab would ever vote for them again. It would also be a problem for the Orthodox members of the Knesset, who cannot declare loyalty to Zionism because, according to Orthodox doctrine, Zionists are depraved sinners and the Zionist flag is unclean. God exiled the Jews from Israel because of their wickedness, and only God can permit them to return. By pre-empting the Messiah’s job, Zionism has committed an unpardonable sin. This is why many Orthodox rabbis chose to remain in Europe and be murdered by the Nazis rather than commit the sin of going to Palestine.
The production of racist laws is now at full capacity. At its centre is Likud, to its right there is the ultra-racist Shas party, to the right of that is Lieberman’s ultra-ultra racist Israel Is Our Home and the ultra-ultra-ultra racist Jewish Home, and to their right the even more racist National Union party, which stands with one foot in the coalition and the other on the moon.
All these factions are trying to outdo each other. When one proposes a crazy bill, the next is compelled to propose a crazier one. All this is possible because Israel doesn’t have a constitution. The Supreme Court’s capacity to annul laws that contradict the state’s ‘basic laws’ is not anchored, and the rightist parties are trying to abolish it. There was a reason Avigdor Lieberman demanded and got the justice and police ministries. With the governments of the US and Israel clearly on a collision course over the settlements, this racist fever may infect the whole coalition. If one goes to sleep with a dog, one should not be surprised to wake up with fleas: those who elected such a government, and even more so those who joined it, should not be surprised by the course of events.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Uri Avnery is a former member of the Knesset and a leader of Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc.
Last month, the Knesset voted 47 to 34 to pass the preliminary reading of a bill that threatens imprisonment for anyone who questions Israel’s claim to be a Jewish and democratic state. The private member’s bill, proposed by Zevulun Orlev of the Jewish Home party, calls for up to one year’s imprisonment for anyone who publishes ‘a call that negates the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state’, if it might lead to ‘actions of hate, contempt or disloyalty against the state or the institutions of government or the courts’.
You can see what comes next. Israel’s million and a half Arab citizens cannot be expected to recognise the country as a ‘Jewish and democratic state’. They want it to be a state for all its citizens, not just Jews. They also claim, with reason, that Israel discriminates against them, and therefore is not really democratic. There are Jews too who don’t want Israel to be defined as a Jewish state in which non-Jews have the status, at best, of tolerated outsiders. The prisons will not be able to hold all those convicted. And if that happens, more stringent steps will have to be taken, such as revoking the citizenship of the democracy-deniers and deporting them, together with Jewish leftists and all other enemies of the Jewish democracy.
The bill now goes to the legal committee of the Knesset, which will prepare it for its first reading. Within a few weeks or months, it will become law. The bill does not even need to single out Arabs: everyone who voted for it understood that it is aimed at them. It also prohibits Jews from advocating any change in the definition of the state, or the creation of a binational state in historic Palestine, or disseminating any other such unconventional ideas.
The bill does not stand out at all in today’s political landscape. The new government has already adopted a bill sanctioning three years’ imprisonment for anyone who mourns the Naqba. That bill’s sponsors expect Arab citizens to realise that any unpleasantness was just a by-product of the foundation of our state: now we must forget the Naqba and mark the Independence Day of the Jewish and democratic state with joy in our hearts. The bill was passed by the Ministerial Commission for Legal Matters, and was about to be submitted to the Knesset, but several ministers appealed against the decision and the committee will have to reconsider. It is extremely likely, however, that their original decision will stand, and that since the rightist government commands a majority in the Knesset, the bill will be adopted almost automatically.
All this takes me back to the 1960s, when the weekly magazine I edited, Haolam Hazeh, published an Arabic edition. One of its employees was a young man called Rashed Hussein from the village of Musmus, a gifted poet with a promising future. He told me that some years earlier he had been summoned by the military governor of his area. At the time, Arabs in Israel were ruled over by a military authority which controlled their lives in all matters big and small. Without a permit, an Arab citizen could not leave his village or town even for a few hours, get a job as a teacher, buy a tractor or dig a well. The governor offered Rashed coffee and paid lavish compliments to his poetry. Then he came to the point: in a month’s time it would be Independence Day, and the governor was going to hold a big reception for the Arab ‘notables’; he asked Rashed to write a poem for the occasion. Rashed explained to the governor that Independence Day wasn’t a joyful day for him, since his relatives had been driven from their homes and most of the land belonging to his village had been expropriated.
When Rashed arrived back in Musmus a few hours later, he could not help noticing that his neighbours were looking at him in a peculiar way. When he went into his house, he found his family sitting on the floor, the women wailing at the top of their voices, the children huddling fearfully in a corner. His first thought was that somebody had died.
‘What have you done to us?’ one of the women cried. ‘What did we do to you?’ ‘You have destroyed the family,’ another shouted. ‘You have finished us!’ The governor had called his family and told them that Rashed had refused to fulfil his duty to the state. The threat was clear: the extended family, one of the largest in the village, would be on the military government’s blacklist. Rashed gave in and wrote the poem. But something inside him was broken. A few years later he emigrated to the US, got a job at the PLO office there and died tragically: he was burned alive in his bed after going to sleep, it appears, while smoking a cigarette.
There were many stormy demonstrations against military rule before it was finally abolished in 1966. As a newly elected member of the Knesset, I voted for its abolition. Since then the fearful and subservient Arab minority that amounted to some 200,000 has recovered its self-esteem. A second and third generation has grown up, and today the Arab population is 1.5 million. But the attitude towards it of the Jewish right has not changed for the better. On the contrary.
In the bakery that is the Knesset (the Hebrew word for ‘bakery’ is mafia) new delicacies are being prepared. One of them stipulates that anyone applying for Israeli citizenship must declare loyalty to ‘the Jewish, Zionist and democratic state’, and undertake to serve in the army or a civilian alternative. Its sponsor is David Rotem of Israel Is Our Home, who also happens to be chairman of the Knesset law committee. A declaration of loyalty to the state and its laws is reasonable. But loyalty to the Zionist state? Zionism is an ideology, and in a democratic state the ruling ideology can change from time to time. It would be like declaring loyalty to a capitalist US, a rightist Italy, a leftist Spain, a Catholic Poland or a nationalist Russia. The tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews in Israel who reject Zionism won’t need to worry about this, since Jews will not be affected by this law: they are given citizenship automatically on arrival.
Another bill waiting its turn before the ministerial committee proposes to change the declaration that every new Knesset member has to make. Instead of loyalty ‘to the state of Israel and its laws’, he or she will be required to declare loyalty ‘to the Jewish, Zionist and democratic state of Israel, its symbols and its values’. That would exclude any Arab Knesset member, since if they declared loyalty to the Zionist state no Arab would ever vote for them again. It would also be a problem for the Orthodox members of the Knesset, who cannot declare loyalty to Zionism because, according to Orthodox doctrine, Zionists are depraved sinners and the Zionist flag is unclean. God exiled the Jews from Israel because of their wickedness, and only God can permit them to return. By pre-empting the Messiah’s job, Zionism has committed an unpardonable sin. This is why many Orthodox rabbis chose to remain in Europe and be murdered by the Nazis rather than commit the sin of going to Palestine.
The production of racist laws is now at full capacity. At its centre is Likud, to its right there is the ultra-racist Shas party, to the right of that is Lieberman’s ultra-ultra racist Israel Is Our Home and the ultra-ultra-ultra racist Jewish Home, and to their right the even more racist National Union party, which stands with one foot in the coalition and the other on the moon.
All these factions are trying to outdo each other. When one proposes a crazy bill, the next is compelled to propose a crazier one. All this is possible because Israel doesn’t have a constitution. The Supreme Court’s capacity to annul laws that contradict the state’s ‘basic laws’ is not anchored, and the rightist parties are trying to abolish it. There was a reason Avigdor Lieberman demanded and got the justice and police ministries. With the governments of the US and Israel clearly on a collision course over the settlements, this racist fever may infect the whole coalition. If one goes to sleep with a dog, one should not be surprised to wake up with fleas: those who elected such a government, and even more so those who joined it, should not be surprised by the course of events.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Uri Avnery is a former member of the Knesset and a leader of Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Letter from French Jewish Writer:
Open letter to the President of Israel, by Jean-Moïse Braitberg: *
Dear Sir,
I am writing to you, to ask you to contact those who are authorized to do so, to remove the name of my grandfather from the memorial at Yad Vashem, which is dedicated to the Jewish victims of National Socialism. It says "Moshe Brajtberg, gassed in 1943 in Treblinka."
The rest of my family also perished in the various of the camps to which they were deported. I beg you. Mr. President, to do this, because that which has happened in Gaza, and in other places, and has defined the fate of the Arab peoples of Palestine for 60 years now, disqualifies - to my mind - Israel to be the center which is dedicated to remember the suffering of the Jews, and by extension, that of all of mankind.
Understand me: ever since I was a child I have lived among survivors of the death camps. I saw the numbers tattooed on their arms and heard the stories of their tortures. I experienced the unbearable mourning and shared the nightmares.
I learned that these crimes shall never again take place, that no person, ever again, shall despise another for his ethnicity or religion, and rob him of his elementary Human Rights, just as he has a right to a life lived in decent circumstances, with the hope of better things for his family.
Still, Mr. President, I have noticed that despite innumerable Resolutions of the international community, despite the obvious injustices to which the Palestinians have been heirs since 1948, despite the hopes of Oslo, and despite the repeated recognition on the part of the Palestinian authorities that Israeli Jews have the right to live in peace and security, the only answer of successive Israeli governments has been brute force, blood shed, incarceration, constant controls, colonization and expropriations.
You will tell me, Mr. President, that it is legitimate for a country to defend itself
against rockets aimed at its people, or kamikazis who take many innocents with them in death. To which I will answer that my human sympathies do not ask after the nationality of the victim.
You, on the other hand, lead a nation that means to represent the Jews in their entirety, but also claim to preserve the memory of the victims of National Socialism. That is what touches me and is unbearable to me. While you write the names of my loved ones at Yad Vashem, in the heart of Israel,the state holds the memory of my family prisoner behind the barbed wire of Zionism, in order to make them hostages of a so-called authority which - day after day - practices injustice.
So I beg you to take away the name of my grandfather from the memorial that testifies to the horrors suffered by the Jews, so that it can no longer be used to justify the horror which is visited upon the Palestinians.
Veuillez agréer, monsieur le president, l'assurance de ma respectueuse considération.
_____________________________________________________________
* Published in Le Monde, Paris on 28 January 2009
http://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/2009/01/28/effacez-le-nom-de-mon-grand-pere-a-yad-vashem_1147635_0.html
Dear Sir,
I am writing to you, to ask you to contact those who are authorized to do so, to remove the name of my grandfather from the memorial at Yad Vashem, which is dedicated to the Jewish victims of National Socialism. It says "Moshe Brajtberg, gassed in 1943 in Treblinka."
The rest of my family also perished in the various of the camps to which they were deported. I beg you. Mr. President, to do this, because that which has happened in Gaza, and in other places, and has defined the fate of the Arab peoples of Palestine for 60 years now, disqualifies - to my mind - Israel to be the center which is dedicated to remember the suffering of the Jews, and by extension, that of all of mankind.
Understand me: ever since I was a child I have lived among survivors of the death camps. I saw the numbers tattooed on their arms and heard the stories of their tortures. I experienced the unbearable mourning and shared the nightmares.
I learned that these crimes shall never again take place, that no person, ever again, shall despise another for his ethnicity or religion, and rob him of his elementary Human Rights, just as he has a right to a life lived in decent circumstances, with the hope of better things for his family.
Still, Mr. President, I have noticed that despite innumerable Resolutions of the international community, despite the obvious injustices to which the Palestinians have been heirs since 1948, despite the hopes of Oslo, and despite the repeated recognition on the part of the Palestinian authorities that Israeli Jews have the right to live in peace and security, the only answer of successive Israeli governments has been brute force, blood shed, incarceration, constant controls, colonization and expropriations.
You will tell me, Mr. President, that it is legitimate for a country to defend itself
against rockets aimed at its people, or kamikazis who take many innocents with them in death. To which I will answer that my human sympathies do not ask after the nationality of the victim.
You, on the other hand, lead a nation that means to represent the Jews in their entirety, but also claim to preserve the memory of the victims of National Socialism. That is what touches me and is unbearable to me. While you write the names of my loved ones at Yad Vashem, in the heart of Israel,the state holds the memory of my family prisoner behind the barbed wire of Zionism, in order to make them hostages of a so-called authority which - day after day - practices injustice.
So I beg you to take away the name of my grandfather from the memorial that testifies to the horrors suffered by the Jews, so that it can no longer be used to justify the horror which is visited upon the Palestinians.
Veuillez agréer, monsieur le president, l'assurance de ma respectueuse considération.
_____________________________________________________________
* Published in Le Monde, Paris on 28 January 2009
http://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/2009/01/28/effacez-le-nom-de-mon-grand-pere-a-yad-vashem_1147635_0.html
Monday, July 26, 2004
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