Skyredoubt translated portions of a piece in Hebrew by Benny Tziper, in Haaretz, only Haaretz, and posted it on his flickr site.
[…]A nice man was there at the entrance
to the museum, an invalid of IDF from the Yom
Kippur War, who was born and lived all his
life in Ashkelon. From his knowledge and
enthusiasm one could tell that he loves the
city very much. He had no problem telling me
how in 1953 the Arabs were expelled, and the
long process of looking for a new name for
the place started (the Arab name was Majdl),
till it was decided to call the place
Ashkelon. The entire communications between
the authorities regarding the cleansing of
the city of Arabs and Hebrewisation of the
name is exhibited in the museum. I think that nobody makes the connection
today between the fact that the Qassams land
on Ashkelon and the fact that poor Arabs who did nothing wrong to anybody were put
on trucks and expelled from their city to
Gaza fifty five years ago, and since then
they are there and Ashkelon is here. And this did not happen in wartime or as a
result of hostilities, but from a cold
calculation that the area must be cleansed of
Arabs. There is a picture in the museum that
shows the Arabs sitting and waiting in front
of the of Israeli military government
building. It sends shivers down my spine
because it happens in the year I was born.
And it is really, really hard for me to
realize that at the time that my parents were
happy with my birth, other people were put on
trucks and expelled from their homes.[…]
[…]If we come back to the question of the
immortality of Am Yisrael in contrast to
other peoples, then I think that what keeps
us alive is this insularity we developed to
the suffering of the other. In India less
than a month ago scores were killed in a
brutal act of terror that here got the
moniker “The Chabad House Massacre," because
we consider only the Jewish victims and all
the rest can go to hell. In Gaza there live
more than a million people that have no
connection to what Hamas does to us, but
nobody here minds to starve them and enclose
them and prevent them from getting the most
basic supplies. Gaza is indeed a chronic disease. The virus
that causes it is called
"insularitis" and, by the way, it
is quite lethal.
Weiss gets to comment first:
1. When scholars Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer wrote in 2006 that the Israeli new historians' revelations about Israel/Palestine lessened the moral case in the U.S. for unswerving support for Israel, they were smeared as antisemites. Tziper's piece was published in Israel, and no one in our press will touch it. No one in our press will talk about the history of southern Israel and how those people got to Gaza. No one in the MSM will publish op-eds about ethnic cleansing. No one will put Tziper, or Ilan Pappe, or Tom Segev, or Lila Abu-Lughod, or Raja Shehadeh, or Lubna Hammad, or Saif Ammous, or Norman Finkelstein, or Adam Horowitz on TV to talk about the Nakba and the creation of Israel. 2. There are great things about Israeli society. The free press, the Hebrew culture, democratic institutions, and the great Haaretz. Let these things be shared with the people who were there first.
