The other day someone asked me what I love about Israel, and I realized later I should always begin with Uri Avnery. Now in his 80s, he is a great wise man, who gave up ambition for truth a long time ago. Here's his latest, a reflection on his Zionist youth at a dirt-poor kibbutz in the 1930s, having escaped the Holocaust with no awareness at all of the ethnic-religious politics that have now come to dominate foreign policy discussions here and in Israel/Palestine.
Read the whole piece for the vivid memoir of his childhood. I am excerpting the wisdom toward the end, the lesson that the sins of the Occupation, the refusal by Israel to accept the '67 lines, have essentially opened people's eyes on '48, in which Avnery himself was a soldier, and caused him to reflect on his own purity of heart and innocence. The philosophy of this piece is strictly humanist. What a leader...
For the fighters – as for the entire Yishuv – it was, quite simply, an existential war. The slogan was “There is No Alternative”, and all of us believed in it completely. We were fighting with our backs to the wall, the lives of our families hanging in the balance. The enemy was all around us. We believed that we, the few, the very few, almost without arms, were standing up against a sea of Arabs. In the first half of the war, the Arab fighters (known to us as “the gangs”) indeed dominated all the roads, and in the second half, the regular Arab armies approached the centers of the Hebrew population, surrounding Hebrew Jerusalem and coming close to Tel-Aviv. The Yishuv lost 6000 young people out of a population of some 635 thousand. Whole year-groups were decimated. Innumerable heroic acts were performed.
...The fighters did not think then about “ethnic cleansing” – a term not yet invented.
...The fighters did not think then about “ethnic cleansing” – a term not yet invented.
We had no understanding about the real balance of power between us and the other side. The Arabs looked to us like a huge force. We did not know that the Palestinians were quarreling with each other, unable to unite and to create a country-wide defense force, that they had a severe shortage of modern arms. Later, when the Arab armies joined the fray, we did not know that they were unable to cooperate with each other, that it was more important for them to compete with each other than to defeat us.
Today, a growing number of Israelis have started to understand the full significance of the “Nakba”, the great tragedy of the Palestinian people and all the individuals who lost their homes and most of their homeland. ...An abyss yawns between the emotional reality of those days and the historical truth as we know it now.
Some see the entire 1948 war as a conspiracy of the Zionist leadership which intended right from the beginning to expel the Palestinians from the country in order to turn it into a Jewish State. According to this view, the soldiers of 1948 were war criminals who implemented a vicious policy, much as the pioneers of the preceding generation were land robbers, knights of ethnic cleansing by expulsion and expropriation.
They are strengthened in this view by today’s settlers, who are driving the Palestinians from what remains of their land. By their actions they blacken the pioneer past. Religious fanatics and fascist hooligans, who claim to be the heirs of the pioneers, obliterate the real intentions of that generation
HOW CAN one overcome the contradiction between the intentions and emotions of the actors and their many magnificent achievements in building a new nation, and the dark side of their actions and the consequences?
How to sing about the hopes and dreams of our youth and at the same time admit to the terrible injustice of many of our actions? Sing with full heart the pioneer songs and the 1948 war songs (one of which I wrote, of which I am far from proud), without denying the terrible tragedy we imposed on the Palestinian people?
Barack Obama told the Turkish people this week that they must come to grips with the massacre of the Armenians committed by their fathers, while at the same time reminding the Americans that they must confront the genocide of the Native Americans and the black slavery exploited by their own forefathers.
I believe we can do this regarding the catastrophe that we have caused the Palestinians. I am convinced that this is important, indeed essential, for our own national mental health, as well as a first step toward eventual reconciliation. We must acknowledge and recognize the consequences of our deeds and repair what can be repaired – without rejecting our past and the songs that express the innocence of our youth.
We must live with this contradiction, because it is the truth of our lives.
Sorry. Recognizing the Nakba would mean the Israelis would have to eschew their victim narrative.
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"Zionist memory" see Israel and the Jews as the victims in the conflict, and do not tend to support agreements or compromises with the enemy in order to achieve peace. This finding, he explains, demonstrates the importance of changing the collective memory of conflicts, making it less biased and more objective – on condition, of course, that there is a factual basis for such a change.
link to haaretz.com
"Some see the entire 1948 war as a conspiracy of the Zionist leadership which intended right from the beginning to expel the Palestinians from the country in order to turn it into a Jewish State. According to this view, the soldiers of 1948 were war criminals who implemented a vicious policy, much as the pioneers of the preceding generation were land robbers, knights of ethnic cleansing by expulsion and expropriation."
About right.
It's Avnery's need to put in 'conspiracy' to delegitimise the basic idea that expelling the arabs was always at the heart of Zionism, and certainly its initial leaders, which means he still has a long way to go.
"The other day someone asked me what I love about Israel"
Always this bizarre "love Israel" theme. What do you love about colonial apartheid?
"Always this bizarre "love Israel" theme."
Don't think critically about it. Use feelings and pity.
About wrong. No matter how willfully ignorant people see it, the re-creation of Israel was a modern miracle wrought by a people more then decimated by the Holocaust.
Those Jews had every reason to believe, as promoted by arab propaganda, that the arab forces were keen on finishing the job started by their spiritual father's mentor.
Expelling Arabs was never at the heart of Zionism. That is an antisemitic canard and Otto full well knows it.
Here's Josh Marshall:
"For some of my Jewish friends and, it seems, more and more non-Jews of a certain political persuasion, there is just an inability to recognize that the dispossession of Arabs was an essential element to the fulfillment of the Jewish people's national aspirations in Palestine. (That was a blindness that a ben Gurion or a Dayan never made. Read their writings, their speeches, especially their letters. They understood this.)"
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/154235.php
Even if one grants that the Palestinians had to be dispossessed if the Jews were to have their state, the dispossession could have been done much more humanely. An internationally funded and recognized program to find homes for the Palestinians outside Palestine would have rendered what was done to them at any rate less barbaric. It probably should have been considered as essential a part of building a Jewish state as funding the Jewish state itself was.
Perhaps the Jews can be expelled from Israel in a more humane, less barbaric way. One way or another, they have to be removed.
avnery is still lying to himself. like macnamara and the viet nam war. can't quite get to it.
Not only is Avnery lying to himself, he's lying to others particularly to Western liberals who love him. Avnery was a charter member of the "samson's foxes", a motorized brigade that rode in jeeps in 1948 and shot Arabs fleeing on foot like animals. He later claimed that although he did carry arms, he "did not kill anyone". What hypocrisy!
Another Avnerian motif is that the early Zionist pioneers were innocent idealists who "had no idea" that what they were doing would involve ethnic cleansing. Bullshit. Read Ilan Pappe's account of the enormous Village Files, amassed for 10 solid years before 1948 and whice prove ensure that it was empty of inhabitants when the theft was complete.
The essential requirement of opponents of Zionism for 120+ years has been the renunciation of Jewish self-government in the Land of Israel as a sovereign state. The more lurid opponents require the subjugation, dissolution, or extermination of the Jewish community.
One might ask, given the large "Colonies", Greek, American, Armenian, German religious implantations in the cities of the Levant, whether the Kibbutz movement should have been content with non-sovereign communities from the 20s to the 50s, when Arab nationalism cleansed the Levant of "foreigners" (read "indigenous non-Muslim religious minorities"). Sub and non-nationalist utopians, some socialist, some not, on both sides, were undone by Nasserism. Avnery himself was a participant in the Canaanite movement that, like the SSNP, and Ba'ath, sought an authoritarian order in the name of authenticity. A new Semitic Empire was to restore the original, Hebraic identity of Jew and Arab. If nothing else, unlike Sa'adeh and Saddam's deadly pipe-dreams, at least it didn't shed blood, except possibly a few paper cuts in Parisian journals.
All your anti-Zionism tells me is you want my blood, and a Hamas government over the Jews of Eretz Israel, to liquidate them.
And that is nothing new.
RE: "Today, a growing number of Israelis have started to understand the full significance of the “Nakba”, the great tragedy of the Palestinian people and all the individuals who lost their homes and most of their homeland. …An abyss yawns between the emotional reality of those days and the historical truth as we know it now. "
I think this, and everything else said by the speaker and the comments here so far, lead to dwelling on
people pushed to the edge, frightened by the events of the day they react to–look at all the Americans in the weeks after 9/11, which BushCo quickly beat the bush of fear to inflame (never ignore an opportunity–Rahm-boy) in the same way Hitler/Goebbels took advantage of the burning of the Reichstag… I bet a lot of really aged Germans could identify with what Avnery says here, harking back to their youth during WW1 followed by their Great Depression,
their negative image in the civilized world, then on, joined by youth adamant to right the past their parents and grandparents had suffered though….
Always easy to look on while those two play chess, or to analyze the game afterward, after the
stop watch had long stopped…
Pappe never mentions what the Arabs plans were. They must have had plans how to deal with the Jewish population. Every one makes plans. Where are they?
Pappe never mentions what the Arabs plans were. They must have had plans how to deal with the Jewish population. Every one makes plans. Where are they?
Pappe's account of the Village Files reminded me of nothing so much as of Edwin Black's account in IBM and the Holocaust of census records on IBM Hollerith cards that allowed the Nazis to quickly identify and locate Jews.
Black's Transfer Agreement is a shocking account of how the nascent Jewish state in Palestine struck a deal with Nazi Germany in its early, critical years: in return for Nazi Germany permitting large numbers of Jews to emigrate to Palestine, the Zionists would see to it that a worldwide boycott of Nazi Germany would topple the Nazi government. Strangely, Black thinks this deal was worthwhile, that the price was worth paying in order to have a Jewish state, and the book even carries a favorable endorsement by Abraham Foxman. I wonder if Black, in general an honest writer, would be capable of seeing the parallel with the Village Files.
Otto: "For some of my Jewish friends and, it seems, more and more non-Jews of a certain political persuasion, there is just an inability to recognize that the dispossession of Arabs was an essential element to the fulfillment of the Jewish people's national aspirations in Palestine. (That was a blindness that a ben Gurion or a Dayan never made. Read their writings, their speeches, especially their letters. They understood this.)"
Very good quote. This is one of the reasons I respect people like Ben Gurion. If you want to establish a nation on a piece of land other than Antarctica, chances are you will have an indigenous population that MUST be removed or forcibly assimilated. Otherwise you don't have a nation.
I don't see the issue as having any moral content; it's simply the way things are. I can't help but be grateful to my ancestors for removing the Indians, since I would never have been born otherwise!
Certainly it sucks for whoever is displaced, but who do you expect to fix the world so we all get what we want and never compete over land and resources? God? 21st century liberal blogreaders?
So, I guess, David F, the very ex-post facto legal premise of the Nuremberg trials and the international definitions of war crimes, etc in its aftermath, mean nothing. In short, there has been not even de jure progression since one apeman
clubbed another to gain whatever. All those jews and gypsies, all those dead from everywhere pursuant WW2 mean nothing at all; they all died in vain. Goering was right. Might makes right.
That's the way things are?
Hitler apparently was right. He did love to study the Indian Wars in America through German
trash novels as a kid. He launched his assault on the jews, confident in his awareness nobody
remembered the Armenians.
Hitler won.
Some people just have to wake up to that reality, but not us, eh David F?
Citizen,
I understand why people want to correct past injustices, but I think we are often seduced by a fantasy that we can right injustice done to the dead while committing new injustices upon the living.
I think the US and much of the world enabled the occupation out of a desire to do justice to the suffering and losses of the Holocaust. In reality, all we did was commit new injustice against new victims.
Attempting to somehow do justice to the Nakba by ending Israel's status as a Jewish state is the same kind of moral error.
In practice, a people is most likely to find justice when they can live at peace in their own state under their own laws.
Re: Nuremberg and International Law
I'm afraid Goering was right. The Nazis were tried and convicted because they lost. The Allies' innovations in population center bombing and Stalinist atrocities were not brought up because we won.
We (and our client-state Israel) violate international law, torture, and invade other countries on pretext whenever it pleases us. If the UN objects, we veto them or ignore them. Our sanctions in Iraq led to the deaths of over a million, and the Iraq war civilian deaths are likely in that range as well. The closest Bush will ever be called to account was when those shoes whizzed by his head!
The groups with the greatest economic and military power will always get to define justice in terms of their interests. I would prefer that they not be able to hide their self-interest behind a legalistic facade.
This is why I think nationalism and the maintenance of a balance of powers is a more realistic model for peace.
David F, you said:
"I think the US and much of the world enabled the occupation out of a desire to do justice to the suffering and losses of the Holocaust. In reality, all we did was commit new injustice against new victims.
Attempting to somehow do justice to the Nakba by ending Israel's status as a Jewish state is the same kind of moral error."
I agree with your first point.
I think your second point is more contestable from a humanitarian POV. Please understand, I don't ipso facto disagree with you. But I think your "somehow" & "Jewish state" is exactly
what needs to be clarified.
David F says:
"The groups with the greatest economic and military power will always get to define justice in terms of their interests. I would prefer that they not be able to hide their self-interest behind a legalistic facade.
This is why I think nationalism and the maintenance of a balance of powers is a more realistic model for peace."
Yes, I agree Goering was right also. I'm not sure what Goering would make of your partnering of nationalism and Metternich-cheapened -by -Kissinger would make of this, your version of a realistic model for peace.