Last week Miko Peled, the Israeli author of The General’s Son, appeared with his publisher Helena Cobban in Manhattan and spoke for 40 minutes. You can watch his speech in a Manhattan apartment above. (He was hosted by Donna Nevel and Dorothy Zellner of Jews Say No and Constancia Romilly of the Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theater). The speech is eloquent. The bit of laughter a minute or two in is when Peled discovers that a leaky pen has ruined his shirt. Other than that the talk is very serious.
As the speech is long, I want to paraphrase the salient points (I apologize that these are not direct quotes, but readers who require them can easily produce them from my video):
This is not an evenhanded presentation. Anyone who tells you they’re evenhanded is not being truthful. The situation is not even. When people say things should be worked out like between kids in a schoolyard, they are not telling you that one of the kids is a bully and he is armed.
Coming from a legendary Israeli family, notable for his father Matti Peled, a leading general of the ’67 war who had served as an officer in the ’48 war, Miko Peled never spoke on equal terms with Palestinians till 2000 in San Diego. Then he began learning their stories and it was painful to him. He heard about the Nakba from people who had experienced it and he trusted. He recognized that the Law of Return for Jews claiming a 2000 year old connection was a hypocritical double standard when people living in Palestine 60 years ago can’t come back to their homes.
People say, The Palestinians should get over it. But Jews are taught to nurse the grievances of thousands of years ago in Egypt at the Passover service, and to teach their children not to forget. Who are we to tell Palestinians to forget their expulsion inside their own lifetimes?
Learning about the Nakba was excruciating. So much of what he had learned as a child was lies. Though his mother said that she had been offered an Arab house, as the family of an officer, in 1948, and turned it down, staying in a small apartment. And she had seen Jews looting Arab homes in the wake of the Nakba and felt great shame. Jews don’t do these things. There are many things we were taught that Jews don’t do. And we were wrong.
Peled’s niece Smadar was killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in 1997. She was 13. Because the family was famous for seeking peace with Palestinians, journalists crowded Miko’s sister Nurit Peled-Elhanan’s house to hear her response. She said, No mother should experience what I am experiencing. No mother, Palestinian or Jewish. And what have we done to Palestinians to so blight the hopes of their children that two young men would be willing to kill themselves and in so doing kill my daughter? The brutal occupation has done this. The enemy is not the Palestinians. It is the extremists in our own political life. Since then Nurit Peled-Elhanan has done a study of the racism taught to Israelis in schools, to enable the occupation.
People speak of Jewish military achievements but these are greatly exaggerated. How was it possible for a small Jewish community to rout 800,000 Palestinians and then five armies in 1947-1948, erasing 500 villages? Well the Jews had been preparing for years and forming well-trained and indoctrinated militias. Right after Partition they began ethnic cleansing.
In 1967 the Arab armies were not prepared for war. Peled learned this in army archives: His own father said as much in counsels of the Israeli army. The Egyptians were a year and a half away from being ready for a war. And so the generals urged a strike in June 1967. The generals also extended the war, in defiance of the political leaders, for two days. Only because this coup was a success, and seized the Golan, were they not reprimanded. The political leaders were more conservative. They were born in Europe and had memories of Jewish helplessness. The generals were all born in Palestine. It was not a miracle that 15,000 Arabs were killed in six days and Israeli trebled its territory. It was military preparedness.
The occupation of Palestine post 67 is merely a continuation of the occupation of Palestine in 48. The Nakba has never ended. The same designs that Ben Gurion had Avigdor Lieberman has: to Judaize the land of Israel. Not the state of Israel, but the land. The treatment of Palestinians inside Israel is often worse than the treatment of Palestinians inside Palestine. They are denied electricity and water, because they are supposedly too remote; while neighboring Jewish communities get the services.
Israeli leaders began to talk the two state solution only when they knew it was impossible to effect. The conversation was a charade. The two state solution is an absurd proposition now, Partition is impossible. There is one regime between river and sea and the challenge is its “transformation” from racism and apartheid to democracy. This is a transformation that Americans can help to produce, the 50 people in Peled’s audience.
Both sides are oppressed by fanatical wings. The only way to overcome the fanaticism is political: for there to be a democracy in which the reasonable middles of both sides find one another and marginalize the fanatics.
As it is, fanatics rule in Israel. And the army is the largest most well-equipped terrorist organization in the world. Its only purpose is to penalize Palestinians, from arresting them in the middle of the night to shooting them. The Palestinians fire rockets. Of course. Any people would resort to violent resistance if they were under siege unending, as Gazans are, and denied water and freedom of movement.
“Who are we to tell the Palestinians not to forget their expulsion inside their own lifetimes?”
I think you want to lose that “not”.
Miko Peled is related to Nurit Peled Elhanan. Great generous people, humanistic Jews who are an example to those mired in ethnic hatred. Long term they will be vindicated.
I cannot say enough about Miko and his power as a speaker. This man is simply magnificent.
The amazing thing about Miko, is that as a fierce critic of Israel, he was able to inspire empathy in me for Israel and Israelis. When he speaks about his sister and his niece, it always beings tears to my eyes.
I am ashamed to admit that when I heard of the violence perpetrated by Israel on Gaza or Lebanon, I secretly wished for Israelis to feel the pain they were inflicting on others. Every time I catch myself doing that, I think of Miko’s family and what it would mean for them to be in the firing line, and I am brought back to sanity.
I met Miko Peled at the ADC conference in Washington after he spoke in NY, very interesting character. I also read his book. The penultimate chapter is about Peled’s meeting with a former Fatah commander, Abu Ali Shahin, whose family was massacred by the IDF in 67. General Peled investigated, wrote a report which was dismissed; it had a major impact on his views.
The father of Abu Shahin was killed in battle in 1948, when he was 9. General Peled fought with great distinction as a junior officer in 1948, and he and his wife were offered a spacious home in Katamon, the west Jerusalem district of well to do Palestinian families who had fled (e.g. Edward Said’s). They refused, especially his mother, who would not occupy the home of a dispossessed family. The family suffered some privation as a result, and it wasn’t until Peled advanced in the ranks that they enjoyed middle class comfort.
In 1967, when the Israelis massacred Abu Shahin’s whole family, and others, over 30 non-combatants, they were living in Rafah refugee camp. He was a senior Fatah figure moving around in Israel and the territories, and was eventually captured.
He weighed 75 kilos then, and after 5 months of torture, during which he didn’t
talk, was down to 39. He was then brought to Tel Aviv, where Rabin, Bar-Lev and a third general, interviewed him. They asked him why he hadn’t talked. He asked them, when the Palestinians liberate Tel Aviv, and capture you, will you talk? Tough words to the 3 most senior Israeli generals, coming off 5 months of torture.
He later told the story of the massacre to an interrogator who was reporting to General Peled, who was commander in Gaza at the time. Peled knew Arabic, and went to Rafah camp personally and interviewed the survivors and witnesses of that day, and visited the massacre site. He wrote a report and sent it to Rabin, the
chief of staff, who of course did nothing.
Miko Peled asked his mother about it, and she recalled it immediately, said the general couldn’t sleep for weeks. In addition to the massacre report he wrote a Gaza Report at the end of his tenure, which was famous to the IDF archvists, warning of the inhumanity of the occupation and of the degeneration of the IDF.
Abu Shahin was the commander of the prisoners in Israeli prisons for 2 decades. He looked so weak when the torturers turned him over to the military prison that the warden refused to accept him. The Israelis threw him in with common Israeli criminals, including one notorious gangster and serial killer, whom they expected would murder him or at least make him miserable, but they conspired with him against the jailers. With their help he organized smuggling of notes and texts in tiny handwriting throughout the prison system up and down Israel, instructing and educating the Palestinian prisoners, who democratically wrote and approved a constitution, among other accomplishments.
Abu Shahin insisted he never attacked civilians, and that was also the IDF’s record of him, he fought “only the khaki”, the army. He learned of General Peled’s investigation of the massacre in Rafah camp. He learned Hebrew in jail, and knew of the public change in General Peled’s views. The Palestinians in Israel called Peled Abu Salaam. Abu Shahin realized that the massacre and investigation had been a major influence on Peled. After Abu Shahin’s heroic resistance and suffering, he recognized on the other side someone who understood him, with whom he could have lived in peace. Upon his release Abu Shahin visited Peled’s grave 9 or 10 times, sometimes leaving flowers, until his Israeli permit was revoked. Miko Peled’s Palestinian friends introduced him to Abu Shahin, and he spent an extraordinary day hearing the story.
All that said, I am a little jaded about an apartment full of American Jews swooning over their latest Israeli hero, in a line going back to Yesh Gvul after Lebanon in 1982, and earlier. American Jews need to become ex-“diaspora Jews” and instead liberal citizens, as Peled has become an ex-Zionist. Miko’s story is an inspiration, but it is not a substitute for Spinoza, Marx, Luxemburg, Arendt, Berger, Deutscher, Rodinson, Shahak, et al. Rather Miko and his family have joined them, in their remarkable way.
If the attack on the USS Liberty was for the purpose of concealing Israeli preparations for the attack on Syria, as is often claimed, that would seem to imply that the attack on the Liberty was done without the knowledge or consent of Israel’s political leaders.