Uri
Avnery
September
6, 2014
FOR SIX
decades my friends and I have warned our people: if we don't make peace with
the nationalist Arab forces, we shall be faced with Islamic Arab forces.
The
Israeli-Palestinian conflict will turn into a Jewish-Muslim conflict. The
national war will become a religious war.
National
conflicts are basically rational. They concern territory. They can usually be
solved by compromise.
Religious
conflicts are irrational. Each side believes in an absolute truth, and
automatically considers everybody else as infidels, enemies of the only true
God.
There can
be no compromise between True Believers, who believe that they are fighting for
God and get their orders straight from Heaven. "God Wills It" shouted
the Crusaders and butchered Muslims and Jews. "Allah is the Greatest"
shout fanatical Muslims and behead their enemies. "Who is like you among
the Gods!" cried the Maccabees, and annihilated all fellow Jews who had
adopted Greek manners.
THE
ZIONIST movement was created by secularized Jews, after the victory of the
European Enlightenment. Almost all the founders were convinced atheists. They
were mostly quite ready to use religious symbols for decoration, but were
roundly denounced by all the great religious sages of their time.
Indeed,
before the creation of the State of Israel, the Zionist enterprise was
remarkably free of religious dogmas. Even today, extreme Zionists talk about
the "Nation State of the Jewish People", not of the "Religious State of the Jewish Faith". Even
for the "national religious" camp, the forerunners of today's
settlers and semi-fascists, religion was subordinate to the national goal – the
creation of a national Jewish state in all the land between the Mediterranean
Sea and the Jordan River.
This
national onslaught met, of course, with the resolute resistance of the Arab
national movement. After some initial hesitation, Arab national leaders turned
against it. This resistance had very little to do with religion. True, for some
time the Palestinian resistance was led by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,
Haj Amin al-Husseini - not because of his religious standing but because he was
the leader of Jerusalem's
most aristocratic clan.
The Arab
national movement was always decidedly secular. Some of its most outstanding
leaders were Christians. The pan-Arab Baath ("Resurrection") party,
which came to dominate both Syria
and Iraq,
was founded by Christians.
The great
hero of the Arab masses at that time, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, though formally Muslim,
was quite un-religious. Yasser Arafat, the leader of the PLO, was a pious
Muslim in private, but under his leadership the PLO remained a secular body
with many Christian ingredients. He spoke about liberating East
Jerusalem's "mosques and churches". For some time the
official aim of the PLO was to create in Palestine
a "democratic and non-denominational" state.
SO WHAT
has happened? How did a nationalist movement turn into a violent, fanatical
religious one?
Karen
Armstrong, the nun-turned-historian, pointed out that the same thing happened
practically simultaneously in all three monotheistic religions. In the US, evangelical
Christians now play a large role in politics, in close cooperation with the
Jewish right-wing establishment. All over the Muslim world, fundamentalist
movements are gaining strength. And in Israel, a messianic Jewish
fundamentalism is now playing a larger and larger role.
When the
same thing happens in such diverse countries and religions, there must be a
common cause. What is it?
It is
easy to speak about something nebulous with the German title of Zeitgeist,
the spirit of the times, but that really explains very little.
In the
Muslim world, the bankruptcy of liberal, secular nationalism has created a
spiritual void, an economic breakdown and national humiliation. The shining
promise of Nasserism ended in abject stagnation under Hosny Mubarak. The Baath
dictators in Baghdad and Damascus failed in creating modern states.
The militaries in Algeria
and Turkey
did not do much better. After the overthrow of the elected democratic Iranian
leader, Mohammed Mossadeq by oil-grabbing Western powers, the luckless Shah
could not fill the void.
And, all
the time, there was the humiliating sight of Israel, which grew from a despised
little foreign implant into a formidable military and economic power, and which
easily trounces Arab states again and again.
After
every new war, Muslim people ask themselves: What's wrong? If nationalism has
failed both in peace and in war, if both capitalism and socialism did not
succeed in creating a sound economy, if neither European humanism nor Soviet
communism succeeded in filling the spiritual void, where is the solution?
The
thunderous reply comes from the depths of the masses: "Islam is the
Answer!"
LOGIC
WOULD have it that the Israeli reply would be the opposite.
Israel is a success story. Not only does it
have a mighty military machine and credible nuclear capabilities, but it is a
technological power and has a comparatively sound economic basis.
But
messianic fundamentalism, closely allied with an extreme nationalism, is now
dictating our course.
On the
eve of the recent war, the commander of the Giv'ati brigade published an
order-of-the-day to his officers. It shocked many.
The
Giv'ati brigade was an outstanding fighting force in the war of 1948 (I was one
of its original fighters and wrote two books about it). We took great pride in
its composition. The fighters were a mixture of the sons of the metropolitan
Tel Aviv elite and the poorest surrounding slums – a mixture that was eminently
successful and proved itself in battle.
The
brigade commander was a former German communist underground fighter under the
Nazis, who converted to Zionism and became a member of a very left-wing
kibbutz. So were most of his staff officers. I don't remember a single soldier
in the brigade who wore a kippah.
Imagine
our shock when the current brigade commander called for a holy fight to fulfill
God's will. Colonel Ofer Winter, who in his youth attended a religious-military
school, had this to say to his soldiers on the eve of battle:
"History
has chosen us as the spearhead of the fight against the Gazan terrorist enemy,
who abuses and curses the God of Israel's battles…I raise my eyes to heaven and
call with you: 'Hear oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One'. Oh Lord,
the God of Israel, make us
succeed on our way, as we are going to fight for Israel against an enemy who curses
your name!"
The
official aim of the Israeli army in this campaign was to guard the border and
stop the launching of rockets at Israeli towns and villages. But that is not
the aim of the Colonel. He sent his soldiers to die (three of them did) for the
God of Israel,
against those who curse his name.
If this
officer were the only religious fanatic in the army, it would be bad enough.
But the army is now full of kippah-wearing officers who have been indoctrinated
with religious fervor and indoctrinate their soldiers in turn with the same
spirit.
The
Zionist-religious party and its fanatical rabbis, many of them outspoken
fascists, have been working for years to systematically infiltrate the army's
officer corps. It’s a process of natural selection: officers who are loath to
act as colonial masters in occupied territories leave the army to become
high-tech entrepreneurs, while messianic fanatics are sent to fill their place.
The
colonel, by the way, has not been reprimanded or harmed in any way. On the
contrary, he has been lauded during the war as an exemplary battle commander.
ALL THIS
leads me to ISIS – the Islamic State of Iraq
and al-Sham (Greater Syria),
which recently changed its name to just "Islamic State". The change
means that the former states, created by the Western colonialists after World
War I, are abolished. There is going to be one Islamic state that includes all
former and present Islamic territories, including Palestine
(including Israel).
This is a
new and frightening phenomenon. There are, of course, many Islamist parties and
organizations in the Muslim world – from the Turkish ruling party to the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to the Palestinian Hamas. But almost all of them
restrict their fight to their national countries – Turkey,
Syria, Palestine, Yemen.
They want to attain power and rule their countries. Even Osama bin Laden wanted
mostly to take over his Saudi homeland.
ISIS is something quite different. It
wants to destroy all states, especially the Muslim states carved out by Western
imperialists from Islamic land. With horrible savagery, elevated to a religious
symbol, it sets out on its way to conquer the Muslim world, and then the globe.
It may
seem a ridiculous aim, given that the whole enterprise consists of a few
thousand fighters. But this tiny force has already conquered a huge part of Syria and Iraq. It expresses the Muslim
longing for restoring ancient glory, their hatred of all those (including us)
who have humiliated Islam, a thirst for spiritual values. One cannot help being
reminded of the beginnings of the Nazi movement – its resentments, its thirst
for revenge, its attraction for all the poor and humiliated.
It may
take only a few years to become a huge force, threatening all the states of
this region.
DOES IT
threaten Israel?
Of course it does. If its dynamism holds, it will overthrow the Assad regime
and reach the Israeli border, where other Islamic rebels have already shot the
first few rounds this week.
With such
a menace looming in the north, it seems ridiculous to fight against a miniscule
Islamic-patriotic force in Gaza
– even if curses the name of the Lord.
There may
be very little time left to make peace with the Arab national movement, and
especially with the Palestinian people – including both the PLO and Hamas – and
join the fight against the Islamic state.
The
alternative is frightening.
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