July 9, 2016
Hatred Unlimited
A PALESTINIAN youngster breaks into a settlement, enters the nearest house, stabs a 13-year old girl in her sleep and is killed.
Three Israeli men kidnap a 12-year old Palestinian boy at random, take him to an open field and burn him alive.
Two
Palestinians from a small town near Hebron enter Israel illegally, have
coffee in a Tel Aviv amusement quarter and then shoot up everybody
around before they are captured. They become national heroes.
An
Israeli soldier sees a severely wounded Palestinian attacker lying on
the ground, approaches him and shoots him in the head at point blank
range. He is applauded by most Israelis.
These
are not "normal" actions even in a guerrilla war. They are the
manifestations of bottomless hatred, a hatred so terrible that it
overcomes all norms of humanity.
THIS
WAS not always so. A few days after the 1967 war, in which Israel
conquered East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, I traveled
alone though the newly occupied territories. I was welcomed almost
everywhere, people were eager to sell me their goods, tell me their
stories. They were curious about the Israelis, much as we were curious
about them.
At
the time, Palestinians did not dream of an eternal occupation. They
hated the Jordanian rulers and were glad that we had driven them out.
They believed that we would leave soon, allowing them to rule themselves
at long last.
In
Israel, everyone spoke about a "benevolent occupation". The first
military governor was a very humane person, Chaim Herzog, a future
President of Israel and the father of the present chairman of the Labor
Party.
Within
a few years, all this had changed. The Palestinians realized that the
Israelis did not intend to leave, but that they were about to steal
their land, quite literally, and cover it with their settlements.
(Something similar happened 15 years later
in South Lebanon. The Shiite population greeted our troops with flowers
and rice, believing that we would drive the Palestinians out and leave.
When we didn't, they turned into determined guerrilla fighters and
eventually founded Hezbollah.)
By
now, hatred is everywhere. Arabs and Israelis use different highways,
but it is far worse than South African apartheid, because the whites
there had no interest in driving the blacks out. It is also far worse
than most forms of
colonialism, because the imperial powers did not generally pull the
land out from under the feet of the natives in order to settle there.
Nowadays,
mutual hatred reigns supreme. The settlers terrorize their Arab
neighbors, Arab boys throw rocks and improvised fire-bombs at passing
Jewish cars on the highroads where they themselves are not allowed to
drive. Recently, the car of a high-ranking army officer was stoned. He
got out, pursued a boy who was running away, shot him in the back and
killed him – in flagrant violation of army rules for opening fire.
TODAY,
SOME 120 years after the beginning of the Zionist experiment, the
hatred between the two peoples is abysmal. The conflict dominates our
lives. More than half of all news stories in the media concern this
conflict.
If
the founder of modern Zionism, the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl,
were to come to life again, he would be totally shocked. In the
futuristic novel he wrote in German at the beginning of last century,
called Altneuland ("Old-new Land"), he described in detail life in the
future Jewish State. Its Arab inhabitants are portrayed as happy and
patriotic citizens, grateful for all the progress and advantages brought
by the Zionists.
In
the beginning of the Jewish immigration, the Arabs were indeed
remarkably acquiescent. Perhaps they believed that the Zionists were a
new version of the German religious immigrants who had arrived a few
decades earlier and indeed brought progress to the country. These
Germans, who called themselves Templars (no connection with the medieval
crusader group so called) had no political ambitions. They set up model
villages and urban neighborhoods and lived happily ever after, until
the German Nazis infected them. At the outbreak of World War II the
British deported them all to far-away Australia.
The
model village these Templars built near Jaffa, Sarona, is now an
amusement park in Tel Aviv – the very place where the latest terrorist
outrage took place.
When
the Arabs realized that the new Zionist immigrants were not a repeat of
the Templars, but a new aggressive colonialist implantation, conflict
became inevitable. It grows worse from year to year. The hatred between
the two peoples seems to reach new heights all the time.
BY
NOW, the two peoples seem to live in two different worlds. A
centuries-old Arab village and a new Israeli settlement, situated one
mile apart, might just as well exist on two different planets.
From
their first day on earth, children of the two peoples hear totally
different stories from their parents. This goes on in school. By the
time they are grown up, they have very few perceptions in common.
For
a young Palestinian, the story is quite simple. This was an Arab land
for more than 14 centuries, a part of Arab civilization. For some, their
ownership of the country goes back thousands of years, since Islam did
not displace the existing Christian population when it conquered
Palestine. Islam was at the time a much more progressive religion, so
local Christians gradually adopted Islam, too.
In
the Palestinian view, Jews ruled Palestine in antiquity for a few
decades only. The Jewish claim to the country now, based on a promise
given to them by their own private Jewish God, is a blatant colonialist
ploy. The Zionists came to the country in the 20th century as allies of the British imperialist power, without any right to it.
Most
Palestinians are now ready to make peace and even to live in a reduced
Palestinian state side by side with Israel, but are rebuffed by the
Israeli government, which wants to keep "all of Eretz Israel" for Jewish
colonization, leaving only some disconnected enclaves to the
Palestinians.
A
PALESTINIAN ARAB who believes that this is a self-evident truth may
live a few hundred yards away from a Jewish Israeli, who believes that
this is all a pack of lies, invented by Arab anti-Semites (an oxymoron)
in order to drive the Jews into the sea.
Every
Jewish child in Israel learns from an early age that this land was
given by God to the Jews, who ruled it for many centuries, until they
offended God and He drove them out as a temporary punishment. Now the
Jews have come back to their country, which was occupied by a foreign
people which came from Arabia. These people now have the cheek to claim
the country as their own.
This
being so, official Israeli doctrine says, there is no solution. We just
have to be ready for a very very long time – practically for eternity –
to defend ourselves and our country. Peace is a dangerous illusion.
The
naïve vision of Herzl was opposed by the right-wing Zionist leader
Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky. He stated – quite rightly – that nowhere in
the world has a native people ever give up its land peacefully to a
foreigner. Therefore, he said, we have to build an "iron wall" to defend
our new settlement in the country of our forebears.
Jabotinsky,
who had studied in the liberal post-Risorgimento Italy, had a liberal
world-view. His present-day followers are Binyamin Netanyahu and the
Likud party, who are anything but liberal.
They
would applaud wildly if God made all Palestinians disappear overnight
from "our" country. They might even consider helping God a little bit.
INDEED, GOD plays an ever growing role in the conflict.
In
the beginning, God played a very minor role. Almost all
first-generation Zionists, including both Herzl and Jabotinsky, were
staunch atheists. It was said that Zionists were people who did not
believe in God, but who believed that God had promised us the country.
This has radically changed – on both sides.
In
the beginning of the conflict, early last century, the entire Arab
world was infected with European-style nationalism. Islam was always
there, but it was not the driving force. Arab national heroes, like
Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, were avid nationalists, who promised to unify the
Arabs and turn them into a world power.
Arab
nationalism failed miserably. Communism never took root in the Islamic
countries. Political Islam, which was victorious against the Soviets in
Afghanistan, is gaining ground throughout the Arab world.
Curiously
enough, the same happened in Israel. After the 1967 war, in which
Israel completed its conquest of the Holy Land, and especially the
Temple Mount and the Western Wall, atheist Zionism steadily lost ground,
and a violent religious kind of Zionism took over.
In
the Semitic world, the European idea of separation between state and
church never really took root. In both Islam and Judaism, religion and
State are inseparable.
In
Israel, power is now wielded by a government dominated by the extreme
ideology of the religious right-wing, while the "secular" left-wing has
long been in full retreat.
In
the Arab world, the same is happening – only more so. Al-Qaeda, Daesh
and their ilk are gaining everywhere. In Egypt and other places,
military dictatorships try to stop this process, but their foundations
are shaky.
Some
of us Israeli atheists have been warning of this danger for decades. We
said that nationalist states can reach compromise and make peace, while
for religious movements this is almost impossible.
Secular
rulers can be assassinated, like Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Yitzhak
Rabin in Israel. Religious movements live on when this happens to their
leaders.
(Assassin is a corruption of the Arab Word Hashisheen. The 12th
century founder of this sect, the Old Man of the Mountain, used to feed
his emissaries with Hashish and send them on incredibly daring
missions. The great Salah-ad-Din (Saladin) once woke up in his bed to
find a dagger next to him – and hastened to make a deal with the leader
of the Assassins.)
I
AM convinced that it is in the vital interest of Israel to make peace
with the Palestinian people, and with the Arab world at large, before
this dangerous infection engulfs the entire Arab – and Muslim – world.
The
leaders of the Palestinian people, both in the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip, are still comparatively moderate people. This is true even for
Hamas, a religious movement.
I
would suggest that for the West in general, supporting peace in our
region is also of paramount importance. The convulsions now affecting
several Arab countries do not bode well for them, either.
Reading
a document like this week's Quartet report on the Middle East, I am
amazed by their self-destructive cynicism. This ridiculous document of
the Quartet, composed of the US, Europe, Russia and the UN, is intent on
creating an equilibrium – equally blaming the conqueror and the
conquered, the oppressor and the oppressed, ignoring the occupation
altogether. Verily, a masterpiece of hypocrisy, a.k.a. diplomacy.
Absent all chances for a serious effort for peace, hatred will just grow and grow, until it engulfs us all.
Unless we take action to stem it in time.
|
Friday, July 8, 2016
Guest Post by Uri Avnery: Hatred Unlimited
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment