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AMIRA HASS: Israel’s right to sweep away Palestinians

Expelling Palestinians is a paradigm that’s alive and well in the Jews’ state – a plan that was carried out and that is always waiting to be replicated.
By Amira Hass | Jun. 8, 2016 | 7:03 PM | 3
Why are people so shocked that Israel has jailed a professor of astrophysics over his posts on Facebook, along with young girls who brandished knives? It has every right to do so. This right follows naturally from Israel’s essence and past, and can be summed up in a term derived from a statement by Uzi Narkiss, who headed the army’s Central Command in the June 1967 war: the right to sweep away.

“I don’t know if anything will happen,” Narkiss said on the eve of that war, according to Israel Defense Forces documents recently released for publication. “But if something does happen, it will take less than 72 hours for us to sweep all the Arabs out of the West Bank.”

Here are three new examples of the exercise of that right that unfortunately haven’t received appropriate media coverage:

* The right to worship, trespass and kill. Some 4,000 Jews (according to Israel National News), including Knesset members, prayed at Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus from late Thursday night to early Friday morning last week, under heavy military protection (this follows from the rights to Judaize graves, to sanctify stones the way a dog marks his territory, and to prioritize memorializing a dead Jew over the daily routine of live Palestinians).

Maj. Elitzur Trabelsi, an officer in the Samaria Brigade’s territorial defense unit, said this unit’s “hard work, before and during the visit” to Joseph’s Tomb “is satisfying when you see the number of people coming here. The Samaria Brigade will continue to enable such visits in accordance with the government’s instructions and work to ensure the visitors’ security.”

The brazen locals, who deny the right to sweep them away, demonstrated. The IDF fired live bullets at them. About 10 demonstrators were wounded, including Jamal Dweikat, 20, who was wounded in the head. He died of his wounds on Monday.

* The right to dismantle a kindergarten (which derives from having turned Area C, the part of the West Bank assigned to full Israeli control by the Oslo Accord, into the rock of our existence). On Sunday, the IDF and Israel’s Civil Administration in the West Bank raided the Hamadin Bedouin community in Sateh al-Bahr (“Sea Level”) on the road leading to the Dead Sea. Accompanied by heavy engineering vehicles (a crane and a digger) and at least eight all-terrain vehicles, they dismantled and confiscated six prefab houses and one prefab that served as a kindergarten for 12 children.

The buildings, a UN donation, were funded by several European countries (including Germany). Twenty-six people, including 13 children, lost their homes.

The Hamadin, a clan of the Jahalin tribe, are one of the Bedouin communities which the Civil Administration is planning to sweep out of their place of residence of the past several decades (the Jahalin, of course, had first been swept out of the Negev in the early 1950s) and to concentrate them in a township, so that they will adjust their way of life and their movements to our sacred right to spread southward and eastward and build kosher Jewish villas.

* The right to prepare for the coming and welcome wars. Between May 30 and June 1, five Palestinian communities (made up of 58 families) were ordered to evacuate their homes in the steaming northern Jordan Valley for various periods of time due to IDF exercises. Military exercises within Palestinian communities are nothing new. In April 2014, Col. Einav Shalev, then an officer in Central Command’s operations division, revealed that training exercises and the expansion of firing zones in the Jordan Valley are a way of reducing the number of Palestinians. “When the troops march, people move aside,” he said. “There are places where we significantly reduced the number of exercises, and weeds sprang up there.”

When Narkiss spoke of “sweeping out all the Arabs,” he drew a logical line to the expulsion of 1948. In other words, he revealed that expelling Palestinians is a paradigm that’s alive and well in the Jews’ state – a plan that was carried out and that is always waiting to be replicated. That plan hasn’t succeeded. But “sweeping” the Palestinians into crowded enclaves continues all the time, an inseparable part of our right as masters.

A Bedouin of the Jahalin tribe walks in his encampment near the Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, June 16, 2012.Reuters read more: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.723737
A Bedouin of the Jahalin tribe walks in his encampment near the Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, June 16, 2012.Reuters
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.723737
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Gideon Levy: Americans “Are Supporting the First Signs of Fascism in Israel”

 Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy talks to journalist Max Blumenthal about how the Israeli occupation has poisoned not only the region but much of the world, and how BDS might be the last standing hope to dismantle it –   March 22, 2016

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php…

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Gideon Levy

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Covertly, Israel prepares to fight boycott activists online

 

Feb. 17, 2016 8:21 AM EST

FILE – In this April 20, 2015, file photo, an Egyptian man shouts anti-Israeli slogans in front of… Read more

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israel is using its world-leading expertise in cyber security to take on the growing threat of the global pro-Palestinian movement to boycott Israel.

The Israeli government recently allotted nearly $26 million in this year’s budget to combat what it sees as worldwide efforts to “delegitimize” the Jewish state’s right to exist. Some of the funds are earmarked for Israeli tech companies, many of them headed by former military intelligence officers, for digital initiatives aimed at gathering intelligence on activist groups and countering their efforts.

“I want to create a community of fighters,” said Sima Vaknin-Gil, the director general of Israel’s Ministry for Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, to Israeli tech developers at a forum last month dedicated to the topic.

Initiatives are largely being kept covert. Participants at the invite-only forum, held on the sidelines of a cyber technology conference, repeatedly stood up to remind people that journalists were in the room.

Among the government officials involved in the efforts are some of Israel’s top secret-keepers, including Sima Shine, a former top official in the Mossad spy agency, and Vaknin-Gil, who recently retired as the chief military censor responsible for gag orders on state secrets.

Israel has established itself as a world leader in cyber technology innovation, fueled by graduates of prestigious and secretive military and security intelligence units. These units are widely thought to be behind some of the world’s most advanced cyber-attacks, including the Stuxnet virus that attacked Iran’s nuclear energy equipment last decade.

Each year, these units churn out a talent pool of Israelis who translate their skills to the corporate world. Now Israel is looking to harness their technological prowess for the fight to protect Israel’s international image.

Vaknin-Gil said her ministry is encouraging initiatives to expose the funding and curb the activities of anti-Israel activists, as well as campaigns to “flood the Internet” with content that puts a positive face on Israel. She said some of these actions will not be publicly identified with the government, but that the ministry will not fund unethical or illegal digital initiatives.

Established about 10 years ago, the pro-Palestinian “BDS” campaign is a coalition of organizations that advocate boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Inspired by the anti-apartheid movement, BDS organizers say they are using nonviolent means to promote the Palestinian struggle for independence.

The movement has grown into a global network of thousands of volunteers, from campus activists to church groups to liberal Jews disillusioned by Israeli policies. They lobby corporations, artists and academic institutions to sever ties with Israel.

The movement has made inroads. U.S. and British academic unions have endorsed boycotts, student governments at universities have made divestment proposals, and some famous musicians have refused to perform in Israel. The BDS movement also claims responsibility for pressuring some large companies to stop or modify operations in Israel. In its latest push, it has urged top Hollywood actors to reject a government-paid trip to Israel being offered to leading Oscar nominees.

Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the BDS movement, said “quite a few web pages” that BDS websites linked to have mysteriously disappeared from the Internet.

“We assume Israel’s cyber sabotage is ongoing, but we are quite pleased that its detrimental impact on the global BDS movement has been dismal so far,” he said.

Israel says the movement is rooted in anti-Semitism and seeks not to change Israeli policies, but ultimately to put an end to the Jewish state.

Many online activists driving anti-Israeli campaigns on social media are tech-savvy, second- and third-generation Muslims in Europe and the U.S. who have grievances against the West and also lead online campaigns against European and U.S. governments, said Elad Ratson, who tracks the issue for Israel’s Foreign Ministry and spoke at last month’s cybersecurity forum.

He said they often create code that allows activists to blast thousands of messages from social media accounts — creating the illusion that many protesters are sharing the same anti-Israel or anti-West message online.

Israeli officials lobby Facebook to remove pages it says incite violence against Israelis, and there has been talk of advancing legislation to restrict Facebook in Israel. A Facebook representative met with Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan in Israel last week about the matter.

Ratson said social media giants are beginning to close inciting users’ accounts. Twitter said in a statement this month that since mid-2015, it has closed more than 125,000 accounts that were “threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to ISIS,” the Islamic State group. But he said Islamist activists are simply moving to “Darknet” sites not visible on the open internet.

Some Israeli tech companies are starting to build sly algorithms to restrict these online activists’ circle of influence on the “Darknet,” so activists think their message is reaching others when in fact it is being contained, Ratson said.

Other Israeli companies work on forensic intelligence gathering, such as detecting digital or semantic signatures buried in activists’ coding so they are able to track and restrict their online activity.

Firewall Israel, a non-profit initiative sponsored by the Reut Institute, an Israeli think tank, is building an online platform to help pro-Israel activists around the world communicate about anti-Israel activism in their communities. At a recent event the initiative held at Campus Tel Aviv, a Google-sponsored event space for entrepreneurs, an Israeli web expert taught young activists how to mine the internet for BDS activities.

“Delegitimizers are engaged in a Disneyland of hate,” Igal Ram of Firewall Israel told seminar participants. “We want to act against the people who run the Disneyland … and the useful idiots who help.”

Inspiration, an Israeli intelligence analysis company founded by Ronen Cohen and Haim Pinto, former military intelligence officers, launched a technological initiative some months ago to collect intelligence on BDS organizations in Europe, particularly Scandinavian countries, the U.S., and South America, Cohen said. He said the initiative aims to dismantle the infrastructure of groups he said were responsible for incitement and anti-Semitism against Israel. He declined to give specifics.

“It’s no different than an operation, which you sometimes read about in the newspaper, in Syria or Lebanon,” Cohen said. “It’s the kind of thing that, if you want to do it in the future … you can’t work in the open.”

_source__

Follow Daniel Estrin on Twitter at www.twitter.com/danielestrin

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Israelis Ignore the Gaza Ghetto Until the War Drums Are Heard

Haaretz February 4, 2016

Two million human beings, some of whom worked here for years, some of them even have friends here, live in abject poverty and petrifying despair, mainly because of Israel’s blockade.

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.701213

Gideon Levy |

Most Israelis cannot imagine the daily lives of Gazans.Credit: AFP

The latest news from the ghetto comes, as usual, from the outside. The addiction to fear and the eternal wallowing in terror in Israel suddenly reminded one of the existence of the neighboring ghetto. Only thus are we here reminded of Gaza. When it shoots, or at least digs. Residents of the communities surrounding Gaza hear sounds, perhaps the sounds of digging, and the ghetto is no longer abandoned. We recall its existence. Iran dropped off the agenda. Sweden isn’t scary enough. Hezbollah is busy. So we return to Gaza.

If the Ayelet Zurer affair loses steam heaven forbid, or the Moshe Ivgy affair doesn’t take off – the things that are really interesting – because then some bored commentators and editors and politicians and bloodthirsty generals are liable to drag Israel into another “war” in Gaza. And “war” in Gaza is always another controlled massacre, whose achievements are measured in the number of corpses and amount of destroyed buildings that it leaves behind. Isaac Herzog has already promised as much.

But the real news from Gaza doesn’t reach Israelis. Who here heard that jets of the most moral air force in the world poisoned in recent weeks the fields of a “buffer zone,” which Israel declared unilaterally, at a distance of 300 meters from the fence? Farmers in Gaza report that the dusters spread the poison up to 500 meters, and that 1,187 dunams (293 acres) were damaged in the last poisoning in December. The pilots, convinced that they are doing a good thing, reported hitting their targets accurately.

Pay attention to the sterile wording of the IDF spokesman: “Aerial spraying of herbicidal germination preventing material next to the security fence was carried out in order to allow optimal implementation of ongoing security missions in the area,” he stated.

Fishermen are forbidden from venturing more than six nautical miles out from shore. Sometimes they catch a fisherman or shoot him. Farmers are forbidden from going within 300 meters. Everything is done to serve Israel’s security, and its security alone – and the occupation of the Gaza Strip ended a long time ago.

Just an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv, there is a ghetto. Even without supplying “germination preventing materials,” almost nothing grows in it. Up-to-date data from Gisha-Legal Center for Freedom of Movement indicate 43 percent unemployment, 70 percent in need of humanitarian assistance and 57 percent suffering from nutrition insecurity.

And then there is the spine-chilling report that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency issued in August under the headline “Gaza 2020: A livable place?” By then the damage to the water infrastructure will be irreversible. The water today is already not potable. The GDP per capita, $1,273, is less than it was 25 years ago, perhaps the only one that declined. Another 1,000 doctors and 2,000 nurses will be needed in the besieged, collapsing health system. From where will they come, out the faculty of medicine in Nuseirat or from the students who left to study medicine at Harvard? Egypt tightened its grasp, the world shirked its commitments and Israel exploits this to continue the blockade.

They get three hours of electricity, sometimes six, in the cold and rain. After that, there is no electricity for 12 hours, and then again for three or six hours, day in, day out. There are about two million people, a million of them refugees and their families, made refugees directly or indirectly by Israel. About a million of them are children. No Israeli can imagine it. Few Israelis feel guilty about it. There are few Israelis who care at all. Hamas, you know.

When the next catastrophe in the world hits, be it an earthquake or flood, we’ll be there with a delegation from the Israel Defense Forces, the same IDF in the same fatigues in which they spray the fields in Gaza. We are always the first.

And meanwhile in the ghetto, two million human beings, some of whom worked here for years, some of them even have friends here, live in abject poverty and petrifying despair, mainly because of Israel’s blockade.

The “We left Gaza” operation is complete. Now we only need to wait for the tunnels to start bombing again.

 

Gideon Levy

Haaretz Correspondent

source

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Does America Really “Share Values” With Today’s Israel?

A group of settlers protesting against the demolition of a synagogue in the settlement of Givat Ze'ev, November 2015.
In the late sixties or early seventies, when I served as the executive head of the Synagogue Council of America, the coordinating body for certain social action and interreligious activities of the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform national rabbinical and congregational organizations in the United States, I had a private conversation—one of many—with Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who was considered the leader of modern Orthodoxy in the United States, if not the world.
Rabbi Soloveitchik had just completed a high-level seminar attended by a select group of rabbis and Christian ministers. I asked him if he would agree to lead another such a seminar on the Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel and the concept of “kedushat haaretz” (the holiness of the land), and how these are to be differentiated from concepts such as “blut und boden” (blood and land) at the heart of German fascism and other totalitarian regimes.
Soloveitchik’s answer surprised me, for I was then not only a practicing Orthodox Jew but an ardent Zionist who identified with the religious nationalist branch of the Zionist movement. He told me he could not lead such a seminar because “I would have difficulty explaining that difference even to my own children.”
I never lost my love for the idea of a Jewish state, although I long ago lost my innocence about Palestine being “a land without a people for a people without a land”—a founding Zionist motto—not to speak of my loss of innocence about the theological premises of Orthodoxy. But I did not fully understand Soloveitchik’s refusal to tackle the subject of implications of the concept of the land’s holiness until I saw the video of settlers —young Orthodox Jews with the longest payot (side curls), thetzitzit (ritual fringes) and largest skull caps—asserting their Jewish and Zionist authenticity by reenacting and celebrating the incineration of a Palestinian baby.
Of course, Netanyahu and his ministers condemned this revolting display, and I do not question the sincerity of their denunciations. But they do not begin to understand what Soloveitchik apparently feared—that an unbridled nationalism that sanctifies the nation and its land may lead to the dehumanization of the Other and the desecration of human life.
Netanyahu and his far-right government have not only been indifferent to this danger, they have actively encouraged it.
As I wrote these lines, Netanyahu’s government decided to support legislation introduced in Israel’s Knesset that would punish Israeli NGO’s devoted to the protection of the rights of Israel’s non-Jewish minorities and to the prevention of abuses of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories by Israel’s military and security forces. Since these NGO’s are dependent on support from the U.S. and the European Union, the legislation seeks to deprive them of that support in the expectation that this will shut them down.
The reason for these NGO’s dependence on foreign support is that Netanyahu and Israel’s right-wingers, who have come to dominate Israel’s political culture, have so brutally demonized Israeli human rights organizations that most Israelis see them as collaborators with Israel’s enemies. It is not at all uncommon for the diminishing “leftists” in Israel—a term that in the past signified no more than supporters of a peace accord with the Palestinians—to be told: “Why don’t you move to Gaza.”
Yet Netanyahu’s government’s support for this despicable legislation is not the worst of it. The worst of it is Netanyahu’s appointment of Ayelet Shaked as his Minister of Justice. On July 1st 2014, Shaked posted on her Facebook page an article whose author, Uri Elitzur, a settler leader she admired, wrote that “Israel should target not only the militants but the mothers of the martyrs who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
An Israeli prime minister who appoints as his minister of justice an advocate of the murder of mothers of Palestinian terrorists and considers Palestinian babies little snakes that should be exterminated cannot disclaim his paternity of settlers who celebrate the incineration of Palestinian babies.
Nor can Naftali Bennett, the Minister of Education who heads the Habayit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) Party and aspires to inherit Netanyahu’s prime ministerial post, disclaim his paternity. In 2013, he famously said during a cabinet debate that, “if you catch terrorists, you simply have to kill them.” When reproached by the National Security Advisor Yaakov Amidror that “this is not legal,” he replied, “I have killed lots of Arabs in my life, and there is no problem with that.”
And neither Bennett nor Netanyahu can claim that the Jewish terrorists they are now denouncing are distinguishable from ISIS decapitators. They have their hands full just distinguishing their own past pronouncements from the behavior of these settlers.
The only unanswered question is how much longer will President Obama insist there can be no daylight between the U.S. and Israel because of the values they share.
Henry Siegman is the president of the U.S./Middle East Project. He served as a Senior Fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations and as a non-resident research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, SOAS, University of London. He formerly headed the American Jewish Congress and the Synagogue Council of America>
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#FREEABUSAKHA

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Avigdor Feldman, a Lonely Lawyer

Uri Avnery
December 19, 2015

A Lonely Lawyer

avi2

BY NOW EVERY ISRAELI has seen the TV clip several times – showing a 14-year
old Arab girl being shot dead near the central market of Jewish Jerusalem.

The story is well known: two sisters, 14 and 16 years old, have decided to
attack Israelis. The clip, taken by a security camera, shows one of them,
clad in traditional Arab garb, jumping around on the sidewalk, brandishing a
pair of scissors.

The whole thing looks almost like a dance. She is jumping around aimlessly,
waving the scissors, threatening no one in particular. Then a soldier aims a
pistol at her and shoots her. He runs to the girl and kills her while she is
lying helplessly on the ground. The other girl is grievously wounded.

The soldier was lauded for his bravery by the Minister of Defense, a former
army Chief of Staff, and by his present successor. Throughout the political
establishment, not a single voice was raised against the killing. Even the
opposition was silent. 

THIS WEEK one person raised his voice. Avigdor Feldman, a lawyer, informed
the Attorney General that he was going to apply to the Supreme Court, asking
it to open a criminal investigation against the soldier. He wants the court
to order the authorities to investigate all cases in which soldiers and
civilians have shot and killed “terrorists” after they had already become
unable to act.

In today’s Israel, this is an act of incredible courage. Advocate Feldman is
no crackpot. He is a well-known lawyer, prominent especially in the field of
civil rights.

I got to know him when he was still at the start of his career. He was still
a “stageur” – a lawyer who has finished his studies but is not yet a fully
licensed advocate – working in a friend’s office. He represented me in
several minor court cases, and even then I was struck by his sharp mind.

Since then, Feldman has become a prominent civil-rights lawyer. I have seen
him several times pleading in the Supreme Court, and noticed the reactions
of the court. When Feldman speaks, the judges stop their day-dreaming and
doodling and follow his arguments with rapt attention, interrupting him with
sharp questions, obviously enjoying the judicial jousting. 

Now Feldman has done what nobody else has dared to do: taking the army by
the horns and challenging the high command.

In Israel, that is close to lèse majesté.

SINCE THE beginning of October, Israel has been experiencing a wave of
violence that has not yet acquired an official name. Newspapers call it a
“wave of terrorism”, some speak of “the intifada of the individuals”.

Its outstanding characteristic is that it lacks any organization. It is not
planned by a group, no orders are transmitted from above, no coordination
between cells is necessary.

Some Arab teenager takes a knife from his mother’s kitchen, looks for a
uniformed person in the street and stabs him. If no soldier or policeman is
available, he stabs a settler. If he sees no settler around, he stabs any
Israel he can find. 

If he drives a car, he just looks for a group of soldiers or civilians
waiting by the road and runs them over. 

Many others just throw stones at a passing Israeli car, hoping to cause a
fatal accident. 

Against such acts, the army (in the occupied territories) and the police (in
Israel proper or in annexed East Jerusalem) is almost helpless. In the two
earlier intifadas and in between, the security organs incredibly caught
almost all perpetrators. This was achieved because the acts were committed
by groups and organizations. Almost all of these were sooner or later
infiltrated by Israeli agents. Once one of the perpetrators had been caught,
he or she was induced to inform on the others – either by bribes, “moderate
physical pressure” (as our courts call torture) and such.

All these proven measures are quite useless, when a deed is carried out by a
single person, or by two brothers, acting on the spur of the moment. No
spies. No traitors. No prior signs. Nothing to work on.

The Israeli security services have tried to work out a typical profile of
such perpetrators. To no avail. There is nothing common to all or most of
them. There were several 14 year old teenagers, but also a grandfather with
children and grandchildren. Most did not appear in any anti-terrorist
database. Some were religious radicals, but many others were not religious
at all. Some were females, one a mother. 

What pushed them? The official Israeli stock answer is: sedition. Mahmud
Abbas incites them. Hamas incites them. The Arab media incite them. Almost
all these “incitements” are routine reactions to Israeli actions. And
anyway, a young Arab does not need “incitement”. He sees what’s going on
around him. He sees terrifying nightly arrests, Israeli troops invading
towns and villages. He does not need the lure of the virgins awaiting the
martyr in paradise. 

SINCE THERE is no immediate remedy, politicians and other “experts” fall
back on “deterrence”. Foremost method: summary execution.

This was first discovered in April 1974, when an Israeli bus was hijacked by
four inexperienced Arab youngsters. It was stopped near Ashkelon and
stormed. Two of the four were killed in the shooting, but two were captured
alive. Three photographers took their pictures alive, but later the army
announced that they were also killed in the fighting.

This was a blatant lie, protected by army censorship. As the editor of
Haolam Hazeh magazine, I threatened to go to the Supreme Court. I was
allowed to publish the photos, and a giant storm erupted. The chief of the
Security Service (Shin Bet or Shabak) and his assistants were indicted, but
pardoned without a trial.

In the course of the scandal, a secret directive came to light: the then
Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, had issued an oral directive saying that “no
terrorist should remain alive after committing a terrorist act”. 

Something like that must be in force now. Soldiers, policemen and armed
civilians believe that this is an order: terrorists must be killed on the
spot.

Officially, of course, soldiers and others are allowed to kill only when
their own lives or the lives of others are in direct and immediate danger.
According to the laws of war, as well as Israeli law, it is a crime to kill
enemies when they are wounded, handcuffed or otherwise unable to endanger
lives.

Yet almost all Arab perpetrators – including the wounded and the captured –
are shot on the spot. How is this to be explained?

Most frequently, the facts are simply denied. But with the proliferation of
security cameras, this becomes more and more impossible.

An argument often used is that a soldier has no time to think. He has to act
quickly. A battlefield is no courtroom. A soldier often acts instinctively.

Yes and no. Very often indeed there is no time to think. He who shoots first
stays alive. A soldier has the right – indeed, the duty – to defend his
life. When in doubt, he should act. No one needs to tell me that. I have
been there.

But there are situations when there is no doubt at all. If a handcuffed
prisoner is shot, it is clearly a crime. To shoot a wounded enemy, lying
helplessly on the ground, like the girl with the scissors, is disgusting.

These are clearcut cases. If the Minister of Police (now called Minister for
Interior Security) says in the Knesset that the girl-killer had no time to
think – he lies. 

I dare to say that this minister, Gilad Ardan, an aggressive he-man who did
his glorious army service as a desk officer in the army personnel
department, has a bit less battle experience than I. What he said in the
Knesset is rubbish.

The soldiers shoot and kill because they think that their superiors want
them to. Probably they have been told to do so. The logic behind this is
“deterrence” – if the perpetrator knows that he is going to be killed for
sure, he may think twice before doing it.

There is absolutely no evidence for this. On the contrary, the knowledge
that he or she, the perpetrators, are probably going to be shot on the spot,
just pushes them on. Becoming a shahid, a martyr, will make their family and
the entire neighborhood proud.

Ah, say the deterrers, but if we also destroy the house of the perpetrator’s
family, they will think twice. Their family will beg them to abstain. Sounds
logical?

Not at all. There is absolutely no evidence for this, either. Quite the
contrary. Becoming the parents of a shahid is such an honor, that it
overrides the loss of the family home. Especially if funds provided by Saudi
Arabia and the other Gulf states will pay indemnities. 

It is the clearcut opinion of the security experts that this kind of
collective punishment does not work. On the contrary, it creates more
hatred, which will create more shahids. In short, counter-productive. 

The top army and security service commanders do not hide their opposition to
these measures. They are overruled by politicians and commentators who seek
popularity.

SUMMARY EXECUTIONS and collective punishments are, of course, diametrically
opposed to the international Laws of Warfare. Many Israelis despise these
laws and ignore them. They believe that such naive laws should not hinder
our army in the defense of our country and us.

This argument is based on ignorance.

The laws of warfare were initiated after the 30-year war, in the first half
of the 17th century, which brought untold misery to central Europe. When it
was finished, two thirds of Germany was destroyed and the one third of the
German population wiped out.

The originators of the laws, in particular a Dutchman called Grotius,
started from the sensible assumption that no law will hold if it prevents
the prosecution of war. A nation fighting for its life will not observe any
law that hinders it doing so. But in wars, a lot of atrocities are committed
which serve no military purpose at all, just out of hatred or sadism.

It is these acts – acts that serve no military purpose – that are forbidden
by the international laws of war. Both sides suffer from them. Killing
prisoners, letting the wounded perish, destroying civilian property,
collective punishments and such help no side. They just satisfy sadistic
impulses and senseless hatred.

Such acts are not just immoral and ugly. They are also counterproductive.
Atrocities create hatred, which creates more shahids. Dead prisoners cannot
be interrogated and provide no information, which may be essential for
forming new strategies and tactics. Cruelty is just another form of
stupidity.

Our army knows all this. They are against. But they are overruled by
politicians of the more detestable kind, which we have in abundance.

CONNECTED WITH this subject is the persecution of an organization called
“Breaking the Silence”. 

This was formed by soldiers who, upon their release, started to publicize
their experience in the occupied territories, things they did and things
they saw. This has become a big operation. Their meticulous adherence to the
truth has gained the respect of the army, and testimony given by them is
respected by the army General Attorney’s office and often acted upon.

This has now led to a furious incitement campaign against the group by the
demagogues of the extreme Right. It has been accused of treason, of
“besmirching our boys”, of aiding and abetting the terrorists and such. Many
of the accusers are former office soldiers and shirkers, who accuse former
combatants.

This week the Rightist demagogues furiously attacked the President of
Israel, Reuben Rivlin, for committing treason. His crime: he appeared at a
political conference organized in New York by the liberal Israeli newspaper
Haaretz, where Breaking the Silence was also invited. 

Rivlin is a very nice, very humane person. As President he is insisting on
full equality for Arab citizens. But he also entertains very right-wing
opinions and objects to giving up an inch of “Eretz Israel” territory for
peace. Yet no right-wing politician has come to his aid against the wild
accusations.

Breaking the Silence does not stand alone. Fascist groups – I use the term
with some hesitation – accuse many peace and human rights organizations of
“treason”, citing the fact that several of them do receive donations from
European governments and organizations. The fact that Israeli right-wing and
downright fascist organization receive vastly more money from Jewish and
Christian Evangelist organizations abroad does not matter.

ALL THIS shows how courageous Advocate Feldman is in his efforts. 

As we say in Hebrew: All honor to him. 

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The Miracle of Israel – Open Letter to David Grossman

Philosopher Lieven De Cauter carefully listened to the lunch talk of the great writer David Grossman today in Passa Porta. Writing down all he said in his notebook, he was perplexed by the wisdom of his words. But afterwards he suddenly felt utterly sad. In order to find out why, he went back to his note book and wrote an open letter to the great writer.

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Dear David Grossman,

you said wonderful words during your lunch talk in Passa Porta today, words of great wisdom. I filled four pages of my note book with them. How come I felt so utterly sad when I left? Maybe the answer is in my notebook.

I will not retell the story of you latest novel, A horse walks into a bar, the plot of which you told us in such a subtle way. ‘Literature’, you said, at the end of this introduction, ‘does not judge, literature is a second chance’. Beautiful. When your interviewer gave you a quote from the book from Pessoa ‘It is enough to exist, in order to be perfect’, you said: ‘To be complete means to live with the cracks, the losses, the contradictions’. And you added another quote: ‘Nothing more whole than a broken heart’. Beautiful.

‘Dovele, the main character, keeps the score of the people in the audience who leave when he breaks out in his painful story, why?’, the interviewer asked. You replied: ‘It is natural that people don’t want to look into the wounds of others. But some people stay and do look’. Beautiful. I want to be one of them, a higher voice in me said.

On the question why the book is political, you replied that it is political; that you cannot turn your back to a tormented, abnormal situation. ‘Most Israeli’s turn their back on what happens. My book The smile of the land was the first novel on the occupation and not many have been written since [Israeli novels you meant, no doubt]  and Yellow wind was a book on life in the occupied territories. You told us how you went to Dheisheh camp, and that people had never seen an Israeli without a uniform, and how a grandmother looking like yours, took you into her concrete hut and told you her story. How they were expelled.

And then you said between nose and lips (as we say), ‘whether they were expelled or ran away, remains still dubious’. Well. Would you not run away, when villages are attacked by the Hagana at night and thirty houses are blown up with the people in them? That is quite a convincing argument to ‘spontaneously’ run away, isn’t it? Please let’s not beat around the bush on this: the Nakba, the foundation of Israel was an ethnic cleansing. Israel is literally based on a crime against humanity. The story that they just ‘ran away’, is miraculous, because till the present day it is and remains the only ethnic cleansing that is not recognized by the international community (according to your compatriot Ilan Pappe). And this ethnic cleansing and land grabbing is ongoing. Does that not bother you?

‘Politics, we must confront politics’, you continued, ‘we are the victims of politics, we are the victims of politicians that do nothing, that keep the status quo, after 40 years of occupation (well over 60 years I would say, but that can be debated). I do not think they do nothing, the colonization of the Westbank is ongoing, even heightened. That is not doing nothing, is it?

‘Between despair and apathy, there is a gap’, you said, ‘between daily life and reality, and this gap is filled with extremism’. Beautiful words. Words that increasingly apply to Europe too. ‘Israel is not an exiting place anymore to build a normal life, this is a danger to our democracy’.

Then the interviewer asked how one can live with trauma. ‘A thousand times Dovele has told his story to himself. We become trapped in our own stories, striking ones, “legislative stories”, you called them. We have to massage them and look and them with a sceptical eye. Under every story there is another story. There is an archaeology of stories. If we allow this flexibility, we can give up the story, the frustration is not to be fossilized, trapped into the story, otherwise we live frozen lives’. Beautiful words. And then you added: not only individuals are trapped into legislative stories, but also nations, myths. Like the myth that Israeli’s are victims.

Like your character, Dovele, you told us that ‘walking on your hands is useful.’ It is a way to invert the perspective. ‘To reformulate the world is the task of the artist and this reformulation echoes in the heart of the reader… the writer stresses the nuances in those stories. All the stories have been told, how to tell the stories, so they can move us, make a movement in us, change us?’ Beautiful.

The interviewer returned to the theme of trauma, and the Shoah. ‘The people who survived were lucky and felt guilty about it, and there was no place for them in the new Israel, they were victims from the past (very much the theme of your book See under: love)…’ ‘Netanyahu is a magician in stirring up the contemporary dangers with the shadows of the past’. ‘But’, you said, at the end, ‘One of the miracles of Israel is the reinvention of Hebrew, the coming home after 2000 years to our country from a diaspora of 70 countries, founding a democracy 3 years after the Shoah’. These last words left me speechless. This ‘legislative story’, this myth of return has been revealed a fiction by Shlomo Sand (in How the Jewish people was invented) and others, and moreover, this ‘miracle’ is based on a crime against humanity, the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, a crime that is ongoing. And about Israel being a democracy, we can discuss. Ilan Pappe was expelled for saying that the founding of Israel was an ethnic cleansing. Not very democratic.

There was only time for one question afterwards: ‘How do you see the future of Israel?’

You said: ‘I cannot afford the luxury of despair….  They make us believe that war is the only possible reality, that war is some sort of divine fate… The extremists have taken power on both sides, but I believe the belligerent way is against our interest. I believe in dialogue, in agreement, it will not be a fast process, but I believe in the educational power of compromise, it might take generations, I do not believe in absolute justice, I believe in the power of routine, of everydayness, Palestinian and Israeli s playing football together, playing music together like Daniel Barenboim’s orchestra. Our war cannot be won. Only normalcy can save us. Now we have no normalcy, we have no normal life, we have a limited life, not a complete life… But do not misread me, we need a strong army, for we are surrounded by big enemies, but only peace can save us. But not a naïve peace, a binational state [the one state solution] will only create an apartheid system.’ Again I was speechless. Do you not know that it is an apartheid system already? And a ruthless one, with hideous crimes every day. You must know.

The ‘Belgian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel’ (BACBI) convinced KASK, an art school in Ghent, where you speak tonight, not to accept the money from the Israeli Embassy that sponsors your trip. But does it change anything? For you are an ambassador for Israel either way. Is this a contradiction that makes you complete? Was your advice for question time, ‘literature not politics please’, not your turn to look away?

Now I understand why the Israeli embassy is willing to sponsor your trips: you are the best ambassador Israel can dream of. For you are the human face of Israel, a living testimony of its ‘miracles’. And while you do your critical-melancholic talks, on contradictions and the sceptical view on myths, the net result is hasbara [apologetic explanations defending Israel]. It is must be that what made me so sad.

With utmost respect

Lieven De Cauter, philosopher

 

Live stream David Grossman: http://www.passaporta.be/en/relive/live-stream/

 

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