The Truth About Israel As Only Gideon Levy Can Tell It
- March 7, 2010
Gideon Levy writes for Ha'aretz, the newspaper than enables some Israelis, sadly a minority, to cling on to their sanity. I have described him in the past as the conscience of Israeli journalism. But he is far more than that. He is the conscience of all Israeli Jews. Today, 7 March 2010, he writes about the Israeli peace camp, which in terms of the headline over his article "Never was and never will be."
I am posting below the complete text of this article. It should be required reading, today, by President Obama. (Perhaps George Mitchell, who is in Israel, will transmit the text of the Ha'aretz original to his master?)
Gideon, the eldest of two sons of Nazi concentration camp survivors, was born in Tel Aviv in 1953. In an interview with ABC on 11 June 2007, he described his "modest mission" as being "to prevent a situation in which many Israelis will be able to say, `We didn't know.'"
He is constantly critical of what he describes as Israeli society's "moral blindness" to the effects of its acts of war and occupation; and he has described the construction of illegal settlements on private Palestinian land as "the most criminal enterprise in Israel's history"
On the subject of Israel's most recent war on the Gaza Strip, (an offensive which I described as a naked act of Zionist state terrorism, war crimes and all), Gideon wrote that it was a complete failure. "The conclusion is that Israel is a violent and dangerous country, devoid of all restraints and blatantly ignoring the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, while not giving a hoot about international law."
He supports a unilateral withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories without demanding concessions. "Israel", he has written, "is not being asked `to give' anything to the Palestinians; it is only being asked to return – to return their stolen land and restore their trampled self-respect, along with their fundamental human rights and humanity."
Gideon is, of course, vilified by some Israelis and other supporters of the Zionist state right or wrong everywhere. In 2002, Israeli novelist Irit Linur sparked a wave of subscription cancellations to Ha'aretz when she wrote an open letter to the paper cancelling her own subscription. "It is a person's right to be a radical leftist, and publish a newspaper in accordance with his world view… However Ha'aretz has reached the point where its anti-Zionism has become stupid and evil," she wrote.
As I write, it occurs to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea if all of Israel's Arab citizens wrote to the editor of Ha'aretz telling him how much they appreciated Levy's contributions to understanding.
Here now is Gideon's latest piece:
The Israeli peace camp didn't die. It was never born in the first place. While it's true that since the summer of 1967, several radical and brave political groups have been working against the occupation – all worthy of recognition – a large, influential peace camp has never existed here.
It's true that after the Yom Kippur War, after the first Lebanon War and during the giddy days of Oslo (oh, how giddy those days were), citizens took to the streets, generally when the weather was nice and when the best of Israeli music was being performed at rallies, but few people really said anything decisive or courageous, and fewer still were willing to pay a personal price for their activities. After the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, people lit candles in the square and sang Aviv Geffen songs, but this certainly isn't what one would call a peace camp.
It is also true that the stance advocated by the so-called Matzpen movement immediately after the Six-Day War has now more or less become the Israeli consensus position – but it is mere words, devoid of content. Nothing meaningful has been done so far to put it into practice. One would have expected more, a lot more, from a democratic society in whose backyard such a prolonged and cruel occupation has existed and whose government has primarily invoked the language of fear, threats and violence.
There have been societies in the past in whose name frightful injustice has been committed, but at least within some of them, genuine, angry and determined left-wing protest took place – of the sort that requires personal risk and courage, and which is not limited to action within the cozy consensus. An occupying society whose town square has been empty for years, with the exception of hollow memorial rallies and poorly attended protests, cannot wash its hands of the situation. Neither democracy nor the peace camp can.
If people didn't take to the streets in large numbers during Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, then there isn't a genuine peace camp. If people don't flood the streets now – when dangers lie in wait and opportunity is wasted time after time, and democracy sustains blow after blow on a daily basis and there are no longer sufficient resources to properly defend it, and when the right wing controls the political map and settlers amass more and more power – then there is no genuine left wing.
There is nothing like the debate over the future of the Meretz party to demonstrate the sorry state of the left. This comes in the wake of the strange and ridiculous report last week about the party's poor showing in the last election, and which gives every possible recommendation. Meretz disappeared because the party fell silent; you don't need a commission to find that out. But even during its relatively better days, Meretz was not a real peace camp. When Meretz applauded Oslo, it deliberately ignored the fact that the champions of the "historic" peace accords never intended to evacuate even a single settlement over the course of the great "breakthrough" that earned its promoters Nobel peace, yes, peace prizes. This camp also overlooked Israel's violations of the agreements, its illusions of peace.
Above all, however, the problem was rooted in the left's impossible adherence to Zionism in its historical sense. In precisely the way there cannot be a democratic and Jewish state in one breath, one has to first define what comes before what – there cannot be a left wing committed to the old-fashioned Zionism that built the state but has run its course. This illusory left wing never managed to ultimately understand the Palestinian problem – which was created in 1948, not 1967 – never understanding that it can't be solved while ignoring the injustice caused from the beginning. A left wing unwilling to dare to deal with 1948 is not a genuine left wing.
The illusory left never understood the most important point: For the Palestinians, consenting to the 1967 borders along with a solution to the refugee problem, including at least the return of a symbolic number of refugees themselves, are painful concessions. They also represent the only just compromise, without which peace will not be established; but there's no sense in accusing the Palestinians of wasting an opportunity. Such a proposal, even including the "far-reaching" proposals of Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, has never been made to them.
Meretz will surely find some kind of organizational arrangement and will again get half a dozen members elected to the Knesset, on a good day maybe even a dozen. This doesn't mean much, however. The other left-wing groups, both Jewish and Arab, remain excluded. No one has any use for them, no one thinks about including them, and they are too small to have any influence. So let's call the child by its real name: The Israeli peace camp is still an unborn baby.
--
Peace.
Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
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I
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President Barack Obama does have a foreign policy. It's called war. The President has not defined any real difference between his hawkish approach to international issues and that of his predecessor, former President George W. Bush. Where's the change we can believe in? Bush left a legacy of two wars, neither of which was ever fully explained or justified. Obama has merely picked up the sword that Bush left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan. 
... Despite two ongoing wars, it was striking that Obama focused so little in his first State of the Union speech on the world outside our borders other than the call to be competitive in the global economy. Indeed, he dedicated only eight minutes of the 70-minute speech to foreign policy. Yet many of the pressing economic problems the country faces that were addressed in the speech are directly related to foreign policy. And, despite promises of change, much of this foreign policy shows disappointing continuity with previous administrations. 
Saying there are too many non-natives living in Kahnawake, the local band council has issued eviction notices to 25 residents, giving them 10 days to leave the Indian reserve on Montreal's South Shore. About 25 non-natives - mostly white people involved in relationships with Mohawks - are being asked to leave the reserve because Mohawk law does not allow them to live there, said Joe Delaronde, press attaché for the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake. "They are people with no native ancestry at all," Delaronde said in an interview yesterday. According to Mohawk law, non-aboriginals have no residency rights. About 7,500 Mohawks live on the reserve. 
Professor Boyle's intervention with the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute the Bush War Cabinet for international crimes is welcome news. Professor Boyle's meticulously documented charges come shortly after news of a reward being set up in Great Britain for those who attempt citizens' arrests of credibly accused war criminal, Tony Blair. All over the world, citizens are mobilizing to take action to demand accountability from those who have been committing with impunity the highest order of international crime. About a year ago I joined this global movement 
President Barack Obama on Monday asked Congress to approve a record $708 billion in defense spending for fiscal year 2011, including a 3.4 percent increase in the Pentagon's base budget and $159 billion to fund U.S. military missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The White House budget request also included $33 billion in additional funding for fiscal 2010 to pay for increasing military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and drawing down U.S. forces in Iraq. That comes on top of $129.6 billion already provided for the current fiscal year, which ends September 30. 
President Barack Obama calls the $3.8-trillion US budget he just sent to Congress a major step in restoring America's economic health. In fact, it's another potent fix given to a sick patient deeply addicted to the dangerous drug -- debt. More empires have fallen because of reckless finances than invasion ... Increasing numbers of Americans are rightly outraged and fearful of runaway deficits. Most do not understand their political leaders are also spending their nation into ruin through unnecessary foreign wars and a vainglorious attempt to control much of the globe -- what neocons call "full spectrum dominance." 
... Lincoln, we should also remember, was a passionate segregationist, a fact Krannawitter barely touches on, though it might interest our new President to know that the Great Emancipator's preferred solution was to abolish slavery and to remove all "free colored persons" from the United States. In 1862 he proposed an amendment that would authorize Congress to pay for this huge project. 
Mark Weber, historian and director of the IHR, speaks about the importance of historical revisionism, and Prof. Anthony Kubek speaks about the `Morgenthau Plan' for a brutal and vindictive Allied occupation of Germany after the end of World War II. From the Ninth IHR Conference (1989). Runtime: 9:44 mins. 
She was the mystery figure at Hitler's side that the world never knew about during the lifespan of the Third Reich. Now the first comprehensive biography of Eva Braun reveals how the hidden First Lady of Nazism was the polar opposite of everything her beloved Adolf decreed should be found in a woman. 'Eva Braun: Life With Hitler,' by renowned German historian Heike B. Goertemaker, paints Eva not as an air-head besotted by a dominant man, but a fiercely loyal, independent thinker at odds with Hitler's public proclamations about 'the fairer sex'. 
One useful spin-off from the developing story of Google's difficulties with the Chinese communist regime is that it may finally spur the west to discard the rose-tinted spectacles through which it has chosen to view China in the past decade ... The regime is irredeemably authoritarian and never had any intention of ceding freedom of information to its people. Neither has it ever bought into the idea of market triumphalism. The whole Chinese economic "miracle" is a refutation of the link between capitalism and liberalism: Hu Jintao & Co believe it is perfectly possible to build a dynamic, prosperous economy without bothering with all that democracy nonsense. Recent developments confirm the indifference of the regime to western sensibilities. 
Germany and Israel are intensifying negotiations over a nearly one billion euro ($1.45 billion) naval procurement package, a considerable portion of which Israel hopes to fund from a combination of German and U.S. aid. The Israeli-proposed arms-aid deal - to be discussed Jan. 18 in Berlin at a special joint meeting of the German and Israeli cabinets - involves an additional Dolphin diesel-electric submarine, torpedoes and two German-built warships. 
