http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1249169057/
Uri Avnery
01/08/09
A Jeremiad
"Therefore I, a 95 year old Sabra [native born Israeli Jew], ….declare
herewith that I renounce my belief in the Zionism which has failed, that I
shall not be loyal to the Jewish fascist state and its mad vision"
− Dov Yermiya
Dear Dov Yermiya,
I have received the distressing letter that you recently sent to a limited
number of friends. You paint the Israeli reality in dark – but true –
colors, and end by cutting your ties with it.
"Therefore I, a 95 year old Sabra (native born Israeli Jew), who has plowed
its fields, planted trees, built a house and fathered sons, grandsons and
great-grandsons, and also shed his blood in the battle for the founding of
the State of Israel,
"Declare herewith that I renounce my belief in the Zionism which has failed,
that I shall not be loyal to the Jewish fascist state and its mad visions,
that I shall not sing anymore its nationalist anthem, that I shall stand at
attention only on the days of mourning for those fallen on both sides in the
wars, and that I look with a broken heart at an Israel that is committing
suicide and at the three generations of offspring that I have bred and
raised in it."
SINCE I first met you, Dov, some fifty years ago, I have always considered
you the salt of the earth. You were born in a village, the son of a farmer,
were a fighter in the 1948 war and later a Colonel in the army, a modest
man, a moral person in every fiber.
In the first Lebanon War, you exposed the atrocities committed against the
Palestinian refugees in the Tyre-Sidon area, and your courageous report
shocked me no less than those of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. You did not
hesitate to break the silence, as the "Breaking the Silence" youngsters are
doing now, knowing full well that your peers in the officers' corps would
excommunicate you.
You are a man of my heart, Dov. That is why your words distress me so much.
I think it important to share the statement of a man of your caliber with
those in our camp who spend sleepless nights worrying about the situation of
our state.
YOU START your letter by mentioning the founders of the Zionist movement.
"If Herzl could come to life again and see what those who claim to carry the
flag of Zionism are doing, he would flee at once, miserable and shocked,
back to his grave. So would Chaim Weizmann and most of the pioneers, the
fathers and mothers of my generation. They were people of conscience and
morality, who held to the axiom that human beings are decent and honest."
Most of your fierce accusations concern Israel's treatment of the
Palestinians. "And thus, for 42 years, Israel turned what should have been
Palestine into a giant detention camp, and is holding a whole people captive
under an oppressive and cruel regime, with the sole aim of taking away their
country, come what may!!!
"The IDF eagerly suppresses their efforts at rebellion, with the active
assistance of the settlement thugs, by the brutal means of a sophisticated
Apartheid and a choking blockade, inhuman harassment of the sick and of
women in labor, the destruction of their economy and the theft of their best
land and water.
"Over all this there is waving the black flag of the frightening contempt
for the life and blood of the Palestinians. Israel will never be forgiven
for the terrible toll of blood spilt, and especially the blood of children,
in hair-raising quantities."
But I believe that the abysmal despair echoed in your words has other roots,
too. It is a feeling that troubles the heart of many of your and my
generation, the feeling that "they have stolen our state", that there is no
resemblance between the state which we dreamed of and fought for and the
thing that has taken its place.
WHEN I think of our youth, yours and mine, one scene is never far from my
mind: the 1947 Dalia festival.
Tens of thousands of young men and women were sitting on the slope of a hill
in the natural amphitheater near Kibbutz Dalia on Mount Carmel. Ostensibly
it was a festival of folk dancing, but in reality it was much more – a great
celebration of the new Hebrew culture which we were then creating in the
country, in which folk dancing played an important role. The dancing groups
came mainly from the kibbutzim and the youth movements, and the dances were
original Hebrew creations, interwoven with Russian, Polish, Yemenite and
Hassidic ones. A group of Arabs danced the Debka in ecstasy, dancing and
dancing and dancing on.
In the middle of the event, the loudspeakers announced that members of the
UN Commission of Inquiry, which had been sent by the international
organization to decide upon the future of the country, were joining us. When
we saw them entering the amphitheater, the tens of thousands spontaneously
rose to their feet and started to sing the "Hatikva", the national anthem,
with a holy fervor that reverberated from the surrounding mountains.
We did not know then that within half a year the great Hebrew-Arab war would
break out - our War of Independence and their Naqba. I believe that most of
the 6000 young people who fell in the war on our side, as well as the
thousands that were wounded – like you and me – were present at that moment
in Dalia, seeing each other and singing together.
What state did we think of then? What state did we set out to create?
What has happened to the Hebrew society, the Hebrew culture, the Hebrew
morality that we were so proud of then?
YES, WE did create a state. As the old song goes: "On the battlefield, a
town is now standing". We have brought millions of people to this country.
From a Hebrew community of 650 thousand we have grown into a population of
7.5 million. A fourth and fifth generation speaks Hebrew as their mother
tongue. Our economy is large and solid, even in these times of crisis. In
several fields we are in the first rank of human endeavor.
But is this the society, is this the state, which we saw in our mind's eye
on the day it was set up? Is this the army that you and I swore allegiance
to on the day it was founded?
Did we dream of this corrupt society, a society without compassion, where a
handful of the very rich live off the fat of the land, with a large band of
politicians and media people and other lackeys groveling in the dust at
their feet?
Did we dream of a state that is an isolated and shunned ghetto in the
region, lording it over an oppressed Palestinian ghetto-within-a-ghetto?
There were days when we could stand up anywhere in the world and proudly
declare "I am an Israeli". No one can do that now. The name of Israel has
become mud. Since the Gaza War, in which our army poured molten lead onto
men, women and children, many Israelis avoid speaking Hebrew in the streets
of foreign cities and the IDF has ordered the faces of some of its
officers – those whose rank equals yours – be obscured in pictures published
in the media.
WHY DID this happen? When did this happen?
My aim is not to start a discussion with you about the fundamentals of
Zionism, both positive and negative. We might not agree. Nor shall I enter
into the question of whether everything really started in 1967, with the
intoxicating and corruptive victory, or whether the seeds of disaster were
sown earlier. On one thing I agree with you entirely: that the fatal step
was taken then, on the morrow of that war, when we had the choice between
the shining gold of peace and the base metal of annexation, and stretched
our hands out towards the latter.
My personal conscience is clean. I am proud that I was one of the few in the
country, and the sole voice in the Knesset, who proposed even during the war
to turn over the occupied territories to the Palestinian people, so as to
enable them to set up their state. This unique opportunity was missed, as
you point out in your letter, because of the greed of the founders of the
settlement movement, the champions of a Greater Israel.
From there things rolled on, as in a Greek tragedy, to where we are now,
with an assorted crew of settlers, racists, nationalists, messianic zealots
and ordinary fascists in charge of the state, turning the Knesset into a
circus, undermining the Supreme Court, perverting the army, imposing
obscurantist religious laws, handing the public treasury to unbridled
tycoons, polluting the education system with a primitive nationalist
indoctrination, persecuting poor asylum seekers, oppressing the national
minority and planning military attacks that will wreak death and destruction
on civilian populations.
This is the state that you detest. I have no quarrel with you about that.
This is the state that you despair of. About that I do have a dispute with
you.
YOU BEAR the name of the prophet who is nearest to my heart, Yirmiyahu, the
prophet of anger who called out: "Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne
me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole world … every one
doth curse me!" (Jer. 15:10)
But Jeremiah was not only an accuser, he was also a healer: "to root out,
and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down – to build and to
plant." (Jer. 1:10)
You, Dov, have invested in this state much too much to turn your back on it
in a gesture of anger and despair. The most hackneyed and worn-out slogan in
Israel is also true: "We don't have another state!"
Other states in the world have sunk to the depths of depravity and committed
unspeakable crimes, far beyond our worst sins, and still brought themselves
back to the family of nations and redeemed their souls.
We and all the members of our generation, who were among those who created
this state, bear a heavy responsibility for it. A responsibility to our
offspring, to those oppressed by this state, to the entire world. From this
responsibility we cannot escape.
Even at your respectable age, and precisely because of it and because of
what you represent, you must be a compass for the young and tell them: This
state belongs to you, you can change it, don't allow the nationalist
wreckers to steal it from you!
True, 61 years ago we had another state in mind. Now, after our state has
tumbled to where it is today, we must remember that other state, and remind
everybody, every day, what the state should have been like, what it can be
like, and not allow our vision to disappear like a dream. Let's lend our
shoulders to every effort to repair and heal!
You have voiced the message of Jeremiah, the prophet of anger. I beg you,
give voice also to Jeremiah, the prophet of hope!
[Dov Yermiya, a former Israeli Defence Forces lieutenant-colonel, who
published a critical eye-witness account of Israeli crimes in the 1982
Lebanon War, entitled "My War Diary: Lebanon June 5 -- July 1, 1982"]
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