A personal account which gives us some hope…
Pem Rutgers, The Hague. August 22, 2006
We had dinner the other night with the Irish youth leader Mark of the Anglican Church who is leaving us after two years, and the assistant chaplain Rosy.
Rosy asked directly whether we thought BBC (World) is biased in reporting on the crisis/war. My husband Bram said: “Well they surely have a lot more reporters on location in Lebanon.” And Mark said wholeheartedly: “They are. It is disgraceful.”
We started to discuss nations’ sympathies and confusements. Each one labouring under its own particular historical burden.
Mark the Irishman living in the North growing up amidst a religious bloody conflict and working now with youth will participate in the next youth camp for Israeli and Palestinian teenagers we are preparing for coming summer. He has been involved in encounters between people from opposite sides. These camps are drops in the ocean. But a grain in the earth can shoot up and become big when fully grown. Just need careful tending.
Our first experience in the summer of 2004 has given us hope. Kids from “opposite sides” staying with families with teenage children, sharing a room: even sharing one double bed feel more or less safe in the context of a camp and families. They could bring out their emotions and fears, their griefs and losses. Could mourn together. While doing a lot of fun things in the open air as well.
Finally on the way from the lakes North to The Hague in the bus they had a group encounter which started naturally and spontaneously. And after that they were inseparable.
When a politician from the European Union came to speak to them about keeping peace etc. they opposed him together. In doing this together, being in agreement that you can not compare the European détente with the Middle East, they experienced for the first time - as one kid said - unity and togetherness.
One Israeli girl and a girl from Bethlehem have since then gone on holiday together in Ireland, speaking to a youth conference. Tina (Bethlehem) shared a room with Orit and said to her: “You have soldiers eyes.” And Orit retorted: “And you carry bombs”. At the final meeting during a farewell service they said confidentially: “We are the generation that will make peace.” We all sat with thick tears in our eyes.
They followed this up by making music together which they had done all along while at camp. The youth leaders were skilled young people from Israel and the leader was a Palestinian from Bethlehem. They all work with an organisation in Jerusalem by name of Musalaha. The director is Salim Munayer.
Salim has recently written a piece on “Discernment and reconciliation in the fogs of the war”.
No need to say anything, I just want, as Ralph Prins ( survivor of the camps) and a great artist, just turned 80, calls it: “Light a candle’s flame in the dark.” Like you three are doing.
Indeed, "hate talk” we do not need. Let’s follow David’s example and turn a deaf ear and go one step further as he does, by not allowing that kind of talk in our own houses
Thursday, August 24, 2006
A few home truths from Uri Avneri - the corrupting effect of the occupation on the army
Good morning, Elijah!
Uri Avneri
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/he/channels/avnery/1156357257/
A STORY has it that Oscar Wilde once attended the premiere of a colleague's play and every few minutes raised his hat. When asked about this odd behavior, he replied: "I am a courteous person. I raise my hat when I meet an old acquaintance."
If I wore a hat, I would have to raise it every few minutes these days when I view TV talk shows, listen to the radio or read the papers. I keep meeting things I wrote years ago, and especially things I have written since the beginning of this war.
For example: for decades I have warned again and again that the occupation is corrupting our army. Now the papers are full of learned articles by respected commentators, who have discovered - surprise! surprise! - that the occupation has corrupted our army.
In such cases we say in Hebrew: "Good morning, Elijah!" You have woken up at long last.
If there is a touch of irony in my remark, I do apologize. After all, I wrote in the hope that my words would convince the readers - and especially people of the Israeli establishment - and that they would pass them on. When this is happening now, I am quite happy about the plagiarism.
But it is important to spell out how the occupation has "corrupted our army". Otherwise it is just an empty slogan, and we shall learn nothing from it.
A PERSONAL flashback: in the middle of the 1948 war I had an unpleasant experience. After a day of heavy fighting, I was sleeping soundly in a field near the Arab village Suafir (now Sapir). All around me were sleeping the other soldiers of my company, Samson's Foxes. Suddenly I was woken up by a tremendous explosion. An Egyptian plane had dropped a bomb on us. Killed: none. Wounded: 1.
How's that? Very simple: we were all lying in our personal foxholes, which we had dug, in spite of our fatigue, before going to sleep. It was self-evident to us that when we arrived anywhere, the first thing to do was dig in. Sometimes we changed locations three times a day, and every time we dug foxholes. We knew that our lives depended on it.
Not anymore. In one of the most deadly incidents in the Second Lebanon War, 12 members of a company were killed by a rocket near Kfar Giladi, while sitting around in an open field. The soldiers later complained that they had not been led to a shelter. Have today's soldiers never heard of a foxhole? Have they been issued with personal shovels at all?
Inside Lebanon, why did the soldiers congregate in the rooms of houses, where they were hit by anti-tank missiles, instead of digging foxholes?
It seems that the army has been weaned from this practice. No wonder: an army that is dealing with "terrorists" in the West Bank and Gaza does not need to take any special precautions. After all, no air force drops bombs on them, no artillery shells them. They need no special protection.
THAT IS true of all our armed forces on land, in the air and on the sea. It is certainly a luxury to fight against an enemy who cannot defend himself properly. But it is dangerous to get used to it.
The navy, for example. For years now it has been sailing along the shores of Gaza and Lebanon, shelling at pleasure, arresting fishermen, checking ships. It never dreamed that the enemy could shoot back. Suddenly it happened - and on live television, too. Hizbullah hit it with a land-to-sea missile.
There was no end to the surprise. It was almost considered as Chutzpah. What, an enemy who shoots back? What next? And why did Army Intelligence not warn us that they have such an unheard of thing, a land-to-sea missile?
IN THE air as on the sea. For years now, Air Force pilots shoot and bomb and kill at will. They are able to hit a moving car with great precision (together with the passers-by, of course.) Their technical level is excellent. But what? Nobody is shooting at them while they are doing this.
The Royal Air Force boys during the Blitz ("the few to whom so many owe so much") had to confront the determined pilots of the Luftwaffe, and most of them were killed. Later, the British and Americans who bombed Germany ran the gauntlet of murderous flak.
But our pilots have no such problems. When they are in action over the West Bank and Gaza, there are no enemy pilots, no surface-to-air missiles, no flak. The sky belongs to them, and they can concentrate on their real job: to destroy the infrastructure of life and act as flying executioners, "eliminate" the objects of "targeted liquidations", feeling only a "slight bang on the wing" while releasing a one-ton bomb over a residential area.
Does that create a good air force? Does that prepare them for battle with a real enemy? In Lebanon the pilots have not (yet) met anti-aircraft fire. The only helicopter shot down was hit by anti-tank fire while landing troops. But what about the next war everybody is speaking about?
AND THE ground troops? Were they prepared for this war?
For 39 years now they have been compelled to carry our the jobs of a colonial police force: to run after children throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, to drag away women trying to protect their sons from arrest, to capture people sleeping at home. To stand for hours at the checkpoints and decide whether to let a pregnant woman reach the hospital or send back a sick old man. At the worst, they have to invade a casbah, to face untrained "terrorists" who have nothing but Kalashnikovs to fight against the tanks and airplanes of their occupiers, as well as courage and an unbelievable determination.
Suddenly these soldiers were sent to Lebanon to confront tough, well trained and highly motivated guerilla fighters who are ready to die while carrying out their mission. Fighters who have learned to appear from an unexpected direction, to disappear into well-prepared bunkers, to use advanced and effective weapons.
"We were not trained for this war!" the reserve soldiers now complain. They are right. Where could they have been trained? In the alleys of Jabalieh refugee camp? In the well-rehearsed scenes of embraces and tears, while removing pampered settlers with "sensitivity and determination"? Clearly it was easier to blockade Yasser Arafat and his few untrained bodyguards in the Mukata'ah compound in Ramallah than to conquer Bint Jbeil over and over again.
That applies even more to the tanks. It is easy to drive a tank along the main street of Gaza or over a row of houses in a refugee camp, facing only stone-throwing boys, when the opponent has no trained fighters or half-way modern weapons. It's a hell of a difference driving the same tank in a built-up area in Lebanon, when a trained guerilla with an effective anti-tank weapon can lurk behind every corner. That's a different story altogether. The more so as our army's most modern tank is not immune from missiles.
The deepest rot appeared in the logistics system. It just did not function. And why should it? There is no need for complex logistics to bring water and food to the soldiers at the Kalandia checkpoint.
THE SIMPLE truth is that for decades now our army has not faced a serious military force. The last time was 24 years ago, during the First Lebanon War, when it fought against the Syrian army.
At the time we said in my magazine, Haolam Hazeh, that the war was a complete military failure, a fact that was suppressed by all the military commentators. In that war, too, our army did not reach its targets on time according to the plan: it reached them either late or not at all. In the Syrian sector the army did not reach its assigned objective at all: the Beirut-Damascus road. In the Palestinian sector, it reached that road much too late, and only after violating the agreed cease-fire.
The last serious war of our army was the Yom Kippur war. After the initial disgraceful setbacks, it did indeed attain an impressive victory. But that was only six years into the occupation. Now, 33 years later, we see the full damage done by the cancer called occupation, which by now has spread to all the organs of the military body.
How to stop the cancer?
The military commentator Ze'ev Schiff has a patent medicine. Schiff generally reflects the views of the army high command. (Perhaps over the last 40 years, there may have been instances when he voiced opinions that were not identical with those of the General Staff, but if so, they have escaped me.) He proposes to shift the burden of occupation from the army to the Border Police.
Sounds reasonable, but is completely unrealistic. How can Israel create a second big force to maintain the occupation, on top of the army, which already costs something approaching 12 billion dollars a year?
But, thank goodness, there is another remedy. An amazingly simple one: to free ourselves from the occupation once and for all. To get out of the occupied territories in agreement and cooperation with the Palestinians. To make peace with the Palestinian people, so they can establish their independent state side by side with Israel.
And, while we are at it, to make peace with Syria and Lebanon, too.
So that the "Defense Army for Israel", as it is officially called in Hebrew, can go back to its original purpose: to defend the recognized international borders of the State of Israel.
Uri Avneri
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/he/channels/avnery/1156357257/
A STORY has it that Oscar Wilde once attended the premiere of a colleague's play and every few minutes raised his hat. When asked about this odd behavior, he replied: "I am a courteous person. I raise my hat when I meet an old acquaintance."
If I wore a hat, I would have to raise it every few minutes these days when I view TV talk shows, listen to the radio or read the papers. I keep meeting things I wrote years ago, and especially things I have written since the beginning of this war.
For example: for decades I have warned again and again that the occupation is corrupting our army. Now the papers are full of learned articles by respected commentators, who have discovered - surprise! surprise! - that the occupation has corrupted our army.
In such cases we say in Hebrew: "Good morning, Elijah!" You have woken up at long last.
If there is a touch of irony in my remark, I do apologize. After all, I wrote in the hope that my words would convince the readers - and especially people of the Israeli establishment - and that they would pass them on. When this is happening now, I am quite happy about the plagiarism.
But it is important to spell out how the occupation has "corrupted our army". Otherwise it is just an empty slogan, and we shall learn nothing from it.
A PERSONAL flashback: in the middle of the 1948 war I had an unpleasant experience. After a day of heavy fighting, I was sleeping soundly in a field near the Arab village Suafir (now Sapir). All around me were sleeping the other soldiers of my company, Samson's Foxes. Suddenly I was woken up by a tremendous explosion. An Egyptian plane had dropped a bomb on us. Killed: none. Wounded: 1.
How's that? Very simple: we were all lying in our personal foxholes, which we had dug, in spite of our fatigue, before going to sleep. It was self-evident to us that when we arrived anywhere, the first thing to do was dig in. Sometimes we changed locations three times a day, and every time we dug foxholes. We knew that our lives depended on it.
Not anymore. In one of the most deadly incidents in the Second Lebanon War, 12 members of a company were killed by a rocket near Kfar Giladi, while sitting around in an open field. The soldiers later complained that they had not been led to a shelter. Have today's soldiers never heard of a foxhole? Have they been issued with personal shovels at all?
Inside Lebanon, why did the soldiers congregate in the rooms of houses, where they were hit by anti-tank missiles, instead of digging foxholes?
It seems that the army has been weaned from this practice. No wonder: an army that is dealing with "terrorists" in the West Bank and Gaza does not need to take any special precautions. After all, no air force drops bombs on them, no artillery shells them. They need no special protection.
THAT IS true of all our armed forces on land, in the air and on the sea. It is certainly a luxury to fight against an enemy who cannot defend himself properly. But it is dangerous to get used to it.
The navy, for example. For years now it has been sailing along the shores of Gaza and Lebanon, shelling at pleasure, arresting fishermen, checking ships. It never dreamed that the enemy could shoot back. Suddenly it happened - and on live television, too. Hizbullah hit it with a land-to-sea missile.
There was no end to the surprise. It was almost considered as Chutzpah. What, an enemy who shoots back? What next? And why did Army Intelligence not warn us that they have such an unheard of thing, a land-to-sea missile?
IN THE air as on the sea. For years now, Air Force pilots shoot and bomb and kill at will. They are able to hit a moving car with great precision (together with the passers-by, of course.) Their technical level is excellent. But what? Nobody is shooting at them while they are doing this.
The Royal Air Force boys during the Blitz ("the few to whom so many owe so much") had to confront the determined pilots of the Luftwaffe, and most of them were killed. Later, the British and Americans who bombed Germany ran the gauntlet of murderous flak.
But our pilots have no such problems. When they are in action over the West Bank and Gaza, there are no enemy pilots, no surface-to-air missiles, no flak. The sky belongs to them, and they can concentrate on their real job: to destroy the infrastructure of life and act as flying executioners, "eliminate" the objects of "targeted liquidations", feeling only a "slight bang on the wing" while releasing a one-ton bomb over a residential area.
Does that create a good air force? Does that prepare them for battle with a real enemy? In Lebanon the pilots have not (yet) met anti-aircraft fire. The only helicopter shot down was hit by anti-tank fire while landing troops. But what about the next war everybody is speaking about?
AND THE ground troops? Were they prepared for this war?
For 39 years now they have been compelled to carry our the jobs of a colonial police force: to run after children throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, to drag away women trying to protect their sons from arrest, to capture people sleeping at home. To stand for hours at the checkpoints and decide whether to let a pregnant woman reach the hospital or send back a sick old man. At the worst, they have to invade a casbah, to face untrained "terrorists" who have nothing but Kalashnikovs to fight against the tanks and airplanes of their occupiers, as well as courage and an unbelievable determination.
Suddenly these soldiers were sent to Lebanon to confront tough, well trained and highly motivated guerilla fighters who are ready to die while carrying out their mission. Fighters who have learned to appear from an unexpected direction, to disappear into well-prepared bunkers, to use advanced and effective weapons.
"We were not trained for this war!" the reserve soldiers now complain. They are right. Where could they have been trained? In the alleys of Jabalieh refugee camp? In the well-rehearsed scenes of embraces and tears, while removing pampered settlers with "sensitivity and determination"? Clearly it was easier to blockade Yasser Arafat and his few untrained bodyguards in the Mukata'ah compound in Ramallah than to conquer Bint Jbeil over and over again.
That applies even more to the tanks. It is easy to drive a tank along the main street of Gaza or over a row of houses in a refugee camp, facing only stone-throwing boys, when the opponent has no trained fighters or half-way modern weapons. It's a hell of a difference driving the same tank in a built-up area in Lebanon, when a trained guerilla with an effective anti-tank weapon can lurk behind every corner. That's a different story altogether. The more so as our army's most modern tank is not immune from missiles.
The deepest rot appeared in the logistics system. It just did not function. And why should it? There is no need for complex logistics to bring water and food to the soldiers at the Kalandia checkpoint.
THE SIMPLE truth is that for decades now our army has not faced a serious military force. The last time was 24 years ago, during the First Lebanon War, when it fought against the Syrian army.
At the time we said in my magazine, Haolam Hazeh, that the war was a complete military failure, a fact that was suppressed by all the military commentators. In that war, too, our army did not reach its targets on time according to the plan: it reached them either late or not at all. In the Syrian sector the army did not reach its assigned objective at all: the Beirut-Damascus road. In the Palestinian sector, it reached that road much too late, and only after violating the agreed cease-fire.
The last serious war of our army was the Yom Kippur war. After the initial disgraceful setbacks, it did indeed attain an impressive victory. But that was only six years into the occupation. Now, 33 years later, we see the full damage done by the cancer called occupation, which by now has spread to all the organs of the military body.
How to stop the cancer?
The military commentator Ze'ev Schiff has a patent medicine. Schiff generally reflects the views of the army high command. (Perhaps over the last 40 years, there may have been instances when he voiced opinions that were not identical with those of the General Staff, but if so, they have escaped me.) He proposes to shift the burden of occupation from the army to the Border Police.
Sounds reasonable, but is completely unrealistic. How can Israel create a second big force to maintain the occupation, on top of the army, which already costs something approaching 12 billion dollars a year?
But, thank goodness, there is another remedy. An amazingly simple one: to free ourselves from the occupation once and for all. To get out of the occupied territories in agreement and cooperation with the Palestinians. To make peace with the Palestinian people, so they can establish their independent state side by side with Israel.
And, while we are at it, to make peace with Syria and Lebanon, too.
So that the "Defense Army for Israel", as it is officially called in Hebrew, can go back to its original purpose: to defend the recognized international borders of the State of Israel.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
A historical note - Harry Truman in 1948 in favour of an international trusteeship for Palestine
JIM REED: As the world shrugs
CBC News Viewpoint July 19, 2006
The world is watching while war takes its toll of innocent lives, as Israel is forced to defend itself by attacking a neighbour. No leader, no statesman has come forward to offer any better alternative.
On one side is a powerless government - Lebanon - held hostage by a band of dedicated proponents of terror as a solution to a political dilemma. And on the other side is a powerful government acting on its own without international help.
The impotence and indeed the indifference of the international community have never been more starkly demonstrated than now, during this crisis in the Middle East.
The outside world stands by, as it has for more than half a century, and watches and waits while hundreds and in the end perhaps thousands of innocent people die as they have been dying for generations.
Most people shrug and say, "Well that's the Middle East for you," and go on about their business.
But with the proliferation of high-tech weapons, the hardening of attitudes on all sides and the widespread suffering of innocent civilian victims, simply standing by and doing nothing seems callous.
There's no shortage of finger pointing, however — and the blame game is being played by all the parties including us bystanders. Israel is blamed for over-reacting - but when your soldiers are captured, rockets are landing on your towns and cities and your people are being killed, who are we to say what reaction is appropriate?
History teaches us that nation states often behave irresponsibly or without sufficient regard to the consequences of certain actions and behaviour, in much the same way individual human beings often do.
Foresaw a multitude of tragedies
Occasionally, however, a national leader shows real insight and courage, as U.S. President Harry S. Truman did in 1948, with regard to the events in Palestine.
Truman and his secretary of state, General George C. Marshall, both foresaw the multitude of tragedies that would follow hot on the heels of an unsupervised partition of Palestine. On March 25, 1948, Truman made a speech in which he outlined what he felt the United Nations ought to do at the time.
He pointed out that the United States vigorously supported the UN partition committee's majority report, which recommended the division of Palestine into three separate provinces.
One was to serve as a homeland for the Jewish people, one was to be a Palestinian Arab state and the third was to be an international zone, which included the city of Jerusalem. That city was slated to be governed by an international council, representing the nations of the world.
However, both Truman and Marshall expressed concern that Great Britain, which was the central authority in Palestine prior to partition, was prepared to abdicate its responsibility for maintaining security and stability in the territory.
In his speech on that warm and sunny Thursday in March, Truman issued a plea that, as we witness events unfolding now, seems prescient indeed.
Truman was well aware of the violence already occurring in the area, well before the target date for dividing it up. The prospect of even more violence genuinely bothered him and he spoke publicly about it and the imminent dangers and consequences of war.
"If we are to avert tragedy in Palestine," he said, "an immediate truce must be reached between the Arabs and the Jews." Truman proposed an international trusteeship for Palestine "to provide a government to keep the peace."
'Violence and bloodshed'
The trusteeship was being proposed, he said, "only after we had exhausted every effort to find a way to carry out partition by peaceful means." He emphasized that the trusteeship was not meant to be a substitute for the plan of partition, but was intended only to be "an effort to fill the vacuum soon to be created by the termination of the British mandate on May 15th."
Truman and Marshall envisioned the chaos that would result if the partition process were not properly policed and Truman put the problem in clear language. Here's the core of what he had to say:
"The United Kingdom has announced its firm intention to abandon its mandate in Palestine on May 15. Unless emergency action is taken, there will be no public authority in Palestine on that date capable of preserving law and order. Violence and bloodshed will descend upon the Holy Land.
"Large-scale fighting among the people of that country will be the inevitable result. Such fighting would infect the entire Middle East and could lead to consequences of the gravest sort involving the peace of this Nation (the United States) and of the world."
It's almost as if old Harry could see into the future and imagine what we've been looking at lately on our TV screens and reading in our newspapers, "...consequences of the gravest sort involving the peace of the Nation (the U.S.) and of the world."
The world didn't listen to Harry Truman in 1948 and today, there's no leader who has either his insight or his courage.
CBC News Viewpoint July 19, 2006
The world is watching while war takes its toll of innocent lives, as Israel is forced to defend itself by attacking a neighbour. No leader, no statesman has come forward to offer any better alternative.
On one side is a powerless government - Lebanon - held hostage by a band of dedicated proponents of terror as a solution to a political dilemma. And on the other side is a powerful government acting on its own without international help.
The impotence and indeed the indifference of the international community have never been more starkly demonstrated than now, during this crisis in the Middle East.
The outside world stands by, as it has for more than half a century, and watches and waits while hundreds and in the end perhaps thousands of innocent people die as they have been dying for generations.
Most people shrug and say, "Well that's the Middle East for you," and go on about their business.
But with the proliferation of high-tech weapons, the hardening of attitudes on all sides and the widespread suffering of innocent civilian victims, simply standing by and doing nothing seems callous.
There's no shortage of finger pointing, however — and the blame game is being played by all the parties including us bystanders. Israel is blamed for over-reacting - but when your soldiers are captured, rockets are landing on your towns and cities and your people are being killed, who are we to say what reaction is appropriate?
History teaches us that nation states often behave irresponsibly or without sufficient regard to the consequences of certain actions and behaviour, in much the same way individual human beings often do.
Foresaw a multitude of tragedies
Occasionally, however, a national leader shows real insight and courage, as U.S. President Harry S. Truman did in 1948, with regard to the events in Palestine.
Truman and his secretary of state, General George C. Marshall, both foresaw the multitude of tragedies that would follow hot on the heels of an unsupervised partition of Palestine. On March 25, 1948, Truman made a speech in which he outlined what he felt the United Nations ought to do at the time.
He pointed out that the United States vigorously supported the UN partition committee's majority report, which recommended the division of Palestine into three separate provinces.
One was to serve as a homeland for the Jewish people, one was to be a Palestinian Arab state and the third was to be an international zone, which included the city of Jerusalem. That city was slated to be governed by an international council, representing the nations of the world.
However, both Truman and Marshall expressed concern that Great Britain, which was the central authority in Palestine prior to partition, was prepared to abdicate its responsibility for maintaining security and stability in the territory.
In his speech on that warm and sunny Thursday in March, Truman issued a plea that, as we witness events unfolding now, seems prescient indeed.
Truman was well aware of the violence already occurring in the area, well before the target date for dividing it up. The prospect of even more violence genuinely bothered him and he spoke publicly about it and the imminent dangers and consequences of war.
"If we are to avert tragedy in Palestine," he said, "an immediate truce must be reached between the Arabs and the Jews." Truman proposed an international trusteeship for Palestine "to provide a government to keep the peace."
'Violence and bloodshed'
The trusteeship was being proposed, he said, "only after we had exhausted every effort to find a way to carry out partition by peaceful means." He emphasized that the trusteeship was not meant to be a substitute for the plan of partition, but was intended only to be "an effort to fill the vacuum soon to be created by the termination of the British mandate on May 15th."
Truman and Marshall envisioned the chaos that would result if the partition process were not properly policed and Truman put the problem in clear language. Here's the core of what he had to say:
"The United Kingdom has announced its firm intention to abandon its mandate in Palestine on May 15. Unless emergency action is taken, there will be no public authority in Palestine on that date capable of preserving law and order. Violence and bloodshed will descend upon the Holy Land.
"Large-scale fighting among the people of that country will be the inevitable result. Such fighting would infect the entire Middle East and could lead to consequences of the gravest sort involving the peace of this Nation (the United States) and of the world."
It's almost as if old Harry could see into the future and imagine what we've been looking at lately on our TV screens and reading in our newspapers, "...consequences of the gravest sort involving the peace of the Nation (the U.S.) and of the world."
The world didn't listen to Harry Truman in 1948 and today, there's no leader who has either his insight or his courage.
You who make peace in high places, Help us make peace down here on earth
Speech at Solidarity Rally for Israel
Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks
Sunday 23 July 2006
Solidarity rally for Israel, JFS, Kenton, London
We have come together today to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Israel and to say a simple prayer.
Ribbono shel olam:
Let your people Israel live in peace.
Let there be an end to bloodshed and violence.
Let there be an end to hostility and hate.
Let Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev come home.
Let Israel’s defence forces come home.
What else did Your people ever want, except the right to live with security, without fear, in peace? Almighty G-d, let your people Israel live in peace.
Today we stand in solidarity with Israel, and rarely have I felt so proud of Anglo-Jewry as I have done these past few days. Especially of our young people. Last week 1300 of them, from youth groups right across the religious spectrum, went out to Israel. Every one of them, or their families, might have said, ‘No, not now. It’s too dangerous.’ Yet almost none of them did. I want to say to every one of those young people: Kol hakavod. You make us proud.
And today I want a message to go forth from us to Israel to say: Israel, you make us proud.
In a mere 58 years, in a country half the size of Lake Michigan, you have done things that are unbelievable. You have gathered together Jews from more than a hundred different countries speaking more than eighty different languages and out of them made a great nation. You have taken a land with no natural resources and turned it into one of the great economies of the modern world. You have created a democracy in a part of the world where no one thought it possible. You have taken a desolate land and made it blossom and bear fruit. And you have developed medical technologies to save life.
Wherever in the world there has been a natural disaster, you have been among the first to offer humanitarian aid. Through six decades under almost continuous threat you have given the world poets and philosophers and musicians and novelists whose heart is Jewish and whose love is for all humanity. You have taken the language of the Bible and made it speak again You have taken a people from the valley of the shadow of death and made it live again. You have taken hope itself – hatikvah shnot alpayim – and made it breath again. Israel: you are our people and our pride and we stand with you today.
Why then does a people who have consistently said Yes to life and No to death, who have consistently said Yes to peace and No to terror, find itself today fighting in Lebanon and Gaza? The answer is so simple, yet so unbelievable, that we must hear it clearly and unequivocally: Israel is fighting today in Lebanon because six years ago it withdrew from Lebanon. Israel is fighting today in Gaza because one year ago it withdrew from Gaza.
And Israel discovered the terrible truth spoken by the late Mother Theresa that no good deed goes unpunished! Every gesture of goodwill undertaken by Israel has been seized on by its enemies as a sign of weakness. Every Israeli effort towards peace has led without exception to an increase in violence against Israel. The Oslo Peace Process led directly to the first Palestinian suicide attacks in Israel. Taba: the most generous offer Israel ever made to the Palestinians, led directly to the most concerted set of terrorist attacks against any nation in modern history. The Gaza Withdrawal, the most painful act Israel has ever had to undertake, led within less than a year to 1000 Kassam rocket attacks on Israeli civilian targets including schoolchildren.
And finally the Lebanon withdrawal, undertaken by Israel six years ago in full compliance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 425. That resolution was immediately broken by Hizbullah, about which the United Nations special envoy to Lebanon warned at the time, in November 2000, “Such breaches of international peace and security in the south threaten to ignite a new spiral of violence with tragic consequences for the civilian population.”
That failure led in 2004 to the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 which called categorically for the disarming of militias in Lebanon. Again rejected. This time Kofi Annan himself protested to the Syrians. The effect? The arming of Hizbullah with weapons that threaten the very heart of Israel. Israel withdrew from Lebanon. Israel does not want to be in Lebanon. It does not want to do any of the things it is now doing. It accepted in good faith the commitment of the United Nations that it would not have to.
It is acting today only because the international community has failed to ensure that its neighbours met their obligations when Israel met hers. Israel, the Israel we know and love, is a people that pursues peace, yearns for peace, sings about peace, needs peace. For 58 years it has done everything a nation could do in pursuit of peace, and it has been rewarded instead with violence and terror. It has done what the world has asked it to do, and the result has been that it has been left vulnerable and alone.
Which of us does not weep when we see the news day after day? Does any of us, God forbid, take satisfaction at the devastation of Lebanon? Is that who we are? Let me be clear and unambiguous. We weep not just for Israel but for the people of Lebanon also.
Lebanon was once a great country, a centre of civilization A beacon in the Middle East… Until Jordan drove the Palestinians out of Jordan into Lebanon Until Syria used them to terrorise the Lebanese Until Iran armed and funded and manipulated them; Until the whole country of Lebanon, every man, woman and child, became a hostage. And so a great country was destroyed and reduced to ruins. And today Israel is fighting in Lebanon so that Israel should not become, G-d forbid, another Lebanon, as any country in the world will become if it lacks the clarity and courage to say No to terror and Yes to peace.
Tragically Jews have learned over the centuries that when their enemies speaking of killing them, driving them into the sea, wiping them off the face of the earth, they mean what they say.
What Hizbullah and Hamas have said in word and deed is this:
We will kill you if you stay
and we will kill you if you leave.
We will kill you if you retaliate
and we will kill you if you don’t retaliate.
What can Israel do but to seek to end the terror that threatens and is meant to threaten its very existence? When alone among the 192 nations that make up the United Nations, after 58 years it still finds its very right to exist denied?
Friends, let me tell you what is wrong with terror. It is not just that it murders the innocent: the young, the old, the defenseless, the uninvolved. It is that it murders innocence itself. It turns virtue into weakness, decency into vulnerability. And if we, if Israel, if Europe, if America do not take a stand against terror, if we ignore it as the world ignored it for so long, then it will leave a stain on the human future that no tears, no regrets, will ever remove.
The battle Israel is fighting today is not for itself alone. It is for the sake of all those who say no to terror. No to the desecration of life. No to killing in the name of God. Whether they live in Bali or Beslan, or Madrid or Mumbai. And therefore let me end with simple words of prayer:
Ribbono shel olam:
Be with your people Israel now.
Hear their cry.
Heed their tears.
Listen to this, our prayer on their behalf.
Grant peace to all your children, Jew, Christian and Muslim alike.
Help us live together, respecting one another.
Help us cherish life.
Help us to use the powers You gave us, to heal, to mend, to build.
We ask of You, Almighty God, just one thing:
You who make peace in high places.
Help us make peace down here on earth.
Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks
Sunday 23 July 2006
Solidarity rally for Israel, JFS, Kenton, London
We have come together today to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Israel and to say a simple prayer.
Ribbono shel olam:
Let your people Israel live in peace.
Let there be an end to bloodshed and violence.
Let there be an end to hostility and hate.
Let Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev come home.
Let Israel’s defence forces come home.
What else did Your people ever want, except the right to live with security, without fear, in peace? Almighty G-d, let your people Israel live in peace.
Today we stand in solidarity with Israel, and rarely have I felt so proud of Anglo-Jewry as I have done these past few days. Especially of our young people. Last week 1300 of them, from youth groups right across the religious spectrum, went out to Israel. Every one of them, or their families, might have said, ‘No, not now. It’s too dangerous.’ Yet almost none of them did. I want to say to every one of those young people: Kol hakavod. You make us proud.
And today I want a message to go forth from us to Israel to say: Israel, you make us proud.
In a mere 58 years, in a country half the size of Lake Michigan, you have done things that are unbelievable. You have gathered together Jews from more than a hundred different countries speaking more than eighty different languages and out of them made a great nation. You have taken a land with no natural resources and turned it into one of the great economies of the modern world. You have created a democracy in a part of the world where no one thought it possible. You have taken a desolate land and made it blossom and bear fruit. And you have developed medical technologies to save life.
Wherever in the world there has been a natural disaster, you have been among the first to offer humanitarian aid. Through six decades under almost continuous threat you have given the world poets and philosophers and musicians and novelists whose heart is Jewish and whose love is for all humanity. You have taken the language of the Bible and made it speak again You have taken a people from the valley of the shadow of death and made it live again. You have taken hope itself – hatikvah shnot alpayim – and made it breath again. Israel: you are our people and our pride and we stand with you today.
Why then does a people who have consistently said Yes to life and No to death, who have consistently said Yes to peace and No to terror, find itself today fighting in Lebanon and Gaza? The answer is so simple, yet so unbelievable, that we must hear it clearly and unequivocally: Israel is fighting today in Lebanon because six years ago it withdrew from Lebanon. Israel is fighting today in Gaza because one year ago it withdrew from Gaza.
And Israel discovered the terrible truth spoken by the late Mother Theresa that no good deed goes unpunished! Every gesture of goodwill undertaken by Israel has been seized on by its enemies as a sign of weakness. Every Israeli effort towards peace has led without exception to an increase in violence against Israel. The Oslo Peace Process led directly to the first Palestinian suicide attacks in Israel. Taba: the most generous offer Israel ever made to the Palestinians, led directly to the most concerted set of terrorist attacks against any nation in modern history. The Gaza Withdrawal, the most painful act Israel has ever had to undertake, led within less than a year to 1000 Kassam rocket attacks on Israeli civilian targets including schoolchildren.
And finally the Lebanon withdrawal, undertaken by Israel six years ago in full compliance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 425. That resolution was immediately broken by Hizbullah, about which the United Nations special envoy to Lebanon warned at the time, in November 2000, “Such breaches of international peace and security in the south threaten to ignite a new spiral of violence with tragic consequences for the civilian population.”
That failure led in 2004 to the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 which called categorically for the disarming of militias in Lebanon. Again rejected. This time Kofi Annan himself protested to the Syrians. The effect? The arming of Hizbullah with weapons that threaten the very heart of Israel. Israel withdrew from Lebanon. Israel does not want to be in Lebanon. It does not want to do any of the things it is now doing. It accepted in good faith the commitment of the United Nations that it would not have to.
It is acting today only because the international community has failed to ensure that its neighbours met their obligations when Israel met hers. Israel, the Israel we know and love, is a people that pursues peace, yearns for peace, sings about peace, needs peace. For 58 years it has done everything a nation could do in pursuit of peace, and it has been rewarded instead with violence and terror. It has done what the world has asked it to do, and the result has been that it has been left vulnerable and alone.
Which of us does not weep when we see the news day after day? Does any of us, God forbid, take satisfaction at the devastation of Lebanon? Is that who we are? Let me be clear and unambiguous. We weep not just for Israel but for the people of Lebanon also.
Lebanon was once a great country, a centre of civilization A beacon in the Middle East… Until Jordan drove the Palestinians out of Jordan into Lebanon Until Syria used them to terrorise the Lebanese Until Iran armed and funded and manipulated them; Until the whole country of Lebanon, every man, woman and child, became a hostage. And so a great country was destroyed and reduced to ruins. And today Israel is fighting in Lebanon so that Israel should not become, G-d forbid, another Lebanon, as any country in the world will become if it lacks the clarity and courage to say No to terror and Yes to peace.
Tragically Jews have learned over the centuries that when their enemies speaking of killing them, driving them into the sea, wiping them off the face of the earth, they mean what they say.
What Hizbullah and Hamas have said in word and deed is this:
We will kill you if you stay
and we will kill you if you leave.
We will kill you if you retaliate
and we will kill you if you don’t retaliate.
What can Israel do but to seek to end the terror that threatens and is meant to threaten its very existence? When alone among the 192 nations that make up the United Nations, after 58 years it still finds its very right to exist denied?
Friends, let me tell you what is wrong with terror. It is not just that it murders the innocent: the young, the old, the defenseless, the uninvolved. It is that it murders innocence itself. It turns virtue into weakness, decency into vulnerability. And if we, if Israel, if Europe, if America do not take a stand against terror, if we ignore it as the world ignored it for so long, then it will leave a stain on the human future that no tears, no regrets, will ever remove.
The battle Israel is fighting today is not for itself alone. It is for the sake of all those who say no to terror. No to the desecration of life. No to killing in the name of God. Whether they live in Bali or Beslan, or Madrid or Mumbai. And therefore let me end with simple words of prayer:
Ribbono shel olam:
Be with your people Israel now.
Hear their cry.
Heed their tears.
Listen to this, our prayer on their behalf.
Grant peace to all your children, Jew, Christian and Muslim alike.
Help us live together, respecting one another.
Help us cherish life.
Help us to use the powers You gave us, to heal, to mend, to build.
We ask of You, Almighty God, just one thing:
You who make peace in high places.
Help us make peace down here on earth.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Where are you, Motti Ashkenazi of 2006?
Where are the voices of protest?
By Yoel Marcus
Haaretz, August 22, 2006
The war has created a serious dilemma for the Israeli public. We went to battle with unparalleled self-confidence and came home bent and bowed. The call to war of our leaders, from the prime minister to the chief of staff, promised a crushing victory. The greater the promises, the deeper our disappointment. The army failed to achieve two of the war's objectives - freeing the captured soldiers and stopping the missile attacks on Israel.
The chief of staff, mistakenly believing that Hezbollah could be knocked out from the air, discovered too late that ground troops would have to be mobilized. Most of the soldiers lacked proper training. They were equipped with weapons that went out with the flood, and armor that could be penetrated by anti-tank missiles.
In 48 hours, 34 soldiers were killed for no rhyme or reason. The reservists felt duped. Like cannon fodder. God only knows how things might have ended if President Bush had not rushed to draw up a cease-fire agreement that gave us an honorable way of retreating from this unfortunate military campaign.
Ehud Olmert's promise that Israel would soon be a fun place to live has become the joke of the year. The arrogance projected by our heads of state, including the defense minister, who promised that Nasrallah would never forget his name, and Olmert, who assured us that victory was already in our hands, has only made the public angrier. Israel's citizens want to know who is responsible around here.
Who is responsible for the fact that the substandard shelters that the state comptroller complained about in 2001 were not repaired? Who is responsible for the fact that the political and military echelons have ignored the recommendations of the National Security Council from one decade to the next? Who is responsible for the fact that the government and its agents performed so poorly during the war? Who is responsible for the fact that Hamas has discovered our weak spot, and it won't be long before its pathetic Qassams are replaced by Katyushas and long-range missiles?
The frustration of the public has triggered some tough responses. One proposal is to bring down the government with early elections, which probably won't help much. The Kadima party doesn't really exist, and Labor has gone to the dogs since it gave up its socialist ideology and Amir Peretz, the defender of the poor, was given the portfolio he knows least about. There are no alternative leaders on the horizon. "The cupboard is bare," as Eitan Haber put it.
Another proposal is to sack the chief of staff, Dan Halutz, who has the ultimate defense at his fingertips: "I recommended, but you approved." Peretz has already chosen the option he likes best - an internal committee that will be friendly toward his superiors, the kind that will conduct an investigation, but without getting too fanatic about it. In short, a farce.
A third proposal is a national commission of inquiry. By law, however, such commissions are headed by a justice of the Supreme Court, and he makes the rules. Our government ministers are not going to offer up their necks to a panel whose decisions constitute the last word on who is guilty.
The Agranat Commission, which investigated the blunders of the Yom Kippur War, recommended the dismissal of the chief of staff and the head of the Southern Command - both stars of the Six-Day War - but vindicated Israel's political leaders. In spite of this war, which dropped on us out of the blue, a war that Moshe Dayan described as "the destruction of the Third Temple" in which 3,000 soldiers died, Golda Meir and Dayan ran again and won the elections.
An army captain by the name of Motti Ashkenazi was called up for emergency reserve duty on September 26, 1973. Together with his men, he was sent off to Budapest, the northernmost outpost on the Bar-Lev line. The outpost withstood five days of intense bombardment by Egyptian forces. After five days, Ashkenazi and his soldiers were rescued.
Upon his release from the army on February 3, 1974, Ashkenazi began a one-man vigil outside the Prime Minister's Office and demanded Dayan's resignation. He stood there alone for many days. But little by little, other embittered reserve soldiers joined him. One man's dissent became a massive protest movement that forced Golda and Dayan to step down.
As we hear more and more of the reservists' horror stories and the nightmare endured by hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens driven from their homes by rocket fire, and our politicians try harder and harder to dodge responsibility, the question grows louder and shriller: Where are you, Motti Ashkenazi of 2006?
By Yoel Marcus
Haaretz, August 22, 2006
The war has created a serious dilemma for the Israeli public. We went to battle with unparalleled self-confidence and came home bent and bowed. The call to war of our leaders, from the prime minister to the chief of staff, promised a crushing victory. The greater the promises, the deeper our disappointment. The army failed to achieve two of the war's objectives - freeing the captured soldiers and stopping the missile attacks on Israel.
The chief of staff, mistakenly believing that Hezbollah could be knocked out from the air, discovered too late that ground troops would have to be mobilized. Most of the soldiers lacked proper training. They were equipped with weapons that went out with the flood, and armor that could be penetrated by anti-tank missiles.
In 48 hours, 34 soldiers were killed for no rhyme or reason. The reservists felt duped. Like cannon fodder. God only knows how things might have ended if President Bush had not rushed to draw up a cease-fire agreement that gave us an honorable way of retreating from this unfortunate military campaign.
Ehud Olmert's promise that Israel would soon be a fun place to live has become the joke of the year. The arrogance projected by our heads of state, including the defense minister, who promised that Nasrallah would never forget his name, and Olmert, who assured us that victory was already in our hands, has only made the public angrier. Israel's citizens want to know who is responsible around here.
Who is responsible for the fact that the substandard shelters that the state comptroller complained about in 2001 were not repaired? Who is responsible for the fact that the political and military echelons have ignored the recommendations of the National Security Council from one decade to the next? Who is responsible for the fact that the government and its agents performed so poorly during the war? Who is responsible for the fact that Hamas has discovered our weak spot, and it won't be long before its pathetic Qassams are replaced by Katyushas and long-range missiles?
The frustration of the public has triggered some tough responses. One proposal is to bring down the government with early elections, which probably won't help much. The Kadima party doesn't really exist, and Labor has gone to the dogs since it gave up its socialist ideology and Amir Peretz, the defender of the poor, was given the portfolio he knows least about. There are no alternative leaders on the horizon. "The cupboard is bare," as Eitan Haber put it.
Another proposal is to sack the chief of staff, Dan Halutz, who has the ultimate defense at his fingertips: "I recommended, but you approved." Peretz has already chosen the option he likes best - an internal committee that will be friendly toward his superiors, the kind that will conduct an investigation, but without getting too fanatic about it. In short, a farce.
A third proposal is a national commission of inquiry. By law, however, such commissions are headed by a justice of the Supreme Court, and he makes the rules. Our government ministers are not going to offer up their necks to a panel whose decisions constitute the last word on who is guilty.
The Agranat Commission, which investigated the blunders of the Yom Kippur War, recommended the dismissal of the chief of staff and the head of the Southern Command - both stars of the Six-Day War - but vindicated Israel's political leaders. In spite of this war, which dropped on us out of the blue, a war that Moshe Dayan described as "the destruction of the Third Temple" in which 3,000 soldiers died, Golda Meir and Dayan ran again and won the elections.
An army captain by the name of Motti Ashkenazi was called up for emergency reserve duty on September 26, 1973. Together with his men, he was sent off to Budapest, the northernmost outpost on the Bar-Lev line. The outpost withstood five days of intense bombardment by Egyptian forces. After five days, Ashkenazi and his soldiers were rescued.
Upon his release from the army on February 3, 1974, Ashkenazi began a one-man vigil outside the Prime Minister's Office and demanded Dayan's resignation. He stood there alone for many days. But little by little, other embittered reserve soldiers joined him. One man's dissent became a massive protest movement that forced Golda and Dayan to step down.
As we hear more and more of the reservists' horror stories and the nightmare endured by hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens driven from their homes by rocket fire, and our politicians try harder and harder to dodge responsibility, the question grows louder and shriller: Where are you, Motti Ashkenazi of 2006?
Sunday, August 20, 2006
There is no such thing as unilateral peace...
Talking only to ourselves
Daniel Ben Simon
Haaretz, August 17, 2006
I am trying to recall when I last saw Israeli leaders talking with Arab leaders about peace, and finding it hard to remember. In recent years, our compulsive tendency to talk to ourselves about an agreement with the Arabs has been strengthening, as though the real conflict in the Middle East were between the right and the left. The fruitless discussions between these two tired bodies have had two goals: to neutralize any possibility of change and to freeze the reality on the ground, for fear that any step toward peace will ignite a domestic war among the Jews. And if we are already fated to go to war, say our architects to themselves, it is better to have a war against the Arabs. It is torturous to think that had similar diplomatic energy been invested vis-a-vis Palestinian leaders, Lebanese leaders and Syrian leaders, perhaps everything would look different. Perhaps we would even be living in peace with them.
Is it possible that the miserable war in Lebanon and the endless slaughter in Gaza are an outcome of the lack of willingness to talk with our neighbors? When was the last time we tried to talk to the Palestinians about their future and about our future? When was the last time we sent out probes to the Lebanese about signing a peace agreement with them?
When was the last time we tried to renew the truncated negotiations with the Syrians about the possibility of arriving at a peace agreement? For six years now Israeli politics has been at a standstill. Ever since prime minister Ehud Barak shoved Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat into the lodge at Camp David in July 2000, there has been no serious contact between an Israeli leader and an Arab leader with whom we are in conflict. The result is dreadful. Israel has slammed doors on its neighbors and has made up its mind to set arrangements on its own, in dialogue with itself, while ignoring its neighbors as though it were a lone juniper tree in the desert. It is possible that for this insult, we are now paying the price.
To a large extent both the slaughter in Gaza after the disengagement and the war in Lebanon prove the failure of the unilateral approach. How is it possible, asks every reasonable individual, that we pulled out of Lebanon and they are attacking us? How is it possible, asks every reasonable individual, that we pulled out of Gaza and they are still attacking us? Is it any wonder that the lack of gratitude on both these fronts has led many Israelis to the conclusion that hatred for Jews is imprinted in the Muslim genome and that the urge to go to war is imprinted in the Arab character?
And perhaps this outburst of aggression has its source in our egotistic nature, in our refusal to relate to our neighbors, in our unwillingness to see them from the distance of a meter. There is no such thing as unilateral peace, just as there is no such thing as unilateral war. It takes two to dance the dance of death, and to dance the dance of joy. We have decided to dance with ourselves, as though the Arabs were shapeless, transparent and not worth speaking to.
And it isn`t as though in the past there haven`t been bilateral contacts that aroused hope. However, they can be counted on one hand. Only two months ago a cheerful meeting was held between our new prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan. How many smiles they scattered, and how many times they clapped one another on the shoulder. Olmert was at his best. He laughed, he joked, he chummed and he demonstrated impressive communications skills. He spoke with everyone - apart from the only person at that meeting who justified a serious discussion. And indeed, Olmert`s aides worked for days so that their boss would not shake the hand of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
These are the achievements of Israeli diplomacy vis-a-vis the Palestinians during the past six years: Ehud Barak pushed Arafat at Camp David, the same Barak invited Arafat to dinner at his home, prime minister Ariel Sharon invited Abbas to a meeting at the Prime Minister`s Residence, Olmert bestowed a hug on Abbas. Two gestures, one conversation and one dinner party during the course of six whole years. Not a bad output for a country mired in a bloody conflict with the Palestinian people.
And during this entire time, Israel has withdrawn into itself, refusing to look sideways. It exited Lebanon in anger and it exited in similar anger from the Gaza Strip, without having attempted to coordinate the moves with those concerned. It is also planning to exit the West Bank with a similar, unilateral slam of the door.
Instead of speaking with our enemies we speak with our friends, not to say our patrons, the Americans, as though we were lowly vassals. We have adopted English almost as a mother tongue and we relate to Arabic as almost an existential threat. Thus far, the subordination of our lives, our values and our future to the Americans has not proved itself. We have never been as insecure as we are today. As part of our despair we are surrounding ourselves with a wall and turning the symbol of national rebirth into a fortified Jewish ghetto closed on all sides.
If the despair with our neighbors and with peace spreads, the Israelis are liable to deposit the reins of the state in the hands of dangerous fanatics like Yisrael Beiteinu MK Avigdor Lieberman. 'For insane situations, you need insane people in charge,' said an inhabitant of Kiryat Shmona last week who thus reflected the new mood and mentioned Lieberman as a wonder drug.
If Olmert does not hold out any hope soon and does not start talking with the Lebanese and the Palestinians and the Syrians, the despair is liable to push the Israelis toward extreme solutions.
Daniel Ben Simon
Haaretz, August 17, 2006
I am trying to recall when I last saw Israeli leaders talking with Arab leaders about peace, and finding it hard to remember. In recent years, our compulsive tendency to talk to ourselves about an agreement with the Arabs has been strengthening, as though the real conflict in the Middle East were between the right and the left. The fruitless discussions between these two tired bodies have had two goals: to neutralize any possibility of change and to freeze the reality on the ground, for fear that any step toward peace will ignite a domestic war among the Jews. And if we are already fated to go to war, say our architects to themselves, it is better to have a war against the Arabs. It is torturous to think that had similar diplomatic energy been invested vis-a-vis Palestinian leaders, Lebanese leaders and Syrian leaders, perhaps everything would look different. Perhaps we would even be living in peace with them.
Is it possible that the miserable war in Lebanon and the endless slaughter in Gaza are an outcome of the lack of willingness to talk with our neighbors? When was the last time we tried to talk to the Palestinians about their future and about our future? When was the last time we sent out probes to the Lebanese about signing a peace agreement with them?
When was the last time we tried to renew the truncated negotiations with the Syrians about the possibility of arriving at a peace agreement? For six years now Israeli politics has been at a standstill. Ever since prime minister Ehud Barak shoved Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat into the lodge at Camp David in July 2000, there has been no serious contact between an Israeli leader and an Arab leader with whom we are in conflict. The result is dreadful. Israel has slammed doors on its neighbors and has made up its mind to set arrangements on its own, in dialogue with itself, while ignoring its neighbors as though it were a lone juniper tree in the desert. It is possible that for this insult, we are now paying the price.
To a large extent both the slaughter in Gaza after the disengagement and the war in Lebanon prove the failure of the unilateral approach. How is it possible, asks every reasonable individual, that we pulled out of Lebanon and they are attacking us? How is it possible, asks every reasonable individual, that we pulled out of Gaza and they are still attacking us? Is it any wonder that the lack of gratitude on both these fronts has led many Israelis to the conclusion that hatred for Jews is imprinted in the Muslim genome and that the urge to go to war is imprinted in the Arab character?
And perhaps this outburst of aggression has its source in our egotistic nature, in our refusal to relate to our neighbors, in our unwillingness to see them from the distance of a meter. There is no such thing as unilateral peace, just as there is no such thing as unilateral war. It takes two to dance the dance of death, and to dance the dance of joy. We have decided to dance with ourselves, as though the Arabs were shapeless, transparent and not worth speaking to.
And it isn`t as though in the past there haven`t been bilateral contacts that aroused hope. However, they can be counted on one hand. Only two months ago a cheerful meeting was held between our new prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan. How many smiles they scattered, and how many times they clapped one another on the shoulder. Olmert was at his best. He laughed, he joked, he chummed and he demonstrated impressive communications skills. He spoke with everyone - apart from the only person at that meeting who justified a serious discussion. And indeed, Olmert`s aides worked for days so that their boss would not shake the hand of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
These are the achievements of Israeli diplomacy vis-a-vis the Palestinians during the past six years: Ehud Barak pushed Arafat at Camp David, the same Barak invited Arafat to dinner at his home, prime minister Ariel Sharon invited Abbas to a meeting at the Prime Minister`s Residence, Olmert bestowed a hug on Abbas. Two gestures, one conversation and one dinner party during the course of six whole years. Not a bad output for a country mired in a bloody conflict with the Palestinian people.
And during this entire time, Israel has withdrawn into itself, refusing to look sideways. It exited Lebanon in anger and it exited in similar anger from the Gaza Strip, without having attempted to coordinate the moves with those concerned. It is also planning to exit the West Bank with a similar, unilateral slam of the door.
Instead of speaking with our enemies we speak with our friends, not to say our patrons, the Americans, as though we were lowly vassals. We have adopted English almost as a mother tongue and we relate to Arabic as almost an existential threat. Thus far, the subordination of our lives, our values and our future to the Americans has not proved itself. We have never been as insecure as we are today. As part of our despair we are surrounding ourselves with a wall and turning the symbol of national rebirth into a fortified Jewish ghetto closed on all sides.
If the despair with our neighbors and with peace spreads, the Israelis are liable to deposit the reins of the state in the hands of dangerous fanatics like Yisrael Beiteinu MK Avigdor Lieberman. 'For insane situations, you need insane people in charge,' said an inhabitant of Kiryat Shmona last week who thus reflected the new mood and mentioned Lieberman as a wonder drug.
If Olmert does not hold out any hope soon and does not start talking with the Lebanese and the Palestinians and the Syrians, the despair is liable to push the Israelis toward extreme solutions.
If it wasn’t so sad, it might be funny,,,
The war is over, the in-fight is beginning
Jerusalem Times: Opinion
August 20, 2006
This week in Israel….. Behind the news with Gershon Baskin
With the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, the cease fire came into effect and the Israeli troops began heading home. The last 30 hours of the war that the government implemented while the Security Council was already in session brought about no military achievement and only led to more than 30 additional, unnecessary casualties. It has been reported that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was against launching the expanded ground operation up to the Litani, yet he gave in to the pressure of the military and of Minister of Defense Amir Peretz.. Olmert, as Prime Minister, as he himself stated in his last Knesset address, bears full responsibility for the decisions made by the government. This was one of the most foolish and costly decisions taken by his government.
The investigation committee established by Peretz to assess the operational aspects of the war (headed by former Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak) has no authority to judge the decisions made by the politicians. Olmert and Peretz should also have to answer to the public for leading the country into a war without achievable goals, with faulty tactical plans, and without taking into account the huge price that the home front would have to pay. Olmert’s taking responsibility has to be more than just words. Peretz must also stand before a real investigation so that the public can understand how and why he made the decisions that he did that cost so many human lives, so much physical damage in Israel and in Lebanon, and so much suffering.
It is still too early to determine who won and who lost this war. The outcome and the balance of accounts will only come in the aftermath in the months to come. If the Lebanese army is capable of deploying, as it has begun, and if it keeps armed Hizbollah combatants away from the south, then Israel and Lebanon will have both won, and that is good. Hizbollah will not simply go away, nor will we probably ever know what losses Hizbollah really suffered in the war, because they simply do not publish the truth.
The Government of Fouad Siniora (no relation to Hanna Siniora) seems to be coming out on top fully backed by Saad Hariri and even Walid Jumblat - this is good for Lebanon and good for the region. Israel suffered damages to more than 1,500 apartments and homes with massive damage to the forests and open spaces. Lebanon suffered damage to more than 15,000 apartments (some people are saying up to 30,000). The international community is now directing itself to raise funds for the reconstruction of Lebanon, while the government of Israel and the Jewish agency are doing the same for the north of Israel. Shimon Peres is off to the States on a fundraising tour. The losses, reconstruction costs and rebuilding the army will probably come to more than $2 billion. There go all of the budgetary reserves that were supposed to be invested in education, health and welfare.
A problem with the concept
Many people are blaming the lack of experience of Olmert, Peretz and Halutz for the less than satisfactory results of the war. The problem is, however, one that developed way before these gentlemen were sitting at the helm. In my assessment, the problem rests with the concept of what the Israeli army is and what kind of wars it was prepared to face. The problem’s roots can be found in the policies that were developed and implemented in the days of Chief of Staff Ehud Barak (1991-1995). Barak’s concept, mirroring what he saw in the United States following the first Gulf war was that Israel needed a small, intelligent and sophisticated fighting force. Translating that concept into policy and planning meant investing huge sums first and foremost in the air force, in modern technologies, and in scaling down the reserve forces, depending on elite units of the regular army. Since 1991, Israel invested the major parts of its military budgets into these areas and scaled down the dependence on ground infantry units. The overall dependence of Israel on the air force during the beginning of this war was not because the Chief of Staff came from the air force, but because that was the entire military concept of the IDF since Barak’s time. This concept is good perhaps for the United States when it attacked Kosovo, or even when they launched the attack against the Saddam Hussein regime, but is it the right concept for Israel? Perhaps, if Israel had to go to war against another army it would be right, but it appeared to be quite wrong regarding a war against a guerilla fighting force. Now, in the aftermath of the war, the army needs to be re-equipped and serious re-evaluation of the future needs of the army must be undertaken. The IDF needs to be prepared for a war against another army, but it also needs to be prepared for a possible second round.
The Government in shambles
Unconnected to the war, but in addition to it, the government seems to be coming apart. Olmert is under investigation for an alleged bribe concerning real estate; the Minister of Justice Haim Ramon is resigning over an alleged sexual abuse charge, the Chief of Staff was accused of selling his stock portfolio on the day the war began (although not illegal – it stinks), Shimon Peres is under investigation for illegal campaign funds, and the cherry on the cake concerns the sexual harassment charges against the President, Moshe Katzav who will probably have to resign before his term of office ends.
It has also been reported that since the beginning of the war, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs were hardly speaking with each other. According to the reports, Tzipi Livni was opposed to many of the government decisions concerning the war and chose to take a low profile. When the diplomatic efforts were launched and negotiations were underway on the text of the UN Resolution, Livni wanted to go to NY to be there, but Olmert prevented her from going. Olmert controlled all of the negotiations on the UN text by himself with his top advisors, leaving Livni out of the loop.
Today it was reported that Livni appointed her chief political advisor, Yaki Dayan to begin investigating and assessing the possibilities for opening up the Israeli-Syrian track. It is not clear if she made that decision with the agreement of the Prime Minister or perhaps despite his possible disagreement.
Today even Olmert is admitting that his realignment plan is off the agenda. The main aim of the government for the coming year will be the rebuilding of the north of the country. If it wasn’t so sad, it might be funny. Olmert, who came into office with his great promises of reshaping the country and setting Israel’s final boundaries, is now busy rebuilding what should not have been destroyed from the first place. The reason for going to war was the Hizbollah unprovoked attack against Israel, the killing of eight soldiers and the kidnapping of two others. Israel certainly had a casus belli - the question is whether or not it was wise to launch such a massive attack in order to achieve what has been achieved. Perhaps a more tempered response and a massive diplomatic offensive could have achieved the same or better results, and with a lot less damage?
New elections? – not now
The Government has a lot to answer for and the loss of support for the leaders in the public opinion polls is completely understandable (Olmert and Peretz are both in the mid to low 20’s approval rating after reaching the 70’s at the beginning of the war a few weeks ago). If the government wasn’t so young and if there weren’t so many new MK’s, the talk about early elections might have to be taken more seriously. But other than a few of the parties in the opposition, no one wants to go to new elections – they haven’t yet heated up their new seats and they are not get ready to take the risk of not returning to them. Olmert will probably try to expand his government, but it doesn’t seem that there are too many parties or opposition MK’s who are running to step on what now appears to be a sinking ship. Meretz won’t join, nor are they being asked. Meretz was divided at the beginning of the war, like the Peace Now movement, feeling that the war was justified, but by its end, most of their membership had joined the anti-war camp. Olmert has spoken about Lieberman and his right-wing Yisrael Beitenu joining the government, but even without the realignment platform, it does not seem likely that Labour and Lieberman can sit together. Perhaps Olmert will finally conclude the negotiations with the Orthodox United Torah Judaism party that have been dragging on since the government was formed months ago. Whoever joins this government, if anyone, still has to chart a course through some very unfriendly waters in the coming months. Even with the summer recess underway, a civil-society protest movement that may develop against the Government and against Olmert and Peretz specifically, will cause additional headaches to the Prime Minister. Together with that, we can be sure that the opposition will work overtime to have the Knesset meet frequently during recess.
Gaza next?
I visited Gaza last week. Many people there believe that Israel will take its Lebanese frustrations out on Gaza. Already severely hit and suffering, Gaza is mentally preparing itself for a new Israeli onslaught. There has been no real progress in freeing the kidnapped soldier Gilead Shalit. Israel is still looking for the address that is in charge of the soldier. The assessments from senior Hamas personalities in Gaza and from senior Israeli officials are that Gilead Shalit is alive and well. But in both camps, no one is sure who and where the decisions are being made about his future. In the meantime, it can be expected that Israel will prepare for a massive ground offensive in the coming weeks if the soldier is not returned to Israel. The Government needs an achievement and needs to rebuild the morale of the country. Finding the soldier and punishing the Palestinians at the same time would boost support for the government which only gives more reason to believe that this is in the plans. If this is the path taken, the chances of survival for Shalit are probably less than 50:50, there will most likely be Israeli casualties and there will certainly be massive Palestinian casualties. This is not the path that should be taken, but if there will be no progress on the issue of Shalit, it seems that it is inevitable, unfortunately.
Jerusalem Times: Opinion
August 20, 2006
This week in Israel….. Behind the news with Gershon Baskin
With the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, the cease fire came into effect and the Israeli troops began heading home. The last 30 hours of the war that the government implemented while the Security Council was already in session brought about no military achievement and only led to more than 30 additional, unnecessary casualties. It has been reported that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was against launching the expanded ground operation up to the Litani, yet he gave in to the pressure of the military and of Minister of Defense Amir Peretz.. Olmert, as Prime Minister, as he himself stated in his last Knesset address, bears full responsibility for the decisions made by the government. This was one of the most foolish and costly decisions taken by his government.
The investigation committee established by Peretz to assess the operational aspects of the war (headed by former Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak) has no authority to judge the decisions made by the politicians. Olmert and Peretz should also have to answer to the public for leading the country into a war without achievable goals, with faulty tactical plans, and without taking into account the huge price that the home front would have to pay. Olmert’s taking responsibility has to be more than just words. Peretz must also stand before a real investigation so that the public can understand how and why he made the decisions that he did that cost so many human lives, so much physical damage in Israel and in Lebanon, and so much suffering.
It is still too early to determine who won and who lost this war. The outcome and the balance of accounts will only come in the aftermath in the months to come. If the Lebanese army is capable of deploying, as it has begun, and if it keeps armed Hizbollah combatants away from the south, then Israel and Lebanon will have both won, and that is good. Hizbollah will not simply go away, nor will we probably ever know what losses Hizbollah really suffered in the war, because they simply do not publish the truth.
The Government of Fouad Siniora (no relation to Hanna Siniora) seems to be coming out on top fully backed by Saad Hariri and even Walid Jumblat - this is good for Lebanon and good for the region. Israel suffered damages to more than 1,500 apartments and homes with massive damage to the forests and open spaces. Lebanon suffered damage to more than 15,000 apartments (some people are saying up to 30,000). The international community is now directing itself to raise funds for the reconstruction of Lebanon, while the government of Israel and the Jewish agency are doing the same for the north of Israel. Shimon Peres is off to the States on a fundraising tour. The losses, reconstruction costs and rebuilding the army will probably come to more than $2 billion. There go all of the budgetary reserves that were supposed to be invested in education, health and welfare.
A problem with the concept
Many people are blaming the lack of experience of Olmert, Peretz and Halutz for the less than satisfactory results of the war. The problem is, however, one that developed way before these gentlemen were sitting at the helm. In my assessment, the problem rests with the concept of what the Israeli army is and what kind of wars it was prepared to face. The problem’s roots can be found in the policies that were developed and implemented in the days of Chief of Staff Ehud Barak (1991-1995). Barak’s concept, mirroring what he saw in the United States following the first Gulf war was that Israel needed a small, intelligent and sophisticated fighting force. Translating that concept into policy and planning meant investing huge sums first and foremost in the air force, in modern technologies, and in scaling down the reserve forces, depending on elite units of the regular army. Since 1991, Israel invested the major parts of its military budgets into these areas and scaled down the dependence on ground infantry units. The overall dependence of Israel on the air force during the beginning of this war was not because the Chief of Staff came from the air force, but because that was the entire military concept of the IDF since Barak’s time. This concept is good perhaps for the United States when it attacked Kosovo, or even when they launched the attack against the Saddam Hussein regime, but is it the right concept for Israel? Perhaps, if Israel had to go to war against another army it would be right, but it appeared to be quite wrong regarding a war against a guerilla fighting force. Now, in the aftermath of the war, the army needs to be re-equipped and serious re-evaluation of the future needs of the army must be undertaken. The IDF needs to be prepared for a war against another army, but it also needs to be prepared for a possible second round.
The Government in shambles
Unconnected to the war, but in addition to it, the government seems to be coming apart. Olmert is under investigation for an alleged bribe concerning real estate; the Minister of Justice Haim Ramon is resigning over an alleged sexual abuse charge, the Chief of Staff was accused of selling his stock portfolio on the day the war began (although not illegal – it stinks), Shimon Peres is under investigation for illegal campaign funds, and the cherry on the cake concerns the sexual harassment charges against the President, Moshe Katzav who will probably have to resign before his term of office ends.
It has also been reported that since the beginning of the war, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs were hardly speaking with each other. According to the reports, Tzipi Livni was opposed to many of the government decisions concerning the war and chose to take a low profile. When the diplomatic efforts were launched and negotiations were underway on the text of the UN Resolution, Livni wanted to go to NY to be there, but Olmert prevented her from going. Olmert controlled all of the negotiations on the UN text by himself with his top advisors, leaving Livni out of the loop.
Today it was reported that Livni appointed her chief political advisor, Yaki Dayan to begin investigating and assessing the possibilities for opening up the Israeli-Syrian track. It is not clear if she made that decision with the agreement of the Prime Minister or perhaps despite his possible disagreement.
Today even Olmert is admitting that his realignment plan is off the agenda. The main aim of the government for the coming year will be the rebuilding of the north of the country. If it wasn’t so sad, it might be funny. Olmert, who came into office with his great promises of reshaping the country and setting Israel’s final boundaries, is now busy rebuilding what should not have been destroyed from the first place. The reason for going to war was the Hizbollah unprovoked attack against Israel, the killing of eight soldiers and the kidnapping of two others. Israel certainly had a casus belli - the question is whether or not it was wise to launch such a massive attack in order to achieve what has been achieved. Perhaps a more tempered response and a massive diplomatic offensive could have achieved the same or better results, and with a lot less damage?
New elections? – not now
The Government has a lot to answer for and the loss of support for the leaders in the public opinion polls is completely understandable (Olmert and Peretz are both in the mid to low 20’s approval rating after reaching the 70’s at the beginning of the war a few weeks ago). If the government wasn’t so young and if there weren’t so many new MK’s, the talk about early elections might have to be taken more seriously. But other than a few of the parties in the opposition, no one wants to go to new elections – they haven’t yet heated up their new seats and they are not get ready to take the risk of not returning to them. Olmert will probably try to expand his government, but it doesn’t seem that there are too many parties or opposition MK’s who are running to step on what now appears to be a sinking ship. Meretz won’t join, nor are they being asked. Meretz was divided at the beginning of the war, like the Peace Now movement, feeling that the war was justified, but by its end, most of their membership had joined the anti-war camp. Olmert has spoken about Lieberman and his right-wing Yisrael Beitenu joining the government, but even without the realignment platform, it does not seem likely that Labour and Lieberman can sit together. Perhaps Olmert will finally conclude the negotiations with the Orthodox United Torah Judaism party that have been dragging on since the government was formed months ago. Whoever joins this government, if anyone, still has to chart a course through some very unfriendly waters in the coming months. Even with the summer recess underway, a civil-society protest movement that may develop against the Government and against Olmert and Peretz specifically, will cause additional headaches to the Prime Minister. Together with that, we can be sure that the opposition will work overtime to have the Knesset meet frequently during recess.
Gaza next?
I visited Gaza last week. Many people there believe that Israel will take its Lebanese frustrations out on Gaza. Already severely hit and suffering, Gaza is mentally preparing itself for a new Israeli onslaught. There has been no real progress in freeing the kidnapped soldier Gilead Shalit. Israel is still looking for the address that is in charge of the soldier. The assessments from senior Hamas personalities in Gaza and from senior Israeli officials are that Gilead Shalit is alive and well. But in both camps, no one is sure who and where the decisions are being made about his future. In the meantime, it can be expected that Israel will prepare for a massive ground offensive in the coming weeks if the soldier is not returned to Israel. The Government needs an achievement and needs to rebuild the morale of the country. Finding the soldier and punishing the Palestinians at the same time would boost support for the government which only gives more reason to believe that this is in the plans. If this is the path taken, the chances of survival for Shalit are probably less than 50:50, there will most likely be Israeli casualties and there will certainly be massive Palestinian casualties. This is not the path that should be taken, but if there will be no progress on the issue of Shalit, it seems that it is inevitable, unfortunately.
Friday, August 18, 2006
Israeli Arabs' experiences in the Palestinian Authority during the war
Israeli Arabs' war experiences
Ynet (Ma'ariv), August 16, 2006
Roee Nahmias
Several Arab families decided to act on Hizbullah Chief Hassan Nasrallah's "recommendation" and leave rocket-stricken Haifa during the war in south Lebanon.
They traveled to Palestinian towns like Bethlehem and Ramallah, and even to East Jerusalem, but soon after decided they had rather return home and face the rocket menace.
The reason: The bad treatment awarded to them in hotels, restaurants and stores, as well as ongoing harassments of their wives and daughters on the part of the local residents.
Ghani Abassi, married and a father of three daughters, decided to go with his family to Bethlehem and flee the Katyusha attacks. Abbasi traveled to the Palestinian town with some 10 other families from Haifa, who all chose to stay at local hotels. Unfortunately, this was when their true nightmare began.
"I waited for three days until I got a room. Then it turned out that the air conditioning wasn't working, and I was told that the reason was the high price of electricity. I decided that this wasn't that bad, because we felt we were among our brothers at the West Bank and were willing to endure the terrible heat, knowing we're safe and that our visit was also of financial help," Abbasi described to the website of the Israeli-Arab newspaper al-Sinara.
"However, the treatment we received was disgraceful and dreadful," he said. "We walked around town for a while, but the attitude we encountered on the part of the locals was horrible. The youngsters on the street started harassing our wives and daughters and used shocking expressions that I cannot even bring myself to pronounce," he said.
Another Haifa resident, who went with his family to Jerusalem to escape from the rocket threat, said that the local merchants blatantly took advantage of the situation and inflated the prices in stores. A bottle of mineral water that usually sells for about NIS 4, for instance, was being sold to the Haifa tourists for NIS 10.
'Even foreigners are respected there'
"They told us, 'you are worse than the Jews.' We heard expressions of joy over the fact we have fled our homes, and some even tried to attack us. We were disgusted and decided to return to Haifa," he said, stressing that he used to be a regular donor to the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza.
According to him, after that day and the humiliation he experienced in Bethlehem, he does not plan on donating even one shekel.
"We thought we are one nation and that what really hurts them, hurts us too. We went to demonstrations for them and we donated a lot of money to them because we thought they are our brothers and that is our obligation. But, what we found was exploitation and undeserving treatment toward someone supposedly from the same nation," he told.
The same resident added that he expected the families from Haifa and Nazareth to be warmly received in the West Bank towns, but what took place was the exact opposite.
Today he speaks with regret about the two days he spent in Bethlehem. "While touring in Ramallah, a few youngsters said to us, 'you are the same as, even worse than, the Jews.'
We tried to understand why they were acting that way toward us, but they attacked us and a fight broke out. We are very sorry for what happened and we couldn't have expected such an unfit welcome from members of our nation whom we had respected and appreciated very much. But they didn't respect us at all, and saw as worse than the Jews. We are very sorry for what happened and that we drove all the way there to see the painful truth that they don't respect us there," said Ghani Abassi.
Abassi added that the restaurants jacked up prices for customers because they thought they were foreign 'tourists.' "Even foreigners are respected there, but we, their own brothers, felt like they don't respect us, and my friends and I asked why? Are we unworthy of the respect due to members of the same nation?"
Following such treatment, Abassi and his friends hurried back to the lap of the Katyushas and air raid sirens of Haifa. "'We will never again make a donation or participate in a demonstration for the West Bank from now on," said one of them.
Ynet (Ma'ariv), August 16, 2006
Roee Nahmias
Several Arab families decided to act on Hizbullah Chief Hassan Nasrallah's "recommendation" and leave rocket-stricken Haifa during the war in south Lebanon.
They traveled to Palestinian towns like Bethlehem and Ramallah, and even to East Jerusalem, but soon after decided they had rather return home and face the rocket menace.
The reason: The bad treatment awarded to them in hotels, restaurants and stores, as well as ongoing harassments of their wives and daughters on the part of the local residents.
Ghani Abassi, married and a father of three daughters, decided to go with his family to Bethlehem and flee the Katyusha attacks. Abbasi traveled to the Palestinian town with some 10 other families from Haifa, who all chose to stay at local hotels. Unfortunately, this was when their true nightmare began.
"I waited for three days until I got a room. Then it turned out that the air conditioning wasn't working, and I was told that the reason was the high price of electricity. I decided that this wasn't that bad, because we felt we were among our brothers at the West Bank and were willing to endure the terrible heat, knowing we're safe and that our visit was also of financial help," Abbasi described to the website of the Israeli-Arab newspaper al-Sinara.
"However, the treatment we received was disgraceful and dreadful," he said. "We walked around town for a while, but the attitude we encountered on the part of the locals was horrible. The youngsters on the street started harassing our wives and daughters and used shocking expressions that I cannot even bring myself to pronounce," he said.
Another Haifa resident, who went with his family to Jerusalem to escape from the rocket threat, said that the local merchants blatantly took advantage of the situation and inflated the prices in stores. A bottle of mineral water that usually sells for about NIS 4, for instance, was being sold to the Haifa tourists for NIS 10.
'Even foreigners are respected there'
"They told us, 'you are worse than the Jews.' We heard expressions of joy over the fact we have fled our homes, and some even tried to attack us. We were disgusted and decided to return to Haifa," he said, stressing that he used to be a regular donor to the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza.
According to him, after that day and the humiliation he experienced in Bethlehem, he does not plan on donating even one shekel.
"We thought we are one nation and that what really hurts them, hurts us too. We went to demonstrations for them and we donated a lot of money to them because we thought they are our brothers and that is our obligation. But, what we found was exploitation and undeserving treatment toward someone supposedly from the same nation," he told.
The same resident added that he expected the families from Haifa and Nazareth to be warmly received in the West Bank towns, but what took place was the exact opposite.
Today he speaks with regret about the two days he spent in Bethlehem. "While touring in Ramallah, a few youngsters said to us, 'you are the same as, even worse than, the Jews.'
We tried to understand why they were acting that way toward us, but they attacked us and a fight broke out. We are very sorry for what happened and we couldn't have expected such an unfit welcome from members of our nation whom we had respected and appreciated very much. But they didn't respect us at all, and saw as worse than the Jews. We are very sorry for what happened and that we drove all the way there to see the painful truth that they don't respect us there," said Ghani Abassi.
Abassi added that the restaurants jacked up prices for customers because they thought they were foreign 'tourists.' "Even foreigners are respected there, but we, their own brothers, felt like they don't respect us, and my friends and I asked why? Are we unworthy of the respect due to members of the same nation?"
Following such treatment, Abassi and his friends hurried back to the lap of the Katyushas and air raid sirens of Haifa. "'We will never again make a donation or participate in a demonstration for the West Bank from now on," said one of them.
From mania to depression - Uri Avery
From Mania to Depression
Uri Avnery
Ha'aretz, August 16, 2006
THIRTY THREE days of war. The longest of our wars since 1949.
On the Israeli side: 154 dead - 117 of them soldiers. 3970 rockets launched against us, 37 civilians dead, more than 422 civilians wounded.
On the Lebanese side: about a thousand dead civilians, thousands wounded. An unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead and wounded.
More than a million refugees on both sides.So what has been achieved for this terrible price?
"GLOOMY, HUMBLE, despondent," was how the journalist Yossef Werter described Ehud Olmert, a few hours after the cease-fire had come into effect.
Olmert? Humble? Is this the same Olmert we know? The same Olmert who thumped the table and shouted: "No more!" Who said: "After the war, the situation will be completely different than before!" Who promised a "New Middle East" as a result of the war?
THE RESULTS of the war are obvious:
The prisoners, who served as casus belli (or pretext) for the war, have not been released. They will come back only as a result of an exchange of prisoners, exactly as Hassan Nasrallah proposed before the war.
Hizbullah has remained as it was. It has not been destroyed, nor disarmed, nor even removed from where it was. Its fighters have proved themselves in battle and have even garnered compliments from Israeli soldiers. Its command and communication stucture has continued to function to the end. Its TV station is still broadcasting.
Hassan Nasrallah is alive and kicking. Persistent attempts to kill him failed. His prestige is sky-high. Everywhere in the Arab world, from Morocco to Iraq, songs are being composed in his honor and his picture adorns the walls.
The Lebanese army will be deployed along the border, side by side with a large international force. That is the only material change that has been achieved.
This will not replace Hizbullah. Hizbullah will remain in the area, in every village and town. The Israeli army has not succeeded in removing it from one single village. That was simply impossible without permanently removing the population to which it belongs.
The Lebanese army and the international force cannot and will not confront Hizbullah. Their very presence there depends on Hizbullah's consent. In practice, a kind of co-existence of the three forces will come into being, each one knowing that it has to come to terms with the other two.
Perhaps the international force will be able to prevent incursions by Hizbullah, such as the one that preceded this war. But it will also have to prevent Israeli actions, such as the reconnaissance flights of our Air Force over Lebanon. That's why the Israeli army objected, at the beginning, so strenuously to the introduction of this force.
IN ISRAEL, there is now a general atmosphere of disappointment and despondency. From mania to depression. It's not only that the politicians and the generals are firing accusations at each other, as we foresaw, but the general public is also voicing criticism from every possible angle. The soldiers criticize the conduct of the war, the reserve soldiers gripe about the chaos and the failure of supplies.
In all parties, there are new opposition groupings and threats of splits. In Kadima. In Labor. It seems that in Meretz, too, there is a lot of ferment, because most of its leaders supported the war dragon almost until the last moment, when they caught its tail and pierced it with their little lance.
At the head of the critics are marching - surprise, surprise - the media. The entire horde of interviewers and commentators, correspondents and presstitutes, who (with very few exceptions) enthused about the war, who deceived, misled, falsified, ignored, duped and lied for the fatherland, who stifled all criticism and branded as traitors all who opposed the war - they are now running ahead of the lynch mob. How predictable, how ugly. Suddenly they remember what we have been saying right from the beginning of the war.
This phase is symbolized by Dan Halutz, the Chief-of-Staff. Only yesterday he was the hero of the masses, it was forbidden to utter a word against him. Now he is being described as a war profiteer. A moment before sending his soldiers into battle, he found the time to sell his shares, in expectation of a decline of the stock market. (Let us hope that a moment before the end he found the time to buy them back again.)
Victory, as is well known, has many fathers, and failure in war is an orphan.
FROM THE deluge of accusations and gripes, one slogan stands out , a slogan that must send a cold shiver down the spine of anyone with a good memory: "the politicians did not let the army win."
Exactly as I wrote two weeks ago, we see before our very eyes the resurrection of the old cry "they stabbed the army in the back!"
This is how it goes: At long last, two days before the end, the land offensive started to roll. Thanks to our heroic soldiers, the men of the reserves, it was a dazzling success. And then, when we were on the verge of a great victory, the cease-fire came into effect.
There is not a single word of truth in this. This operation, which was planned and which the army spent years training for, was not carried out earlier, because it was clear that it would not bring any meaningful gains but would be costly in lives. The army would, indeed, have occupied wide areas, but without being able to dislodge the Hizbullah fighters from them.
The town of Bint Jbeil, for example, right next to the border, was taken by the army three times, and the Hizbullah fighters remained there to the end. If we had occupied 20 towns and villages like this one, the soldiers and the tanks would have been exposed in twenty places to the mortal attacks of the guerillas with their highly effective anti-tank weapons.
If so, why was it decided, at the last moment, to carry out this operation after all - well after the UN had already called for an end to hostilities? The horrific answer: it was a cynical - not to say vile - exercise of the failed trio. Olmert, Peretz and Halutz wanted to create "a picture of victory", as was openly stated in the media. On this altar the lives of 33 soldiers (including a young woman) were sacrificed.
The aim was to photograph the victorious soldiers on the bank of the Litani. The operation could only last 48 hours, when the cease-fire would come into force. In spite of the fact that the army used helicopters to land the troops, the aim was not attained. At no point did the army reach the Litani.
For comparison: in the first Lebanon war, that of Sharon in 1982, the army crossed the Litani in the first few hours. (The Litani, by the way, is not a real river anymore, but just a shallow creek. Most of its waters are drawn off far from there, in the north. Its last stretch is about 25 km distant from the border, near Metulla the distance is only 4 km.)
This time, when the cease-fire took effect, all the units taking part had reached villages on the way to the river. There they became sitting ducks, surrounded by Hizbullah fighters, without secure supply lines. From that moment on, the army had only one aim: to get them out of there as quickly as possible, regardless of who might take their place.
If a commission of inquiry is set up - as it must be - and investigates all the moves of this war, starting from the way the decision to start it was made, it will also have to investigate the decision to start this last operation. The death of 33 soldiers (including the son of the writer David Grossman, who had supported the war RM: but called just before the push for an end to it - see earlier in this blog) and the pain this caused their families demand that!
BUT THESE facts are not yet clear to the general public. The brain-washing by the military commentators and the ex-generals, who dominated the media at the time, has turned the foolish - I would almost say "criminal" - operation into a rousing victory parade. The decision of the political leadership to stop it is now being seen by many as an act of defeatist, spineless, corrupt and even treasonous politicians.
And that is exactly the new slogan of the fascist Right that is now raising its ugly head.
After World War I, in similar circumstances, the legend of the "knife in the back of the victorious army" grew up. Adolf Hitler used it to carry him to power - and on to World War II.
Now, even before the last fallen soldier has been buried, the incompetent generals are starting to talk shamelessly about "another round", the next war that will surely come "in a month or in a year", God willing. After all, we cannot end the matter like this, in failure. Where is our pride?
THE ISRAELI public is now in a state of shock and disorientation. Accusations - justified and unjustified - are flung around in all directions, and it cannot be foreseen how things will develop.
Perhaps, in the end, it is logic that will win. Logic says: what has thoroughly been demonstrated is that there is no military solution. That is true in the North. That is also true in the South, where we are confronting a whole people that has nothing to lose anymore. The success of the Lebanese guerilla will encourage the Palestinian guerilla.
For logic to win, we must be honest with ourselves: pinpoint the failures, investigate their deeper causes, draw the proper conclusions.
Some people want to prevent that at any price. President Bush declares vociferously that we have won the war. A glorious victory over the Evil Ones. Like his own victory in Iraq.
When a football team is able to choose the referee, it is no surprise if it is declared the winner.
Uri Avnery
Ha'aretz, August 16, 2006
THIRTY THREE days of war. The longest of our wars since 1949.
On the Israeli side: 154 dead - 117 of them soldiers. 3970 rockets launched against us, 37 civilians dead, more than 422 civilians wounded.
On the Lebanese side: about a thousand dead civilians, thousands wounded. An unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead and wounded.
More than a million refugees on both sides.So what has been achieved for this terrible price?
"GLOOMY, HUMBLE, despondent," was how the journalist Yossef Werter described Ehud Olmert, a few hours after the cease-fire had come into effect.
Olmert? Humble? Is this the same Olmert we know? The same Olmert who thumped the table and shouted: "No more!" Who said: "After the war, the situation will be completely different than before!" Who promised a "New Middle East" as a result of the war?
THE RESULTS of the war are obvious:
The prisoners, who served as casus belli (or pretext) for the war, have not been released. They will come back only as a result of an exchange of prisoners, exactly as Hassan Nasrallah proposed before the war.
Hizbullah has remained as it was. It has not been destroyed, nor disarmed, nor even removed from where it was. Its fighters have proved themselves in battle and have even garnered compliments from Israeli soldiers. Its command and communication stucture has continued to function to the end. Its TV station is still broadcasting.
Hassan Nasrallah is alive and kicking. Persistent attempts to kill him failed. His prestige is sky-high. Everywhere in the Arab world, from Morocco to Iraq, songs are being composed in his honor and his picture adorns the walls.
The Lebanese army will be deployed along the border, side by side with a large international force. That is the only material change that has been achieved.
This will not replace Hizbullah. Hizbullah will remain in the area, in every village and town. The Israeli army has not succeeded in removing it from one single village. That was simply impossible without permanently removing the population to which it belongs.
The Lebanese army and the international force cannot and will not confront Hizbullah. Their very presence there depends on Hizbullah's consent. In practice, a kind of co-existence of the three forces will come into being, each one knowing that it has to come to terms with the other two.
Perhaps the international force will be able to prevent incursions by Hizbullah, such as the one that preceded this war. But it will also have to prevent Israeli actions, such as the reconnaissance flights of our Air Force over Lebanon. That's why the Israeli army objected, at the beginning, so strenuously to the introduction of this force.
IN ISRAEL, there is now a general atmosphere of disappointment and despondency. From mania to depression. It's not only that the politicians and the generals are firing accusations at each other, as we foresaw, but the general public is also voicing criticism from every possible angle. The soldiers criticize the conduct of the war, the reserve soldiers gripe about the chaos and the failure of supplies.
In all parties, there are new opposition groupings and threats of splits. In Kadima. In Labor. It seems that in Meretz, too, there is a lot of ferment, because most of its leaders supported the war dragon almost until the last moment, when they caught its tail and pierced it with their little lance.
At the head of the critics are marching - surprise, surprise - the media. The entire horde of interviewers and commentators, correspondents and presstitutes, who (with very few exceptions) enthused about the war, who deceived, misled, falsified, ignored, duped and lied for the fatherland, who stifled all criticism and branded as traitors all who opposed the war - they are now running ahead of the lynch mob. How predictable, how ugly. Suddenly they remember what we have been saying right from the beginning of the war.
This phase is symbolized by Dan Halutz, the Chief-of-Staff. Only yesterday he was the hero of the masses, it was forbidden to utter a word against him. Now he is being described as a war profiteer. A moment before sending his soldiers into battle, he found the time to sell his shares, in expectation of a decline of the stock market. (Let us hope that a moment before the end he found the time to buy them back again.)
Victory, as is well known, has many fathers, and failure in war is an orphan.
FROM THE deluge of accusations and gripes, one slogan stands out , a slogan that must send a cold shiver down the spine of anyone with a good memory: "the politicians did not let the army win."
Exactly as I wrote two weeks ago, we see before our very eyes the resurrection of the old cry "they stabbed the army in the back!"
This is how it goes: At long last, two days before the end, the land offensive started to roll. Thanks to our heroic soldiers, the men of the reserves, it was a dazzling success. And then, when we were on the verge of a great victory, the cease-fire came into effect.
There is not a single word of truth in this. This operation, which was planned and which the army spent years training for, was not carried out earlier, because it was clear that it would not bring any meaningful gains but would be costly in lives. The army would, indeed, have occupied wide areas, but without being able to dislodge the Hizbullah fighters from them.
The town of Bint Jbeil, for example, right next to the border, was taken by the army three times, and the Hizbullah fighters remained there to the end. If we had occupied 20 towns and villages like this one, the soldiers and the tanks would have been exposed in twenty places to the mortal attacks of the guerillas with their highly effective anti-tank weapons.
If so, why was it decided, at the last moment, to carry out this operation after all - well after the UN had already called for an end to hostilities? The horrific answer: it was a cynical - not to say vile - exercise of the failed trio. Olmert, Peretz and Halutz wanted to create "a picture of victory", as was openly stated in the media. On this altar the lives of 33 soldiers (including a young woman) were sacrificed.
The aim was to photograph the victorious soldiers on the bank of the Litani. The operation could only last 48 hours, when the cease-fire would come into force. In spite of the fact that the army used helicopters to land the troops, the aim was not attained. At no point did the army reach the Litani.
For comparison: in the first Lebanon war, that of Sharon in 1982, the army crossed the Litani in the first few hours. (The Litani, by the way, is not a real river anymore, but just a shallow creek. Most of its waters are drawn off far from there, in the north. Its last stretch is about 25 km distant from the border, near Metulla the distance is only 4 km.)
This time, when the cease-fire took effect, all the units taking part had reached villages on the way to the river. There they became sitting ducks, surrounded by Hizbullah fighters, without secure supply lines. From that moment on, the army had only one aim: to get them out of there as quickly as possible, regardless of who might take their place.
If a commission of inquiry is set up - as it must be - and investigates all the moves of this war, starting from the way the decision to start it was made, it will also have to investigate the decision to start this last operation. The death of 33 soldiers (including the son of the writer David Grossman, who had supported the war RM: but called just before the push for an end to it - see earlier in this blog) and the pain this caused their families demand that!
BUT THESE facts are not yet clear to the general public. The brain-washing by the military commentators and the ex-generals, who dominated the media at the time, has turned the foolish - I would almost say "criminal" - operation into a rousing victory parade. The decision of the political leadership to stop it is now being seen by many as an act of defeatist, spineless, corrupt and even treasonous politicians.
And that is exactly the new slogan of the fascist Right that is now raising its ugly head.
After World War I, in similar circumstances, the legend of the "knife in the back of the victorious army" grew up. Adolf Hitler used it to carry him to power - and on to World War II.
Now, even before the last fallen soldier has been buried, the incompetent generals are starting to talk shamelessly about "another round", the next war that will surely come "in a month or in a year", God willing. After all, we cannot end the matter like this, in failure. Where is our pride?
THE ISRAELI public is now in a state of shock and disorientation. Accusations - justified and unjustified - are flung around in all directions, and it cannot be foreseen how things will develop.
Perhaps, in the end, it is logic that will win. Logic says: what has thoroughly been demonstrated is that there is no military solution. That is true in the North. That is also true in the South, where we are confronting a whole people that has nothing to lose anymore. The success of the Lebanese guerilla will encourage the Palestinian guerilla.
For logic to win, we must be honest with ourselves: pinpoint the failures, investigate their deeper causes, draw the proper conclusions.
Some people want to prevent that at any price. President Bush declares vociferously that we have won the war. A glorious victory over the Evil Ones. Like his own victory in Iraq.
When a football team is able to choose the referee, it is no surprise if it is declared the winner.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Haifa zoo animals stressed out after confinement due to war
By The Associated Press
Ha'aretz, August 15, 2006
A female bear resting at the entrance to a bomb shelter at Haifa Zoo on Tuesday (AP)
After 34 days in indoor shelters, many of the animals at the Haifa Zoo got a breath of outdoor air - if not a taste of freedom - for the first time on Tuesday.
During a month-long barrage of rocket fire from Hezbollah guerillas, the baboons got stressed, the lions got fat and zoo officials worry the antelopes might have heart attacks.
Zoo officials moved all the carnivores, bears and monkeys indoors at the start of the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, both to protect them from rocket strikes and to keep an errant missile on a retaining wall from setting them loose into Israel's third-largest city.
"The lions gained weight, but they look basically OK," said zoo manager Etty Ararat as he released them outdoors on Tuesday. Hours before, the lions roared and flashed their teeth at reporters who visited them at the 3 by 2-meter-(yard) indoor cages where they were confined for more than a month.
"Baboons suffered from stress," Ararat said.Most of all, he worried about the more fragile animals, like the gazelles, who had to stay outside while thousands of explosions went off around them.
"These animals sometimes die instantly from a heart attack several weeks after they were traumatized," he said.
But all the animals seemed pleased when they were allowed to venture out with the declaration of a cease-fire on Monday.
"They're thrilled, very happy. It's like a new place for them," said veterinarian Ayelet Shmueli.
A troop of baboons scrambled to get outside through a little gate before it was even fully opened on the first day they were allowed out. Bears paced nervously, and a tiger blinked hard in the morning sun.
"But we don't know what will be the impact of the fact they were enclosed for so long," Shmueli said.
While indoors, zoo officials were forced to get creative to keep the animals from going crazy.
"We hung sacks of meat on the ceilings of the leopards' and tigers' cages so they had to jump to get them," zookeeper Yoav Ratner said. The handlers stuffed pumpkins full of meat, he added. They filled bamboo poles with jelly "so the monkeys had to do a bit of work to get the jelly," he said.
The war also hurt the zoo itself. July and August, usually the busiest months for visitors, were completely wiped out financially because of the war.
"We had no revenues and I had a lot of extra expenses," Ararat, the manager said. Those expenses included buying meat the zoo usually got for free because markets had shut down, and buying tranquilizers just in case one of the animals got loose in the city, he said.
Photo fraud - or resurrection? - at Qana?
Those for whom the issue of photo fraud is relevant, among all the undoubted death and destruction, might want to consult the following site:
http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx
And you can also cConsult David Frankfurter's site for a clear explanation of what to do to see the two figures in this picture which are considered to be proof of photo fraud:
http://dfrankfurter.livejournal.com/77833.html
David writes:
The front page of the Washington Post of 31 July 2006, had a dramatic photo by Lefteris Pitarakis of AP, captioned "A resident of Qana, in southern Lebanon, weeps as he shows the bodies of some of the 57 victims of an Israeli airstrike on a building being used as a shelter."
Long after the event, with so many questions reverberating in the blogosphere as to whether much of the events in Qana (or at least their journalistic aftermath) were, in fact staged, one would think that a self-respecting editor would very closely scrutinise photos for possible hints of Hezballywood.
Click on the picture on the left and give it a few minutes to load. Courtesy of PressDisplay.com, you will enter a site that lets you enlarge the page using the magnifying glass tool (at the bottom of the screen). Then click and drag your mouse to cruise around reasonably high resolution image of the page. Move up to the the last "body" in the row. Someone forgot to tell him that the photo-op wasn't quite over, and that he really should play dead for just a few more minutes.
And try to make up your own minds.
Remember that the figures of nearly 60 casualties were adjusted down to just under 30 a few days later.
And still, as I wrote at the time, pray for us...
http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx
And you can also cConsult David Frankfurter's site for a clear explanation of what to do to see the two figures in this picture which are considered to be proof of photo fraud:
http://dfrankfurter.livejournal.com/77833.html
David writes:
The front page of the Washington Post of 31 July 2006, had a dramatic photo by Lefteris Pitarakis of AP, captioned "A resident of Qana, in southern Lebanon, weeps as he shows the bodies of some of the 57 victims of an Israeli airstrike on a building being used as a shelter."
Long after the event, with so many questions reverberating in the blogosphere as to whether much of the events in Qana (or at least their journalistic aftermath) were, in fact staged, one would think that a self-respecting editor would very closely scrutinise photos for possible hints of Hezballywood.
Click on the picture on the left and give it a few minutes to load. Courtesy of PressDisplay.com, you will enter a site that lets you enlarge the page using the magnifying glass tool (at the bottom of the screen). Then click and drag your mouse to cruise around reasonably high resolution image of the page. Move up to the the last "body" in the row. Someone forgot to tell him that the photo-op wasn't quite over, and that he really should play dead for just a few more minutes.
And try to make up your own minds.
Remember that the figures of nearly 60 casualties were adjusted down to just under 30 a few days later.
And still, as I wrote at the time, pray for us...
It's official - no such city as Jerusalem. Honest!
On a lighter note, I am pleased to report that, in its wisdom, the Jerusalem Municipality has ruled:
I would like to remind the readers of this blog that its owner and her spouse (aka Daisyabba) are suing the Jerusalem Municipality over its collusion, connivance, and general cooperation in the construction of an illegal and sub-standard structure...
May such lighter notes come to characterize this blog rather than its content of the last month.
And may I catch up with my translation commitments!
PS Those of you who remember me asking weeks ago when the prime minister would be addressing the nation may be interested to know that yesterday, both he and the head of the Opposition spoke in the Knesset.
Unquestionably, Bibi's speech was the better of the two.
Watch this space...
I would like to remind the readers of this blog that its owner and her spouse (aka Daisyabba) are suing the Jerusalem Municipality over its collusion, connivance, and general cooperation in the construction of an illegal and sub-standard structure...
May such lighter notes come to characterize this blog rather than its content of the last month.
And may I catch up with my translation commitments!
PS Those of you who remember me asking weeks ago when the prime minister would be addressing the nation may be interested to know that yesterday, both he and the head of the Opposition spoke in the Knesset.
Unquestionably, Bibi's speech was the better of the two.
Watch this space...
Monday, August 14, 2006
"Bleeding-heart ignoramuses" - British columnist Julie Burchill
Bleeding-heart ignoramuses
By Julie Burchill (non-Jewish British columnist)
Published in Ha'aretz, Monday, August 13, 2006
A few weeks back it was my birthday, and my equally non-Jewish journalist friend Chas Newkey-Burden took his life in his hands and presented me with a cuddly toy. Now, normally I feel that people who bother with cuddly toys over the age of eight are either mad and/or prostitutes, but this little sweetie stole my heart. A honey-brown camel with a heart-melting smile and a jaunty cap, he proudly wore an Israeli Army uniform with a fetching hole cut out for his hump. "I've named him Bibi," Chas told me, obviously in honor of our mutual crush.
Later that night Chas and I were watching a TV news report of the beginnings of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. To say we were amazed when a news presenter solemnly intoned that there had been "two militants wounded" with all the grieving gravitas of Richard Dimbleby reporting on the state funeral of the late Winston Churchill is to employ English understatement to an almost surreal degree. But it's been that way ever since - and more than one night has seen me screaming at the TV/my husband "You don't understand! None of you English bastards understands!" before running into the bedroom, slamming the door and collapsing in a tearful heap with only Bibi to comfort me.
One of the most grotesque examples of the almost brainwashed level of bias can be seen on the official BBC Religions Web site, where that "peace be upon him" eyewash is going on like crazy, while other religions are coolly commented on in a strictly "objective" way.
The conflict has sent this tendency into overdrive, with not just the usual Masochist Hacks For Mohammed such as Robert Fisk (beaten up by Islamists, says they were right to do it) and Yvonne Ridley (kidnapped by Islamists, then became one) getting their chadors in a twist about big swarthy men with tea-towels on their heads treating the West mean and keeping it - in their case at least - keen.
Even the women's magazines have gotten in on the act, with lots of first-person eye-witness accounts of British citizens fleeing the Jewish jackboot. Then turn the page and you'll often find a shocked article about honor-killing or forced marriage, Muslim-style. That Israel is fighting the frontline war, on behalf of the freedom and civilization of all of us, against the very real evils of shari'a law never seems to occur to these bleeding-heart ignoramuses.
Over at Channel 4, Jon Snow interviewed an Israeli diplomat with all the finesse and objectivity of a neo-Nazi spraying a six-foot swastika on a wall. Of the rockets which murdered Israeli civilians in the town of Sderot, he said "Rockets, pretty pathetic things - nobody gets injured." This was gleefully picked up and proclaimed by The Guardian, the newspaper I left some years ago in protest at what I saw as its vile anti-Semitism.
All across the board, Lebanese civilians are referred to as "civilians" where Israeli civilians are referred to as "Israelis" - an eerie and sinister difference pointed out by the non-Jewish stand-up comic genius Natalie Haynes, and one which very few people appear to have noticed - even me, until then.
In fact the tone in papers as diverse as the "liberal" Guardian to the right-wing Daily Mail has been repulsively similar; look, look, the Israelis are as bad as the terrorists! Worse, in fact, because they've got America behind them! Even the normally sensible Matthew Parris in the normally sensible Times wrote: "The past 40 years have been a catastrophe, gradual and incremental, for world Jewry. Seldom in history have the name and reputation of a human grouping lost so vast a store of support and sympathy so fast."
The catastrophe he refers to is the State of Israel itself; you'd really think, reading this, that the years leading up to the creation of the Jewish state were, in fact, a right royal romp in the park. Instead of the Holocaust.
A surprising number of British people - especially the super-creepy British Jews who recently signed a treacherous letter to the press distancing themselves from Israel's actions - seem to think Israel should exist not as a real, imperfect country full of real, imperfect people led by real, imperfect leaders, but as some sort of collective kosher Mater Dolorosa, there to provide a selfless, suffering example to the rest of us.
Fight back, and the outside world reacts with the revulsion of a man seeing his sainted grandmother drunk and offering sailors outside. Even (especially?) anti-Semites and enemies of Israel are shameless in recycling the legends of "brave little Israel" - I'm thinking of David and Goliath here - and basically believe that each IDF member should go into battle against the assembled hordes of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah armed with nothing but a slingshot apiece. Failing that, this tiny country must embark on a suicidal act of self-sacrifice in the face of murderous, genocidal hatred, as Matthew Parris astoundingly suggests:
"The settlement has to be a return to its pre-1967 boundaries. Precisely because Israel is by no means forced to make so generous a move, the international support (even love) this would generate would secure its future permanently. It would bring it back within the pale."
Personally, I'd far prefer the Jews to be angry, aggressive and alive than meek, mild and dead - and that's what makes me and a minority like me feel so much like strangers in our own country, now more than ever. I've always loved being a hack, but now even that feels weird, as though I'm living among a bunch of snatched-body zombies who look like journalists but believe and say the most inhuman, evil things.
When Mel Gibson was picked up for drunk-driving recently, he was reported to have screamed at the police officer, whom he believed to be Jewish, "Fucking Jews! The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." His subsequent excuse was that he has "battled the disease of alcoholism for all my adult life." The British media are notorious for our love of the hard stuff; is that going to be our excuse too, I wonder, when large numbers of us are finally bang to rights for peddling the same loathsome lie?
By Julie Burchill (non-Jewish British columnist)
Published in Ha'aretz, Monday, August 13, 2006
A few weeks back it was my birthday, and my equally non-Jewish journalist friend Chas Newkey-Burden took his life in his hands and presented me with a cuddly toy. Now, normally I feel that people who bother with cuddly toys over the age of eight are either mad and/or prostitutes, but this little sweetie stole my heart. A honey-brown camel with a heart-melting smile and a jaunty cap, he proudly wore an Israeli Army uniform with a fetching hole cut out for his hump. "I've named him Bibi," Chas told me, obviously in honor of our mutual crush.
Later that night Chas and I were watching a TV news report of the beginnings of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. To say we were amazed when a news presenter solemnly intoned that there had been "two militants wounded" with all the grieving gravitas of Richard Dimbleby reporting on the state funeral of the late Winston Churchill is to employ English understatement to an almost surreal degree. But it's been that way ever since - and more than one night has seen me screaming at the TV/my husband "You don't understand! None of you English bastards understands!" before running into the bedroom, slamming the door and collapsing in a tearful heap with only Bibi to comfort me.
One of the most grotesque examples of the almost brainwashed level of bias can be seen on the official BBC Religions Web site, where that "peace be upon him" eyewash is going on like crazy, while other religions are coolly commented on in a strictly "objective" way.
The conflict has sent this tendency into overdrive, with not just the usual Masochist Hacks For Mohammed such as Robert Fisk (beaten up by Islamists, says they were right to do it) and Yvonne Ridley (kidnapped by Islamists, then became one) getting their chadors in a twist about big swarthy men with tea-towels on their heads treating the West mean and keeping it - in their case at least - keen.
Even the women's magazines have gotten in on the act, with lots of first-person eye-witness accounts of British citizens fleeing the Jewish jackboot. Then turn the page and you'll often find a shocked article about honor-killing or forced marriage, Muslim-style. That Israel is fighting the frontline war, on behalf of the freedom and civilization of all of us, against the very real evils of shari'a law never seems to occur to these bleeding-heart ignoramuses.
Over at Channel 4, Jon Snow interviewed an Israeli diplomat with all the finesse and objectivity of a neo-Nazi spraying a six-foot swastika on a wall. Of the rockets which murdered Israeli civilians in the town of Sderot, he said "Rockets, pretty pathetic things - nobody gets injured." This was gleefully picked up and proclaimed by The Guardian, the newspaper I left some years ago in protest at what I saw as its vile anti-Semitism.
All across the board, Lebanese civilians are referred to as "civilians" where Israeli civilians are referred to as "Israelis" - an eerie and sinister difference pointed out by the non-Jewish stand-up comic genius Natalie Haynes, and one which very few people appear to have noticed - even me, until then.
In fact the tone in papers as diverse as the "liberal" Guardian to the right-wing Daily Mail has been repulsively similar; look, look, the Israelis are as bad as the terrorists! Worse, in fact, because they've got America behind them! Even the normally sensible Matthew Parris in the normally sensible Times wrote: "The past 40 years have been a catastrophe, gradual and incremental, for world Jewry. Seldom in history have the name and reputation of a human grouping lost so vast a store of support and sympathy so fast."
The catastrophe he refers to is the State of Israel itself; you'd really think, reading this, that the years leading up to the creation of the Jewish state were, in fact, a right royal romp in the park. Instead of the Holocaust.
A surprising number of British people - especially the super-creepy British Jews who recently signed a treacherous letter to the press distancing themselves from Israel's actions - seem to think Israel should exist not as a real, imperfect country full of real, imperfect people led by real, imperfect leaders, but as some sort of collective kosher Mater Dolorosa, there to provide a selfless, suffering example to the rest of us.
Fight back, and the outside world reacts with the revulsion of a man seeing his sainted grandmother drunk and offering sailors outside. Even (especially?) anti-Semites and enemies of Israel are shameless in recycling the legends of "brave little Israel" - I'm thinking of David and Goliath here - and basically believe that each IDF member should go into battle against the assembled hordes of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah armed with nothing but a slingshot apiece. Failing that, this tiny country must embark on a suicidal act of self-sacrifice in the face of murderous, genocidal hatred, as Matthew Parris astoundingly suggests:
"The settlement has to be a return to its pre-1967 boundaries. Precisely because Israel is by no means forced to make so generous a move, the international support (even love) this would generate would secure its future permanently. It would bring it back within the pale."
Personally, I'd far prefer the Jews to be angry, aggressive and alive than meek, mild and dead - and that's what makes me and a minority like me feel so much like strangers in our own country, now more than ever. I've always loved being a hack, but now even that feels weird, as though I'm living among a bunch of snatched-body zombies who look like journalists but believe and say the most inhuman, evil things.
When Mel Gibson was picked up for drunk-driving recently, he was reported to have screamed at the police officer, whom he believed to be Jewish, "Fucking Jews! The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." His subsequent excuse was that he has "battled the disease of alcoholism for all my adult life." The British media are notorious for our love of the hard stuff; is that going to be our excuse too, I wonder, when large numbers of us are finally bang to rights for peddling the same loathsome lie?
A spirit of absolute folly
A spirit of absolute folly
By Ari Shavit
Ha'aretz, August 13, 2003
In the difficult summer of 2006, the State of Israel is declaring in astonishment: They surprised us. They surprised us in a big way. They surprised us with Katyushas and they surprised us with the Al-Fajr rockets and they surprised us with the Zelzal missiles. They surprised us with anti-tank missiles. And they surprised us with the operational skill of theanti-tank squads. They surprised us with the bunkers and the camouflage. They surprised us with the command and monitoring. They surprised us with strategy, fighting ability and a fighting spirit. They surprised us with the astonishing power that a small death-army with low technology and high religious motivation can have.
However, more than they surprised us in Summer 2006 with the strength of Hezbollah, they surprised us this summer with our own weakness. They surprised us with ourselves. They surprised us with the low level of national leadership. They surprised us with scandalous strategic bumbling. They surprised us with the lack of vision, lack of creativity and lack of determination on the part of the senior military command. They surprised us with faulty intelligence and a delusionary logistical network and improper preparedness for war. They surprised us with the fact that the Israeli warmachine is not what it once was. While we were celebrating it became rusty.
Generally it is not right to conduct an in-depth investigation of a wartime failure during a war. However, at the end of the most embarrassing year of Israeli defense since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Israeli government is not drawing conclusions. It is not reorganizing the system, there is no evidence of a real learning curve and it is not radiating a new ethos. On the contrary: It is adding another layer of folly onto a previous one. Its slowness to react is dangerous. Its caution is a recipe for disaster. Its attempt to prevent bloodshed is costing a greatdeal of bloodshed. So that now of all times, just when the forces are moving toward south Lebanon, there is no escaping the question of where we went wrong. It is so that Israel will be able to achieve a last-minute victory and so that the troops will be able to achieve their goals and so the soldiers will be able to return home safely, that we must ask already now: What happened to us? What the hell happened to us?
A simple thing happened: We were drugged by political correctness. The political correctness that has come to dominate Israeli discourse and Israeli awareness in the past generation was totally divorced from the Israeli situation. It did not have the tools to deal with the reality of an existential conflict. It did not have the tools to deal with a reality of an inter-religious and inter-cultural conflict. That is why it focused entirely on the Palestinian issue. It made the baseless assumption that the occupation is the source of evil. It assumed that it is the occupation that is preventing peace and causing unrest and perpetuating the instability.
At the same time, political correctness assumed that Israeli strength is a given. That Israel is insanely strong. Therefore, political correctness disdained any attempt to build and maintain Israeli strength. The defense budget was cut, the values of volunteerism were mocked, the concepts of heroism and fortitude became despicable. Since the Israel Defense Forces was identified as an army of occupation - rather than as an army defending feminists and homo-lesbians from the fanaticism of the Middle East - they had reservations about it, they shook it off and became alienated from it. After all, in the spiritual world of political correctness, power and army have become dirty words.
Any national idea was rejected because of the sanctity of the private sphere. Every cooperative ethos was dismantled in favor of the individual. Power was identified with fascism. Masculinity was publicly condemned. The pursuit of absolute justice was mixed with the pursuit of absolute pleasure and turned the reigning discourse from a discourse of commitment and enlistment to one of protest and pampering.
Another thing happened: We were poisoned with an illusion of normalcy. The State of Israel is fundamentally an abnormal state. Just because it is a Jewish state in an Arab region, and just because it is a Western country in a Muslim region, and just because it is a democratic state in a region of fanaticism and despotism, Israel is in constant tension with its surroundings. On the one hand, because of the situation in which it finds itself, Israel cannot live a life of European normalcy. On the other hand, because of its values and its structure in terms of identity, economics and culture, Israel cannot avoid being a part of European normalcy.
Therefore Israel is in a constant state of basic contradiction. The way to resolve this contradiction is to create a positive anomaly - both ideological and ethical - that will provide an answer to the negative anomaly in which Israel exists. There is no other way: Israel must prepare a defense envelope that will protect its internal environment from the external environment surrounding it. Life in defiance of the environment is an essential part of Israeli existence.
However, in the past generation this cruel insight has dissipated, the delusion has spread that we have overcome our problems and reached a state of tranquility, and that we can live in this place like any other nation. This illusion led to a situation where the positive Israeli anomaly gradually became blurred, and the energies devoted to maintaining the defensive shield that isolates Israel from the region and protects it from this region were drastically reduced. Weakness prevailed. Our willpower was weakened. The bubble so inebriated the Israelis that they didn't bother to surround it with a fortified wall. Therefore, the pressures of the external environment steadily increased - with the terror of 2002 and the Qassams of 2005 and the Katyushas of 2006 - until they penetrated deep inside the Israeli environment. Thus was created the paradox that those who wanted to believe that Israel could be totally normal were the ones who caused it to decline into a chaotic situation of total anomaly and a loss of balance.
Both political correctness and the illusion-of-normalcy spread first and foremost among the Israeli elites. The Israeli public in general has remained for the most part sober and strong. It did not err with illusions of a new Middle East. It did not turn its back on the existential imperative, the defense ethos and the IDF. Even its core values were not destroyed. Therefore, it impressively withstood both the test of terror of 2001-2003 and the test of "fire-on-the-home front" of 2006. It demonstrated an almost British fortitude and continues to do so.
On the other hand, the Israeli elites of the past 20 years have become totally divorced from reality. The capital, the media and the academic world of the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, have blinded Israel and deprived it of its spirit. Their repeated illusions regarding the historical reality in which the Jewish state finds itself, caused Israel to make a navigational error and to lose its way. Their unending attacks, both direct and indirect, on nationalism, on militarism and on the Zionist narrative have eaten away from the inside at the tree trunk of Israeli existence, and sucked away its life force. While the general public demonstrated sobriety, determination and energy, the elites were a disappointment. Capital brought the illusion-of-normalcy ad absurdum, and established a crushing social-economic regime here that does not suit the historical situation. The academic world promoted political correctness ad absurdum and conducted a somewhat suicidal spirit of criticism here. And the media combined the two and created a hallucinatory state of mind, which combines unbridled consumerism with false righteousness.
Instead of being constructive elites, in the past generation the Israeli elites have become dismantling elites. Each in its own area, each by its own method, dealt with the deconstruction of the Zionism enterprise. Step by step, the top 1000th percentiles abandoned the existential national effort. They stopped doing reserve duty, they stopped sending their sons tothe fighting units. They mocked those officers who warned about unilateral withdrawals. They mocked those officers who warned that the emergency warehouses were emptying out and the enemies were becoming stronger. And they deceived themselves and those around them that Tel Aviv is in fact Manhattan. Money is in fact everything. And thus they bequeathed to young Israelis a legacy of values that makes it very difficult for them to attack even when the attack is fully justified. Because a country that lacks equality, that lacks justice and that lacks faith in the rightness of its path, is a country for which it is very difficult to go on the attack. It is a country for which not many are willing to kill and be killed.
And in the Middle East of the 21st century, a country whose young elites find it difficult to kill and be killed for it is a country on borrowed time. A country that cannot endure. So that what is now beingrevealed before our eyes, as the smoke of the Katyushas continues to rise from the Lebanese thicket, is not a failure of the IDF but a failure of the elites that turned their back on the IDF. What is being revealed now, when Israel cannot properly protect the lives of its citizens, is not problems of command and problems of tactics, but rather deep-seated problems of a society whose elites have abandoned it. It is not Major-General Udi Adam or Brigadier-General Gal Hirsch who are the problem, it is the Israeli spirit. A spirit that for far too long has been a spirit of stupidity. A spirit of absolute folly.
Usually, the accusation of folly is directed at battle-hungry generals and warmongering politicians. However, at the end of this war, the accusation of folly will be directed at an entire cadre of Israeli opinion-makers and social leaders who lived in a bubble and caused Israel to live in a bubble. The army will be required to put its house in order and to rebuild, but the true anger will be directed toward the elites who failed. Elites who betrayed the trust of a wise, impressive and strong nation.
However, now it is wartime. The citizens of the north are still in bomb shelters, the soldiers of the regular and standing armies are risking their lives in a war that was not properly planned or properly defined and is being conducted poorly. Therefore, what is needed now is to operate quickly, to operate while in motion, in order to strengthen the spirit of those participating in the battle. What is needed is to create immediately a new discourse that will suit the new situation. Without a new spirit and without a new language there will be no victory in the fighting. Therefore, while the war is raging we must find the spirit and we must find the language that we lost in the years preceding the war.
Israel tried with all its soul and all its might to be Athens. However in this place, in this era, there is no future for an Athens without a speck of Sparta. There is no hope for a society-of-life that does not know how to organize itself to deal with death. Therefore, after decades during which the right and the left and the center took Israeli power for granted and wastefully exploited it, now there is no escaping the need to place the renewed building of Israeli power at the top of the agenda. We are returningto the encounter with our fate; returning to what is decreed by the reality of our lives.
By Ari Shavit
Ha'aretz, August 13, 2003
In the difficult summer of 2006, the State of Israel is declaring in astonishment: They surprised us. They surprised us in a big way. They surprised us with Katyushas and they surprised us with the Al-Fajr rockets and they surprised us with the Zelzal missiles. They surprised us with anti-tank missiles. And they surprised us with the operational skill of theanti-tank squads. They surprised us with the bunkers and the camouflage. They surprised us with the command and monitoring. They surprised us with strategy, fighting ability and a fighting spirit. They surprised us with the astonishing power that a small death-army with low technology and high religious motivation can have.
However, more than they surprised us in Summer 2006 with the strength of Hezbollah, they surprised us this summer with our own weakness. They surprised us with ourselves. They surprised us with the low level of national leadership. They surprised us with scandalous strategic bumbling. They surprised us with the lack of vision, lack of creativity and lack of determination on the part of the senior military command. They surprised us with faulty intelligence and a delusionary logistical network and improper preparedness for war. They surprised us with the fact that the Israeli warmachine is not what it once was. While we were celebrating it became rusty.
Generally it is not right to conduct an in-depth investigation of a wartime failure during a war. However, at the end of the most embarrassing year of Israeli defense since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Israeli government is not drawing conclusions. It is not reorganizing the system, there is no evidence of a real learning curve and it is not radiating a new ethos. On the contrary: It is adding another layer of folly onto a previous one. Its slowness to react is dangerous. Its caution is a recipe for disaster. Its attempt to prevent bloodshed is costing a greatdeal of bloodshed. So that now of all times, just when the forces are moving toward south Lebanon, there is no escaping the question of where we went wrong. It is so that Israel will be able to achieve a last-minute victory and so that the troops will be able to achieve their goals and so the soldiers will be able to return home safely, that we must ask already now: What happened to us? What the hell happened to us?
A simple thing happened: We were drugged by political correctness. The political correctness that has come to dominate Israeli discourse and Israeli awareness in the past generation was totally divorced from the Israeli situation. It did not have the tools to deal with the reality of an existential conflict. It did not have the tools to deal with a reality of an inter-religious and inter-cultural conflict. That is why it focused entirely on the Palestinian issue. It made the baseless assumption that the occupation is the source of evil. It assumed that it is the occupation that is preventing peace and causing unrest and perpetuating the instability.
At the same time, political correctness assumed that Israeli strength is a given. That Israel is insanely strong. Therefore, political correctness disdained any attempt to build and maintain Israeli strength. The defense budget was cut, the values of volunteerism were mocked, the concepts of heroism and fortitude became despicable. Since the Israel Defense Forces was identified as an army of occupation - rather than as an army defending feminists and homo-lesbians from the fanaticism of the Middle East - they had reservations about it, they shook it off and became alienated from it. After all, in the spiritual world of political correctness, power and army have become dirty words.
Any national idea was rejected because of the sanctity of the private sphere. Every cooperative ethos was dismantled in favor of the individual. Power was identified with fascism. Masculinity was publicly condemned. The pursuit of absolute justice was mixed with the pursuit of absolute pleasure and turned the reigning discourse from a discourse of commitment and enlistment to one of protest and pampering.
Another thing happened: We were poisoned with an illusion of normalcy. The State of Israel is fundamentally an abnormal state. Just because it is a Jewish state in an Arab region, and just because it is a Western country in a Muslim region, and just because it is a democratic state in a region of fanaticism and despotism, Israel is in constant tension with its surroundings. On the one hand, because of the situation in which it finds itself, Israel cannot live a life of European normalcy. On the other hand, because of its values and its structure in terms of identity, economics and culture, Israel cannot avoid being a part of European normalcy.
Therefore Israel is in a constant state of basic contradiction. The way to resolve this contradiction is to create a positive anomaly - both ideological and ethical - that will provide an answer to the negative anomaly in which Israel exists. There is no other way: Israel must prepare a defense envelope that will protect its internal environment from the external environment surrounding it. Life in defiance of the environment is an essential part of Israeli existence.
However, in the past generation this cruel insight has dissipated, the delusion has spread that we have overcome our problems and reached a state of tranquility, and that we can live in this place like any other nation. This illusion led to a situation where the positive Israeli anomaly gradually became blurred, and the energies devoted to maintaining the defensive shield that isolates Israel from the region and protects it from this region were drastically reduced. Weakness prevailed. Our willpower was weakened. The bubble so inebriated the Israelis that they didn't bother to surround it with a fortified wall. Therefore, the pressures of the external environment steadily increased - with the terror of 2002 and the Qassams of 2005 and the Katyushas of 2006 - until they penetrated deep inside the Israeli environment. Thus was created the paradox that those who wanted to believe that Israel could be totally normal were the ones who caused it to decline into a chaotic situation of total anomaly and a loss of balance.
Both political correctness and the illusion-of-normalcy spread first and foremost among the Israeli elites. The Israeli public in general has remained for the most part sober and strong. It did not err with illusions of a new Middle East. It did not turn its back on the existential imperative, the defense ethos and the IDF. Even its core values were not destroyed. Therefore, it impressively withstood both the test of terror of 2001-2003 and the test of "fire-on-the-home front" of 2006. It demonstrated an almost British fortitude and continues to do so.
On the other hand, the Israeli elites of the past 20 years have become totally divorced from reality. The capital, the media and the academic world of the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, have blinded Israel and deprived it of its spirit. Their repeated illusions regarding the historical reality in which the Jewish state finds itself, caused Israel to make a navigational error and to lose its way. Their unending attacks, both direct and indirect, on nationalism, on militarism and on the Zionist narrative have eaten away from the inside at the tree trunk of Israeli existence, and sucked away its life force. While the general public demonstrated sobriety, determination and energy, the elites were a disappointment. Capital brought the illusion-of-normalcy ad absurdum, and established a crushing social-economic regime here that does not suit the historical situation. The academic world promoted political correctness ad absurdum and conducted a somewhat suicidal spirit of criticism here. And the media combined the two and created a hallucinatory state of mind, which combines unbridled consumerism with false righteousness.
Instead of being constructive elites, in the past generation the Israeli elites have become dismantling elites. Each in its own area, each by its own method, dealt with the deconstruction of the Zionism enterprise. Step by step, the top 1000th percentiles abandoned the existential national effort. They stopped doing reserve duty, they stopped sending their sons tothe fighting units. They mocked those officers who warned about unilateral withdrawals. They mocked those officers who warned that the emergency warehouses were emptying out and the enemies were becoming stronger. And they deceived themselves and those around them that Tel Aviv is in fact Manhattan. Money is in fact everything. And thus they bequeathed to young Israelis a legacy of values that makes it very difficult for them to attack even when the attack is fully justified. Because a country that lacks equality, that lacks justice and that lacks faith in the rightness of its path, is a country for which it is very difficult to go on the attack. It is a country for which not many are willing to kill and be killed.
And in the Middle East of the 21st century, a country whose young elites find it difficult to kill and be killed for it is a country on borrowed time. A country that cannot endure. So that what is now beingrevealed before our eyes, as the smoke of the Katyushas continues to rise from the Lebanese thicket, is not a failure of the IDF but a failure of the elites that turned their back on the IDF. What is being revealed now, when Israel cannot properly protect the lives of its citizens, is not problems of command and problems of tactics, but rather deep-seated problems of a society whose elites have abandoned it. It is not Major-General Udi Adam or Brigadier-General Gal Hirsch who are the problem, it is the Israeli spirit. A spirit that for far too long has been a spirit of stupidity. A spirit of absolute folly.
Usually, the accusation of folly is directed at battle-hungry generals and warmongering politicians. However, at the end of this war, the accusation of folly will be directed at an entire cadre of Israeli opinion-makers and social leaders who lived in a bubble and caused Israel to live in a bubble. The army will be required to put its house in order and to rebuild, but the true anger will be directed toward the elites who failed. Elites who betrayed the trust of a wise, impressive and strong nation.
However, now it is wartime. The citizens of the north are still in bomb shelters, the soldiers of the regular and standing armies are risking their lives in a war that was not properly planned or properly defined and is being conducted poorly. Therefore, what is needed now is to operate quickly, to operate while in motion, in order to strengthen the spirit of those participating in the battle. What is needed is to create immediately a new discourse that will suit the new situation. Without a new spirit and without a new language there will be no victory in the fighting. Therefore, while the war is raging we must find the spirit and we must find the language that we lost in the years preceding the war.
Israel tried with all its soul and all its might to be Athens. However in this place, in this era, there is no future for an Athens without a speck of Sparta. There is no hope for a society-of-life that does not know how to organize itself to deal with death. Therefore, after decades during which the right and the left and the center took Israeli power for granted and wastefully exploited it, now there is no escaping the need to place the renewed building of Israeli power at the top of the agenda. We are returningto the encounter with our fate; returning to what is decreed by the reality of our lives.
The Face of a Hero - Roi Klein, of blessed memory
http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?AID=409254The Face of a Hero
By Chana Weisberg
Roi Klein.
It is a name that until a few days ago held no meaning to me. He was a complete stranger, about whom I had never heard and whom I had never met.
Yet an image of the last seconds of his life won't leave my mind.
Roi was a son. He was a brother. He was a husband to Sara and a father to three-year-old Gilad and one-year-old Yoav.
But most of all, Roi was a hero for all of us. He was a face and a name to the many Jewish heroes spanning the generations.
Roi's funeral was last Thursday (July 27), the day that would have been his 31st birthday.
Major Roi Klein was a Golani brigade deputy commander. He was killed last Wednesday, in an ambush among the houses of Bint Jbail, a large village in southern Lebanon. Hezbullah terrorists killed eight soldiers, including Roi, and injured nearly two dozen.
There were two other soldiers next to Roi. A hand grenade was thrown at them and Roi shouted, "Grenade!" He then threw his body over it, sacrificing his life for the sake of his soldiers, who later attributed being alive to his act of selflessness.
In his last seconds of life, Roi mustered the strength to shout "Shema Yisroel" the prayer that Jews have prayed for centuries, declaring our belief in G-d and in a better world; the prayer that so many Jewish martyrs throughout the generations called out as they were being led to their deaths.
My mind can't stop conjuring what it must have been like in those last seconds of his life, when Roi made the split-second decision to jump on the grenade. I imagine Roi seeing his beloved family in his mind's eye--his wife, and their two young children who would now grow up knowing him only from stories that they'd be told or from pictures that they'd be shown.
I imagine Roi thinking about his grieving elderly parents; of his mother, Shoshana whose voice cracked at her son's grave as she cried out, "The pain is unbearable... We will look after the children and raise them according to what you left behind…"
And I imagine Roi seeing the West Bank hilltop settlement of Eli that he and his wife idealistically made their home, despite those who wished to dismantle it.
It was for these loved one that Roi served in the special units of the Paratroop and Golani brigades. It was for them, and for the ideals represented by the Shema Yisroel prayer, that Roi diligently and courageously pursued his army service, advancing to the point where he would have been promoted to battalion commander.
What a colossal contrast between Roi and his enemy.
Roi was there to ensure a peaceful existence of his people in their homeland. He was there to safeguard the innocent lives of his children and his nation. To ensure that people could live in their homes in peace and tranquility. To guarantee that they could continue their ordinary day to day activities. Activities like shopping in a mall without being blown to bits, like eating a family meal together in a pizza shop without worrying about flying shrapnel, like praying in a synagogue without having to run for cover in a bomb shelter, or like sending their children on a school bus without thoughts of bullets penetrating within.
Roi was there to defend his people against those that vowed their destruction. Even in his death, he sacrificed his own life to ensure that two of his comrades could live.
I picture his enemy, too, in my mind. He is there to cause as much death, devastation and destruction as he possibly can. He is eager to send his young, strapped with explosive bombs stuffed with nails on missions of "suicide bombings," as long as in their death they murder as many Jews as possible with them. He is launching rocket after rocket into densely populated Jewish cities so that hospitals healing the sick and homes housing the elderly will be destroyed together with the lives of those inside.
Roi's enemy was willing to die to bring death and mourning to as many as possible; Roi was willing to die to ensure life and liberty for others, to preserve a world in which Jews could pray to G-d in their synagogues, perform G-d's commandments and make our world a better, more moral and more conscientious place.
This is the third time in this last century that the Jewish people have found themselves on the front lines against those who sought their annihilation.
For the Nazis, the Jew was a racial impurity to be exterminated like insects. For the Soviet communists, the Jewish religion was a thorn in their sides to be eradicated. And for the Islamic extremists, the Jew and his state must be eliminated from the face of the earth.
Less than a century has passed since Jews fell in the Soviet gulag with the chant of Shema in their mouths for the mere "crime" of observing kashrut or Shabbat in their private lives. Just over a half a century has passed since the echo of the Shema resonated in the Nazi gas chambers where Jews were asphyxiated and then burnt to ashes in the crematoriums just because they were born as Jews.
And now Roi Klein followed in the path of these martyrs, dying with the cry of Shema on his lips in the act of defending his people from those who, yet again, wish to destroy them.
Roi is no stranger after all. He is each of our husbands, sons and brothers. His face is the face of each of our heroes and martyrs.
Tallest building in Kiryat Shmona hit by Katyusha - August 13
August 13, 2006
Dear Friends,
I wrote a brief note on Friday, to tell everyone that I'm OK, in case they saw my building on television. In fact, only a few minutes later, the building was shown on TV, on the 5:00 p.m. news program; my phone didn't stop ringing for hours.
I was about to get ready to leave the house anyway, when I heard the whoosh of a Katyusha, the loudest crash I'd ever heard, and the building literally bounced. My apartment, on the 13th floor of the "14 storey building" faces east, with one window on the north; I looked down from there, to see if the building had been hit on that side, and it hadn't. When I got out into the hallway, I heard lots of voices on the stairs, or on the floors below. Although the elevators were working, I decided to walk down, and see what was going on. I walked onto each floor from the stairwell.
When I got to the ninth floor, I did the same, and noticed some drops of blood on the floor in front of the south-west apartment. At the same time, someone was hollering from inside the apartment, "Is anybody there?" When I answered, he asked me to try to push open the door from the outside, he couldn't get it open. I pushed and even kicked it, but couldn't get it open. I told him to wait, and I'd get help; he seemed calm enough. I went to the stairwell, and called down for help. Immediately, a policeman appeared, and spoke to the man inside, who answered him. The policeman tried to kick the door open, with no success, and ran and got the firemen who were in the building. No one could figure out how the man was trapped inside, because obviously, whoever had been hurt had left from that door. I surmised that whoever it was had gone in and the door slammed behind them. The firemen started working on cutting the door open. The door is what is known as a multi-bolt door: it's metal, with bolts that go into the frame on all four sides of the door. They kept trying to call to the man inside, but now there was no answer, and faces were looking very worried. Several firemen asked me if I was sure I'd heard someone there, but the policeman interceded and said that, "Yes, there was someone there", and he had spoken to him, we both had. Of course, a crowd of neighbors had collected. One was Ella's husband from the 10th floor, who ran back upstairs. A few moments later, Ella came down with the key - just in time; they were close to breaking in. But there was no one there! He'd been rescued by the fire truck, which reached him through the living room window. I had a glimpse of destruction, with the windows and shutters shattered, and glass all over, before the door was closed and locked again.
I had a passing thought of a funny incident that occurred last summer: I'd been sitting at the computer, which is near the window, and heard voices very close. Now, sound does travel up, and I sometimes hear sounds from the street, but this sounded like someone was talking into a telephone or walkie-talkie, extremely close to the window. I couldn't figure it out. Suddenly, a man loomed up next to my window! I don't know which one of us was more startled upon seeing the other. I chatted with him and offered him a cold drink. Turned out that he was a fireman, and after a minor fire in a 3rd floor apartment, the fire department had decided to practice reaching the upper floors, "just in case". Now, I thought how lucky it was that the firemen had practiced reaching the upper floors of our building, the tallest in Kiryat Shmona, when they did.
At that point, one of the firemen I knew asked about the other residents of the building, in the floors above the ninth. He and I went up again, floor by floor, to make sure no one else was trapped in their apartments. I pointed out which residents had already left, and which apartments still had people living in them, and we knocked on those doors. By that time, all the residents were downstairs, milling around in the lobby.
I went to the 10th floor, to Ella's apartment. It was a shambles. Every day, I had warned them not to close the windows all the way. However, her husband had come home from work, turned on the air conditioner, and closed the windows. Then he sat down in the living room to read the paper, after having just stepped out of the kitchen. All the living room windows were knocked out; I don't understand how he wasn't seriously injured by flying glass. All he had was a small cut on his arm. The kitchen was in worse shape. They'd had a huge window in there, which was completely blown out, frame, glass, even bits of plaster, and all. Here, it wasn't just the force of the shock wave, as it had been in the living room, but shrapnel as well. Pieces of shrapnel and glass were embedded in the wall above the cabinets. Another piece had evidently struck the mechanism of the refrigerator, because it had stopped working. The sink had been dislodged from the surrounding countertop, and was tilting at an angle. All in all, though, they were uninjured. Her father had been lying in bed, in the far bedroom (facing the southern niche) and so hadn't been hurt, either.
I left her and went downstairs. Most of the other neighbors were milling around; one family was in hysterics. I had met them only a few hours earlier, when I came home. The siren had gone off, and they had run to the stairwell, which is very secure. Now, some of their windows had been blasted in, and they were totally in shock. Several people noted how many people had stayed in the building; I would estimate that one-third of the residents were still there, which seems to be typical of the town as a whole.
The building is shaped roughly as below (my artistic abilities are nil Note from Daisyima: the drawing did not come over in the posting); there are four apartments on a floor, each identical. Each apartment has 3-way ventilation. (One of the jokes here is that Nasrallah is trying to improve living conditions by giving everyone cross-ventilation.) Most windows face one direction, one window in the next direction going counter-clockwise, and the third, continuing counter-clockwise, facing into the "niche" . The inner part of the niche is the kitchen window. So, for example, my windows mostly face east, with another window facing north, and the one facing the niche actually facing west, but blocked by the other side of the niche. My kitchen window faces east as well, but is on the inner side of the niche. Hope this isn't too confusing.
What had happened is that the Katyusha hit inside the niche, which amplified the effect. All, or almost all, of the kitchens facing west, i.e. the lower left quadrant of the figure above, were damaged, from at least the 3rd floor to at least the 13th. That is, the kitchen windows were blown in, with glass and possibly shrapnel inside. I don't know about above and below that, because people weren't home, and I couldn't tell from outside. Most of the apartments which have one window facing into the niche, i.e. the north facing ones, were also damaged. Even with the windows open, the force of the blast blew them off their frames, and there's glass everywhere.
People keep asking me about the building itself, the electricity, the elevators, etc. There was no real structural damage: apartments like Ella's, and Riki's below hers, had a lot of glass, wood and plastic damage, even perhaps a cinderblock or two dislodged, and plaster knocked off the concrete. However, despite the jokes, e.g. Nasrallah wants everyone in Kiryat Shmona to have a single-storey house, the Katyusha is not like a bomb dropped from a plane, or even the size and strength of those that have fallen in Haifa, which seriously damage buildings and infrastructure. The Katyusha is actually an anti-personnel weapon. Because it's sent over with tremendous force, and has so much explosives packed into it, it can and does do damage to structures. But that damage is usually a hole where it penetrated, and whatever it wrecks inside. It usually does not do structural damage, and certainly not in modern, strongly-built buildings like mine.
Getting back to what happened that evening, I again started leaving the building, and ran into David T. coming in. David is an engineer, who has been assigned by the municipality to check on physical damage, and authorize evacuation for those people whose homes and apartments have been damaged to the point where they can't stay there. First, he was waylaid by a neighbor downstairs, who said that water was leaking from the 7th floor down, in the southwest quadrant. He then asked me who lived where, what apartments were affected. We ended up coming back up to my apartment, where I printed out a list of the residents I had on my computer, having once been the treasurer of the building committee. We went over the list, and I explained which apartments were damaged and which people needed to be evacuated. Before he was finished, he got a call to run to the next site that had been hit. A little later, when I discovered that two families weren't listed, I called David, and he was already at the third site. Among those whose names I gave him was Ella and her family.
I finally left, about an hour after I originally planned to leave. In all of this going up and down, I was still holding a container of cat food to put out, and eventually I did so - luckily. I was in time for one of the most moving moments of the day. A family from the Eshkol neighborhood, where I volunteer, and with whom I'd been in contact, knew that I lived in the 14 storey building, but didn't have my phone number. So, they hopped in their car to come over and see if they could find me, to make sure I was OK! We met in the parking lot. As I say, I was very touched.
Of course, my phone didn't stop ringing from the moment the building was shown on TV, about 15 minutes after it was hit. All my friends, from near and far, wanted to make sure that I was OK. Every time I completed one phone call, there were 2 or 3 messages waiting. It's wonderful to know that so many people care.
After eating dinner out - far away from town - I returned. Two families were downstairs, waiting to be picked up, and taken to their temporary homes away from Kiryat Shmona, although they didn't know where. But Ella and her family hadn't been picked up. I went upstairs to her apartment, and called David from there. Turns out he'd had the wrong phone number: Ella's brother-in-law, Peter, lives in the building, too. They had gone to relatives for the duration, and David had mistakenly gotten Peter's number from information, and kept calling Peter's empty apartment. By the time I was able to put Ella and David into direct contact, it was too late to do anything. Ella and her husband had already cleaned up most of the broken glass, and they ended up spending the entire weekend in the apartment, with no windows. When I left this morning, they were waiting for a call about their evacuation. They'd received a call from the tax authorities, telling them that the damage in their apartment was too extensive for a regular temporary solution. A longer-term solution, close enough for them to continue going to work even after the war is over, was being sought. In the meantime, all they could do was wait. [By this evening, they were gone, and I'll try to call her tomorrow and get details.]
I had another full and interesting day at the moked today, but details of that will have to wait until tomorrow's update.
Until then, have a quiet and peaceful night,
Marsh
Dear Friends,
I wrote a brief note on Friday, to tell everyone that I'm OK, in case they saw my building on television. In fact, only a few minutes later, the building was shown on TV, on the 5:00 p.m. news program; my phone didn't stop ringing for hours.
I was about to get ready to leave the house anyway, when I heard the whoosh of a Katyusha, the loudest crash I'd ever heard, and the building literally bounced. My apartment, on the 13th floor of the "14 storey building" faces east, with one window on the north; I looked down from there, to see if the building had been hit on that side, and it hadn't. When I got out into the hallway, I heard lots of voices on the stairs, or on the floors below. Although the elevators were working, I decided to walk down, and see what was going on. I walked onto each floor from the stairwell.
When I got to the ninth floor, I did the same, and noticed some drops of blood on the floor in front of the south-west apartment. At the same time, someone was hollering from inside the apartment, "Is anybody there?" When I answered, he asked me to try to push open the door from the outside, he couldn't get it open. I pushed and even kicked it, but couldn't get it open. I told him to wait, and I'd get help; he seemed calm enough. I went to the stairwell, and called down for help. Immediately, a policeman appeared, and spoke to the man inside, who answered him. The policeman tried to kick the door open, with no success, and ran and got the firemen who were in the building. No one could figure out how the man was trapped inside, because obviously, whoever had been hurt had left from that door. I surmised that whoever it was had gone in and the door slammed behind them. The firemen started working on cutting the door open. The door is what is known as a multi-bolt door: it's metal, with bolts that go into the frame on all four sides of the door. They kept trying to call to the man inside, but now there was no answer, and faces were looking very worried. Several firemen asked me if I was sure I'd heard someone there, but the policeman interceded and said that, "Yes, there was someone there", and he had spoken to him, we both had. Of course, a crowd of neighbors had collected. One was Ella's husband from the 10th floor, who ran back upstairs. A few moments later, Ella came down with the key - just in time; they were close to breaking in. But there was no one there! He'd been rescued by the fire truck, which reached him through the living room window. I had a glimpse of destruction, with the windows and shutters shattered, and glass all over, before the door was closed and locked again.
I had a passing thought of a funny incident that occurred last summer: I'd been sitting at the computer, which is near the window, and heard voices very close. Now, sound does travel up, and I sometimes hear sounds from the street, but this sounded like someone was talking into a telephone or walkie-talkie, extremely close to the window. I couldn't figure it out. Suddenly, a man loomed up next to my window! I don't know which one of us was more startled upon seeing the other. I chatted with him and offered him a cold drink. Turned out that he was a fireman, and after a minor fire in a 3rd floor apartment, the fire department had decided to practice reaching the upper floors, "just in case". Now, I thought how lucky it was that the firemen had practiced reaching the upper floors of our building, the tallest in Kiryat Shmona, when they did.
At that point, one of the firemen I knew asked about the other residents of the building, in the floors above the ninth. He and I went up again, floor by floor, to make sure no one else was trapped in their apartments. I pointed out which residents had already left, and which apartments still had people living in them, and we knocked on those doors. By that time, all the residents were downstairs, milling around in the lobby.
I went to the 10th floor, to Ella's apartment. It was a shambles. Every day, I had warned them not to close the windows all the way. However, her husband had come home from work, turned on the air conditioner, and closed the windows. Then he sat down in the living room to read the paper, after having just stepped out of the kitchen. All the living room windows were knocked out; I don't understand how he wasn't seriously injured by flying glass. All he had was a small cut on his arm. The kitchen was in worse shape. They'd had a huge window in there, which was completely blown out, frame, glass, even bits of plaster, and all. Here, it wasn't just the force of the shock wave, as it had been in the living room, but shrapnel as well. Pieces of shrapnel and glass were embedded in the wall above the cabinets. Another piece had evidently struck the mechanism of the refrigerator, because it had stopped working. The sink had been dislodged from the surrounding countertop, and was tilting at an angle. All in all, though, they were uninjured. Her father had been lying in bed, in the far bedroom (facing the southern niche) and so hadn't been hurt, either.
I left her and went downstairs. Most of the other neighbors were milling around; one family was in hysterics. I had met them only a few hours earlier, when I came home. The siren had gone off, and they had run to the stairwell, which is very secure. Now, some of their windows had been blasted in, and they were totally in shock. Several people noted how many people had stayed in the building; I would estimate that one-third of the residents were still there, which seems to be typical of the town as a whole.
The building is shaped roughly as below (my artistic abilities are nil Note from Daisyima: the drawing did not come over in the posting); there are four apartments on a floor, each identical. Each apartment has 3-way ventilation. (One of the jokes here is that Nasrallah is trying to improve living conditions by giving everyone cross-ventilation.) Most windows face one direction, one window in the next direction going counter-clockwise, and the third, continuing counter-clockwise, facing into the "niche" . The inner part of the niche is the kitchen window. So, for example, my windows mostly face east, with another window facing north, and the one facing the niche actually facing west, but blocked by the other side of the niche. My kitchen window faces east as well, but is on the inner side of the niche. Hope this isn't too confusing.
What had happened is that the Katyusha hit inside the niche, which amplified the effect. All, or almost all, of the kitchens facing west, i.e. the lower left quadrant of the figure above, were damaged, from at least the 3rd floor to at least the 13th. That is, the kitchen windows were blown in, with glass and possibly shrapnel inside. I don't know about above and below that, because people weren't home, and I couldn't tell from outside. Most of the apartments which have one window facing into the niche, i.e. the north facing ones, were also damaged. Even with the windows open, the force of the blast blew them off their frames, and there's glass everywhere.
People keep asking me about the building itself, the electricity, the elevators, etc. There was no real structural damage: apartments like Ella's, and Riki's below hers, had a lot of glass, wood and plastic damage, even perhaps a cinderblock or two dislodged, and plaster knocked off the concrete. However, despite the jokes, e.g. Nasrallah wants everyone in Kiryat Shmona to have a single-storey house, the Katyusha is not like a bomb dropped from a plane, or even the size and strength of those that have fallen in Haifa, which seriously damage buildings and infrastructure. The Katyusha is actually an anti-personnel weapon. Because it's sent over with tremendous force, and has so much explosives packed into it, it can and does do damage to structures. But that damage is usually a hole where it penetrated, and whatever it wrecks inside. It usually does not do structural damage, and certainly not in modern, strongly-built buildings like mine.
Getting back to what happened that evening, I again started leaving the building, and ran into David T. coming in. David is an engineer, who has been assigned by the municipality to check on physical damage, and authorize evacuation for those people whose homes and apartments have been damaged to the point where they can't stay there. First, he was waylaid by a neighbor downstairs, who said that water was leaking from the 7th floor down, in the southwest quadrant. He then asked me who lived where, what apartments were affected. We ended up coming back up to my apartment, where I printed out a list of the residents I had on my computer, having once been the treasurer of the building committee. We went over the list, and I explained which apartments were damaged and which people needed to be evacuated. Before he was finished, he got a call to run to the next site that had been hit. A little later, when I discovered that two families weren't listed, I called David, and he was already at the third site. Among those whose names I gave him was Ella and her family.
I finally left, about an hour after I originally planned to leave. In all of this going up and down, I was still holding a container of cat food to put out, and eventually I did so - luckily. I was in time for one of the most moving moments of the day. A family from the Eshkol neighborhood, where I volunteer, and with whom I'd been in contact, knew that I lived in the 14 storey building, but didn't have my phone number. So, they hopped in their car to come over and see if they could find me, to make sure I was OK! We met in the parking lot. As I say, I was very touched.
Of course, my phone didn't stop ringing from the moment the building was shown on TV, about 15 minutes after it was hit. All my friends, from near and far, wanted to make sure that I was OK. Every time I completed one phone call, there were 2 or 3 messages waiting. It's wonderful to know that so many people care.
After eating dinner out - far away from town - I returned. Two families were downstairs, waiting to be picked up, and taken to their temporary homes away from Kiryat Shmona, although they didn't know where. But Ella and her family hadn't been picked up. I went upstairs to her apartment, and called David from there. Turns out he'd had the wrong phone number: Ella's brother-in-law, Peter, lives in the building, too. They had gone to relatives for the duration, and David had mistakenly gotten Peter's number from information, and kept calling Peter's empty apartment. By the time I was able to put Ella and David into direct contact, it was too late to do anything. Ella and her husband had already cleaned up most of the broken glass, and they ended up spending the entire weekend in the apartment, with no windows. When I left this morning, they were waiting for a call about their evacuation. They'd received a call from the tax authorities, telling them that the damage in their apartment was too extensive for a regular temporary solution. A longer-term solution, close enough for them to continue going to work even after the war is over, was being sought. In the meantime, all they could do was wait. [By this evening, they were gone, and I'll try to call her tomorrow and get details.]
I had another full and interesting day at the moked today, but details of that will have to wait until tomorrow's update.
Until then, have a quiet and peaceful night,
Marsh
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