Just 4 items below. I have foregone examining the foreign press today, because at least two of the items below (2 and 3) not only are longish but also contain content worth mulling over. I’ll return to each in a minute. If you have the time and energy, I invite you also to check out ‘Today in Palestine’ www.theheadlines.org to keep abreast of what is happening in the oPt.
Item 1 expresses America’s disapproval of Israel’s decision to withhold Palestinian funds—ones that are properly theirs. But the disapproval is expressed by the usual kind of United States reaction when Israel does things that the US disapproves of: finger shaking, “tsk tsk tsk, you naughty child. You must learn to behave.” Israel’s governments have from the beginning been experts at ignoring such invectives from the UN, the US, and anyone else. Unless these finger shakings are accompanied with sanctions or other means (non-violent, of course) of pressure, Israel will continue to ignore them.
Items 2 and 3 are interesting in that they appear in a domestic newspaper, albeit one that is not read even in Hebrew by most Israelis, because most Israelis prefer lighter fare. The 2 are yet more interesting because they are written by Zionists, albeit left-leaning—the former by Bradley Burston, the other by Aluf Benn, both editors of Haaretz. Both are critical of Israel.
I don’t agree with Burston that all the blame can be put on Israel’s leaders– the public after all elects them. Moreover, polls show that the Israeli population has moved decidedly to the right to the point of approving fascist laws. I also don’t agree with Burston that the elected officials who govern are ‘sheep’—perhaps they are wolves in sheep’s clothing, but not sheep. Sheep are thought of as being benign creatures. There is nothing benign about Israel’s leaders. Nor do I agree with him that Israelis abroad or at home are brighter and more productive and innovative than are any other group of people, which Burston implies. Lastly, Burston parallels Israelis and Palestinians as though they were equals rather than being an oppressor and the oppressed. But apart from these, his criticisms of Israel are accurate. Make a list of those he notes. You probably will be able to add to it. But at least his list is a beginning.
The central message of item 3 is in its title, “Doomed to fight.” New Profile has on the front cover of its brochure “We want peace, Don’t we?
The object is to get people to question, to think. Most people would automatically respond of course we want peace. But then why don’t we have it? While many Israelis do not want war, we nevertheless have an awful lot of them—12 wars and military campaigns in less than 62 years (Israel today celebrated it 63rd
birthday). But our leaders obviously want war, believe that force is the only way to gain political aims, and continue to believe this even after 63 years of continued success in expansion and colonization, but failure in bringing security and peace to Israelis. The conclusion must be that security and peace are far lesser aims than expansion and colonization. The irony is that this country that was from the Zionist standpoint supposed to have created a haven for Jews has from its beginning been the opposite—it has been and is (excepting war zones as Afghanistan) the least safe place for Jews in the world. Sad that Israelis remain ‘doomed to fight.’ Sad that the Jewish Israeli womb is a mechanism for producing soldiers.
The final item, item 4, is the concluding statement of a conference of Palestinians and Israelis that I had much hoped to attend but didn’t. The statement surprised me in that it leaves out issues that I would have expected to have come up—bds, for instance. And again, in the statement that ‘the conference emphasizes its adherence to popular resistance against the occupation and colonization,’ Considering the non-violent protests in the villages against theft of their lands, I would have expected the statement to have been modified by ‘popular non-violent resistance.’ I have been informed that a reason (not the only one) for such omissions is that there simply was no time to discuss these things in depth. There are plans to get into the nitty gritty of details in further contacts. I look forward to updating you an developments.
I wonder what Israel’s 64th birthday will be like? I can only hope that it will be neither more of the same as this year nor a year that has seen another war.
All the best,
Dorothy
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1. Haaretz ,
May 10, 2011
U.S.: Israel’s decision to withhold PA funds ‘premature’
State department deputy spokesman Mark Toner says the U.S. is waiting to see how the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation deal will pan out before making decisions.
Tags: Israel news US Hamas Fatah Palestinians Middle East peace
The United States slammed Monday Israel’s decision to withhold Palestinian Authority funds saying “any decision following the Hamas-Fatah agreement is premature.”
U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner admitted that the Israelis “have their concerns,” but stressed that that the U.S. government’s position is that “we believe that we need to wait and see. We believe it’s premature to make any decisions. What’s important now is that the Palestinians ensure implementation in a way that advances the prospects of peace.”
“We are looking to see what this reconciliation agreement looks like in practical terms, before we make any decisions about future assistance,” Toner said.
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said earlier Monday that for the first time since 2007, the PA is not able to pay salaries to official workers because of Israel’s decision to withhold funds.
The U.S. administration hinted again that the warnings of some members of Congress to cut the aid to the Palestinian Authority following their agreement with Hamas would not be constructive.
“We understand these concerns, and I would just say, as the new Palestinian government’s formed, we’ll assess it based on its policies and we’ll determine the implications for our assistance”, Toner said, adding that training the Palestinian police force was “worthwhile”, as “they are an effective force and they have made significant gains in providing security.
Last week, at the Senate hearing on confirmation of Dan Shapiro’s candidacy as the next U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Shapiro said that the Administration is following closely the implications of the reconciliation agreement.
“There are many details that are as yet unknown about this agreement”, he said, adding that “there are ambiguities in the language of it. There are deep uncertainties about its prospects for implementation. And so we’ll be following that very closely and staying in close touch with the Congress, and also maintaining, as we always do, very close consultations with our colleagues and our partners in the Israeli government to ensure that we have the closest possible common understanding of the meaning of these events.”
Shapiro called Hamas a “terrorist organization,” adding that Palestinian reconciliation is ultimately a desirable goal – if it takes place “on terms that support peace.”
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2. Haaretz,
May 9, 2011
Israel at 63: What part of Shut Up do you not understand?
When, I wonder this Independence Day, did Israelis lose their nerve? These people, who used to be all nerve. When did they opt to be led by sheep?
I love this place. Take it on faith. I do. I cannot explain it even to my own satisfaction. I am not blind to the faults of this place. I have never been anywhere more infuriating, more smugly reckless in action and inaction, more cannibalistic in its official attacks on its own core values, more headstrong in error. Who’d have imagined it, though: love – committed, true, enduring love – turns out to be the opposite of blind. True love, it turns out, winds up seeing it all.
This is what I see this week, this Independence Day:
1. The peoples of Israel and Palestine have rafts more good will, vision, common sense and honest concern for their children and their children’s children, than do their leaders.
2. The peoples of Israel and Palestine are led by sheep. Sheep whose primary concern is for their own welfare. Sheep who are being blackmailed by single-minded predators. Predators who trade in fear, intimidation, incitement and radical religious fiat.
3. After 63 years, the peoples of Israel and Palestine believe that they understand one another. They do not. Polls show that the great majority on both sides would like to see two states. Still, traumatized by history, bloodshed, and personal grief, a large segment of each side believes that the other does not. Meanwhile, should there be any progress toward two states, the predators will be right there to slash and burn – if need be, literally.
It is Independence Day, which Israelis will celebrate despite their government, and certainly not because of it. What can you say about a government which since its inception has had but one message for Palestinian and Jew alike, one message for its American allies, for the North American Jewish Community, for the United Nations, for Richard Goldstone and Rick Jacobs, for Tony Kushner and Barack Obama, for Naomi Hazan and Jeremy Ben-Ami:
“What part of Shut Up do you not understand?”
Palestinians are used to the message. They’ve been getting it for decades. For many Israelis, and Jews as a whole, the message is less familiar. But with every passing week, it is becoming second nature.
The Start Up Nation has somehow acquired the Put Up and Shut Up mode of government, a regime of 19th Century cures for 20th Century afflictions. A regime of obsolete explanations and obdurate, unwarranted self-love, of hijacking democratic tools to serve anti-democratic ends. A regime whose very life is warning Israeli Arabs to shut up about their own history and tragedies, of warning leftist Israeli Jews to shut up about injustice, of warning human rights groups to shut up about morality, of warning asylum seekers to shut up about wanting to be productive citizens, of warning minorities to shut up about living with Jews, of sending the message of shut up and/or leave to non-Orthodox converts to Judaism. A regime, in the end, reduced to granting podiums, salaries and prizes to rabbi-bureaucrats who, in the guise of fearing God, preach segregation, race-hatred, blue-white supremacy, and, above all, fear of peace.
Now, as Independence Day dawns, the government is going after its own. Officials have announced that commemorations for the nation’s fallen will not formal honor three firemen who sacrificed their lives trying to save others in the inferno of the Carmel Forest. Turning a deaf ear to public outcry, the officials said they were bound by laws and regulations (which, as any Israeli can tell you, everyone ignores, as officials did when they bent and reversed their decision, then reversed it back, then announced they were forming a committee).
At the same time, the Interior Ministry announced that its controversial new biometric national identity cards would begin with the serial number 6,000,000, to honor the victims of the Holocaust – this as tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors living in Israel have been neglected, forced to subsist on meager food and insufficient nursing care, as officials bickered over and sat on the compensation payments which could have made their lives much more comfortable.
When, I wonder this Independence Day, did Israelis lose their nerve? These people, who used to be all nerve. When did they opt to be led by sheep? Israelis, whose leaders talk about Te’uzah, daring, until their listeners are gray in the face – when did they stop taking risks? These people, my friends, the Israelis, who, when they live abroad or work on start-ups, astound with their flexibility and willingness to improvise, their powers of innovation, their courage of imagination, when did they begin to give up on their own future?
Part of it, of course, is that the same Occupation which ruins the lives of our neighbors, our cousins, the Palestinians, has also rendered Israel bloated and fearful and tainted and dumbed down and callous – and thus fundamentally unable to do anything about the most enduring threat to its own future, the Occupation.
But we know that, whether we do anything about it or not, we are a country in transition. The thought scares us dry. The thought has affected our government like headlights on deer. We know that after September, after a UN roll call over the question of Palestine, we may never be the same country again. And, in the back of our minds lurks the nagging thought that when that happens, we may yet be better off.
There was a time when I wished I had been able to live at the time of hamedina-sh’b’derech, the nation in the making: pre-state Eretz Israel. Little did I know that I would live long enough to experience just that – pre-state Israel.
This, this ungodly mess of ours, this is pre-state Israel. We have no independence. The occupation has reduced us to a suburb of the settlements, a province of Palestine. As it stands, the barriers to our independence, our sovereignty as a democratic state of the Jews are steep: the blackmail of the settlement movement, the enmity of our enemies; the zadon, the ill-will, the low expectations, the unapologetic failure of our government.
Oddly, the most desperate of us, the most frightened, are the leaders of the right. They know that they are one pragmatic Israeli leader away from losing the West Bank. One leader who can face down predators for the common good. One leader less timid than Netanyahu, the sheep, who, when it comes to making peace, can face down neither his wife nor his centenarian father. A senior settler leader said recently that failed in their goal of attracting 650,000 settlers and rendering a Palestinian state impossible. They know that they have altogether failed to sway the Israeli and world Jewish public to their cause. All they’ve got going for them, at this point, is sheep.
People who know me, know that I have nothing against sheep. In fact, I know them to be intelligent and remarkable, when given a chance, when treated with fairness. They will rise to the occasion. They will act in concert. They will act in cleverness. Left to their own devices, they will do what’s best for them. They will even face down predators.
Our neighbors, our cousins the Palestinians, are taking halting but significant steps toward independence. Our neighbors in the Arab world and Iran have shocked and inspired us in the risks they have taken to see societies become what the majority would like to see, not a coterie of strongmen and/or clerics. They scare us because we suddenly realize we know nothing of where all of this is headed. As if we ever did.
I wish the Palestinians well in their quest for a state. And I wish us well in our quest for one of our own. May we learn the difference between blind, rude, arrogant nationalism and true love of country, the desire for a place of safety and freedom for those we love, and peace with neighbors we respect.
Love, as the song says, hurts. It confounds. But it also heals. Take it on faith. In this unknowable pre-state era, both peoples could yet confound us all. On their own. They could at long last do what’s best for them. They could take the lead, over these leaders with the wool of politics and position pulled down over their eyes. At long last, these peoples could bend and reverse, and start to heal, and actually become what they so yearn to be. Independent. No longer hostage to predators. Free.
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3. Haaretz,
May 9, 2011
Doomed to fight
Though delivered 55 years ago, Moshe Dayan’s eulogy for Roi Rotberg continues to articulate Israel’s situation in its dispute with the Arabs
The April 1956 eulogy delivered by Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan at the funeral of Roi Rotberg, the security coordinator of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, expressed the spirit of the times more aptly than any other text or speech prepared at the time. It continues today to articulate succinctly Israel’s positions in its dispute with the Arabs.
In his short, eloquent speech (238 words in total ), Dayan displayed exceptional understanding regarding the suffering and hostility of the Palestinians, and concluded that violent struggle for control of the land is the “fate of our generation.” We have no choice but to fight, declared Dayan. “This is our life choice,” he said, “to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.”
Under our circumstances in 2011 – in the era of Benjamin Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman and Gideon Sa’ar – Dayan’s text reads as though it is a subversive document. The legendary chief of staff, the person who exemplified the IDF’s spirit of aggressive activism, expressed sensitivity toward the emotions of the enemy who dwelled across the border: “Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we deplore their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate,” declared Dayan.
Today, Dayan would be accused of post-Zionism, of sympathizing with terror, of violating the “Nakba Law.” But in those days, memories of the 1948 War of Independence were still fresh, and evidence of deserted Arab houses and ruined Arab villages was manifest; so it would have been futile to try to conceal or blur this palpable history for the purpose of inculcating a nationalist, Zionist message, as Netanyahu, Lieberman and Sa’ar try to do today.
Though he understood the Palestinians’ suffering, Dayan did not conclude that their demands had to be met. On the contrary: He called on Israelis of his generation to continue the fight, and not pull back.
“We are a generation that settles the land, and without the steel helmet and the cannon’s fire we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home,” concluded the first-born child of Kibbutz Degania, who grew up in the Jezreel Valley fields around Moshav Nahalal. “Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken.”
With these words Dayan expressed an Israeli ideology of force. The late sociologist Baruch Kimmerling described the Rotberg eulogy as an unparalleled exemplification of Israeli militarism. In 1993, Kimmerling wrote that several codes essential to deciphering the truth about Israeli society could be identified in the eulogy. There were some voices that contradicted these militarist codes, Kimmerling argued, but on the whole the chords struck in Dayan’s speech were those that fashioned the character of the society.
Kimmerling summarized Dayan’s message this way: We are a state of immigrant-settlers, whose very existence in the region is not guaranteed or self-evident. The “Arabs,” an indiscriminate category, hate “us” (and justifiably so, from their point of view ). This situation is a necessity that cannot be changed; it is our “fate” and we have no control over it, and the only thing we can do is guarantee our “existence.” Such existence is protected exclusively by means of the fist and the sword. All other societal-wide goals are subsumed within this dominant objective of protecting our survival. We are forced to remain a mobilized, enlisted society. We must accept as a self-evident reality the sacrifice of human life (in addition to costs presumably paid in other spheres ), which we make in order to guarantee our continued existence.
The state funerals of terror victims and soldiers are not only burial ceremonies. They also serve as platforms to deliver political messages – particularly as an answer to the eternal question “What are we fighting for?” The Athenian statesman Pericles inaugurated this tradition 2,500 years ago with his words eulogizing casualties of the Peloponnesian War. Pericles underscored the liberal openness of Athens, in contrast to the aggressive militarism of its rival Sparta, and he designated the principle of equality before the law as a fundamental pillar of democracy.
During the U.S. Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln defined the North’s aims in his 1863 Gettysburg Address. His short, 272-word speech came to be considered a keystone of American democracy. Lincoln’s message in the address was utterly lucid: We are fighting for the rebirth of freedom, of liberty bestowed to us by the founding fathers, based on the principle of “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Schoolchildren in America memorize and recite the speech; its final line was inscribed in the constitution of France’s Fifth Republic.
Lincoln was not only a gifted orator. He was also a politician who was vying for election to a second term, and was wary of defeat: The Union’s war effort that he commanded had taken a devastating toll, its conclusion was not on the horizon, and his competitors in the presidential race seemed to be gaining ground (in an era that preceded public opinion polls ). The Gettysburg Address was designed to bolster morale and confer moral legitimacy to Lincoln’s campaign. Also, the fortunes of war were turning at this stage. The following year, Lincoln was reelected at a time when the Confederacy was on the brink of collapse.
Scared of Hammarskjold
Like Pericles and Lincoln before him, Dayan also had a political goal in mind when he delivered the Rotberg eulogy. In the spring of 1956, tensions on the Israel-Gaza Strip border were on the rise. Palestinian fedayeen insurgents, based in Egypt-controlled Gaza, carried out terror attacks in Israel, and the IDF responded with reprisal raids and heavy shelling against targets in Gaza. The United Nations tried to mediate and bring calm; UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold visited the region as part of shuttle diplomacy talks with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The similarity between events of those days on the Gaza border, and Israel’s criticism of the 2009 UN Goldstone report, is uncanny. Dayan, who supported preemptive war against Egypt, was worried that Israel’s government would accept the mediator’s proposals, and restrain the IDF. For that reason, he interpolated in his eulogy words of warning about “the day when we will heed the ambassadors of malevolent hypocrisy, who call upon us to lay down our arms.” Tensions and violence in Gaza escalated in mid-March 1956, just as the Gaza border witnessed escalation this spring.
Ben-Gurion, who was wary about interfering with Hammarskjold’s diplomatic errand, demanded that coverage of Dayan’s eulogy be censored. Ben-Gurion was unable to stop Israel Radio from broadcasting the critical line about “ambassadors of malevolent hypocrisy,” but the morning newspapers did not print those words.
Mordechai Bar-On, who headed Dayan’s office at the time and later published two books about military events in this period, well remembers the Rotberg speech, and its background: “At the start of April, events on the border became heated; there was no proper fence on the border, and shepherds would climb over the wire which marked the border, and cross into our territory. There was shelling in Gaza, and fedayeen activity; and after all of that calmed down Dayan traveled to visit Israeli communities that had been severely damaged, and he stopped at Nahal Oz. There he met Roi Rotberg, who was the security coordinator, a civilian in regional defense who had a rank of first lieutenant in the army. His wife was pregnant; she was a striking, friendly person.”
Recalling the events of 65 years ago, Bar-On continues: “We visited their [the Rotberg couple’s] room on the kibbutz, and we discussed Israel’s circumstances. As it turned out, the kibbutz was undertaking preparations for a wedding of four couples. By kibbutz standards of the time, this was a grandiose event. They set up a stage and put up decorations; the atmosphere was festive and happy. Dayan was very impressed by Roi and his wife.”
Bar-On continues: “We went home, and the next day [April 29], the event transpired: Palestinian shepherds crossed the border, and started to shoot in the direction of the kibbutz fields. Roi rode out on a horse to expel them; they killed him, and dragged his body across the border wire so as to show that he had trespassed; they abused his body [the murderers removed Rotberg’s eyes; the poet Avot Yeshurun, who was working at Nahal Oz as a volunteer, referred in verse to this gruesome occurrence].”
Bar-On recalls that Dayan was shaken by news of the murder. Dayan was unnerved by the fact “that he had met the victim, and also by the political circumstances of Hammarskjold’s diplomacy and the prospect that [Israel’s] Foreign Ministry would accept his proposals. The incident showed that Egypt’s assurances about its taking steps to calm the border could not be trusted. Then Dayan decided to take part in the funeral.”
Bar-On continues: “He wrote the speech by himself. He sat in a room half an hour or 45 minutes, and wrote. I wrote speeches for many chiefs of staff, but Dayan was better at it than I. During the funeral, Dayan read from these written remarks.”
The poetic language, the pithy formulation of a complex political and social message, Dayan’s premier military rank and the circumstances of the event – all of these transformed the eulogy into a keystone Israeli text, and bestowed mythic proportions to the Rotberg murder. Today, the war over the “Gaza envelope” continues, and Nahal Oz remains a frontier outpost, even in an age when tanks replace a horseback-riding security coordinator, and Grad missiles take the place of fedayeen bullets. So too the argument about the war’s objectives, a debate Dayan eloquently summarized, persists; and so his eulogy remains germane in our day.
Only one thing has changed: In the era of privatization, the old socialist kibbutz structure is moribund, and there are those who make a living out of eulogy writing. The web page of Dr. Yaakov Maor offers for sale “do-it-yourself eulogies”: “If you can’t find the right words, or if you lack the time to write a eulogy, at least remove this worry from your heart,” the site declares. “Within a few minutes, your problems writing the eulogy will be over.” For NIS 90, you can purchase from Maor a prepared packet of eulogies delivered for slain IDF soldiers, which includes phrases from the Gettysburg Address and the Rotberg eulogy.
