NOVANEWS
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Haaretz: Greek move against boats was born of Netanyahu campaign for Greek financial rescue
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Update: US Boat to Gaza returns to port after being stopped by Greek Coast Guard
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In the cover of darkness
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Huwaida Arraf: ‘[The flotilla] is not about aid, this is about Palestinian human rights, this is about liberation’
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Jack Ross’s glorious biography of the prophetic anti-Zionist Elmer Berger
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BDS will free both the oppressed, and the oppressor
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Ackerman says effort to hold Israel to int’l law is ‘anti-Semitism’
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State Department says it opposes sabotaging flotilla boats
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Europe embraces the silences of Aharon Appelfeld
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IDF soldiers wear t-shirts saying they refuse to evict settlers, and are forgiven
Haaretz: Greek move against boats was born of Netanyahu campaign for Greek financial rescue
Jul 01, 2011
Philip Weiss
Can you think of a more dismal day in recent months? Do you feel powerless? Do you know where the power lies? From Barak Ravid’s report, “Netanyahu’s big fat Greek wedding,” inHaaretz (thanks to Noam Sheizaf at 972):
Many of Netanyahu and Papandreou’s talks in the past few months have revolved around the severe financial crisis Greece is currently suffering. Netanyahu recently decided to come to the aid of his newfound friend in a meeting of foreign ministers and European leaders, imploring them to provide Greece with financial aid.
“Netanyahu has become Greece’s lobbyist to the European Union,” an Israeli diplomat said.
In recent weeks, as efforts to stop the impending pro-Palestinian flotilla to Gaza came to a head, Netanyahu reaped the benefits of his investment in Israel-Greece ties and his gamble on the European country paid off.
He was able to create a viable alternative to relations with Turkey in several regards, showing Erdogan that Israel will not hesitate to become close to its greatest enemy in the West.
And when the moment of truth came, Greece followed through and ordered all Gaza-bound departures be blocked from leaving its ports.
Update: US Boat to Gaza returns to port after being stopped by Greek Coast Guard
Jul 01, 2011
Adam Horowitz
Update: Here is an update that Audacity of Hope passenger Medea Benjamin recorded for theInstitute for Middle East Understanding at 3:10pm ET:
Listen to internet radio with IMEU on Blog Talk Radio
Update: Here is the Greek order against boats leaving its ports for Gaza, “the area of maritime blockade by Israel.” (thanks to Ali Abunimah):
Pursuant to a decision by the Minister of Citizen Protection Mr. C. Papoutsis, the departure of ships with Greek and foreign flags from Greek ports to the maritime area of Gazahas been prohibited today.
By orders of the Hellenic Coast Guard Head Quarters to all local Hellenic Coast Guard Authorities, all appropriate measures are taken for the implementation of the said decision.
Here’s video of the American boat leaving port before it was stopped by Greek Coast Guard:
(The Audacity of Hope leaving the port in Athens. Photo: US Boat to Gaza)
From the US Boat to Gaza website:
At 4:45 pm Athens time The Audacity of Hope left the dock to set sail for Gaza. We are awaiting news to see if they are stopped by Greek authorities or allowed to sail.
Passengers waving goodbye moments before the US Boat to Gaza set sail. (Photo: US Boat to Gaza)
Update: After sailing for 15 minutes the US Boat to Gaza was stopped by the Greek Coast Guard. Joseph Dana is tweeting from on board:
@ibnezra Joseph Dana
The coast guard is demanding that we return to port. “we are forbidden to leave” passengers are chanting and screaming at them
Update: US Boat to Gaza is urging you to call the Embassy of Greece in Washington.
Tel. 202.939.1300 202.939.1300
Fax. 202.939.1324
From the US Boat: “We are getting reports that people are having a hard time getting through to the Greek Embassy in Washington, DC….that just means lots of folks are making calls!! It also would be good to have people sending email messages. We understand they are all being forwarded to Athens. Here’s that email address: nycons@greekembassy.org”
Here is the latest from Twitter:
In the cover of darkness
Jul 01, 2011
annie
A representative of the the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the same center constructing a museum of intolerance on top of the ancient Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem that has already resulted in the destruction and disinterment of thousands of Muslim graves and human remains, has called on the UN to dissolve the United Nations Committee for the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) because it “works to delegitimize the Jewish state”.
Shimon Samuels, the Wiesenthal Center’s director for international relations attended a meeting in Brussels hosted by CEIRPP titled “The role of Europe in advancing Palestinian statehood and achieving peace between Israelis and Palestinians” which he later characterized in a letter he wrote to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as “a ‘gangbang’ against the State of Israel.”
I kid you not, check out how The Jerusalem Post spells out the meaning for their readership by quoting Merriam-Webster.com.
Meanwhile a forwarded email arrived in my inbox last night originating from Laura Raymond of the Center for Constitutional Rights in NYC:
I’m writing to share an alarming development regarding the Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem. This past weekend, only weeks after a Jerusalem Municipal planning committee granted final permission for construction of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s so-called “Museum of Tolerance” atop the oldest Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, Israeli bulldozers entered the part of the ancient Mamilla Cemetery that remained intact to destroy and dispose of nearly 100 grave markers, both ancient and renovated. The bulldozers worked under the cover of night (from 11pm to 1am on June 25-26, 2011), and retreated hastily when their operators realized that they were being filmed by local media and activists, as can be seen in the coverage broadcast by Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera
This just happened a couple nights ago. In the middle of the night, in the cover of darkness they went in and destroyed the remaining intact portions of the cemetery. I’m aghast, it breaks my heart. The photos in the (Arabic only) newsreels are horrific.
Raymond’s email:
Gideon Suleimani, the chief archaeologist appointed by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) to excavate the site, concluded after a review of the site that construction should not continue and that the IAA’s conduct on the site, which contains “tens of thousands of skeletons,” constituted an “archeological crime.”
She implored us for help:
Can you help get the word out to archeologists and anthropologists and see if any network or group would be willing to organize against this- either through a statement, an open letter, or any other ideas that might emerge? I think it would be very powerful to have that sector of academics and professionals speak out on this. If you know of any groups that are concerned about cemetery desecrations please send this email to them.
Who’s protecting Palestine? Protection for Palestine needs to grow not shrink. This is an ugly ploy. As September draws near and Israel watches support for a Palestinian State swell, they try to create another opening for themselves again at the expense of the Palestinian people.
Samuels also wrote that the “General Assembly September vote on Palestinian status should be conditioned on prior dismantling of [the] pernicious UN Committee for the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People,” and told Ban that his representative had opened the meeting with a message conveying support for Palestinian unity with Hamas.
“The very existence of the United Nations Committee for the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People continually violates the United Nations Charter,” Samuels wrote. “By its delegitimization of the Jewish state, it is a political instrument that threatens a sovereign UN member, impugning its right to selfdefense under Article 51 of the Charter.”
(my bold throughout)
Huwaida Arraf: ‘[The flotilla] is not about aid, this is about Palestinian human rights, this is about liberation’
Jul 01, 2011
Adam Horowitz
Jack Ross’s glorious biography of the prophetic anti-Zionist Elmer Berger
Jul 01, 2011
Philip Weiss
Jack Ross was one of the first people to reach out to me on this site four years ago. We met at a chocolate bar near Union Square then at Junior’s on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Jack was built like a lineman, with an Abe Lincoln beard, and was just 22 but if you shut your eyes and listened to him you would think he was 50. Later Jack brought me to meet an anti-Zionist leader of the 50s and 60s named Leonard Sussman, and Sussman expressed the same surprise. From the telephone he’d thought Jack was 50, his voice was so deep and his thinking so complex. He had graduated from the National Labor College in Washington but everything he knew he seemed to have taught himself. “I can’t get over the fact that you… never heard of the draft riots,” he said to me on our second or third meeting.
That winter I met his rabbi Ellen Lippmann, from Kolot Chayeinu in Brooklyn. “So you know our silent genius,” she said. Jack was clad that day as he often is, in Birkenstocks without socks, in a black bowler hat straight out of the old country, in a long black coat from a Ben Shahn lithograph. Who could doubt that this youth was a prodigy. His writing for this site was always so compressed and layered and pointed. Who at his age was capable of such focus?
Now Ross is 26 and has written a book on the career of the anti-Zionist rabbi, Elmer Berger (1908-1996), with the same fierce focus and concision. Rabbi Outcast is an independent and glorious intellectual achievement. I was sorry it was over so quickly. I wanted more than 189 pages. The book begins with a dedication to the memory of Tony Judt and ends in the triumphantly optimistic spirit that Ross often signs his emails with: Flourish! It ends with a commandment to himself and to young Americans to heed the prophecies of Rabbi Elmer Berger and Isaiah and Judah Magnes — “those who warned against the madness.”
I can’t say that Ross ever fully captures the personality of Berger, a thrice-married chainsmoking outsider– that would be tough work for a young man– but who cares about personality, it is Berger’s political visions that so resonate. And this is a work of intellectual and religious history; Ross has disinterred a rich living tradition of Reform anti-Zionism in the 1930s-1970s, culminating with Berger’s friendships with Jim Abourezk, Edward Said and Walid Khalidi, a tradition that fully anticipates the non-Zionism and Palestinian solidarity movement we are in today. I am including a list of Ross’s discovered quotations at the bottom of this review, including a juicy Hannah Arendt misstep.
Berger was there first. He was thinking through all the issues that Jews who are freeing themselves of Zionism today are thinking of but decades ahead of us: he developed a religious philosophy of integration and not nationalism, he understood the refugee issue in all its vast moral squalor in the moment, he was crushed by the nascent Israel lobby that took over American Jewish life in the 50s, and he understood as an American that the issue was not just what Zionism was doing to Palestine but what it was doing to the United States.
Jack Ross has the unqiue ability to walk a reader through these religious and political awakenings in a brisk knowing way. His account is distinguished by two qualities, laserlike focus on a group of anti-Zionist rabbis of the American Council for Judaism (yes, honored by Thomas Kolsky’s book). And second, by its moral clangor. Jack Ross is taking on the neoconservative conspiracy that began in the 1940s or the 1880s, he is taking on the nationalist spirit that corrupted Jewish religious authorities and then American politics and played a role in the Iraq war and that he now declares is at an end. Ross is not a cautious thinker, he is a silent genius at a soapbox, and the moral clangor of his own writing is thrilling. Like this, for instance: When in 1999 the Reform rabbis declared that Israeli and Diaspora Jews were “interdependent communities,”
The leadership for the Reform mvomeent thus pledged its devotion to a faith owing more to Moses Hess and Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel than any authentically Judaic source, essentially reducible to the proposition that God so loved the Jews that He sent unto them His only begotten nation-state so that ‘the Jewish people’ would not perish but have everlasting life.
The book is occasionally marred by Ross’s dense style and preference for the conditional over the past tense (Berger would do this, would do that; when I upbraided Ross about this in a note, he said, “What are ‘woulds’ to all your never ending cheesy non-sequitur rhetorical devices?”) but I don’t know that it matters much in the end. This book will be read because it is so taut and ambitious, and though wide readership is as much as anyone could want for it, I am also pushing attention for my prodigious and unconventional friend. He didn’t go to graduate school, he didn’t have a mentor, he mentored himself, with his book-filled apartment in Brooklyn and rows of file cabinets, he has followed no ordinary path to these insights. I hope that more prominent publications than this one will review Ross’s book and meet the author, that Ross will not just be read, but that he will gain attention so that he might flourish.
To that end, the best service I can do to the book is to quote some of its many scholarly gems. Here are a few, most of them Berger quotes:
Berger, 1942:
The “Jewish problem” is not realy Jewish at all, though the Zionist is well on his way to making it so by seeking this thoroughgoing exclusiveness of Jewish life. The destiny of the Jew still lies with the destiny of the liberal world. Because fundamentally, Zionism has no faith with that world, I am a non-Zionist.
Berger, 1943:
I oppose Zionism because I deny that Jews are a nation. We were a nation for perhaps two hundred years in a history of four thousand years. Before that we were a group of warring Semitic tribes whse only tenuous bond of unity was a national deity—a religious unity… Certainly since the Dispersion we have not been a nation. We have belonged to every nation of the world. We have mixed our blood with all peoples. Jewish nationalism is a fabrication woven from the thinnest kind of threads and strengthened only in those eras of human history in which reaction has been dominant and anti-Semites in full cry.
Rabbi Morris Lazaron, 1952:
Let us pray that some generous proposal will be made by the state of Israel to the Arab and Muslim peoples to help solve their refugee problem…
Rabbi Irving Reichert of the American Council for Judaism in a 1936 sermon in San Francisco:
If my reading of Jewish history is correct, Israel took upon itself the yoke of the Law not in Palestine, but in the wilderness at Mount Sinai… There is too dangerous a parallel between the insistence sof some Zionist spokesmen upon nationality and race and blood, and similar pronouncements by Fasicst leaders in European dictatorships. Some types of propaganda may prove too tragically successful for our comfort.. If we succeed in teaching America that Zionism is the only instrument of our political salvation, we may live to regret it…
Norman Thomas, the American socialist leader, in 1952, on the new Israeli Law of Return:
Even more dangerous will be the consequences of this new law in fanning the flames of Arab chauvinism and Muslim fanaticism.
Berger, 1955:
The Old Testament Prophets wrote the most significant pages in the development of Judaism. They first conceived and articulated a religion dependent upon inner, moral strength, rather than upon land, nation or ritual. In Prophetic Judaism, as well as in the noblest conceptions of theAmerican dream, God is conceived as ‘indwelling’ within man.
Ross’s commentary: “It should be noted thought htat while it has gained vogue in recent generations as a position of quasi-agnosticism, the concept of the ‘indwelling God’ has an ancient pedigree in Judaism, originating at the shekhina of kabbalah.”
Berger on visiting Israel and Arab neighbors in 1955:
“I am more than ever concvinced of the absolute necessity for Jews outside of Israel to divorce themselves completely from a situation of moral degradation apparent in the Arab refugee problem.”
Frank Chodorov of ACJ in the 50s.
Israel is only part Israel, the rest being world-wide Zionism, and it is not certain which part wags which. Until this uncertainty is resolved, peace in the Middle East will be precarious, and American foreign policy will be in a similar state of turmoil.
Hannah Arendt in the early 1960s, writing to Berger. This quote should be hung around her reputation like a cowbell:
I am not really an anti-Zionist, and when Ben-Gurion passes from the scene Zionism will revert to the kind of broad, liberal movement it was as I first knew it in Germany.
Berger, followed by Ross:
“We could afford to lose, as we did, the battle against Jewish nationalism in far off Palestine… But we cannot afford to lose the battle against Jewish nationalism in America.” But this had always been the more hopeless battle. One way or another, the great majority of American Jews at the midpoint of the twentieth century were emphatically determined not be be ‘Americans of Jewish faith,” the identity that had meant so much to those who formed the Council [ACJ]. Zionism would give the most compelling answer to the anxieties of that generation, as it was inevitably becoming more Americanized.
Lessing Rosenwald of the ACJ on opposing Zionists:
We had to oppose them as undemocratic in conception and in operation, as archaic, attuned to medieval times rather than to the aspirations of the 20th century.
Ross comparing Theodor Herzl to Marcus Garvey
Garvey packed Madison Square Garden in 1921 to proclaim himself “Provisional President of Africa” in a stunning echo of Herzl’s declaration to have founded the Jewish State at Basel in 1897. Like Herzl, Garvey had a conspicuous taste for pompous dress and manner… The Garveyites, in turn, were no less fanatical than the Zionists against their adversaries, disparaging them in racially charged terms as ‘mulattoes’ and ‘octoroons.’”
And on the goal of Jews in the civil rights movement: “the complete integration into U.S. society of African Americans, a goal that, at least in theory, they had rejected for themselves.”
Berger in 1969 on the urgency of discussing the lobby. If Zionism is not ‘ventilated,” Mr [Abba] Eban will become again Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East.
Ross on recent history:
If anything, the peace process was only interpreted as a license for American Judaism to become more closely and intensely identified with Zionism than ever before… [The new prevalence of Holocaust awareness was a factor.] Another was the dramatic increase of Israeli influences on the religious practices of American Jews, whether directly from Israelis themselves or through the intensely Zionist-oriented Jewish summer camps, which defined the exposure of whole generations to Judaism….
Ross on Berger’s understanding of Jewish history:
The Old Testament reflected little more than a long saga of tribal warfare though the Iron and Bronze Ages …and that fundamentally the Jewish religion is not the tribal religion of this history but the faith of the prophets who proclaimed the possibility of a more just and righteous way of life.
BDS will free both the oppressed, and the oppressor
Jul 01, 2011
Rachel Giora
On June 27, the bill “to protect the state of Israel from damage caused by boycott” was approved by the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee for second and third readings in the plenum. The bill passed its first reading in the Knesset plenum on March 7, 2011, despite severe criticism from governmental ministries, the legal advisor of the Ministry of Justice, and leading civil society organizations. Regardless, Israel is determined to resist international pressure even at the cost of extreme penalties for legitimate, non-violent means used by citizens to protest government policies, such as the refusal of Israeli artists to perform in a theatre located in an Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territory. The bill will become law when its second and third readings take place early in July.
This legislation together with a long series of bills, some already enacted, aim to intimidate critics and silence protest. In March 2010, the Israeli parliament enacted the Nakba law allowing the State to revoke government funding for groups that mark Israeli Arabs’ Day of Destruction (Nakba). These measures of political repression show that Israel is willing to go to a great length in undermining basic rights and freedoms such as the freedom of expression and association, wrecking havoc on its civil society and Palestinian minority.
To meet with retribution and attempts at repression, resistance need not be violent. And when it unites people, it cannot be silenced. Exemplary in this respect is the feminist revolution. It has been liberating women as well as men everywhere, without bloodshed. In the same spirit of solidarity and non-violent resistance, the Palestinian civil society called in July 2005 for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel “until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights.” The effect of this call has been immense and is still growing, so much so that Israel can no longer turn a blind eye to it. Israeli leaders acknowledge that the boycott movement against Israel is effective. Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned of “a political tsunami” against Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu considered boycotting the Mideast Quartet meeting for fear of international pressure.
Indeed, the Palestinian nonviolent struggle made its mark and global solidarity with the Palestinians is soaring while Israel’s international status is plummeting. The EU is considering sanctions against Israel. The UN singled out Israel for human rights abuse. Several South American and Latin American states already recognized Palestinian independence and this trend is now on the rise in Europe. According to a recent BBC poll surveying 27 countries, Israel is grouped with Iran and North Korea as “the world’s least popular countries” and viewed as having a negative influence in the world. According to an ICM European poll carried out in January 2011, European public opinion is swaying against Israel. This may suggest that the international community is approaching the point of finally having enough of Israel’s entrenched policies of occupation and settlement.
Rather than addressing and redressing the real issues Israel is now targeting peace activists and human rights defenders, suggesting they are to blame for Israel’s loss of legitimacy. The incarceration of Palestinian popular struggle leaders Abdullah Abu Rahmah and Bassam Tamimi and of Israeli activist Jonathan Pollak are just a few instances, clearly indicating a move towards severe harassment of activists engaged in popular protest. Those who raise their voice against government policies are denounced as enemies of the state. At the same time, it is worth noting that Israelis of all walks of life responded to the boycott prohibition bill with disdain and anger. Over 50 Israeli civil society organizations, headed by the Coalition of Women for Peace, have signed an urgent appeal to the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee of the Knesset calling the committee to halt the legislative proceedings of the Boycott Prohibition bill. Israel Prize laureates and eminent cultural icons protested the bill, describing it as suicidal. Israel, they have stated, is acting like a criminal state. Israel’s international isolation is now recognized by some prominent Israelis to be a result of misguided, “hysterical” even, actions of a reckless government willing to further sacrifice its commitment to democracy for a commitment to maintaining the occupation.
Outlawing boycotts against Israel and similar measures of repression will not turn the tide. These are rightfully perceived as pathetic and desperate attempts at silencing legitimate dissent. The intensifying pressure of the international community should support the resolve of Israeli and international civil society to continue resisting occupation policies. It should eventually force Israel to come to its senses. As Reverend Samuel Kyles, speaking on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, said: “You can kill the dreamer…but you cannot kill the dream.” The Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice, like the feminist movement, is bound to redeem both the oppressed and the oppressor; may they free themselves from slavery and the enslaver from tyranny.
Rachel Giora is a Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University and a member of BOYCOTT! Supporting the Palestinian BDS call from within.
Ackerman says effort to hold Israel to int’l law is ‘anti-Semitism’
Jul 01, 2011
Philip Weiss
Here’s Gary Ackerman, congressman from Long Island, in the Jerusalem Post, professing his Zionism. A lot of excerpts because this is so crazy. The Jews are a “separate” people, Jewish legislators from around the world must represent Israel, Palestinian statehood initiative is devastating…
While many differences exist among Jewish parliamentarians, the concept ofahavat Yisrael – literally, “love of Israel” – is common to us all. It is for this reason that 55 Jewish parliamentarians from 22 countries have assembled in Jerusalem under the auspices of the World Jewish Congress….
I don’t believe that increasing attacks on Israel’s right to exist and efforts to label its acts of self-defense “war-crimes” or even “crimes against humanity” are actually rooted in a belief in international law, or a principled evaluation of Israeli military operations.
What I believe is really driving most of these claims is a deep-seated and stubborn refusal to see Jews as a people. This conceptual failure – whether rooted in anti-Semitism (which it is) or ignorance (which it is) – leads to a refusal to accept Israel as a Jewish state, or to accept that it, like every state, has a fundamental right to self-defense.
Only Israel, the one and only Jewish state, is subjected to the humiliation of having its right to exist routinely questioned, and the right of its people to be free from violence openly rejected. Only Israel is the permanent whipping boy of the United Nations.
So we are faced with a paradox: While the anti-Semitism and discrimination Jews have historically faced (and in some places rightfully continue to fear) are based on the view of Jews as a people apart, the ongoing assault on Israel’s legitimacy is built upon the idea that the Jews are not a separate people at all, and are thus not entitled to self-determination…THE PALESTINIAN plan to take their case for statehood to the UN General Assembly poses great danger for Israel. If this initiative were to succeed– or worse, to slip out of control, – the results could be devastating. Israel could be exposed to sanctions and pressures beyond the wildest hopes of its worst enemies.
But in addition to these external challenges, we face a more intimate one that we share with the entire Jewish people. How do those of us who are representatives from all over the world and every part of the political spectrum come together to protect and advance our common interests?
State Department says it opposes sabotaging flotilla boats
Jul 01, 2011
Philip Weiss
Well it took some badgering, but State Department spokesman Mark Toner conceded as muchyesterday. Apparently this was the work of the great Matt Lee of AP.
QUESTION: Slightly related, on the Gaza flotilla, are you concerned at all that there seem – that some of these ships appear to be sabotaged?
MR. TONER: I really don’t have any comment on that. I’ve seen the press reports and haven’t had any other confirmation beyond that.
QUESTION: So it wouldn’t bother you at all if this was happening?
MR. TONER: I just can’t speak to whether – the veracity, I guess, of these claims that they’ve been sabotaged. Our opinion – that’s been stated very clearly from the State Department, both from the Secretary down to this podium – is that these flotillas are a bad idea, and there’s other ways to get this kind of assistance to the people of Gaza.
QUESTION: So preventing the flotilla from leaving by a —
MR. TONER: I didn’t say – I am in no way condoning any sabotage of these vessels.
QUESTION: Well, are —
MR. TONER: But I’m saying these vessels, these flotillas, in and of themselves, are not a good idea.
QUESTION: Well, can you say that you would be opposed to anyone trying to sabotage these – trying to sabotage these ships?
MR. TONER: Again —
QUESTION: It’s my understanding that you’re concerned about the safety of everyone involved —
MR. TONER: Precisely.
QUESTION: — and that if there’s someone running around and trying to —
MR. TONER: Precisely. We’re concerned. This is about —
QUESTION: — sabotaging these ships, that’s a safety issue.
MR. TONER: This is about people’s safety. Again, I just – it’s hard for me to speak to because we don’t have any independent confirmation these ships have actually been sabotaged. We’ve just seen press reports and what these flotilla representatives have said. But certainly, we don’t want to see – you’re absolutely right; our emphasis is on the safety of the individuals involved.
QUESTION: Just a quick follow-up. Yesterday it was the Greek ship, Giuliano; today it was the Irish ship. So there are more than one incident. And then yesterday, there were fishermans in waters where there are no fish. I mean, I know it is – gasoline and things like this, so they appear suddenly. So you must be keeping tabs on that, or someone must be? Do you —
MR. TONER: I don’t have any comment.
QUESTION: Okay. Would you equally also say that it is not a good idea to sabotage these ships in any way?
MR. TONER: I would just reiterate what I just said to Matt, is – our bottom line is we don’t want to see anyone put at risk, and that would include any action to sabotage these boats, but also the boats themselves, the flotillas themselves, will put these individuals at risk.
Yeah. Go ahead.
QUESTION: Change of topic?
MR. TONER: Sure.
Europe embraces the silences of Aharon Appelfeld
Jul 01, 2011
Eleanor Kilroy
“Is the genocide of European Jewry being used as part of the negation of what is happening to the Palestinians?” Yitzhak Laor asks, rhetorically, in The Myths of Liberal Zionism (Verso, 2010), his book on the Jewish Israeli literati and the European press that courts them. Laor continues:
Who can doubt it? When Eli Wiesel or Claude Lanzmann or any other of the most distinguished bearers of Holocaust memory are recruited to defend Israel, everyone knows they do so on behalf of the Holocaust survivors and victims, namely the State of Israel. Again, this is all part of the blurred lines between Jews and Israelis, the mixed roles they play, all under one title: victims.
Reading Yitzhak Laor earlier this year, I was at times physically shaken by his searing narrative, and it was his thesis that came to mind last week while reading the French press on a short visit to Brussels. Israeli writer and Holocaust survivor, Aharon Appelfeld, is in France promoting the translation of his book with the French title of Le Garçon qui voulait dormir (The boy who wanted to sleep), from the Hebrew, Ha-ish She-Lo Passak Lishon (literally: The Man who would not cease to sleep). Several reverential reviews and interviews have appeared in the French press, notably Le Monde, which dedicated two pages of its broadsheet ‘Des Livres’ (Books) section on Friday 24 June to the author. The novel’s male protagonist, Erwin-Aharon, is – like the author – an adolescent escapee from the Nazi concentration camps, and at the end of the war, he is taken to Italy, then British mandate Palestine. It is at this moment that the novel is set; recruited with other young people by the Jewish Agency, Erwin, who changes his name to Aharon, and spoke German, Ukranian and Yiddish, learns Hebrew to prepare himself for the future State of Israel. Erwin has, however, taken refuge in almost constant slumber, conversing in dreams with family members murdered during the Holocaust.
One book review/interview resembles another – in part because Appelfeld has some stock phrases: he never speaks of the Holocaust, but always of the ‘catastrophe’. “Look, he says ‘Holocaust’ is like ‘anti-Semitism’: these words are too small!”; and he defines himself as ‘a Jew writing in Israel’ (se définit comme “un juif écrivant en Israël”). Not one of the interviewees asks him about Israel’s occupation of Palestine – something that would be improbable with his Palestinian counterpart, regardless of the subject of her/his book. In all these pages and audio minutes of interviews, the colonised Palestinians cease to exist and Appelfeld is simply a ‘Jew’. Appelfeld is understandably content to play along: if he can tour France promoting his book and avoid questions on the Nakba, and Israel’s military occupation and apartheid policies, so much the better. I shared my exasperation with Yitzhak Laor, and he responded that,
the discourse is not the Israeli writer’s, but rather his Western interlocutors’ construction. Of course, those writers who managed to become what is known today as International Writers play the game, either for very practical reasons or [because they] happen to be just the subject of such a discourse. This discourse is: We are part of you, the West. Don’t spoil that with questions that remind us and you of the colonial division between West and East (within or without the West).
Aharon Appelfeld was born to assimilated Jewish parents in 1932 near Czernowitz, Romania (now Ukraine), and was just a child when he witnessed the assassination of his mother. Together with his father, he was transported to a Nazi concentration camp, and his autobiography, The Story of a Life picks up the story from after his courageous escape from the camp. The book profoundly affected me when I read it – to the extent that I failed to question the absence of any reference to the Palestinian Nakba when, in the second part of the book, Appelfeld’s 14 year old self arrives as a refugee in British mandate Palestine in 1946.
Appelfeld is a complex character, with an openly ambivalent attitude to Israeli identity and to Zionist ideology, which he has nevertheless defended as ‘necessary’. In a 2004 interview with Haaretz, in Hebrew (English translation), he criticized “an aggressive element” in Zionism, whilst yet being openly indifferent to the fate of the Palestinians: “I am not familiar with the Arabs. For me they are an abstraction”. He also expressed anger towards Europe for its continuing failure to acknowledge its full role in the Holocaust and was resentful of any criticism of Israel, which he dismissed as anti-Semitism: “Europe has not given itself a full reckoning of what happened between 1939 and 1945… because to this day they haven’t made a confession, the Europeans feel the need to say of the Jews that they are no better than them… They are already preparing the argument that if something happens to the Jews again, it will be the Jews’ fault, not theirs.” Empathy for the plight of non-Jews is severely lacking:
Week after week the newspapers write about some Palestinian disaster. Very faithfully. Week after week, some Palestinian disaster is described. And I ask myself why isn’t some Jewish disaster written up once in a while? Is there a shortage of Jewish disasters here? Isn’t there Jewish pain here? On every street, there is pain like that. In every house, there is a disaster like that. Wouldn’t it be good to write about a Jewish disaster one week and a Palestinian disaster the next week? Wouldn’t that put things in a more correct perspective?
(A. Shavit, “Not Good for the Jews: An Interview with Aharon Appelfeld,” Haaretz, Feb. 13, 2004)
While Appelfeld cannot be considered a member of the ‘Israeli Peace Camp’, Laor’s examination of the reception Israeli writers get in Europe in The Myths of Liberal Zionism also applies to him:
Of course the Israeli Peace Camp figures do not have the same values as the liberal readers of Le Monde, Liberation, the Guardian, or La Repubblica. Of course, not one of those readers would publically demand the kind of constitution those writers support in Israel… property laws under which Arabs are prevented from purchasing land, not to mention Israel’s laws of citizenship that discriminate against non-Jews.
During an audio interview with France Culture, Appelfeld elaborates on the theme of his Jewish identity, and to the question, “What does it mean for you today to be Israeli?”, he answers:
I am a Jew and I stay a Jew. Jewish is a much wider, extensive notion that Israeli; an Israeli means that I am a Jew in a specific place; I am Jewish and I exist in many places… One cannot describe modern life without the Jews, like Marx, Freud, Wittgenstein, Kafka… and I am linked to them all, like I am linked to Maimonides.
He later adds: “I am very Jewish and therefore very European.” Although the 79 year-old author of several novels and books of essays has lived for 64 years in the State of Israel, he refuses to be drawn on what this citizenship means.
The French journalist Marc Weitzmann takes an admiring look at ‘The Appelfeld paradox’ in Le Monde: “If all his work is centered around a historic cataclysm, each of this books, however, erases as much as possible all reference to the history… and [there is a] radical absence of causality.” Weitzmann is referring to the silences in Appelfeld’s narratives on the Holocaust itself – his books are set during the aftermath of WWII in displacement camps in Europe, then in Palestine and Israel after the creation of the Zionist State in 1948. Regarding Appelfeld’s mantra he is a Jew more than an Israeli, he adds: “If the creation of the State of Israel is the means by which Jews entered into history, Appelfeld cannot but feel exiled from history”. Elsewhere, journalists speculate on whether his “silence was the price paid for building his new country”. Indeed they refer to his own explanation that he had to “create his country”. These writers fail to interrogate the absurd notion that the terrible crimes committed against the young Appelfeld, his family and millions of European Jews can be healed with nation-building.
Examining the complex relations Israeli culture maintains with Western culture in The Myths of Liberal Zionism, Laor finds
Our forefathers adjusted their culture to a foreign model, in a long and torturous process, with physical extermination as one of its stages, and this dislocation has never been mended. On the contrary – Zionism took it one step further when it promised the Jews that it would be mended through the colonization of another people.
