By: Gideon Spiro
10 May 2011 (English translation 15 May)
The end of a dream (for now)
I rejoiced when Barack Obama was elected President of the USA, not only because an Afro-American President had been elected for the first time, which was a great achievement in its own right, but also because I was filled with hope that forty years after the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, someone who looked like him would lead America.
Obama, who rose to power on the slogan “Yes we can”, would realize King’s famous speech, “I have a dream.” If not all of it, at least part of it.
Two years of the Obama’s presidency have given us bitter disappointment. Instead of realizing Martin Luther King’s dream of a society that would put an end to wars, a society that would be democratic, egalitarian and solidaric, the President has won the world’s admiration as an assassin. From one end of the Earth to the other, Obama is being lauded for his liquidation of Osama bin-Laden. In Israel they are praising him to the skies, for they see it as an affirmation of Israel’s “liquidations policy,” which has received the status of sanctity, a kind of 11th Commandment. The colonialist Netanyahu was not ashamed to praise assassination in the name of democracy. Now Obama joins the list of extra-judicial executioners.
Just to be clear: Bin-Laden is a terrorist. But as one who opposes the death penalty, I believe that those who are accused of crimes, however grave they may be, should be given a trial in which their guilt must be proven. Those who accept no limitations on the war on terror will end up resembling terrorists more and more. And indeed, the USA and Israel are states in which the war on terror have eroded democratic norms and which have adopted terrorist methods, which harm their own citizens as well. Since President Bush declared war on Terror, the USA has caused the deaths of innocent civilians on a scale that exceeds the victims of the Twin Towers by a factor of tens.
The USA has exhibited political short-sightedness in its struggle against Islamic jihadism. When Bin-Laden and his comrades fought the Soviet army in Afghanistan, the USA financed and armed them because the USSR was considered to be the primary enemy. Today we know that moderate Islam prevails in the Islamic societies that seceded from the Soviet Union, and it may be that that would have also been the case in Afghanistan if the Americans had permitted the USSR to defend the Communist regime there. It is reminiscent of Israel’s short-sightedness in cultivating Hamas when the PLO and Fatah were considered the primary enemy.
Holocaust Remembrance Day
Not long ago Israel observed Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is a day on which the spring of tears does not stop flowing. In recent years Israeli directors have made moving films that deal with the Holocaust from various perspectives. The tears flow by themselves, as the song goes. They flow in the face of evil and the wickedness, they flow in the presence of the amazing rehabilitations of those who survived the extermination camps, they flow in the light of the stories of the Righteous Gentiles who endangered their lives to save Jews.
What spoils the picture are the hollow clichés of the leaders of the State at the official ceremonies. Netanyahu terrorizes his audience with the danger of destruction that Israel is facing. For example, Hamas, which rules Gaza, the biggest prison in the world, is one of those who “rise against us to destroy us.” Really quite an upside down world, for in reality it is wealthy, armed Israel that is endangering the poor and besieged Hamas.
What bothers the Israeli regime are the Holocaust survivors who are still living among us. Their existence is a grave indictment against Israel. Tens of thousands of them are living in serious hardship. The government of Israel received billions for the survivors, but instead of taking care of their welfare, to permit them to end their lives with dignity, they are humiliated. Every Holocaust survivor who requests any aid, for example in the medical domain, is forced to through the seven circles of hell of bureaucracy that humiliates them with interrogations and tests. The regime loves the six million who are dead, who cannot answer when it speaks in their names. Those who remain alive spoil the show.
I identify with the slogan to remember and not to forget. As a native of Germany and a survivor of the Krystallnacht pogrom in Berlin I also have a personal stake in it. The disagreement is not about remembering, but about the lessons, and those have not been learned in the Israel of Occupation and apartheid.
Another Remembrance Day
These lines are being written on Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism Remembrance Day, which is observed on the eve of Israel’s 63rd Independence Day. As on the Holocaust Remembrance Day, here too our political leaders tend to make speeches at events of State. The speeches are not only characterized by empty flowery rhetoric, but also by substantive lies.
President Shimon Peres said at the opening ceremony of Remembrance Day that was held at the Western Wall Plaza, a religious site (one might parenthetically take note of the intolerable mixing of religion and state), that “we did not seek wars; they were imposed on us,” and he also said that the soldiers who had been killed “fell in defence of the homeland.” The Chief of Staff who spoke at the same ceremony spoke a great deal about the “heroism of the fallen” and similar things were said by the Prime Minister in a television appearance.
Let’s correct the record: Most of the wars were not imposed on us, but imposed on others by Israel. Most of the fallen did not fall in defence of the homeland but in defence of the Occupation and the settlements. Needless death.
As for heroism, I am reminded of the words of the philosopher and scientist Professor Yeshayahu Liebowitz, who said that the fact that millions of soldiers are willing to overcome the instinct for life and to die in wars is a cheapening of the concept of heroism.
The man who stands against his government and its army and says that he is not willing to serve in an unjust war, or who refuses to take part in actions to suppress human rights that offend his conscience and is willing to accept punishment for that refusal, is a heroic person. Accordingly it is the Occupation-refusers who are the heroes and not those who are willing to die on its altar.
A new catastrophe for Israel: Palestinian reconciliation
The Israeli government’s refusal of peace spreads its wings in all directions. When there is a Palestinian rift between Gaza and the West Bank, the government says, “how can we sign a peace treaty with Abu Mazen, who represents only half the Palestinian people?” After a reconciliation agreement was signed between Fatah and Hamas according to which there will be a unified Palestinian government, the government of Israel responds with a ringing rejection: it will not conduct negotiations with a Palestinian government in which the Hamas movement is included, because “we do not talk to terrorist organizations.”
The pretext of not talking to terrorist organizations is a case of throwing sand in our eyes. Because otherwise it would be forbidden to talk to the government of Israel, which has been a terrorist organization since the Occupation began, and especially since the beginning of the settlement enterprise and the land-theft that accompanies it, which are defined in international law as war crimes. International experience instructs that when terrorist organizations talk to each other, there is a chance of finding a solution.
The Palestinian Authority has presented its position regarding a peace agreement: withdrawal to the Green Line borders (the 1949 armistice lines), the evacuation of the settlements, Jerusalem as a shared capital and an agreed-upon solution to the refugee problem. The Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal said in his speech at the signing ceremony for the reconciliation accord in Cairo that the objective is a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. The reconciliation agreement has already borne its first fruit in this Hamas alignment with Fatah.
The Palestinian leadership poses one fundamental question to the government of Israel: what is your peace plan? And there is no answer. And since that is the case, the most convenient escape-route is “we don’t talk to terrorist organizations.”
The slaughter in Syria
The Syrian regime is slaughtering its citizens who are demonstrating for democracy and human rights, as the Israeli regime has been slaughtering Palestinians subject to its rule for 44 years now. The number of killed among the Syrian demonstrators is approaching a thousand. The Syrian regime, like the Israeli one, is putting tanks and soldiers into the centres of cities to suppress the demonstrations. The number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli Occupation forces in 44 years is close to ten thousand. The number of those arrested is close to a million, the number of those who have been tortured in the basements of the Israel Security Agency is in the tens of thousands. The present Syrian government has quite a long way to go before its terror approaches that of the Israeli Occupation in scale.
I assume that this column is not read in Syria, if only because the number of people who know Hebrew there is very small. But since these words are translated into English and appear on the Internet, maybe they will reach a Syrian soldier who knows English and who is surfing the Internet. My message to him is similar to my message to the soldiers of the Israeli oppression: it is a war crime to shoot at unarmed civilian populations. The order to shoot is the height of blatant illegality. Find a suitable way under the circumstances of the Syrian reality to refuse the order and pass it along to your comrades. The more the number of refusers grows, the more the regime of oppression will be shortened, there as here.
Translated from Hebrew for Occupation Magazine by George Malent
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