By: Gideon Spiro 21 October 2014 (English Translation 30 October)
Do not enlist
The five hundred children who were killed by the bombs of the Israeli air force in the who-knows-how-manyeth Gaza War, which named “Solid Cliff” (“Defensive Edge” in English) were not the last Palestinian children killed by the soldiers of the Israeli Occupation army. On Simhat Torah Occupation soldiers killed 13- year-old Baha Samir Badr of Beit Laqiya near Ramallah. The killing of the child did not spoil the celebrators’ enjoyment of the holiday. Whenever I come a across news like this I become still more inclined to call on Israeli youth who have not yet enlisted, and to tell them: if you do not want to kill children, don’t enlist. Go to Berlin, where they do not kill children. Learn German with the help of a government grant, and then hundreds if not thousands of institutions of higher learning or professional training schools will be available to you. For those that do not want to remain in Germany, there is the rest of the European Union with its abundance of opportunities. Instead of oppressing another people and endangering your own lives and the lives of others, enjoy the freedom Europe offers you.
How can you compare?
Once again Knesset Member Haneen Zoabi is getting on everybody’s nerves. This time she has said that there is no difference between an ISIS throat-cutter and an air force pilot who drops bombs on Gaza. In the both cases they are terrorists and murderers.
No difference, Haneen? Now you’re getting on my nerves too. The ISIS murderer, that throat-cutter, works in the primitive and barbaric style of the Middle Ages. After he cuts off the head the blood splatters on his clothes and he had to do a lot of work to get cleaned up, and in the Middle Ages there were no washing-machines or variety of products to remove stains.
The pilot, the airplane and the missile are all products of the scientific era, everything is digital and functions flawlessly. One push of a button and the missile is released and liquidates ten children, or an entire family of 15 souls at one blow. And in attacks like that there are always corpses with parts torn off, a head or an arm or a leg, or an abdomen ripped open with all the internal organs splattered all about. Now try to imagine, Haneen, how hard that throat- cutter would have to work to get such a result. And the pilot, Haneen, returns to his base in clean clothes, drinks a cup of hot chocolate and reports to the commander about the success of the mission. You can see, Haneen, there is no comparing.
So what remains for him to clean? His conscience. The conscience, now there’s a devious device. It works in different ways and on different frequencies with different people. Sometimes the conscience is paralyzed, and then the pilot tells himself: no one told me there were children in Gaza, I am at peace with myself. Sometimes the conscience is partially functional and then the pilot has an internal struggle, he wavers: to bomb or not to bomb? Usually military discipline wins out in the end.
In the more rare event of the conscience working at full capacity, the pilot sweats profusely when he is recalls the painful images that result from the bombings. He wavers, his conscience patiently guides him through stages of yes, no and maybe, What about my comrades? And what awaits me? And gradually a crystal of light grows that tips the scale: thus far and no further. I will not continue. And thus a refuser is born.
Azmi my friend, the most important thing is not to be afraid at all [1]
The Israeli Premier Football League comprises 14 teams. Racism is widespread among football fans and keeps those who cannot stand that contamination away from the football stadiums. One team, Beitar Jerusalem, surpasses them all. Its fans are racist and violent, and no Arab player can approach its gates for fear of being lynched. The racism of Beitar Jerusalem is so monstrous that the new president of Israel, Rubi Rivlin, who served as chairman of Beitar Jerusalem in the past, has declared that he will not attend its games.
According to the regulations of the international football federation FIFA, a team that is racist or has racist fans must be disqualified. If the FIFA regulations were applied as they should be, Beitar Jerusalem would have been removed from the league and disbanded long ago. But as usual, Israel brushes off international regulations and not only is the team wallowing in a swamp of racism, it constitutes a showcase for what is happening in the government of Israel.
If Beitar Jerusalem is a popular team that is acceptable to the present ruling establishment, that is not the case with another team, which to Israel’s racists, both in the government and outside it, constitutes a stain on the Jewish (and non-democratic) character of the State of Israel. That team is called Bnei Sakhnin (literally, “Sons of Sakhnin). An Arab football team that bears the name of an Arab town. The princes and princesses of racism in Israel, including Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Culture and Sports Minister Limor Livnat, are looking for a pretext to remove the Arabs from the Premier League, news of which dominates the sports reporting on television and in the newspapers nearly every day. Their eyes are pained, they block their ears, their stomachs churn and their bodies shrink at the thought of the Sakhnin supporters, some of whom wave Palestinian flags at games, which cannot be concealed in the media reports. “May our camp be pure” is their slogan, and so Bnei Sakhnin must be transferred to one of the minor leagues, where most of the Arabs are concentrated, and the activities of which do not interest anyone. There they can wave Palestinian flags as much as they want, the media won’t report it, and what is not reported might as well not exist.
The leaders of the team know that they are under a microscope. And Bnei Sakhnin has played it smartly. The team has maintained its position in the Premier League for several years now, and once it even won the Israel State Cup, and as such became the Israeli representative in the UEFA Cup tournament in Europe for national cup winners. And the racists? They were bursting with frustration. Sakhnin did not provide them with any pretext to remove it from the Premier League. Until Saturday, 18 October, 2014.
On that Saturday, before the game began, there was a ceremony to award certificates of appreciation to people who had contributed to the club, including Dr. Azmi Bishara. It was a red flag waved in front of the bulls of hate and racism.
Here I will parenthetically say a few words about Azmi Bishara. He headed the group that founded the Balad party, which he represented in the Knesset. He is a man of many talents. An intellectual compared to whom most Knesset Members are mental dwarves. A philosopher by training, charismatic, a political leader, a Knesset Member who raised the level of the debate by several degrees. With the vision of a state of all its citizens, he introduced the alternative to the oxymoron of a Jewish and democratic state. In the 1999 elections, the last elections with a double ballot, one for the prime minister and the other for the party, he ran for prime minister. The political and security establishments were horrified. An Arab as prime minister of Israel? What’s this country coming to? Those ignoramuses had not read Jabotinsky, who envisioned a democratic state in which Arabs would enjoy equal rights, and he did not rule out the possibility of an Arab prime minister with a Jewish deputy, and vice-versa. Bishara was seen as an increasingly dangerous figure, who could attract support not only from Arabs but Jews as well, and so he had to be gotten rid of, the sooner the better. So the Israel Security Agency cooked up an accusation of espionage against him, according to which he helped Hezbollah aim at targets in Israel in the Second Lebanon War. Whoever knows Azmi knows that this was a libel intended to put him away for the rest of his life. He was never in the army, he knows nothing about firing mortars, and he knows nothing about gun laying. I myself, who served in the army and completed a course for mortar commanders – if I were asked to gun-lay for mortars today, I would not know what to do. And if that is the case for me, it is all the more true of Bishara, who as I said has had no military training at all.
Bishara, who was interrogated several times by the ISA, clearly saw which way the winds were blowing. He knew that in the Israeli reality he had no chance of receiving a fair trial – not with the ISA against him. His choice was between prison for life and taking advantage of the parliamentary immunity he still had in order to leave the country permanently, or until it returned to sanity. He made the wise choice, he chose life – which is a commandment in Judaism, but you don’t have to be Jewish to do make that choice. After he ensured his future freedom he resigned from the Knesset.
Back to the football team: governmental brainwashing with the help of servile media have converted Azmi Bishara into a “suspected spy in time of war” who has “fled from justice”. The inclusion of Bishara among the recipients of certificates of appreciation played into the hands of the two L’s – Livnat and Lieberman – and the other Israeli racists. They all launched a well-orchestrated attack on Bnei Sakhnin. The Sports Minister, in line with her unique understanding of the concept of the separation of powers, demanded that the Israel Football Association court punish Bnei Sakhnin severely, and dictated the punishment to the judges: protracted suspension from the Premier League. The charge: introducing politics into sport, which is forbidden by the regulations. The leaders of Bnei Sakhnin replied that this was a tempest in a teapot. There’s no politics here, they said: just recognition for a man who made a contribution to the club. And I might add that it would be easy to verify this: let Limor Livnat contribute to the club and we will see if she receives a certificate of appreciation like the one Azmi Bishara received. Now we must wait and see whether the judges of the Football Federation court will show some independent judgement or function as emissaries of the minister. [2]
For the ears of the Rainbow
Dr. Hani Zubida, a senior lecturer (i.e. he has tenure) in political science at the College of the verdant Jezreel Valley, has been given a rare privilege by the editorial board of the newspaper Haaretz: an opportunity to respond in an entire column. But he blew the opportunity. (Haaretz supplement, 10 October 2014). He creates enemies where they do not exist except in his imagination. The three articles that fuelled his rage, by the journalists Elon Idan, Hila Glazer and the “peach” as he put it, Vered Lee, are innocent of any racism. I do not know those three, but I read them from time to time and not only have I found no racism there; my impression is that they are allies in the struggle against racism. The big failure by Dr. Zubida and his friends adheres to the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow, the directorial committee of which he is now the chairman. Racism against Mizrahi Jews, if indeed it still exists, is a product of racism against Arabs. The 1950s were the years of immigration to Israel from Arab countries. The immigrants, who looked like Arabs and spoke Arabic as well as having a low level of education, were targets for racism and arrogance from the Ashkenazi Zionist establishment. They were also destined to play a role similar to that of Israeli Arabs: working in unprestigious jobs for low pay. It was in those days that the Hebrew language began to be polluted with various kinds of racist expressions.
The Mizrahi uprising in Wadi Salib in Haifa in 1959, which was suppressed with an iron fist, ignited a red light for the governmental and party establishment. It was decided that the emphasis should be put on socializing immigrants from Arab countries, especially the second and third generations. What they failed to accomplish before 1967 was abundantly achieved in the subsequent 47 years of Occupation. The success was dazzling. Jews from Arab countries adopted the Zionist-racist narrative, whether of the Labour Party or the Likud. All the Zionist parties nurtured Mizrahi cadres which continued to promote more sinister aspect of the Zionist project. They reached the highest levels in a variety of roles and continued with dedication what their Ashkenazi predecessors had started.
Mizrahi finance ministers did nothing to reduce the gap between rich and poor. Mizrahi defence ministers continued the policies of Occupation, oppression and building settlements. High-ranking Mizrahi officers were just as warlike as their kibbutznik predecessors and the racist plague keeps infecting more and more youths before their enlistment.
Things have come to such a pass that the more right-wing and racist an organization is, the more Mizrahis are represented in it disproportionately to their share of the general population. I come across them nearly every day, whether it is a taxi driver, the manager of my local post office branch or a shop clerk. I always hear the same words: “You can’t trust Arabs, they will stab you in the back, we know them, we came from there”, and so on, as if they were speaking out of the throat of Knesset Member Brigadier-General (Res) Miri Regev, who is the most popular representative of Mizrahi Jews today.
When The Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow first appeared, I was hopeful that here at long last was a Mizrahi organization that supported peace, equality and democracy, the members of which would storm the strongholds of racism and destroy them, or at least reduce them, as much as its strength would permit, working hand-in-hand with other human-rights organizations. A major hothouse for the cultivation of racism is the Occupation and the regime of apartheid that Israel has set up in the Territories. I hoped that the Rainbow as a body would join Yesh Gvul and support the refusers of occupation and racism, but that did not happen. I wanted to see the Rainbow standing on the front-lines in the struggle against hatred of African asylum-seekers, and that did not happen; I hoped that the Rainbow would embrace the prisoner of conscience Mordechai Vanunu, whom Israel has been tormenting for 29 years now, and that too did not happen. As if there were an over-abundance of Moroccan-born Jews whose names appear on the list of Nobel Peace Prize candidates and have received the Alternative Nobel and the LennonOno Grant for Peace and the Carl von Ossietzky Medal. A partial list. More than once have I appealed to the leadership of the Rainbow, orally and in writing, asking them to support the campaign for Vanunu. I received no reply. Why get involved with such a hated and reviled figure? For that purpose there are lots of Ashkenazis who can make themselves targets for the rage of the incited masses.
In personal conversations I have had with prominent members of the Rainbow I stressed the racist aspect of the Establishment’s harsh approach to Vanunu. And so it would mean a lot if an organization like the Rainbow, to which the crème de la crème of Mizrahi Jewish (or Arab Jewish, as Professor Yehuda Shenhav prefers to put it) society belongs, would link hands with the existing committee, which is reviled as – among other things – a bunch of “Ashkenazi leftists who hate their People.” My interlocutors agreed with me that this was a shortcoming, but it was not corrected. Still, even now it is not too late for the Rainbow to join the campaign to lift the arbitrary restrictions that have been imposed on Vanunu, and to allow him to leave Israel.
In conclusion, an anecdote that illustrates the situation: On 21 April 2004, the day Vanunu was released from the Ashkelon prison, two groups were standing in front of the entrance to the prison, on each side of the narrow street. On one side were supporters who had come to congratulate Vanunu and thank him for what he had done, and on the other side a group of Ashkelon residents, most of them Mizrahi Jews, who had come to protest. Next to me stood then-MK Issam Makhoul. The moment they recognized an Arab Knesset Member, they began to rain a shower of curses and abuse, some of which was taken from Our Teacher Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s elaborate arsenal of curses, and some of which were homemade. They hurled abuse at him just for being an Arab. At that point I stepped in and said to them, “Why are you saying that? After all, you are Arab Jews!” They took that as a terrible insult, and their faces red with rage, spitting sparks of hatred, they replied to me: “You’re an Arab!” In their view that was supposed to insult me, as well being as a clinching argument to which I could give no answer. And indeed I had no answer.
A lot of work remains for the Rainbow to do in the struggle to uproot racism. My advice to Zubida: don’t go in search of enemies. If you act along the lines proposed here, you will find that you have more than enough enemies.
Translator’s notes
1. Allusion to a famous quote attributed to Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, 1772-1810: “All the world is a very narrow bridge, and the important thing is not to be afraid at all.” Also the title line of a popular Israeli song.
2. On 23 October it was reported that the team was fined NIS 15,000. http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Sports/IFA-punishes-Sakhnin-with-NIS-15K-slap-
|