CRAZY COUNTRY

Friday, June 6, 2014

The longest war
At five minutes to eight on the morning of June 5, 1967 precisely forty seven years
ago - I was around the corner from my school in the Old North of Tel Aviv when the
air raid sirens sounded. Hundreds of pupils were running into the basement of the
school building. A kindly teacher comforted us and told us there was nothing to worry
about, that our soldiers were going to win. The open radio said that the army was
counter-attacking after the Egyptians launched an attack on our southern border.
Years later I found this was factually untrue; but disbelieving military communiqus
is not something you learn in school. Anyway, the teacher was evidently right: Tel Aviv
was not bombed, there were no further alarms, and soon there came the exhilarating
news of the incredibly rapid advance of our soldiers on all fronts.

This is what came to be known as the Six Day War a rather misleading name, as in a
sense that war is still going on after all these years. At the time it seemed the most
clear-cut and decisive of military victories. In retrospect, it turned out to provide a
very clear proof of the limitations of military power. Like the proverbial hare running
with all his force and still unable to pass the plodding turtle, all of Israels
overwhelming military superiority is not enough to crush the Palestinians fierce
aspiration to be a free people in their homeland.
After forty seven years the State of Israel is still striving with all its might to
conquer and re-conquer and re-re-conquer that same territory through which its
soldiers had swept in seeming swift and total victory and after forty-seven years
that victory still remains elusive.

On the morning of June 5, 2014, the Israel Today newspaper, better known as the
Bibinews, carried a big headline: The answer: construction and a battle in
Congress. The answer of the Government of Israel to the Palestinians temerity in
daring to heal their rifts and form a Unity Government; and to the United States
Governments greater temerity in recognizing that government. So, Netanyahus
friends on Capitol Hill particularly the Republican ones are being mobilized to once
again engage in a head-on confrontation with the Administration on behalf of
Netanyahus Israel. The Bibinews report made it sound like a fine, no-holds barred
fight of the Good Guys on Capitol Hill against the very nasty Bad Guys in the White
House and the State Department. But commentators in other papers, such as Chemi
Shalev of Haaretz, noted that is fact Netanyahus Senatorial friends were tacitly
asked to make a big noise but not go to go too far. For example, withholding
American funds from the Palestinian Authority might lead to its collapse, forcing
Israel to assume financial and administrative responsibility for the running of
Palestinian daily life, which Netanyahus advisers consider among the worst of all
nightmare scenarios

This leaves the other prong of counter-attack hailed in the Israel Today headline:
Construction with a capital C, or as Housing Minister Uri Ariel termed it, an
appropriate Zionist response. With great fanfare it was announced that the
government would be accepting bids for construction of new homes in several
locations throughout Judea and Samaria 1500 housing units in all. The names of
specific settlements were then enumerated, with the precise number earmarked for
each: 223 new apartments in Efrat; 484 housing units in Beitar Ilit; 38 units in Geva
Binyamin; 76 in Ariel; 78 in Alfei Menashe; 155 in Givat Zeev, including 55 in the
supplementary settlement of Agan Haayalot; and 400 new units in the Ramat Shlomo
neighborhood in East Jerusalem.

An American online publication called Breaking Israeli News, which is devoted to
providing News from a Biblical perspective, reported prominently this appropriate
Zionist response - and accompanied it by an appropriate quote: So the LORD gave
unto Israel all the land which He swore to give unto their fathers; and they possessed
it, and dwelt therein (Joshua 21:42). This piece of breaking Biblical news landed in
my email box just as I was leaving home, to take part in several activities marking the
47
th
anniversary of the occupation.

On King George Street in Central Tel Aviv the Women In Black were holding their
weekly Friday vigil, held uninterruptedly since the time of the first Intifada, and
which was later emulated by women in other countries (notably in the former
Yugoslavia). At noon today they stood in Tel Aviv as in Jerusalem, Haifa and at the
junction Near Kibbutz Gan Shmuel. Black clothing and the big plastic palms which are
their trade mark, bearing the slogan Down with the Occupation in Hebrew, Arabic
and English and sometimes other languages as well. To these were added placards
calling for the release of the Palestinian Administrative Detainees, now on a
widespread hunger strike. Some of the women had just come back from a vigil outside
the Ichilov Hospital, where hunger striking Palestinians are held incommunicado,
under close police guard.

Several bypassers make jeering calls: Go to hell, traitor whores! There is no
occupation, the terrorist Arabs want to murder us all!. One of the women manages to
get one of them to stay and engage in prolonged debate on the sidewalk. After some
time, he seems more calm and less animated and in the end departs saying Well, it
was interesting to talk to you, though I completely disagree.

From there to the nearby Habima Square where Breaking the Silence has scheduled a
special event: the non-stop, ten-hours long reading out of the testimonies collected
from soldiers who had served in the Occupied Territories. Many of the soldiers had
spoken out on condition of remaining anonymous, and would not have wanted to expose
themselves to the public gaze so academics and public figures had volunteered to
read out the testimonies over the loudspeaker.

- We were in the desert in the South Hebron Hills where many Palestinians try to
get through to work illegally in Israel, very crowded in cars operated by professional
smugglers. Somebody thought up what we thought was a funny way to teach them a
lesson when we caught one we just took off the cars tyres and left them stranded
in the middle of the desert. It took us far too long to realize that they had mobile
phones and that as soon as we departed their friends came along with spares. We felt
like utter fools.

- A boy who was quite distant from us lit the flame in a Molotov cocktail. The soldier
near me took aim with a sniper rifle and shot him through the head, he dropped dead
on the spot. We were in a reinforced concrete position, the boy was quite far from us
and could not possibly have harmed any of us. But regulations say that a Molotov is a
deadly weapon and justifies shooting in self defense. The soldier who killed him was
not interested in self-defense, he wanted an excuse to kill and he found it.

- We were in a lookout position on the mountain over Nablus. The soldiers were
politically divided right-wing, left-wing and in between. We debated politics all day,
should we be there or should we not. With no bitterness, at most some bantering,
there were in general good friendly relations among us. The commanding officer
demanded that we stop this debating, said it was bad for morale. Then Rabbi Ronski,
the IDF Chief Rabbi, came by to preach to us. He told us we were engaged in a Holy
War for the sake of God and of the Jewish People, that all our Jewish ancestors
were looking down at us from Heaven, and so on and so on. If ever something really
damaged our morale, that was it.

- A middle aged Palestinian speaking very precise English told me that his home had
been taken over as a temporary military position for three days, and that the soldiers
had urinated everywhere and wantonly smashed the TV. I told him what the
procedure was for lodging a complaint with the military authorities. But I felt I had
to also tell him that it was no use and that after some months he would just be told
that the specific soldiers who had been in his family home could not be identified. I
felt very embarrassed to tell him this.

Suddenly, a small group of people with their bodies draped with Israeli National Flags
approaches, shouting quite hysterically: Lies! Defamations! You are all a bunch of
liars, traitors to your country, in the pay of our enemies! Long live the Army, three
cheers for the IDF!

- I would suggest that you listen for a moment. These are all genuine testimonies of
soldiers who had been there, in the Territories. Me listen to malicious lies invented
by a bunch of traitors in the pay of international Antisemitism? Not on your life! Lies!
Lies! Lies! You are all dirty traitors to your country! The hecklers are finally dragged
away by police, crying out What a rotten country, police in the pay of the leftist
traitors!.

Actually, the Tel Aviv police had put considerable obstacles when the
Hadash activists asked a permit for the protest march due tomorrow night. Citing
traffic problems the police sought to shunt the intended route of the march away
from main streets and where hardly anybody would have seen it. The activists stood
their ground and several hours prolonged negotiations ended with the police after all
approving the original route.

Meanwhile, today Labor Party Leader Yitzchak Herzog unveiled his plan for an
agreement with the Palestinians, which he termed The Plan to Save Zionism:
As enumerated by Nahum Barnea in Yediot Aharonot, the main provisions include: The
final borders will be determined on the basis of the 1967 lines, with land swaps; the
Palestinian state will be demilitarized; The IDF will remain for a time in the Jordan
Valley and will then be replaced by a joint Israeli- Jordanian-Palestinian force; the
Right of Return will be implemented in the Palestinian state; Israel would absorb a
limited number of Palestinian refugees, at its discretion; in Jerusalem the Clinton
Parameters will be implemented - Jewish neighborhoods to Israel, Palestinian ones to
the Palestinians; East Jerusalem will be the capital of Palestine, but the municipal
government will be united; in the Holy Basin [Old City and some holy sites in its
vicinity] there will be a special regime; the Arab countries will be invited to sign
peace agreements with Israel.

Substantial reservations could be made to some of these provisions. Still, they
represent a significant improvement over much of the past records of the Israeli
Labor Party. Over Golda Meir who said there was no Palestinian People and laid much
of the foundations for the settlement project, and also over Shelly Yehimovitz,
Herzogs direct predecessor in the Labor leadership, who tried to minimize any
reference to the Palestinians and concentrate solely on social issues. Also a
significant approval over his own father Chaim Herzog, whose own way of defending
Zionism was a dramatic tearing up of the UN resolution asserting that Zionism was
racist.

But would Yitzchak Herzog ever get to the position of being able to implement his
plan? And if he were, would he actually implement it? Time will tell.


***
To Build (Settlements) Or To Be
a demonstration marking 47 years of occupation
Saturday, June 7, 2014

We meet at 7:00 pm at the entrance to Gan Meir Park on King George Street, Tel
Aviv, and march together to the gates of the Defense Ministry on Kaplan Street