- I've never met Dov Yermiya, a Jewish Israeli peace activist
who is now 94 years old. But I read of course the book he published in
1983 in which he wrote with anguish about the torture and other gross mistreatment
of civilians he witnessed directly during Israel's invasion of Lebanon
the year before. http://www.southendpress.org/2004/items/MyWarDiary
-
- I have it in my hand now.
-
- I just learned, in this open letter published today by
Uri Avnery, that Yermiya, recently renounced the ideology and practice
of Zionism with these stirring words:
-
- I, a 95 year old Sabra (native born Israeli Jew), who
has plowed its fields, planted trees, built a house and fathered sons,
grandsons and great-grandsons, and also shed his blood in the battle for
the founding of the State of Israel,
-
- Declare herewith that I renounce my belief in the Zionism
which has failed, that I shall not be loyal to the Jewish fascist state
and its mad visions, that I shall not sing anymore its nationalist anthem,
that I shall stand at attention only on the days of mourning for those
fallen on both sides in the wars, and that I look with a broken heart at
an Israel that is committing suicide and at the three generations of offspring
that I have bred and raised in it.
-
- ... for 42 years, Israel turned what should have been
Palestine into a giant detention camp, and is holding a whole people captive
under an oppressive and cruel regime, with the sole aim of taking away
their country, come what may!!!
-
- The IDF eagerly suppresses their efforts at rebellion,
with the active assistance of the settlement thugs, by the brutal means
of a sophisticated Apartheid and a choking blockade, inhuman harassment
of the sick and of women in labor, the destruction of their economy and
the theft of their best land and water.
-
- Over all this there is waving the black flag of the frightening
contempt for the life and blood of the Palestinians. Israel will never
be forgiven for the terrible toll of blood spilt, and especially the blood
of children, in hair-raising quantities...
-
- Avnery's response is fascinating. He, too, is a veteran
peace activist, and of about the same generation as Yermiya. But in the
letter he is, I think, pleading with Yermiya not to renounce Zionism completely,
but rather to reconnect with the "idealistic" Zionism that they
both experienced during their youth.
-
- He writes -
-
- When I think of our youth, yours and mine, one scene
is never far from my mind: the 1947 Dalia festival.
-
- Tens of thousands of young men and women were sitting
on the slope of a hill in the natural amphitheater near Kibbutz Dalia on
Mount Carmel. Ostensibly it was a festival of folk dancing, but in reality
it was much more - a great celebration of the new Hebrew culture which
we were then creating in the country, in which folk dancing played an important
role. The dancing groups came mainly from the kibbutzim and the youth movements,
and the dances were original Hebrew creations, interwoven with Russian,
Polish, Yemenite and Hassidic ones. A group of Arabs danced the Debka in
ecstasy, dancing and dancing and dancing on.
-
- In the middle of the event, the loudspeakers announced
that members of the UN Commission of Inquiry, which had been sent by the
international organization to decide upon the future of the country, were
joining us. When we saw them entering the amphitheater, the tens of thousands
spontaneously rose to their feet and started to sing the "Hatikva",
the national anthem, with a holy fervor that reverberated from the surrounding
mountains.
-
- We did not know then that within half a year the great
Hebrew-Arab war would break out - our War of Independence and their Naqba.
I believe that most of the 6000 young people who fell in the war on our
side, as well as the thousands that were wounded - like you and me - were
present at that moment in Dalia, seeing each other and singing together.
-
- What state did we think of then? What state did we set
out to create?
-
- What has happened to the Hebrew society, the Hebrew culture,
the Hebrew morality that we were so proud of then?
- Then, he pleads this:
-
- You, Dov, have invested in this state much too much to
turn your back on it in a gesture of anger and despair. The most hackneyed
and worn-out slogan in Israel is also true: "We don't have another
state!"
-
- Other states in the world have sunk to the depths of
depravity and committed unspeakable crimes, far beyond our worst sins,
and still brought themselves back to the family of nations and redeemed
their souls.
-
- We and all the members of our generation, who were among
those who created this state, bear a heavy responsibility for it. A responsibility
to our offspring, to those oppressed by this state, to the entire world.
From this responsibility we cannot escape.
-
- Even at your respectable age, and precisely because of
it and because of what you represent, you must be a compass for the young
and tell them: This state belongs to you, you can change it, don't allow
the nationalist wreckers to steal it from you!
-
- True, 61 years ago we had another state in mind. Now,
after our state has tumbled to where it is today, we must remember that
other state, and remind everybody, every day, what the state should have
been like, what it can be like, and not allow our vision to disappear like
a dream. Let's lend our shoulders to every effort to repair and heal!
-
- These are very weighty issues that these two longtime
Zionists are debating.
-
- I remember the evening I had back in early March with
longtime Jewish-Israeli nonviolence activist Amos Gvirtz. Gvirtz is "only"
in his late 60s or early 70s. But like Avnery and Yermiya he grew up in
Israel.
-
- He told me in March,
-
- I became an anti-Zionist after Oslo, when the government
expelled the Arabs of Jahhaleenn to make room for the big new settlement
area if Maale Adummim... Like the Zionists, I believe we Jews need a state
of our own. But unlike the Zionists I don't think this should be built
on the ruins of someone else's home. So our state need not necessarily
be right here.
-
- Gvirtz, too, like Avnery, identified a strong link between
the events of 1947-48 and the situation today-- though the nature of the
link Gvirtz identified was very different from Avnery's: "The Nakba
wasn't really a single event that happened in 1948, so much as a long-drawn-out
process, that continues to this day." In other words, he was quite
unwilling to neatly divide Israeli history, as Avnery still does, between
the idealized, pre-lapsarian days of the 1947 Dalia festival and the post-lapsarian
era that was inaugurated-- in Avnery's view-- only by Israel's conquest
of the West Bank.
-
- Obviously, this is a very weighty issue for Zionists
and their supporters to grapple with. Did 1967 mark a notable break between
a laudable past and a troublesome present? Or were there indeed, as Gvirtz
and many other current non- and anti-Zionists have argued, many elements
of continuity from the 1947 period right through to the present?
-
- Anyway, I'd love to see the whole text of the latest
Yermiya letter from which Avnery is quoting, if anyone can provide a link
to it, preferably in English. The only recent English text that I could
find by him online was this letter, published in the Communist weekly Zo
Haderekh in June 2008.
-
- In it, Yermiya was returning to Defense Minister Barak
the invitation he had been sent to attend a ceremony to honor all veterans
of Israel's 1948 "War of Independence".
-
- He wrote,
-
- As a veteran of the 1948 war, who was already wounded
in face to face combat two weeks before the Declaration of the State, I
feel obliged herewith to return the invitation to you, as Minister of Defence.
I do so regretfully but see this as my duty.
-
- I consider you, Ehud Barak, as one of the top military
commanders and prominent political leaders who were responsible for converting
the army from "the Israeli Defence Force" to an army of occupation
and oppression of the Palestinian people and defender of the criminal settlements
in their country.
-
- 40 years of occupation have utterly corrupted the Israeli
army and all strata of Israeli society.They are both characterized by the
nationalist 'east wind' [the east wind brings the chamsin and locusts -
C.A.] which blows and kindles conflagrations of endless wars, which threaten
our people and land with the third and final destruction. Your share in
the responsibility for all this is enormous, and therefore I return your
invitation to you, without thanks...
|
