Uri Avnery

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Uri Avnery is an Israeli author and activist. He is the head of the Israeli peace movement, "Gush Shalom". You can read his column here: http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/ and you can visit Gush Shalom at: http://www.gush-shalom.org.

 

 

 

From Stalingrad to Winograd

 

http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/49361

 

Uri Avnery

2.2.08

 

 

FOR SOME days, the country looked like the Place de la Concorde in 1793. The entire public sat expectantly facing the guillotine, waiting for the tumbril to bring the marquis, for the marquis to lie down, for the blade to fall on his neck and for a soldier to hold up the bloody, severed head for the amusement of the spectators.

 

All eyes were fixed on the raised blade of the Winograd commission. The judge sat down before the cameras and read out the report. But the blade did not come down. No reserve soldier raised the bloody, severed head. The head remained in its place. Ehud Olmert is no marquis, and his head remains firmly on his shoulders.

 

From one end of the country to the other, a deep sigh of disappointment. The reporters and commentators sprang from their seats, like the knitting hags of the Paris square whose marquis has escaped.

 

The Winograd commission has failed, the commentators exclaimed in outrage. To the many failures of the war, the failure of the commission must now be added.

 

 

EVERY EXPERIENCED politician knows the axiom: He who chooses the members of a commission determines its conclusions in advance.

 

That is almost self-evident. After all, the members of the commission are only human. Human beings have attitudes and opinions. These are known in advance to the person who appoints them. He can appoint the members at will. If he appoints tycoons, he can reasonably expect that they will not decide to raise the taxes on the rich. If he appoints leftists instead, the recommendations will be quite different.

 

Therefore, when the proposed Law of Commissions of Inquiry was debated, we decided that the members of an "official" commission of inquiry should not be appointed by the government, but by the President of the Supreme Court. I was a member of the Knesset at the time and took an active part in the debate. I proposed that not only would the Chief Justice appoint the commission members, but that he - and not the government - would decide on the setting up of an inquiry in the first place. (This was rejected.)

 

That happened seven years before the young Ehud Olmert was first elected to the Knesset. But he understands the law perfectly. When, after Lebanon War II, the appointment of an "official" commission of inquiry was proposed, he objected strenuously. He insisted on a government-appointed inquiry commission. While the members of an official commission are appointed by the Chief Justice, the members of a government commission are appointed by the government itself.

 

Vive la petite difference.

 

The appointment of the Winograd commission was greeted by many doubts. But these evaporated completely when the interim report was released last April. It was harsh and uncompromising. It contained very negative remarks about Olmert.

 

So the public relaxed. The difference between the two kinds of commission was forgotten. The Winograd commission behaved exactly like an "official" commission, took decisions like one and spoke like one. It raised the guillotine blade, and everybody waited for it to fall on Olmert's neck.

 

And then it became clear that le petite difference was a very substantial difference indeed. The commission appointed by Olmert has now issued a final report that is favorable to Olmert all along the line, especially about the accusation that Olmert had decided on the last-minute "ground operation" and sent soldiers to their deaths to save his personal prestige.

 

The commission did not lay any personal blame on any politician or general. Here it could base itself on a decision of the Supreme Court, which had expressly forbidden the commission to condemn anyone personally.

 

How come? When the Knesset adopted the Commission of Inquiry Law, we paid much attention to Article 15. It prohibits condemning anyone without giving them a fair opportunity to defend themself. Such a person must be warned in advance and invited to appoint a lawyer, to cross-examine witnesses and to summon witnesses of their own.

 

That is a long process, and a commission of inquiry is generally in a hurry to finish its report before the subject of its investigation is forgotten. For example, the commission of inquiry that was set up after the Yom Kippur war, under Judge Agranat, just disregarded the article altogether and decided to dismiss the Chief of Staff, the Commander of the Southern Front and other generals, without giving them any advance warning at all.

 

The Winograd commission took another path: when the army authorities petitioned the Supreme Court and demanded that the commission respect Article 15, the commission just promised that they would not blame anybody personally.

 

The commission could, of course, have described Olmert's part in the war in such scathing terms as to force him to resign. It did not do so. On the contrary, it concluded that his decisions were reasonable.

 

The blade did not fall, Olmert was bruised, but still standing.

 

 

AFTER THE 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, the "official" commission of inquiry chaired by Judge Kahan published an exemplary report which exposed all the facts. But these could have led it to much harsher conclusions than it did actually reach. Instead of finding that Ariel Sharon and his minions were guilty of "indirect responsibility" for the massacre, it could have decided that they bore direct responsibility. The facts supported such a conclusion. Why did they not do so, and only dismissed Sharon and some officers? I assume that they shrunk back for fear of causing severe damage to the State of Israel.

 

Now I could write much the same about the Winograd commission. The facts exposed by it justify more extreme conclusions. What held them back? One can guess: the five commission members, all pillars of the establishment - 2 generals, 2 leading academics, 1 judge - did not want to topple Olmert, the No. 1 establishment person. Perhaps they feared that his place would be taken by somebody much worse - a worry shared by many others in the country.

 

As prominent establishment figures, the commission members also shrunk back from touching on two basic questions concerning Lebanon War II: (a) Why it was started at all, and (b) What had caused the shocking deterioration of the army.

 

 

IN ITS two reports, the commission asserted that the decision to start the war was taken in a hasty and irresponsible manner. The stated war aims were quite unattainable. But the commission did not say what had caused Olmert & Co. - the government of Israel - to make such a decision.

 

We now know for sure that plans for the war had been prepared a long time before. These were rehearsed only a month before the war and changes were made according to the results. In the end, these plans were not implemented at all. But it is clear that the government and the army had long been thinking about attacking Hizbullah.

 

For six years, the Northern border had been completely quiet. Hizbullah did deploy rockets (as it is doing now) but showed then (as now) no inclination to attack Israel.

 

The cross-border incursion in which two Israeli soldiers were captured was an exception. The action was intended to provide negotiating chips for the release of Hizbullah prisoners held in Israel (and perhaps to demonstrate solidarity with Hamas, which had just captured another Israeli soldier in a similar incursion.) Hassan Nasrallah later admitted that this was a grave mistake and would not have been done if he had imagined that it would cause a war. (Olmert, on his part, has not admitted to any mistake.)

 

As I said right at the beginning, this incident was a pretext for the war, not the reason for it. If so, what was the real reason? The desire of the civilian Olmert for military glory? The dream of the Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz, to prove that the Air Force could win a war alone, by a massive bombardment of the civilian population? The illusion that Hizbullah could be eliminated by one big strike?

 

When Judge Winograd tried to explain why a part of the report must be kept secret, the words he used attracted no attention: "The security of the state and its foreign relations". Foreign relations? What foreign relations? Relations with whom? There is only one reasonable answer: relations with the United States.

 

That could be the crux of the matter: Olmert fulfilled an American wish. President Bush wanted to install his protégé, Fouad Siniora, as ruler in Beirut. For that end, Hizbullah, the main Lebanese opposition force, had to be eliminated. Also, Bush wanted to effect a regime change in Syria, one of the main obstacles to American ambitions in the region.

 

I believe that this is the missing link in Winograd's chain. Olmert could have argued: "I was only obeying orders". But that, of course, is unspeakable.

 

 

THE OTHER black hole in the report concerns the Israeli army. The report criticizes it murderously. Never before has the army leadership been described in such a way - as a bunch of people without character, talent or competence; generals who are ready to send soldiers to their death in an operation they believe to be condemned to failure, just because they do not dare to stand up to their superiors; generals who do not demand a clear definition of the objectives before going into battle; Generals who do not recognize the fateful faults of their army, and who are themselves responsible - they and their predecessors - for these very faults.

 

All this is being said now. What has not been said is: how did we get such a leadership? What has caused these faults?

 

The answers can be summed up in two words: the occupation.

 

In the last few years I have written dozens of articles about the disastrous effects of the occupation on the army. One cannot employ a whole army for decades as a colonial police force for crushing the resistance of an occupied population, without changing its character. Soldiers who run after stone-throwing children in the alleys of the Qasbah, who hammer at night on the doors of civilians, who use bulldozers to destroy people's homes, and all this for year after year - such soldiers are not competent to fight a modern war.

 

Worse: such a colonial army does not attract the best and the brightest. These now go into high-tech and science. The brutal work of the army against civilians and guerrilla fighters disgusts people of conscience and sensitivity, the very ones who are the backbone of a good officers' corps. It blunts the senses of those who remain, or sends them home from the occupied territories traumatized.

 

In the 40 years of occupation, the Israeli army has lost the kind of officers that led it in the 1948 and 1967 wars, people like Yitzhak Sadeh, Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin, Ezer Weitzman, Matti Peled, Haim Bar-Lev and David Elazar, to mention just a few. Their place has been taken by a mediocre, faceless group, gray but arrogant technicians, people of shallow thinking, colonialist and extreme right-wing attitudes, with an ever increasing percentage of knitted kippa-wearers.

 

That is the group the report speaks of - but without saying so. It is an occupation army in which a negative natural selection process operates - everyone who does not feel comfortable in this milieu just leaves. As in any army, the atmosphere prevailing at the top - good or bad - trickles down the ranks to the meanest soldier.

 

This is not an army of Stalingrad fighters defending their country - this is an army of Winograd fighters. An army which no genius can to "repair", as demanded by the commission. Because all the faults stem from the original sin: the occupation.

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Help! A Cease Fire!

Uri Avnery 22.12.07

 

FORGET THE Qassams. Forget the mortar shells. They are nothing compared with what Hamas launched at us this week:

 

The chief of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniyeh, has approached an Israeli newspaper and proposed a cease-fire. No more Qassams, no more mortars, no suicide bombings, no Israeli military incursions into the Strip, no "targeted liquidations" of leaders. A total cease-fire. And not only in the Gaza Strip, but in the West Bank, too.

 

The military leadership exploded in anger. Who does he think he is, that bastard? That he can stop us with such dirty tricks?

 

THIS IS the second time within a few days that an attempt has been made to thwart our war plans.

 

Two weeks ago, the American intelligence community declared, in an authoritative report, that Iran had stopped its attempt to produce a nuclear bomb as early as four years ago.

 

Instead of heaving a sigh of relief, Israeli officials reacted with undisguised anger. Since then, all the commentators in Israel, as well as our huge network of hired pens around the world, have tried to undermine this document. It is mendacious, without foundation, motivated by a hidden, sinister agenda.

 

But miraculously, the report survived unscathed. It has not even been scratched.

 

The report, so it seems, has swept from the table any possibility of an American and/or Israeli military attack on Iran. Now comes the peace initiative of Haniyeh and endangers the strategy of our military establishment towards the Gaza Strip.

 

Again, the army choir gets going. Generals in uniform and out of uniform, military correspondents, political correspondents, commentators of all stripes and genders, politicians from left and right - all are attacking the Haniyeh offer.

 

The message is: it must not be accepted under any circumstances! It should not even be considered! On the contrary: the offer shows that Hamas is about to break, and therefore the war against it must be intensified, the blockade on Gaza must be tightened, more leaders must be killed - indeed, why not kill Haniyeh himself? What are we waiting for?

 

A paradox inherent in the conflict since its beginning is at work here: if the Palestinians are strong, it is dangerous to make peace with them. If they are weak, there is no need to make peace with them. Either way, they must be broken.

 

"There is nothing to talk about!" Ehud Olmert declared at once. So everything is alright, the bloodletting can go on.

 

AND IT IS indeed going on. In the Gaza Strip and around it, a cruel little war is being waged. As usual, each side claims that it is only reacting to the atrocities of the other side.

 

The Israeli side claims that it is responding to the Qassams and mortars. What sovereign state could tolerate being bombarded by deadly missiles from the other side of the border?

 

True, thousands of missiles have killed only a tiny number of people. More than 100 times as many are killed and injured on the roads. But the Qassams are sowing terror, the inhabitants of Sderot and the surrounding area demand revenge and reinforcement for their houses, which would cost a fortune.

 

If the Qassams were really bothering our political and military leaders, they would have jumped at the cease-fire offer. But the leaders don't really care about what's happening to the Sderot population, out on the geographical and political "periphery", far from the center of the country. It carries no political or economic weight. In the eyes of the leadership, its suffering is, all in all, tolerable. It also has an important positive side: it provides an ideal pretext for the actions of the army.

 

THE ISRAELI strategic aim in Gaza is not to put an end to the Qassams. It would still be the same if not a single Qassam fell on Israel.

 

The real aim is to break the Palestinians, which means breaking Hamas.

 

The method is simple, even primitive: to tighten the blockade on land, on sea and in the air, until the situation in the Strip becomes absolutely intolerable.

 

The total stoppage of supplies, except the very minimum necessary to prevent starvation, has reduced life to an inhuman level. There are effectively no imports or exports, economic life has ground to a standstill, the cost of living has risen sky-high. The supply of fuel has already been reduced by half, and is planned to sink even lower. The water supply can be cut at will.

 

Military activity is gradually increasing. The Israeli army conducts daily incursions, employing tanks and armored bulldozers, in order to nibble at the margins of the inhabited areas and draw the Palestinian fighters into a face to face confrontation. Every day, from five to ten Palestinian fighters are being killed, together with some civilians. Every day, inhabitants are being abducted in order to extract information from them. The declared purpose is attrition, to harry and wear down, and perhaps also to prepare for the re-conquest of the Strip - even if the army chiefs want to avoid this at almost any price.

 

One after another, the Palestinian leaders and commanders are being killed from the air. Every point in the Strip is exposed to Israeli airplanes, helicopter gunships and drones. Up-to-date technology makes it possible to track the "children of death", those marked for killing, and a wide net of informers and agents, some of them under duress, which has been built up well in advance, completes the picture.

 

The army chiefs hope that by tightening all these screws they can push the local population to rise up against Hamas and the other fighting organizations. All Palestinian opposition to the occupation will collapse. The entire Palestinian people will raise their hands in surrender and submit to the mercies of the occupation, which will be able to do as it pleases - expropriate lands, enlarge settlements, set up walls and roadblocks, slice up the West Bank into a series of semi-autonomous enclaves.

 

In this Israeli plan, the job reserved for the Palestinian Authority is to act as subcontractors for Israeli security, in return for a stream of money that will safeguard its control of the enclaves.

 

At the end of this phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Palestinian people are supposed to be cut to pieces and helpless in face of the Israeli expansion. The historic clash between the unstoppable force (the Zionist enterprise) and the immovable object (the Palestinian population) will end with the crushing of Palestinian opposition.

 

IN ORDER to succeed in this, a sophisticated diplomatic game must be played. Under no circumstances may the support of the international community be lost. On the contrary, the entire world, led by the US and EU, must support Israel and look upon its actions as a just struggle against Palestinian terrorism, itself an integral part of "international terrorism".

 

The Annapolis conference, and afterwards the Paris meeting, were important steps in this direction. Almost the whole world, including most of the Arab world, has fallen into step with the Israeli plan - perhaps innocently, perhaps cynically.

 

Events after Annapolis developed as expected: no negotiations have started, both side are just playing with images. The very first day after Annapolis, the Israeli government announced huge building projects beyond the Green Line. When Condoleezza Rice mumbled some words of opposition, it was announced that the plans had been shelved. In fact they continue at full speed.

 

How do Olmert and his colleagues fool the whole world? Benjamin Disraeli once said about a certain British politician: "The Right Honourable Gentleman surprised his opponents bathing in the sea and took away their clothes." We, the pioneers of the Two-State Solution, can say this about our government. It has stolen our flag and wrapped it around itself in order to hide its intentions.

 

At long last, there now exists a world-wide consensus that peace in our region must be based on the co-existence of the State of Israel and the State of Palestine. Our government has slipped into it and is exploiting this agreement with another aim altogether: the rule of Israel in the whole country and the turning of the Palestinian population centers into a series of Bantustans. This is, in fact, a One-State-Solution (Greater Israel) in the guise of the Two-State Solution.

 

CAN THIS plan succeed?

 

The battle of Gaza is in full swing. In spite of the huge military superiority of the Israeli army, it is not one-sided. Even the Israeli commanders point out that the Hamas forces are getting stronger. They train hard, their weapons are getting more effective and they show a lot of courage and determination. It seems that the falling of their commanders and fighters in a steady bloodletting is not affecting their morale. That is one of the reasons why the Israeli army is shrinking back from re-conquering the Gaza Strip.

 

Inside the Strip, both the main organizations enjoy wide public support - the demonstration to commemorate Yassir Arafat organized by Fatah and the counter-demonstration of Hamas each drew hundreds of thousands of participants. But it seems that the great majority of the Palestinian public wants national unity in order to fight together against the occupation. They do not want religious compulsion, but neither will they tolerate a leadership that cooperates with the occupation.

 

The government may be very mistaken in counting on the obedience of Fatah. Competing with Hamas, Fatah may surprise us by becoming a fighting organization once again. The stream of money flowing into the Authority may not prevent this. Ze'ev Jabotinsky was wiser than Tony Blair when he said 85 years ago that you cannot buy a whole people.

 

If the Israeli army invades Gaza in order to re-conquer it, the population will stand behind the fighters. Nobody can know how it will react if the economic misery gets worse. The results may be unexpected. Experience with other liberation movements indicates that misery can break a population, but it can also strengthen it.

 

This is, simply put, an existential test for the Palestinian people - perhaps the most severe since 1948. It is also a test for the shrewd policy of Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni and the army chiefs.

 

So a cease-fire is not likely to come into effect. At first Olmert rejected one out of hand. Then this was denied. Then the denial was denied.

 

The inhabitants of Sderot would probably have been glad to accept a cease-fire. But then, who bothers to ask them.

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How they stole the bomb from us

Uri Avnery 8.12.07

 

IT WAS like an atom bomb falling on Israel.

 

The earth shook. Our political and military leaders were all in shock. The headlines screamed with rage.

 

What happened?

 

A real catastrophe: the American intelligence community, comprising 16 different agencies, reached a unanimous verdict: already in 2003, the Iranians terminated their efforts to produce a nuclear bomb, and they have not resumed them since. Even if they change their mind in the future, they will need at least five years to achieve their aim.

 

SHOULDN'T WE be overjoyed? Shouldn't the masses in Israel be dancing in the streets, as they did on November 29, 1947, sixty years ago? After all, we have been saved!

 

Until this week, we have been regularly hearing that - any minute now - the Iranians will produce a bomb that threatens our very existence. Nothing less. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new Hitler of the Middle East, who announces every second day that Israel must disappear from the map, was about to fulfill his own prophecy.

 

A small nuclear bomb, even a teeny-weeny one like the ones dropped on Japan, would be enough to wipe out the whole Zionist enterprise. If it fell on Tel-Aviv's Rabin Square, the economic, cultural and military center of Israel would be vaporized, together with hundreds of thousands of Jews. A second Holocaust.

 

And lo and behold - no bomb and no any-minute-now. The wicked Ahmadinejad can threaten us as much as he wants - he just has not got the means to harm us. Isn't that a reason for celebration?

 

So why does this feel like a national disaster?

 

A TWO-BIT psychologist (like me) might say: Jews have become used to anxiety. After hundreds of years of persecution, expulsions, inquisition, pogroms and then the Holocaust, we have little red warning lights in our heads, which come on at the slightest sign of danger. In such a situation, we feel at home. We know what to do.

 

But when the lights stay off and no danger appears on the horizon, we get the feeling that something suspicious is going on. Something is wrong. Perhaps the lights are out of order. Perhaps it's really a trap!

 

There is one little consolation in the new situation. While it seems as if the immediate danger of annihilation has disappeared, there is a feeling that we are alone, on our own again.

 

That is another sign of Jewish uniqueness: We are facing the entire world alone. As in the days of the Holocaust, all the Goyim have forsaken us. Face to face with the Iranian monster which threatens to devour us, we now stand here alone.

 

All our media are repeating this in unison, like an orchestra which does not need a conductor, because it knows the music by heart.

 

True, other peoples, too, can derive satisfaction from standing alone. Engraved in my memory is a British poster that was hanging on our walls in Palestine in the dark days after the fall of France to the Nazis, when Britain was left quite alone in the war. Under the grim face of Winston Churchill the slogan proudly proclaimed: "Alright then, Alone!"

 

But with us this has almost become a national ritual. As we used to sing in the good old days of Golda Meir: "The whole world is against us / That is an old melody / .And everybody who is against us / Let him go to hell." At the time, one of the army entertainment teams even turned it into a folk dance.

 

In the last few years, a broad coalition against Iran has come into being. The Iranian bomb has become the heart of an international consensus, led by America, Queen of the World. With the consent of all its five permanent members, the UN Security Council has decreed sanctions against Tehran.

 

Now, before our very eyes, this coalition is crumbling. President Bush is stammering. Gone is the excuse for an American military attack on Iran, the dream of the Israeli government and the neocons. Gone is even the pretext for more stringent sanctions. God knows, perhaps even the existing feeble sanctions will be abolished tomorrow.

 

 

THE FIRST reaction of the Israeli leadership was vigorous and determined: total denial.

 

The American report is simply wrong, all the media proclaimed. It is based on false information. Our own intelligence community is in possession of much better data, which prove that the bomb is well on its way.

 

Really? All the intelligence in the hands of the Mossad is automatically transferred to the CIA. It is part of the mass of data on which the American report is based. It must be remembered that the published part of the report constitutes only 3% of the complete document.

 

So the American intelligence agencies must be deliberately lying. There is no escaping the conclusion that murky political motives must lie behind their unequivocal findings. Perhaps they want to make up for the false reports which President Bush employed to justify his invasion of Iraq. Then they overestimated, now they underestimate. Perhaps they want to take revenge on Bush and believe that the time is ripe, since he has become a lame duck. Or they are adapting themselves to American public opinion, which cannot stomach another war. And, besides, their chiefs are, of course, all anti-Semites.

 

Even if the American intelligence operatives innocently believe that Iran has stopped work on the Bomb, it just shows how naive they are. They cannot imagine that the Iranians are fooling them. Who knows better than us how easy it is to hide an atomic bomb and deceive the whole world? After all, we have been at it for years.

 

But all this does not change the fact: this report pushes American policy in a new direction and changes the entire international constellation.

 

The war on Iran, which was to be the defining event of 2008, has turned for the time being into a non-event.

 

 

WHAT ARE the results, as far as Israel is concerned? Why have our leaders been in a state of shock since the publication of the report?

 

The possibility of an independent Israeli military strike against Iran has vanished. Israel cannot wage war without the unreserved backing of the US. We tried once - the Sinai War of 1956 - and then President Dwight D. Eisenhower kicked our ass. Since then we have taken great care to obtain the blessing of the US before every war.

 

For the military and intelligence services, the report is an unmitigated disaster for another reason too. The Iranian bomb plays an indispensable part in the army's annual fight for its massive chunk of the budget cake.

 

For right-wing demagogues, the effect is even more disheartening. Binyamin Netanyahu has built his whole strategy on the Iranian scare, hoping to ride the Bomb right into the Prime Minister's office.

 

Furthermore, when the Iranian issue cools down, the Palestinian issue warms up. That is especially true in Washington DC. President Bush is in trouble, his fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq are still dragging on. Any American effort to install a stable government in Iraq, with its Shiite majority, depends on the backing of Shiite Iran. Bush's dream of delivering a lightning stroke against Iran and thus leaving his imprint on history is going up in smoke.

 

What can he do in order to leave any positive legacy at all? The default alternative is Israeli-Palestinian peace. Perhaps he will now give stronger backing to poor Condoleezza. Perhaps he himself will get more involved. Fact: he is soon going to visit Israel for the first since entering the White House.

 

True, this effort has not much chance of success, but people in Jerusalem are worried nonetheless. That's just what we need - Bush acting like that anti-Semite, Jimmy Carter, who twisted Begin's arm and forced him to make peace with Egypt!

 

So what to do? One can instruct Israeli diplomats abroad to redouble their efforts to convince the governments that the situation has not changed, that one must fight against the Iranian bomb, whether it exists or not. But tell that to the Russians and the Chinese! The world's governments are happy to see the end of Bush's pressure - all except that happy couple, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, the new White House poodles now Tony Blair has gone.

 

 

THE NEW situation poses a thorny dilemma for Ehud Olmert.

 

On the way back from Annapolis, he uttered some amazing statements. If the "two states solution collapses," he declared, "the State of Israel is finished". Nobody in the peace camp has yet dared to go as far as that.

 

Does he believe what he says, or is it just a new spin? That is the question that is now dominating the discourse in Israel. In other words: is he just trying to win time, or is he really going to work for a peace settlement?

 

All indications suggest that he is in no position to take any step whatsoever. If he tries to carry out the first phase of the Road Map and dismantle some settlement outposts, he will face not only the determined opposition of the settlers and their supporters, and the silent (but highly effective) opposition of the military, but also obstruction by his government colleagues. Before the first outpost is dismantled, his coalition will break apart.

 

Olmert has no other coalition handy. Ehud Barak has been trying again and again to outflank him on the right and cannot be relied upon in a crisis. The Labor Party is a chaotic, spineless and unprincipled body. The shrunken Meretz party has a faction of only five Knesset members, four of whom are competing with each other for the party leadership. The ten members of the Arab factions (that's what they are generally called, even though one Hadash Knesset member is a Jew) are outcasts, and no "Zionist" government could be seen to rely openly on their support. And in Olmert's own faction there are several extreme-right members who would obstruct any peace effort.

 

In such a situation, the natural tendency of a real politician like Olmert is to do nothing, to issue pronouncements left and right (in both senses) and try to gain time.

 

This week, the government announced plans to build 300 new homes in the odious Har Homa settlement, near Jerusalem. For someone like me, who has spent many days and nights demonstrating against the building of this particular settlement, that is bitter news indeed. It certainly does not indicate a turn for the better.

 

On the other hand, I have heard an interesting thesis from one of Olmert's inner circle. According to this, knowing that he is going to lose power, Olmert may tell himself: if I must fall, why not enter history as somebody who has sacrificed himself on the altar of a lofty principle, instead of just vanishing as a good-for-nothing political hack?

 

If he has no other way out, he might choose this solution - particularly as his immediate family is pushing him in this direction.

 

I would evaluate this possibility as "unlikely" - but stranger things have happened.

 

In any case, perhaps the peace forces should overcome their understandable reservations and try to influence public opinion in a way that would help Olmert turn in this direction.

 

 

EITHER WAY, one thing is certain: that son of a bitch, Ahmadinejad, has screwed us again.

 

He has stolen our most precious possession: the Iranian Atomic Threat.

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Public debate ONE or TWO STATES with Avnery & Pappe

Gush Shalom Forum, May 8, Tel-Aviv

 

Dear Friends:

 

The Avnery-Pappe debate will take place on Wednesday, May 8th, according to the notice below. See also: English http://www.hagada.org.il/eng/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=167 http://www.hagada.org.il/eng/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=169 Hebrew http://www.hagada.org.il/hagada/html/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=5324 http://www.hagada.org.il/hagada/html/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=5332

 

My comments follow:

 

The public debate between Uri Avnery and Ilan Pappe is a welcome event. Uri Avnery, who was "a machine-gunner in the Samson's Foxes commando unit," participated as a young man from Europe in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which Ilan Pappe has described so well in his recent book. Uri Avnery became an intrepid and tireless campaigner for a peace agreement between the State of Israel and the Palestinian leadership. Ilan Pappe is a spokesperson for the Right of Return of the Palestine refugees. The very fact that this public debate is being held is a sign of the dissatisfaction of peace activists with the old strategies and the old slogans, and an openness to new ideas, previously thought to be "beyond the pale".

 

Unlike Avnery and Pappe, I am not today on the front lines of the struggle in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Nevertheless, I am as interested as anyone that the political debate not get bogged down in false dichotomies or in secondary issues.

 

Briefly put, in my view, the important issue is not the number of states, but rather the quantity and the quality of the rights enjoyed by the people. So, there needs to be a discussion about goals. There is a no less important discussion about the slogans, the immediate demands, and the transitional demands, that form part of the strategic bridge to get from here to there.

 

Partition and Nakba It should be recognized that the "one state-2 states" debate revisits the debates of the 30s and 40s. Moreover, with the benefit of hindsight, we can ask: From the point of view of securing peace and security in Palestine, was the Partition resolution of November 29th, 1947 correct? Further, was the war of 47-48 a just war, on the Israeli side, a war for national independence and national defense? Or was it an unjust war of conquest, occupation, and ethnic cleansing?

 

Israeli supporters of the so-called "2 state solution", while purporting to be "realistic and pragmatic", tend to support the Israeli side in the Nakba. They should admit this historic position openly or, rather, abandon it.

 

The Partition resolution needs be reconsidered, and analyzed, and denounced explicitly, and in detail. There is good reason to re-visit the positions taken by those democrats, worker-activists, and socialists who opposed Partition in the 1940s. The consequences of Partition - a Zionist state that prevents Palestinian self-determination, threatens the region, and serves as a death-trap for the Israelis - must be exposed in detail.

 

This is not a matter only of historical narrative and perspective. In October 2000, Arik Sharon noted that the 1948 war was still being fought. In fact, the "1948 file" was re-opened in Israel on Land Day 1976. The Partition resolution and the ethnic cleansing of 1947-48 must be re-evaluated in order to find the path to a peaceful modus vivendi in the Holy Land.

 

End the Occupation One of the arguments of those peace activists who support the so-called "2 state solution" is that the oppression and suffering caused by the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is so acute that ending this occupation, and this oppression, and this suffering, is and must be an urgent priority. This is a powerful argument for a mass movement, in Israel and the occupied territories, to demand the unconditional end to the occupation. It is not an argument in favor of the so-called "2 state solution", either as understood by Bush-Olmert, or by the Geneva Initiative, or by Gush Shalom.

 

The organized struggle to end the occupation need not be submerged in either "2 state" diplomacy, or in "one state" pie-in-the-sky. The strength of the anti-Zionists organized in Matzpen immediately after the June 67 was expressed in the demand: "Down with the occupation!" No ifs, ands, or buts.

 

This is also the slogan and the goal that mobilizes most people for struggle in the occupied territories. The Palestinian activists who risk their lives to end the Israeli occupation do not thereby endorse Partition or the so-called "2 state solution". They merely want to be free. For them, a future "independent state of Palestine" need not be one that accommodates the Zionist entity.

 

In Israel, the fight to end the occupation is key to demonstrating solidarity with the oppressed. A commitment to removing the yoke of occupation and oppression from the Palestinian people, and thus open the way for them to freely determine their destiny, is the litmus test for any honest Israeli peace activist. Demanding a "2 state solution" (or "a Palestinian state alongside Israel"), rather than an unconditional end to the occupation, is evidence of liberal illusions in diplomacy and a betrayal of solidarity with the oppressed. Demanding a "one state solution" without demanding the unconditional removal of the yoke of oppression is a form of institutionalizing that oppression.

 

For Israeli peace activists and pro-democracy activists, who are truly motivated by solidarity with the oppressed, the demand to end the occupation unconditionally is a central plank of their political strategy, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

 

Let the refugees return Too many Israeli "left-wing" opponents of the right of return warn ominously of a "tsunami" of returning refugees. Thus, these "left-wingers" contribute their share to generating and proliferating Israeli attitudes of hostility, vilification, and contempt against Palestinians. Israeli peace-activists and democrats have a duty to fight these racist attitudes and to cultivate feelings of solidarity with the oppressed. Advocacy for the right of return is a central component of democratic activism and solidarity.

 

Of course, Palestinian peace activists and pro-democracy activists can help undermine Israeli racism by emphasizing that returning refugees are not a threat to peace-loving Israelis. Palestinian activists can proclaim and demonstrate that they seek the return of the oppressed people, so that they may rebuild their lives in their homeland, live at peace with their neighbors, and build together a new society.

 

Upholding the rights of the refugees is key to exposing the undemocratic ethnic-nationalist character of the Israeli state and the need for regime change to open the road to reconciliation. Without reconciliation with the Palestine refugees, there can be no realistic peace plan. And, there is no "just resolution to the refugee problem" that excludes the right of return. Israelis who demonstrate their solidarity with the oppressed are necessarily in opposition to a regime based on ethnic cleansing. The demand to let refugees return must be front and center. I have suggested the slogan: "The refugees are our partner for peace. Let them come home!"

 

Release the political prisoners The political superstructure of any state immediately calls to mind the need for political freedom. The cream of Palestinian political activists are denied political freedom because they are in Israeli prisons and detention centres. No political freedom for the Palestinian people is possible without political freedom for the Palestinian political prisoners, Intifada activists, and administrative detainees. The fight for Palestinian political freedom, and the exercise of the right to self-determination require that the plight of the political prisoners be front and centre. This is not a matter for 10th place on an agenda for diplomatic negotiations. Release of the Palestinian prisoners must be presented as a pre-requisite to negotiation and reconciliation.

 

After the capture of Gilad Shavit at Kerem Shalom, and before the start of the conflict with the Lebanese resistance, Israeli public opinion presented a conjunctural opportunity to demand the release of Palestinian prisoners "in exchange" for corporal Shavit. Israeli peace activists missed this relatively rare opportunity, even while there were large-scale demonstrations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip demanding the release of prisoners. An opportunity for solidarity was missed (just as, previously, Israeli peace activists had abstained from the struggle over the removal of the settler-colonies from Gaza), instead raising the sterile slogan "negotiations now".

 

Regime change

 

The real issue is not one state or 2, but a realistic assessment of the nature of the Israeli state, as projected by the Partition resolution, as established in the ethnic cleansing operations of 47-48, and as expanded in June 67. The dominant features of the Israeli ethnic nationalist regime are:

 

a. settler colonialism; b ethnic cleansing; and c. racist discrimination

 

It can be patiently explained that such a regime is the main obstacle to peace. Peace requires regime change. Nothing less.

 

Unfortunately, the main forces in the Israeli "peace camp" -- Gush Shalom, Maki (ICP), Hadash (DFPE), and many other Israeli leftists who claim to adhere to "Marxism" and "socialism" -- are nevertheless deeply opposed to regime change. They have not learned the lessons of the 20th century, a century of wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions, or of the upheavals of the present young century. Rather than learn how to mobilize the people for regime change, they seek to create a diplomatic patch-up promoting a diplomatic solution involving only the Israeli elite and the Palestinian elite under the auspices of the imperialist "international consensus". Once agitating tirelessly for an "international conference," now calling for "negotiations now" and for the "2 state solution", they reinforce the imperialist-imposed divisions among the people. It must be said that, with Bush and Rice, who are committed to the "political horizon" of the "2 state solution" that leaves intact im! perialist assets in the Middle East, the only prospect is endless suffering for the people.

 

Objectively speaking, there is no alternative to regime change, which must be prepared systematically. This must be explained patiently, and demonstrated consistently with organized action. Those honest peace activists, who do not yet appreciate the need for regime change, can still recognize that the milestones on the road to peace include the demands to: a) end the occupation, b) release the Palestinian prisoners, and c) let the refugees return. Acceptance of the need for regime change will follow.

 

A democratic constitution that upholds human rights

 

I belong to those Israeli leftists who, in the early 1970s, welcomed the Palestinian proposal for a "secular, democratic Palestine". The strength of this slogan, and this perspective, was its focus on the oppressive Zionist regime that needed to be removed (defeated, overthrown), while all peace-loving people, of whatever origin, could look forward to the benefits of coexistence. Ultimately, a joint struggle for liberation is the only strategy for coexistence. Then, as now, without "liberation", coexistence is impossible, and "peace" is a codeword for the oppressive status quo. This is the true dichotomy now, as it was then.

 

The question today is how to enhance solidarity and advance today the struggle for peace.

 

A clear Palestinian statement, supported by mass action -- demanding an end to the occupation, release of political prisoners, return of the refugees, AND coexistence under a democratic constitution that upholds human rights -- would severely undermine the hold of Zionism on the Israeli population. It would re-establish the Palestinian liberation struggle as a movement of democratic reconciliation deserving the support of all decent people. Such a statement, and such a movement, would deliver a fatal blow to Israeli oppression, discrimination, and apartheid, and would strengthen its opponents everywhere.

 

In his recent book, Ali Abunimah has shown that the Palestinian fight against the occupation, for the return of the refugees, and to release political prisoners is part of a fight for coexistence and reconciliation. Abunimah demonstrates how the Palestinians can recapture the moral high ground by focusing on equality and human rights. He shows that the goal is not revenge or domination, but shared democracy.

 

When Palestinian activists make this goal front and center, they can obtain a hearing inside Israel that nothing else has achieved. They will pierce the armor of Zionist claims to provide security for the Israeli people. They will reach out directly to the oppressed inside Israel with the prospects of a new society.

 

One cannot be oblivious to the amazing capacity for social struggle exhibited recently by university students, by Histadrut workers, and by IDF soldiers. A political strategy must be developed that reaches into the class conflict that exists in Israeli society, informs it with the anti-Zionist program, and creates conditions for the future overthrow of the oppressive Zionist regime. Any cynicism on this count - relying on the imperialist "international consensus", all in the name of "realism" - will only postpone the day when the people of Palestine rise up, take responsibility for their own freedom and their own democracy, and create the political conditions for peace.

 

So, not one state or 2, and not illusions in diplomacy, and not passing the buck to the "international community" - but building a movement in Israel and the Occupied Territories, supported from abroad - is the way forward.

 

International solidarity

 

Unlike some popular misconceptions, the Apartheid regime in South Africa was not brought down by international sanctions. The struggle of the oppressed people of South African AND international solidarity are what ended the Apartheid regime. Similarly, decent people internationally must support the oppressed people of Palestine and those Israelis who recognize Palestinian rights. International solidarity with Palestine can use boycott, and other pressure tactics, thoughtfully and effectively to help the oppressed Palestinians and to help those Israelis who support Palestinian rights. It would be a shame if, in the name of "boycotting Israeli apartheid", solidarity activists were to boycott oppressed Palestinians and their allies in Israel. The most important goal of any solidarity campaign must be the clarity of the political message that is conveyed and reinforced.

 

In places like Canada, boycott has already been used effectively against wines produced in the settler-colonies and sold in Quebec Government stores. A campaign should be mounted to oppose the Canadian Government's blockade of the Palestinian Authority. A campaign has long been contemplated to remove the tax-exempt status from the Jewish National Fund, one of the main agencies of ethnic cleansing. The anti-Caterpillar campaign can be a means to take the message of Palestine solidarity to the farmers who buy Caterpillar tractors, and to the autoworkers who produce them. I have suggested the theme: "Oppressed Palestinians need our help! Israelis who support Palestinian rights need our help!" Much is yet to be learned, and improved, in this regard.

 

The Pappe-Avnery debate will present an opportunity to think about the fundamental issues, and to go beyond the false dichotomy of "one state vs. 2 states". In any event, the resolution of this debate, in practice, is premature. When the people of Palestine are free of Zionist oppression, they will exercise their right to freely determine the political structures that they deem necessary. Now is the time to look for practical and realistic struggles and slogans to build a movement that can overcome Zionist oppression. Many Israelis and Palestinians want to break with the Oslo-era illusions in imperialist-led diplomacy, and mobilize to build a new society. Hopefully, they will find ways to strengthen their ranks for the challenges ahead.

 

Regards,

 

Henry Lowi

 

_____________________________________

 

 

 

Inshallah

 

17.3.2007 Uri Avnery

 

NOT ONLY the Palestinians must be breathing a deep sigh of relief after the swearing in of the Palestinian National Unity Government. We Israelis have good reason to do the same.

 

This event is a great blessing, not only for them, but also for us - if indeed we are interested in a peace that will put an end to the historic conflict.

 

 

FOR THE Palestinians, the immediate blessing is the elimination of the threat of civil war.

 

That was a nightmare. It was also absurd. Palestinian fighters were shooting at each other in the streets of Gaza, gladdening the hearts of the occupation authorities. As in the arena of ancient Rome, gladiators killed each other for the amusement of the spectators. People who had spent years together in Israeli prisons suddenly acted like mortal enemies.

 

That was not yet a civil war. But the bloody incidents could have led there. Many Palestinians were worried that if the clashes were not stopped immediately, a fully-fledged fratricidal war would indeed break out. That was, of course, also the great hope of the Israeli government - that Hamas and Fatah would annihilate each other without Israel having to lift a finger. The Israeli intelligence services did indeed predict this.

 

I was not worried on that account. In my view, a Palestinian civil war was never in the cards.

 

First of all, because the basic conditions for a civil war are absent. The Palestinian people are unified in their ethnic, cultural and historical composition. Palestine does not resemble Iraq, with its three peoples who are distinct ethnically (Arabs and Kurds), religiously (Shiites and Sunnites) and geographically (North, Center and South). It does not resemble Ireland, where the Protestants, the descendents of settlers, were fighting the Catholic descendents of the indigenous population. It does not resemble African countries, whose borders were fixed by colonial masters without any consideration of tribal boundaries. It certainly had no revolutionary upheaval like those that brought on the civil wars in England, France and Russia, nor an issue that split the population like slavery in the USA.

 

The bloody incidents that broke out in the Gaza Strip were struggles between party militias, aggravated by feuds between Hamulahs (extended families). History has seen such struggles in almost all liberation movements. For example: after World War I, when the British were compelled to grant Home Rule to the Irish, a bloody struggle among the freedom fighters broke out at once. Irish Catholics killed Irish Catholics.

 

In the days of the struggle of the Jewish community in Palestine against the British colonial regime ("the Mandate"), a civil war was averted only thanks to one person: Menachem Begin, the commander of the Irgun. He was determined to prevent a fratricidal war at all costs. David Ben-Gurion wanted to eliminate the Irgun, which rejected his leadership and undermined his policies. In the so-called "season", he ordered his loyal Haganah organization to kidnap Irgun members and turn them over to the British police, which tortured them and put them in prison abroad. But Begin prohibited his men from using their weapons to defend themselves against Jews.

 

Such a struggle among the Palestinians will not turn into a civil war, because the entire Palestinian people oppose this strenuously. Everybody remembers that during the Arab Rebellion of 1936, the Palestinian leader at that time, the Grand Mufti Hadj Amin al-Husseini, butchered his Palestinian rivals. During the three years of the rebellion (called "the Events" in Zionist terminology) Palestinians killed more of each other than they killed of their British and Jewish opponents.

 

The result: when the Palestinian people came face to face with their supreme existential test, in the war of 1948, they were split and splintered, lacking unified leadership and dependent on the mercies of the bickering Arab governments, who were intriguing against each other. They were unable to stand up to the much smaller organized Jewish community, which rapidly set up a unified and efficient army. The result was the "Naqba", the terrible historic tragedy of the Palestinian people. What happened in 1936 still touches the life of every single Palestinian to this very day.

 

It is difficult to start a civil war if the people are against it. Even provocations from outside - and I assume that there has been no lack of these - cannot ignite it.

 

Therefore I did not doubt for a moment that in the end a Unity Government would indeed come about, and I am glad that this has now happened.

 

WHY IS this good for Israel? I am going to say something that will shock many Israelis and their friends in the world:

 

If Hamas did not exist, it would have to be invented.

 

If a Palestinian government had been set up without Hamas, we should have to boycott it until Hamas was included.

 

And if negotiations do lead to a historical settlement with the Palestinian leadership, we should make it a condition that Hamas, too, must sign it.

 

Sounds crazy? Of course. But that is the lesson history teaches us from the experience of other wars of liberation.

 

The Palestinian population in the occupied territories is almost evenly divided between Fatah and Hamas. It makes no sense at all to sign an agreement with half a people and continue the war against the other half. After all, we shall make serious concessions for peace - such as withdrawing to much narrower borders and giving East Jerusalem back to its owners. Shall we do so in return for an agreement that half the Palestinian people will not accept and will not be committed to? To me this sounds like the height of folly.

 

I shall go further: Hamas and Fatah together represent only the part of the Palestinian people that lives in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. But millions of Palestinian refugees (no one knows for sure how many) live outside of the territory of Palestine and Israel.

 

If we strive indeed for a complete end to the historic conflict, we must reach out for a solution that includes them, too. Therefore I strongly question the wisdom of TzipI Livni and her colleagues, who demand that the Saudis drop from their peace plan any mention of the refugee problem. Simply put: that is stupid.

 

Common sense would advise the exact opposite: to demand that the Saudi peace initiative, which has become an official pan-Arab peace plan, include the matter of the refugees, so that the final agreement will also constitute a solution of the refugee problem.

 

That will not be easy, for sure. The refugee problem has psychological roots that touch the very heart of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict, and it concerns the fate of millions of living human beings. But when the Arab peace plan says that there must be an "agreed upon" solution - meaning agreed upon with Israel - it transfers it from the realm of irreconcilable ideologies to the real world, the world of negotiations and compromise. I have discussed this many times with Arab personalities, and I am convinced that an agreement is possible.

 

 

THE NEW Palestinian government is based on the "Mecca agreement". It seems that it would not have been possible without the energetic intervention of King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia.

 

The international background has to be considered. The President of the United States is now busy with desperate efforts to bring his Iraqi adventure to a conclusion that will not go down in history as a total disaster. For this purpose he is trying to bring together a Sunni Front that would block Iran and help to put an end to the Sunni violence in Iraq.

 

That is, of course, a simplistic idea. It disregards the enormous complexity of the realities of our region. Bush has presided over the setting up in Iraq of a government dominated by the Shiites. He has tried to isolate Sunni Syria. And Hamas is, of course, a pious Sunni organization.

 

But the American ship of state is beginning to turn around. Being a giant ship, it can do this only very slowly. Under American pressure, the Saudi king has agreed (perhaps unwillingly) to take upon himself the leadership of the Arab world, after Egypt has failed in this task. The king has persuaded Bush that he has to speak with Syria. Now he is trying to persuade him to accept Hamas.

 

In this picture, Israel is a hindrance. A few days ago Ehud Olmert flew to America and told the conference of the Jewish lobby, AIPAC, that a withdrawal from Iraq would be a disaster (contrary, by the way, to the opinion of more than 80% of American Jews - who support early withdrawal.) This week, the US ambassador in Tel-Aviv hinted that from now on the Government of Israel is allowed to conduct negotiations with Syria - and it may be assumed that this hint will turn into an order before long. In the meantime, no change in the position of the Israeli government is noticeable.

 

UNFORTUNATELY, JUST at this moment, with a newly formed Palestinian government that has a good chance of being strong and stable, the government of Israel is becoming more and more destabilized.

 

Olmert's support rating in the polls is approaching zero. The percentage points can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Practically everybody speaks about his political demise within weeks, perhaps after the publication of the interim report of the Vinograd commission on the Second Lebanon War. But even if Olmert manages to survive, his will be a lame duck government, unable to start anything new, and certainly no bold initiative vis-a -vis the new Palestinian government.

 

But if Bush supports us on one side, and the Saudi king on the other, perhaps we shall after all take a few steps forward. As people in this region say: in sha Allah, if God wills.

_____________________________________

 

 

 

 

In One Word: MASSACRE!

 

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1163290714

11/11/06

 

 

"THANK GOD for the American elections," our ministers and generals sighed with relief.

 

They were not rejoicing at the kick that the American people delivered to George W. Bush's ass this week. They love Bush, after all.

 

But more important than the humbling of Bush is the fact that the news from America pushed aside the terrible reports from Beit Hanoun. Instead of making the headlines, they were relegated to the bottom of the page.

 

THE FIRST revolutionary act is to call things by their true names, Rosa Luxemburg said. So how to call what happened in Beit Hanoun?

 

"Accident" said a pretty anchorwoman on one of the TV news programs. "Tragedy", said her lovely colleague on another channel. A third one, no less attractive, wavered between "event", "mistake" and "incident".

 

It was indeed an accident, a tragedy, an event and an incident. But most of all it was a massacre. M-a-s-s-a-c-r-e.

 

The word "accident" suggests something for which no one is to blame - like being struck by lightning. A tragedy is a sad event or situation, like that of the New Orleans inhabitants after the disaster. The event in Beit Hanoun was sad indeed, but not an act of God - it was an act decided upon and carried out by human beings.

 

IMMEDIATELY AFTER the facts became known, the entire choir of professional apologists, explainers-away, sorrow-expressers and pretext-inventors, a choir that is in perpetual readiness for such cases, sprang into feverish action.

 

"An unfortunate mistake… It can happen in the best families… The mechanism of a cannon can misfunction, people can make mistakes… Errare humanum est… We have launched tens of thousands of artillery shells, and there have only been three such accidents. (No. 1 in the Olmert-Peretz-Halutz era was in Qana, in the Second Lebanon War. No. 2 was on the Gaza sea shore, where a whole family was wiped out.) But we apologized, didn't we? What more can they demand from us?"

 

There were also arguments like "They can only blame themselves." As usual, it was the fault of the victims. The most creative solution came from the Deputy Minister of Defense, Ephraim Sneh: "The practical responsibility is ours, but the moral responsibility is theirs." If they launch Qassam rockets at us, what else can we do but answer with shells?

 

Ephraim Sneh was raised to the position of Deputy Minister just now. The appointment was a payment for agreeing to the inclusion of Avigdor Liberman in the government (in biblical Hebrew, the payment would have been called "the hire of a whore", Deut. 23,19). Now, after only a few days in office, Sneh was given the opportunity to express his thanks.

 

(In the Sneh family, there is a tradition of justifying despicable acts. Ephraim's brilliant father, Moshe Sneh, was the leader of the Israeli Communist Party, and defended all the massacres committed by Stalin, not only the gulag system, but also the murder of the Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union and its satellites and the Jewish "doctors plot").

 

Any suggestion of equivalence between Qassams and artillery shells, an idea which has been adopted even by some of the Peaceniks, is completely false. And not only because there is no symmetry between occupier and occupied. Hundreds of Qassams launched during more than a year have killed one single Israeli. The shells, missiles and bombs have already killed many hundreds of Palestinians.

 

DID THE shells hit the homes of people intentionally? There are only two possible answers to that.

 

The extreme version says: Yes. The sequence of events points in that direction. The Israeli army, one of the most modern in the world, has no answer to the Qassam, one of the most primitive of weapons. This short-range unguided rocket (named after Izz-ad-Din al-Qassam, the first Palestinian fighter, who was killed in 1935 in a battle against the British authorities of Palestine) is little more than a pipe filled with home-made explosives.

 

In a futile attempt to prevent the launching of Qassams, the Israeli forces invade the towns and villages of the Gaza Strip at regular intervals and institute a reign of terror. A week ago, they invaded Beit-Hanoun and killed more than 50 people, many of them women and children. The moment they left, the Palestinians started to launch as many Qassams as possible against Ashkelon, in order to prove that these incursions do not deter them.

 

That increased the frustration of the generals even more. Ashkelon is not a remote poverty-stricken little town like Sderot, most of whose inhabitants are of Moroccan origin. In Ashkelon there lives also an elitist population of European descent. The army chiefs, having lost their honor in Lebanon, were eager - according to this version - to teach the Palestinians a lesson, once and for all. According to the Israeli saying: If force doesn't work, use more force.

 

The other version holds that it was a real mistake, an unfortunate technical hitch. But the commander of an army knows very well that a certain incidence of "hitches" is unavoidable. So-and-so many percent are killed in training, so-and-so many percent die from "friendly fire", so-and-so many percent of shells fall some distance from the target. The ammunition used by the gunners against Beit-Hanoun - the very same 155mm ammunition that was used in Kana - is known for its inaccuracy. Several factors can cause the shells to stray from their course by hundreds of meters.

 

He who decided to use this ammunition against a target right next to civilians knowingly exposed them to mortal danger. Therefore, there is no essential difference between the two versions.

 

Who is to blame? First of all, the spirit that has gained ground in the army. Recently, Gideon Levy disclosed that a battalion commander praised his soldiers for killing 12 Palestinians with the words: "We have won by 12:0!"

 

Guilty are, of course, the gunners and their commanders, including the battery chief. And the General in charge of the Southern Command, Yoav Gallant (sic), who radiates indifference spiked with sanctimonious platitudes. And the Deputy Chief-of-Staff. And the Chief-of-Staff, Dan Halutz, the Air-Force general who said after another such incident that he sleeps well at night after dropping a one-ton super-bomb on a residential area. And, of course, the Minister of Defense, Amir Peretz, who approved the use of artillery after forbidding it in the past - which means that he was aware of the foreseeable consequences.

 

The guiltiest one is the Great Apologizer: Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister.

 

Olmert boasted recently that because of the clever behavior of his government "we were able to kill hundreds of terrorists, and the world has not reacted." According to Olmert, a "terrorist" is any armed Palestinian, including the tens of thousands of Palestinian policemen who carry arms by agreement with Israel. They may now be shot freely. "Terrorists" are also the women and children, who are killed in the street and in their homes. (Some say so openly: the children grow up to be terrorists, the women give birth to children who grow up to be terrorists.)

 

Olmert can go on with this, as he says, because the world keeps silent. Today the US even vetoed a very mild Security Council resolution against the event. Does this mean that the governments throughout the world - America, Europe, the Arab world - are accessories to the crime at Beit Hanoun? That can best be answered by the citizens of those countries.

 

THE WORLD did not pay much attention to the massacre, because it happened on US election day. The results of the election may sadden our leaders more than the blood and tears of mothers and children in the Gaza strip, but they were glad that the election diverted attention.

 

A cynic might say: Democracy is wonderful, it enables the voter to kick out the moron they elected last time and replace them with a new moron.

 

But let's not be too cynical. The fact is that the American people has accepted, after a delay of three years and tens of thousands of dead, what the advocates of peace around the word - including us here in Israel - were saying already on the first day: that the war will cause a disaster. That it will not solve any problem, but have the opposite effect.

 

The change will not be quick and dramatic. The US is a huge ship. When it turns around, it makes a very big circle and needs a lot of time - unlike Israel, a small speed-boat that can turn almost on the spot. But the direction is clear.

 

Of course, in both new houses of Congress, the pro-Israeli lobby (meaning: the supporters of the Israeli Right) has a huge influence, perhaps even more than in the last ones. But the American army will have to start leaving Iraq. The danger of another military adventure in Iran and/or Syria is much diminished. The crazy neo-conservatives, most of them Jews who support the extreme Right in Israel, are gradually losing power, together with their allies, the crazy Christian fundamentalists.

 

As former Prime Minister Levy Eshkol once said: when America sneezes, Israel catches cold. When America starts to recover, perhaps there is hope for us, too.

_____________________________________

 

 

 

The Great Experiment

 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15306.htm

 

By Uri Avnery

 

10/14/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- IS IT possible to force a whole people to submit to foreign occupation by starving it?

 

That is, certainly, an interesting question. So interesting, indeed, that the governments of Israel and the United States, in close cooperation with Europe, are now engaged in a rigorous scientific experiment in order to obtain a definitive answer.

 

The laboratory for the experiment is the Gaza Strip, and the guinea pigs are the million and a quarter Palestinians living there.

 

IN ORDER to meet the required scientific standards, it was necessary first of all to prepare the laboratory.

 

That was done in the following way: First, Ariel Sharon uprooted the Israeli settlements that were stuck there.

 

After all, you can't conduct a proper experiment with pets roaming around the laboratory. It was done with "determination and sensitivity", tears flowed like water, the soldiers kissed and embraced the evicted settlers, and again it was shown that the Israeli army is the most-most in the world.

 

With the laboratory cleaned, the next phase could begin: all entrances and exits were hermetically sealed, in order to eliminate disturbing influences from the world outside.

 

That was done without difficulty. Successive Israeli governments have prevented the building of a harbor in Gaza, and the Israeli navy sees to it that no ship approaches the shore. The splendid international airport, built during the Oslo days, was bombed and shut down. The entire Strip was closed off by a highly effective fence, and only a few crossings remained, all but one controlled by the Israeli army.

 

There remained a sole connection with the outside world: the Rafah border crossing to Egypt. It could not just be sealed off, because that would have exposed the Egyptian regime as a collaborator with Israel. A sophisticated solution was found: to all appearances the Israeli army left the crossing and turned it over to an international supervision team. Its members are nice guys, full of good intentions, but in practice they are totally dependent on the Israeli army, which oversees the crossing from a nearby control room. The international supervisors live in an Israeli kibbutz and can reach the crossing only with Israeli consent. So everything was ready for the experiment.

 

THE SIGNAL for its beginning was given after the Palestinians had held spotlessly democratic elections, under the supervision of former President Jimmy Carter.

 

George Bush was enthusiastic: his vision of bringing democracy to the Middle East was coming true.

 

But the Palestinians flunked the test. Instead of electing "good Arabs", devotees of the United States, they voted for very bad Arabs, devotees of Allah. Bush felt insulted. But the Israeli government was ecstatic: after the Hamas victory, the Americans and Europeans were ready to take part in the experiment. It could start:

 

The United States and the European Union announced the stoppage of all donations to the Palestinian Authority, since it was "controlled by terrorists". Simultaneously, the Israeli government cut off the flow of money.

 

To understand the significance of this: according to the "Paris Protocol" (the economic annex of the Oslo agreement) the Palestinian economy is part of the Israeli customs system. This means that Israel collects the duties for all the goods that pass through Israel to the Palestinian territories - actually, there is no other route. After deducting a fat commission, Israel is obligated to turn the money over to the Palestinian Authority.

 

When the Israeli government refuses to pass on this money, which belongs to the Palestinians, it is, simply put, robbery in broad daylight. But when one robs "terrorists", who is going to complain?

 

The Palestinian Authority - both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip - needs this money like air for breathing. This fact also requires some explanation: in the 19 years when Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip, from 1948 to 1967, not a single important factory was built there. The Jordanians wanted all economic activity to take place in Jordan proper, east of the river, and the Egyptians neglected the strip altogether.

 

Then came the Israeli occupation, and the situation became even worse. The occupied territories became a captive market for Israeli industry, and the military government prevented the establishment of any enterprise that could conceivably compete with an Israeli one.

 

The Palestinian workers were compelled to work in Israel for hunger wages (by Israeli standards). From these, the Israeli government deducted all the social payments levied on Israeli workers, without the Palestinian workers enjoying any social benefits. This way the government robbed these exploited workers of tens of billions of dollars, which disappeared somehow in the bottomless barrel of the government.

 

When the intifada broke out, the Israeli captains of industry and agriculture discovered that it was possible to get along without the Palestinian workers. Indeed, it was even more profitable. Workers brought in from Thailand, Romania and other poor countries were ready to work for even lower wages and in conditions bordering on slavery.

 

The Palestinian workers lost their jobs.

 

That was the situation at the beginning of the experiment:

 

the Palestinian infrastructure destroyed, practically no means of production, no work for the workers. All in all, an ideal setting for the great "experiment in hunger".

 

THE IMPLEMENTATION started, as mentioned, with the stoppage of payments.

 

The passage between Gaza and Egypt was closed in practice.

 

Once every few days or weeks it was opened for some hours, for appearances' sake, so that some of the sick and dead or dying could get home or reach Egyptian hospitals.

 

The crossings between the Strip and Israel were closed "for urgent security reasons". Always, at the right moment, "warnings of an imminent terrorist attack" appeared.

 

Palestinian agricultural products destined for export rot at the crossing. Medicines and foodstuffs cannot get in, except for short periods from time to time, also for appearances, whenever somebody important abroad voices some protest. Then comes another "urgent security warning" and the situation is back to normal.

 

To round off the picture, the Israeli Air Force bombed the only power station in the Strip, so that for a part of the day there is no electricity, and the water supply (which depends on electric pumps) stops also. Even on the hottest days, with temperatures of over 30 degrees centigrade in the shade, there is no electricity for refrigerators, air conditioning, the water supply or other needs.

 

In the West Bank, a territory much larger than the Gaza Strip (which makes up only 6% of the occupied Palestinian territories but holds 40% of the inhabitants), the situation is not quite so desperate. But in the Strip, more than half of the population lives beneath the Palestinian "poverty line", which lies of course very, very far below the Israeli "poverty line". Many Gaza residents can only dream of being considered poor in the nearby Israeli town of Sderot.

 

What are the governments of Israel and the US trying to tell the Palestinians? The message is clear: You will reach the brink of hunger, and even beyond, if you do not surrender. You must remove the Hamas government and elect candidates approved by Israel and the US. And, most importantly: you must be satisfied with a Palestinian state consisting of several enclaves, each of which will be utterly dependent on the tender mercies of Israel.

 

AT THE moment, the directors of the scientific experiment are pondering a puzzling question: how on earth do the Palestinians still hold out, in spite of everything?

 

According to all the rules, they should have been broken long ago!

 

Indeed, there are some encouraging signs. The general atmosphere of frustration and desperation creates tension between Hamas and Fatah. Here and there clashes have broken out, people were killed and wounded, but in each case the deterioration was halted before it became a civil war. The thousands of hidden Israeli collaborators are also helping to stir things up. But contrary to all expectations, the resistance did not evaporate. Even the captured Israeli soldier has not been released.

 

One of the explanations has to do with the structure of Palestinian society. The Hamulah (extended family) plays a central role there. As long as one person in the family is working, the relatives, too, do not die of hunger, even if there is widespread malnutrition. Everyone who has any income shares it with all his brothers and sisters, parents, grandparents, cousins and their children. That is a primitive system, but quite effective in such circumstances. It seems that the planners of the experiment did not take this into account.

 

In order to quicken the process, the whole might of the Israeli army is now being used again, as from this week.

 

For three months the army was busy with the Second Lebanon War. It became apparent that the army, which for the last 39 years has been employed mainly as a colonial police force, does not function very well when suddenly confronted with a trained and armed opponent that can fight back.

 

Hizbullah used deadly anti-tank weapons against the armored forces, and rockets rained down on Northern Israel. The army has long ago forgotten how to deal with such an enemy.

 

And the campaign did not end well.

 

Now the army returns to the war it knows. The Palestinians in the Strip do not (yet) have effective anti-tank weapons, and the Qassam rockets cause only limited damage. The army can again use tanks against the population without hindrance. The Air Force, which in Lebanon was afraid to send in helicopters to remove the wounded, can now fire missiles at the houses of "wanted persons", their families and neighbors, at leisure. If in the last three months "only" 100 Palestinians were killed per month, we are now witnessing a dramatic rise in the number of Palestinians killed and wounded.

 

How can a population that is hit by hunger, lacking medicaments and equipment for its primitive hospitals and exposed to attacks on land, from sea and from the air, hold out? Will it break? Will it go down on its knees and beg for mercy? Or will it find inhuman strength and stand the test?

 

In short: What and how much is needed to get a population to surrender?

 

All the scientists taking part in the experiment - Ehud Olmert and Condoleezza Rice, Amir Peretz and Angela Merkel, Dan Halutz and George Bush, not to mention Nobel Peace Price laureate Shimon Peres - are bent over the microscopes and waiting for an answer, which undoubtedly will be an important contribution to political science.

 

I hope the Nobel Committee is watching.

---

Uri Avnery is an Israeli author and activist. He is the head of the Israeli peace movement, "Gush Shalom".

_____________________________________

 

 

 

 

Lunch in Damascus

 

Uri Avnery

7.10.06

 

 

ONCE, WHILE traveling in a taxi, I had an argument with the driver - a profession associated in Israel with extreme right-wing views. I tried in vain to convince him of the desirability of peace with the Arabs. In our country, which has never seen a single day of peace in the last hundred years, peace can seem like something out of science fiction.

 

Suddenly I had an inspiration. "When we have peace," I said, "You can take your taxi in the morning and go to Damascus, have lunch there with real authentic Hummus and come back home in the evening."

 

He jumped at the idea. "Wow," he exclaimed, "If that happens, I shall take you with me for nothing!"

 

"And I shall treat you to lunch," I responded.

 

He continued to dream. "If I could go to Damascus in my car, I could drive on from there all the way to Paris!"

 

 

BASHAR AL-ASSAD has done it again. He has succeeded in confusing the Israeli government.

 

As long as he voices the ritual threat to liberate the Golan Heights by force, it does not upset anybody. After all, that only confirms what many want to hear: that there is no way to have peace with Syria, that sooner or later we shall have a war with them.

 

Why is that good? Simple: peace with Syria would mean giving back the Golan Heights (Syrian territory by any definition). No peace, no need to give them back.

 

But when Bashar starts to talk peace, we are in trouble. That is a sinister plot. It may, God forbid, create a situation that would compel us to return the territory.

 

Therefore, we should not even speak about it. The news must be buried in some remote corner of the papers and at the end of the news on TV, as just "another speech of Assad". The government rejects them "on the threshold", adding that it cannot even be discussed until.

 

Until what? Until he stops supporting Hizbullah. Until Syria expels the representatives of Hamas and the other Palestinian organizations. Until regime change takes place in Syria. Until a Western-style democracy is installed there. In short, until he registers as a member of the Zionist organization.

 

 

THE RELATIONS between Israel and Syria have a documented history of at least 2859 years. In the year 853 B.C. Israel is mentioned - for the first time, it seems - in an authentic document outside the Bible. Twelve monarchs of the region, led by the kings of Damascus and Israel, united against the growing threat of Assyria, The decisive battle took place at Karkar (in the north of today's Syria). According to an Assyrian document, 20 thousand soldiers and 1200 chariots of Damascus fought side by side with 10 thousand soldiers and 2000 chariots of Ahab, king of Israel. It is not quite clear which side won.

 

But that was a temporary alliance. For most of the time, Israel and Aram-Damascus fought against each other for regional supremacy. Ahab died a hero's death in one of these wars against Aram, just two years after the battle against the Assyrians.

 

In modern times, the Syrians (although then still under French colonial rule) strenuously opposed the Zionist enterprise right from the beginning. But they also opposed the Palestinian national movement. That is grounded in history: in the Arabic language, the name al-Sham ("the North"), as Syria is called, includes the entire territory between Egypt and Turkey. Therefore, in Arab consciousness, not only Lebanon, but Jordan, Palestine and Israel as well are really part of Syria.

 

When Yasser Arafat created the independent Palestinian national movement at the end of the 1950s, the Syrians demanded to be acknowledged as the protectors of the Palestinian people. When he refused, the Syrians threw the entire Palestinian leadership into prison. (Only the wife of Abu Jihad, Intissar al-Wazir, remained at liberty and took over the command of the Fatah fighters - thus becoming the first woman in modern times to command an Arab fighting force.)

 

Naturally, all the enemies of Arafat found refuge in Damascus, and that is the original reason for the presence of some leaders of Hamas and other organizations there. They were more of a threat to the PLO than to Israel.

 

 

IN THE 1948 war, the Syrian army was the only Arab army that was not defeated. They continued to occupy some Israeli territory. Along this border, many incidents took place (mostly initiated by an officer by the name of Ariel Sharon). In the end, the Israeli army occupied the Golan Heights in the Six-day war, for the outbreak of which Syria bears some responsibility.

 

Since then, all the relations between Israel and Syria have been centered on this occupied territory. Its return is a paramount Syrian aim. Israel has applied Israeli law there (which, contrary to the accepted view, means less than annexation). Hafez al-Assad re-conquered it in the 1973 war, but in the end was pushed back to the approaches of Damascus. Since then, the Syrians have been trying to harass Israel mostly by means of Hizbullah.

 

Once upon a time, the idea of an "Eastern Front" - a coordinated attack by Jordan, Syria and Iraq - used to cause nightmares in Israel. The prophecy of Jeremiah (1, 14), "Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land", echoed through the war-rooms of the army High Command. Since then we have made peace with Jordan, Iraq has been blown to smithereens by the Americans, with the enthusiastic support of Israel and its American lobby. But the Syrians are still considered a menace, because they are allied with Iran and connected with Hizbullah.

 

Is it worthwhile for us to live in this situation in order to keep the Golan Heights? Common sense says no. If we reach a peace agreement with Syria, it will automatically entail an agreement with Hizbullah, too. Without Syrian consent, Hizbullah cannot keep an efficient military force, since practically all Hizbullah's arms have to come from Syria or pass through Syria. Without Syrian support, Hizbullah will become a purely Lebanese party and cease to constitute a threat to us.

 

Moreover, Syria is a thoroughly secular country. When the Muslim Brotherhood rebelled against Assad Sr, he drowned them in blood. Also, the great majority of Syrians are Sunni. When Syria makes peace with Israel, it will have no reason to remain allied with the fanatical Shiite Iran.

 

So why don't we make peace with Syria?

 

 

AT THIS time, there are two reasons: the one domestic, the other foreign.

 

The domestic reason is the existence of 20 thousand settlers on the Golan Heights, who are far more popular than the West Bank settlers. They are not religious fanatics, and their settlements were set up under the auspices of the Labor Party. All Israeli governments have been afraid to touch them.

 

That is the real reason for the failure of all the attempts to negotiate with Syria. Yitzhak Rabin thought about it and drew back. He argued that we should first of all concentrate on settling the Palestinian issue. Ehud Barak almost came to an agreement with Syria, but escaped at the last moment. The only question that remained open was almost ludicrous: should the Syrians reach the shoreline of the Sea of Tiberias (the situation prevailing before the Six-day war) or stay at a distance of a few dozen meters (according to the border fixed between the British, then ruling Palestine, and the French, then ruling Syria). In popular parlance: will Assad dangle his long feet in the water of the lake? For Assad Sr. that was a question of honor.

 

Is it worthwhile to risk for this the lives of thousands of Israelis and Syrians, who may die in another war?

 

Until Israel has a government ready to answer this question and to confront the settlers, there will be no agreement with Syria.

 

The second reason for rejecting peace with Syria is connected with the United States. Syria belongs to George Bush's "axis of evil". The American president doesn't give a damn for the long-range interests of Israel, what is important to him is to achieve some sort of victory in the Middle East. The destruction of the Syrian regime ("a victory for democracy") will compensate him for the Iraq fiasco.

 

No Israeli government - and certainly not that of Olmert - would dare to disobey the American president. Therefore, it is self-evident that all peace feelers from Assad will be rejected "on the threshold". Tsipi Livni, who last week opened a new front against Olmert and presented herself almost as a peace-lover, opposes the start of negotiations with Syria as well.

 

 

THIS AFFAIR throws some light on the complex relations between Israel and the United States: who is wagging who - does the dog wag its tail or the tail its dog?

 

Olmert says that we must ignore Assad's peace offers, because we must not help him to escape Bush's wrath. Let's dwell on this utterance for a moment.

 

An Israeli patriot would, of course, have said exactly the opposite: If Assad is ready to make peace with us - even if only because he is afraid of the Americans - we should jump at this opportunity and exploit this situation to achieve at long last peace on our northern front.

 

Last week Olmert made a remarkable declaration: "As long as I am Prime Minister, we shall not give up the Golan for all eternity!" What does that mean? Either Olmert believes that his term of office coincides with God's term of office, and he will rule in eternity - or in Olmert's world, eternity extends to four years, at most.

 

Anyhow, until then, my taxi-driver and I shall have to wait for our lunch in Damascus.

____________________

 

 

 

Other articles by Uri Avnery:

Junkies of War

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1154819859

Knife in the Back

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14353.htm

Who is winning this war? Q & A With Uri Avnery

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14229.htm

____________________

 

 

 

 

Muhammad's Sword

 

Uri Avnery

23.9.06

 

Muhammad's Sword

 

Since the days when Roman Emperors threw Christians to the lions, the relations between the emperors and the heads of the church have undergone many changes.

 

Constantine the Great, who became Emperor in the year 306 - exactly 1700 years ago - encouraged the practice of Christianity in the empire, which included Palestine. Centuries later, the church split into an Eastern

(Orthodox) and a Western (Catholic) part. In the West, the Bishop of Rome, who acquired the title of Pope, demanded that the Emperor accept his superiority.

 

The struggle between the Emperors and the Popes played a central role in European history and divided the peoples. It knew ups and downs. Some Emperors dismissed or expelled a Pope, some Popes dismissed or excommunicated an Emperor. One of the Emperors, Henry IV, "walked to Canossa", standing for three days barefoot in the snow in front of the Pope's castle, until the Pope deigned to annul his excommunication.

 

But there were times when Emperors and Popes lived in peace with each other. We are witnessing such a period today. Between the present Pope, Benedict XVI, and the present Emperor, George Bush II, there exists a wonderful harmony. Last week's speech by the Pope, which aroused a world-wide storm, went well with Bush's crusade against "Islamofascism", in the context of the "Clash of Civilizations".

 

IN HIS lecture at a German university, the 265th Pope described what he sees as a huge difference between Christianity and Islam: while Christianity is based on reason, Islam denies it. While Christians see the logic of God's actions, Muslims deny that there is any such logic in the actions of Allah.

 

As a Jewish atheist, I do not intend to enter the fray of this debate. It is much beyond my humble abilities to understand the logic of the Pope. But I cannot overlook one passage, which concerns me too, as an Israeli living near the fault-line of this "war of civilizations".

 

In order to prove the lack of reason in Islam, the Pope asserts that the prophet Muhammad ordered his followers to spread their religion by the sword. According to the Pope, that is unreasonable, because faith is born of the soul, not of the body. How can the sword influence the soul?

 

To support his case, the Pope quoted - of all people - a Byzantine Emperor, who belonged, of course, to the competing Eastern Church. At the end of the

14th century, the Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus told of a debate he had - or so he said (its occurrence is in doubt) - with an unnamed Persian Muslim scholar. In the heat of the argument, the Emperor (according to himself) flung the following words at his adversary:

 

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached".

 

These words give rise to three questions: (a) Why did the Emperor say them?

(b) Are they true? (c) Why did the present Pope quote them?

 

WHEN MANUEL II wrote his treatise, he was the head of a dying empire. He assumed power in 1391, when only a few provinces of the once illustrious empire remained. These, too, were already under Turkish threat.

 

At that point in time, the Ottoman Turks had reached the banks of the Danube. They had conquered Bulgaria and the north of Greece, and had twice defeated relieving armies sent by Europe to save the Eastern Empire. In

1452, only a few years after Manuel's death, his capital, Constantinople

(the present Istanbul) fell to the Turks, putting an end to the Empire that had lasted for more than a thousand years.

 

During his reign, Manuel made the rounds of the capitals of Europe in an attempt to drum up support. He promised to reunite the church. There is no doubt that he wrote his religious treatise in order to incite the Christian countries against the Turks and convince them to start a new crusade. The aim was practical, theology was serving politics.

 

In this sense, the quote serves exactly the requirements of the present Emperor, George Bush II. He, too, wants to unite the Christian world against the mainly Muslim "Axis of Evil". Moreover, the Turks are again knocking on the doors of Europe, this time peacefully. It is well known that the Pope supports the forces that object to the entry of Turkey into the European Union.

 

IS THERE any truth in Manuel's argument?

 

The pope himself threw in a word of caution. As a serious and renowned theologian, he could not afford to falsify written texts. Therefore, he admitted that the Qur'an specifically forbade the spreading of the faith by force. He quoted the second Sura, verse 256 (strangely fallible, for a pope, he meant verse 257) which says: "There must be no coercion in matters of faith".

 

How can one ignore such an unequivocal statement? The Pope simply argues that this commandment was laid down by the prophet when he was at the beginning of his career, still weak and powerless, but that later on he ordered the use of the sword in the service of the faith. Such an order does not exist in the Qur'an. True, Muhammad called for the use of the sword in his war against opposing tribes - Christian, Jewish and others - in Arabia, when he was building his state. But that was a political act, not a religious one; basically a fight for territory, not for the spreading of the faith.

 

Jesus said: "You will recognize them by their fruits." The treatment of other religions by Islam must be judged by a simple test: How did the Muslim rulers behave for more than a thousand years, when they had the power to "spread the faith by the sword"?

 

Well, they just did not.

 

For many centuries, the Muslims ruled Greece. Did the Greeks become Muslims? Did anyone even try to Islamize them? On the contrary, Christian Greeks held the highest positions in the Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived at one time or another under Ottoman rule and clung to their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them to become Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian.

 

True, the Albanians did convert to Islam, and so did the Bosniaks. But nobody argues that they did this under duress. They adopted Islam in order to become favorites of the government and enjoy the fruits.

 

In 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants indiscriminately, in the name of the gentle Jesus. At that time, 400 years into the occupation of Palestine by the Muslims, Christians were still the majority in the country. Throughout this long period, no effort was made to impose Islam on them. Only after the expulsion of the Crusaders from the country, did the majority of the inhabitants start to adopt the Arabic language and the Muslim faith - and they were the forefathers of most of today's Palestinians.

 

THERE IS no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the "spreading of the faith by the sword"?

 

What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi ("Spanish") Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.

 

WHY? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the "peoples of the book". In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a special poll-tax, but were exempted from military service - a trade-off that was quite welcome to many Jews. It has been said that Muslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle persuasion - because it entailed the loss of taxes.

 

Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times "by the sword" to get them to abandon their faith.

 

 

THE STORY about "spreading the faith by the sword" is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great wars against the Muslims - the reconquista of Spain by the Christians, the Crusades and the repulsion of the Turks, who almost conquered Vienna. I suspect that the German Pope, too, honestly believes in these fables. That means that the leader of the Catholic world, who is a Christian theologian in his own right, did not make the effort to study the history of other religions.

 

Why did he utter these words in public? And why now?

 

There is no escape from viewing them against the background of the new Crusade of Bush and his evangelist supporters, with his slogans of "Islamofascism" and the "Global War on Terrorism" - when "terrorism" has become a synonym for Muslims. For Bush's handlers, this is a cynical attempt to justify the domination of the world's oil resources. Not for the first time in history, a religious robe is spread to cover the nakedness of economic interests; not for the first time, a robbers' expedition becomes a Crusade.

 

The speech of the Pope blends into this effort. Who can foretell the dire consequences?

____________________

 

 

 

 

The Real Aim

 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14004.htm

 

 

By: Uri Avnery

 

07/15/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- THE REAL aim is to change the regime in Lebanon and to install a puppet government.

 

That was the aim of Ariel Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. It failed. But Sharon and his pupils in the military and political leadership have never really given up on it.

 

As in 1982, the present operation, too, was planned and is being carried out in full coordination with the US.

 

As then, there is no doubt that it is coordinated with a part of the Lebanese elite.

 

That's the main thing. Everything else is noise and propaganda.

 

ON THE eve of the 1982 invasion, Secretary of State Alexander Haig told Ariel Sharon that, before starting it, it was necessary to have a "clear provocation", which would be accepted by the world.

 

The provocation indeed took place - exactly at the appropriate time - when Abu-Nidal's terror gang tried to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London. This had no connection with Lebanon, and even less with the PLO (the enemy of Abu-Nidal), but it served its purpose.

 

This time, the necessary provocation has been provided by the capture of the two Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah. Everyone knows that they cannot be freed except through an exchange of prisoners. But the huge military campaign that has been ready to go for months was sold to the Israeli and international public as a rescue operation.

 

(Strangely enough, the very same thing happened two weeks earlier in the Gaza Strip. Hamas and its partners captured a soldier, which provided the excuse for a massive operation that had been prepared for a long time and whose aim is to destroy the Palestinian government.)

 

THE DECLARED aim of the Lebanon operation is to push Hizbullah away from the border, so as to make it impossible for the