By Mary Rizzo • Jan 4th, 2009 at 14:01 • Category: Analysis, Israel, Mary's Choice, Newswire, Palestine, Religion, Resistance, War, Zionism
WRITTEN BY MARY RIZZO
You really have to hand it to the Israelis, especially those who came from some other place first. In an article that romanticizes militarism, they see their participation in war as a fulfillment of their very essence of being. If the same article were written from a “Jihadi”, I wonder what the reaction might be. At any rate, not to tilt the scales of fantasy too far, I would like to simply address the article that Jewish immigrant to “Israel” has written to the Washington Post, and thank Nancy of www.umkahlil.blogpost.com for having brought it to my attention.
And, without further ado, a simple deconstruction of a paper entitled (without a hint of irony, because the author truly believes that War is what makes an Israeli an Israeli and… hey, he is right!)
As My Son Goes To War I Am Fully Israeli At Last
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/02/AR2009010202196.html
By Yossi Klein Halevi
Sunday, January 4, 2009; Page B01
JERUSALEM
"I just heard on the news that Gavriel's base has been shelled," my wife, Sarah, said to me last Tuesday, referring to our 19-year-old son, a member of an Israeli army tank unit waiting on the Gaza border for the order to enter. And, she added in a deliberately calm tone, "A soldier was killed." We texted Gavriel, and within five minutes he called, safe. How, Sarah asked, did families survive war before cellphones?
My goodness. How did Mothers and Fathers of Israeli soldiers (these are the people who count, of course) get by before they still had their umbilical cord to their child-soldier? But, let us look at this bit of information. On Tuesday, he claims, Sarah informs him of the shelling of Gavriel’s base, (remember, using the first name basis will familiarise the readers with the “human” side of the story, and we know, the “good guys” are the ones we can relate to, they are given names and their worries are articulated in human terms we will immediately recognise as familiar, i.e., part of OUR families). Funny… I started to look that claim up, and know what, dear readers, I couldn’t find anything about any shelling, much less of a tank unit, by Hamas on 30 December 2008. I found that up to that date, since the beginning of the Israeli attacks, four Israelis were killed by Qassams. That’s all I could find. Either this is deliberate disinformation, or poor little soldier-boy’s co-militant was hit by friendly fire.
For days we waited for a cabinet decision: Will there be a land invasion or a new cease-fire? The politicians began to bicker while our soldiers waited on the border, in the rain and the mud.
How nasty of their Chief of Staff to not have set up a Sukkoth for them all.
Anything but this, I said to Sarah. Not another Lebanon War, which, like Gaza, began with an impressive show of Israeli air power but ended with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah predicting the imminent end of "the Zionist entity." If we don't win this time — deliver an unambiguous blow if not topple Hamas entirely — our deterrence will further erode, inviting more rocket attacks and encouraging the jihadist momentum throughout the Middle East.
There you go, the propaganda segment is presented as an existential dilemma. Dragged into a war against Lebanon, the mighty Israeli Air Force gave its best, but of course, sooner or later, the land troops would have to enter and uh-oh, that never works too well with an army that is not truly motivated. Why aren’t they motivated? Because maybe they don’t believe in the existential myth of their fathers. And, naturally, the effects that all of this will cause in the rest of the Middle East is referred to as Jihadist Momentum, which is a Western Codeword for “They Are All So Evil and They Are Coming For You Next”.
And then I caught myself: How can I be hoping for an outcome that will send my son into battle? This is my first experience as the father of a soldier, and now, after 26 years of living in Israel, I finally understand the terrible responsibility of being an Israeli.
It’s always other people’s children who die, and finally, the idea of the land troops going into a place where the outcome is not certain means that the other people are you. But fear not, Yossi, you are not alone. You and the other soldiers are going to get a terrible responsibility once the tribunals for war crimes are opened. This war is not a defensive war. You have marched into a territory, occupying it militarily in a more open way. But since your bio here says you are a man of faith, I will say it to you another way: there isn’t anything new going on here, just that the angel of death is not passing over this time. You didn’t make the sign over your door jamb in time, you did not show yourselves to be followers of the Lord, and your house will not be passed over. Yes, the worst of all the ten plagues is happening to you, and this is what you expect, desire and promote around the world.
I had assumed that I'd become initiated into Israeliness when I myself was drafted into the army as a 34-year-old immigrant in 1989. But perhaps only now have I become fully Israeli. Zionism promised to empower the Jews by making them responsible for their fate; the price for that achievement is to be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for one's commitments.
What exactly are these commitments? To starve and place a medieval siege over an area of impoverished refugee camps without any access to goods, services or free movement? Are you insane? This is a commitment that the devil would invent. Zionism promised things to the Jews alright, and those promises were made at the expense of the freedom of other people. Ah, but they are not Jews, thus you are at peace with that.
I know Gaza from a previous conflict. During the first intifada of the late 1980s, when Palestinians revolted against the occupation, I was part of a reservist unit that patrolled Gaza's refugee camps.
Did you ever ask yourself how they got there? Did you ever ask yourself what they were rising up against?
There I learned that there is no such thing as a benign occupation, as Israelis had once deceived themselves into believing.
Ah, another one of those stories of the Israeli soldier who was “always” against the Occupation! I would like to have a list now of all those who were IN FAVOUR of the Occupation, because I can’t seem to find anyone who will admit that, despite the fact that Occupation has never been truly threatened to end.
Our unit not only arrested terrorist suspects but also dragged people out of their beds in the middle of the night to paint over anti-Israel graffiti and rounded up innocents after a grenade attack just to "make a presence," in army terminology. At night, in our tent, we argued about the wisdom of turning soldiers into policemen of a hostile civilian population that didn't want us there and which we didn't want as part of our society.
Did you ever stop to think about the reasons they were hostile? That you, as an Occupying soldier, as an immigrant from God-Knows-Where and as a bully in their land, might be less than accepting of you? But it is YOUR society that you worry about, this is the evil of the Occupation, that there is Arab presence on your coveted land.
A majority of Israelis emerged from the first intifada convinced that we need to do everything possible to end the occupation and ensure that our children don't serve as enforcers of Gaza's despair. That was why I initially supported the 1993 Oslo peace process that took a terrible gamble on Yasser Arafat's supposed transformation from terrorist to peacemaker.
Where is this majority? Why did they never achieve a single thing? I don’t mean ending the Occupation, oh no, never THAT, I mean, they kept on building nasty settlements EVERYWHERE, erecting walls in Palestinian territory, constructing roads that only Jews could use so as to cut one Palestinian town off from another.
And Arafat was the terrorist? Arafat has less blood on his hands than does his co-Nobel Prize Winner Menachem Begin, the Irgun Hoodlum. But, one man’s revolutionary hero is another man’s terrorist.
And even after it became clear that Arafat and other Palestinian leaders never intended to accept Israel's legitimacy, I supported the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, simply to extricate us from that region, knowing that we would not receive peace in return.
Now, how can someone accept something with nothing in exchange? What was Arafat going to get out of Acceptance of Israel Legitimacy? As to the Unilateral Withdrawal, it was made with all intentions for this very moment your little Gavri’le is facing. Yep, get the Israelis out so that the entire place can be “cleaned”. Why not face the music?
And now my son is fighting in Gaza. The conflict he and his friends confront is far worse than my generation's experience in Gaza. In our time, we were confronted with mere rocks and Molotov cocktails; my son faces Iranian-supplied anti-tank weapons –
What? Where? This bit of propaganda is interesting. If indeed the Hamas had all this fancy stuff, why were close-range rockets used that cause little more damage than badly aimed fireworks?
one more price we will pay, along with the missile attacks on our towns, for the Gaza withdrawal, just as the Israeli right had warned.
I love this one, we have to here come to believe that Yossi the immigrant is on the “left”. But again, the definition of Left and Right in Israel is relative. It is like choosing which bullet to shoot into your enemy’s child’s chest.
Still, I don't regret that withdrawal. If Israelis are united today about our right to defend ourselves against Gaza's genocidally minded regime,
You “Israelis” are united behind your propaganda. You are simply engaging in all out aggressive war against Palestinians. The Gaza genocide in the making is your responsibility, after 19 months of starvation and deprivation, they resist, and that is after 40 years of your expulsion of them from their lands into the hell of refugee camps.
it is at least partly because we are fighting from our international border.
Woah, halt. There are NO internationally recognised borders of Israel. Take an Israeli map, and take a map made by someone else, (anyone really) and you will find variations. You are STILL occupying Gaza militarily as well as the West Bank, thus, you are responsible for the lives and wellbeing of each and every one of them, whether they are supporters of Hamas or not. THAT, Mr. Klein, is international law.
My son and his friends have one crucial advantage over my generation's experience in Gaza: They know, as we did not, that Israel was ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for peace, uprooting thousands of its citizens from their homes and endorsing a Palestinian state.
How can one uproot an immigrant, really? How many of those from the settlements in Gaza were born there, not counting infants, who don’t really care less where there pablum is heated. Rather, the Palestinians have been uprooted since the first Jews immigrated into Palestine. Before the Arab-Israeli war, did you know that 50% of the natives were already chased off their land by the “founders” of the State of Israel? Those who did it operated in terrorist squads, and this is the history of your nation, and here you are correct, being truly Israeli does mean war against Palestinians. As to those expelled, deported and ethnically cleansed, none of them has ever returned, and since then, more and more had been expelled and millions more, born in exile. But they know their roots, and they do not forget.
My son confronts Gaza knowing that its misery is now imposed by its leaders. He knows that his country was even prepared to share its most cherished national asset, Jerusalem, with its worst enemy, Arafat, for the sake of preventing this war.
First of all, you have to learn your history and geography. The Leaders of Gaza do not control the borders of Gaza. That is why the misery the Gazans are living is fully the doing of Israel. Second, Jerusalem is NOT yours to be “prepared to share”. Al-Quds al Arabi. It has been Arab since time began and it remains Arab. If Arabs have been willing and prepared to Share it with non-Arabs, including immigrants from other lands, they have done this out of a sense of faith and belief in a unity of the Abrahamic faiths. Lastly, Arafat is dead. Has been for a while, so you can stop dragging your favourite terrorist out of the grave.
That empowers him with the moral self-confidence he will need to get through the coming days. The face of my Gaza enemy was a teenager throwing rocks; the face of Gavriel's Gaza enemy is a suicide bomber.
Again, the lack of any kind of analysis on Gavri’le’s part I can accept. He’s a brainwashed 19 year old guy with a war-worshipping father and stoic mum who is just fine with sending her kid to war for their lying, stealing State. But, come on, Yossi, to not understand that if someone is not allowed weapons, if they have nothing left to live for but their cause, if life to them is only going to be military occupation, a religious man like yourself should remember the Massada. Suicide exists in every culture as a value, it is not only a nihilistic sacrifice or a way to “kill some 19 year old settler”, it has meaning that maybe it would be time you started to understand, so that those you care about can stop the action from needing to occur at all.
But we are hardly free of moral anxiety. Even as I pray for Gavriel's physical safety, I pray too for his spiritual well-being: that his tank doesn't accidentally shell civilians, that he isn't caught in some terrible mistake, which can so easily happen in a war zone where terrorists hide behind innocent people.
Pray for your son and pray for yourself. Your son WILL kill civilians, he WILL be a war criminal. He is finally Israeli and now, so can you be too!
For the past eight years, Israel has fought a single war with shifting fronts, moving from suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to Katyusha attacks on Israeli towns near the Lebanon border to Qassam missiles on Israeli towns near the Gaza border. That war has targeted civilians, turning the home front into the actual front. And it has transformed the nature of the conflict from a nationalist struggle over Palestinian statehood to a holy war against Jewish statehood. Except for a left-wing fringe, most Israelis recognize the conflict in Gaza as part of a larger war that has been declared against our being and that we must fight.
What, is Jewish Statehood sacred? Is its landgrab a spiritual necessity? And, time to stop with this left-right stuff. You are all on the same side, your blood is sacred, Arab blood is the price to pay.
But how? Even some right-wingers are saying that we should have declared a unilateral cease-fire after the initial airstrike and then dared Hamas to continue shelling our towns, rather than risk another quagmire. And even some left-wingers are saying that we should now destroy the Hamas regime and then offer to turn Gaza over to international control or, if possible, an inter-Arab force led by Egypt. Every option is potentially disastrous. Most Israelis agree on two points: that we cannot live with a jihadist statelet on our border, and that we cannot become occupiers of Gaza again.
Well, who asked you to move there? When was it normal to invade and occupy an Arab country and then expect to be allowed to expel them, kill them, tell the world that they are the murderers and then expect to be allowed to “live in peace”. Resistance is natural, and not only that, it is guaranteed by international law. Whereas, preventive attacks masquerading as Defence are not. You will find out, and Gavri’le will be dragged to court, if he isn’t brought home to you in a box first, which frankly, I think you would find poetic and heroic.
The despair of Gaza is contagious. One friend, a Likud supporter, said to me, "I don't know what to hope for anymore."
Meanwhile, I try to reassure myself about Gavriel's safety. Growing up in Jerusalem during the suicide bombings in the early 2000s, he has already known danger, intimacy with death. A 13-year-old acquaintance was stoned to death, and was so mutilated that he could be identified only by his DNA. A friend lost the use of an eye in a bus bombing on his way to school. At least now, Gavriel and his friends can defend themselves. Perhaps one reason most of them volunteered for combat units was because now the generation of the suicide bombings can finally fight back.
When you can’t bring out the Holocaust, (Gavriel is a few generations out of time) the American public needs the bus bombings for the dose of Jewish Victimhood so that they can accept completely financing the war crimes and Occupation.
Just before the conflict in Gaza began, I happened to visit Gavriel at his base. His unit's barracks had been turned into what young Israelis call a "zula" — a hangout. There were muddy couches, chairs without backs, a darbuka drum, a TV (Jay Leno was on). It could have been a teenage scene anywhere in the West,
There you go, “he’s one of us”. The Palestinians probably wouldn’t “get” our culture, they aren’t probably even able to assemble as teens. Remember, these boys are “Westerners”, i.e., an extension of us.
except that hanging on the walls were Hamas banners captured by the unit's veteran members in a previous round of fighting in Gaza. In a corner of the room hung a photograph of a fallen soldier. Across the bottom someone had written, "What was the rush, Shachar? Why did you have to leave us so soon?"
Awww, isn’t that touching? Reminds me of scenes from Redaction or Full Metal Jacket, or really, any war film where the “boys” tell jokes, flip through their porno mags and are regular guys, but don’t you dare touch their brother in arms, or you will get HELL TO PAY!
Even now, perhaps especially now, I feel that our family is privileged to belong to the Israeli story. Gavriel, grandson of a Holocaust survivor, is part of an army defending the Jewish people in its land. This is one of those moments when our old ideals are tested anew and found to be still vital. That provides some comfort as Sarah and I wait for the next text message.
Opps, spoke too soon, we got the Holocaust in there. We get privilege, Jewish privilege to be part of Israel, part of a State which is only the cover for an army. Good thing they got their cell phones, what ever would Ben-Gurion have thought?
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the author of "At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land."
Like I said, he is talking about searching for God, and he calls the Military Apparatus that he considers his State Holy. It is sad. His delusion is great, and the angel will not pass over.
Mary Rizzo is an art restorer, translator and writer living in Italy. Editor and co-founder of Palestine Think Tank, co-founder of Tlaxcala translations collective. Her personal blog is Peacepalestine.
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