All Hail the Peace Makers 18
I HAVE just seen the new movie “Mandela”, and I am so full of impressions that I cannot abstain from writing them down.
It is a very good film, with very good actors. But that’s not the main point. It is a very accurate film, depicting what actually happened in South Africa, and one cannot help thinking about it again and again.
What do I think?
IF ONE had asked any South African, black or white, some 35 years ago how the conflict would end, the answer would most probably have been: “It will not end. There is no solution.” That is exactly the answer one receives today In Israel and Palestine.
A FORMER Israeli army Chief of Staff, a man of limited intelligence, was told that a certain individual was an atheist. “Yes,” he asked, “but a Jewish atheist or a Christian atheist?”
Lenin, in his Swiss exile, once inquired about the party affiliation of a newly elected member of the Duma. “Oh, he is just a fool!” his assistant asserted. Lenin answered impatiently: “A fool in favor of whom?”
PERHAPS I am too stupid, but for the heck of me I cannot understand the sense of the Israeli demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
On the face of it, it seems like a clever trick by Binyamin Netanyahu to divert attention from the real issues. If so, the Palestinian leadership has fallen into a trap.
Instead of talking about the independence of the putative State of Palestine and its borders, its capital in Jerusalem, the removal of the settlements, the fate of the refugees and the solution of the many other problems, they quarrel endlessly about the definition of Israel.
Ilan Pappe talking in Cambridge
DURING THE last hundred years, Russia has undergone huge changes.
At the beginning, it was ruled by the Czar, in an absolute monarchy with some democratic decorations, a “tyranny mitigated by inefficiency”.
After the downfall of the Czar, a liberal and equally inefficient regime ruled for a few months, when it was overthrown by the Bolshevik revolution.
The “dictatorship of the proletariat” lasted for some 73 years, which means that three generations passed through the Soviet education system. That should have been enough to absorb the values of internationalism, socialism and human dignity, as taught by Karl Marx.
IN THE middle of the 70s, Ariel Sharon asked me to arrange something for him - a meeting with Yasser Arafat.
A few days before, the Israeli media had discovered that I was in regular contact with the leadership of the PLO, which was listed at the time as a terrorist organization.
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1389976804
PETE SEEGER touched my life only once. But what a touch.
It was a few days before the 1967 Six-Day War. After almost three weeks of mounting tension, the war fever was nearing breaking point. I knew that the war was only days, perhaps hours, away.
Dina Dinur, the wife of the Holocaust-writer K. Zetnik, called to invite me to meet Pete Seeger. Dina, a huge woman, had for years gathered a small group of Jewish and Arab intellectuals who met regularly in her home to discuss peace.
WHAT’S WRONG about the demand that the Palestinian leadership recognize Israel as the “Nation State of the Jewish People”?
Well, practically everything.
States recognize each other. They don't have to recognize each other's ideological character.
A state is a reality. Ideologies belong to the abstract realm.
When the United States recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, it recognized the state. It did not recognize its communist nature.
THIS IS a declaration of love. Three loves, actually.
I love Achinoam Nini. I love her from afar. I have never met her.
I love her for what she did a few weeks ago.
The Israeli organization of composers and writers had awarded her a prize for Life Achievement. Though only 44 years old, she certainly deserved it. She is a wonderful singer.
IT HAS always been a secret ambition of mine to have a bagatz ruling bearing my name.
Bagatz is the Hebrew acronym for “High Court of Justice”, the Israeli equivalent of a constitutional court. It plays a very important role in Israeli public life.
Having a ground-breaking Supreme Court decision named after you confers a kind of immortality. Long after you are gone, lawyers quote your case and refer to the judgment.
IT IS the summer of 1941. Five youngsters – three young men and two young women – meet in a bar and spend a happy evening, flirting with each other, getting drunk, dancing forbidden foreign dances. They have grown up together in the same neighborhood of Berlin.
It is a happy time. The war started by Adolf Hitler a year and a half before has progressed incredibly well. In this short time Germany has conquered Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. The Wehrmacht is invincible. The Führer is a genius, “the greatest military strategist of all times”.
BINYAMIN NETANYAHU is very good at making speeches, especially to Jews, neocons and such, who jump up and applaud wildly at everything he says, including that tomorrow the sun will rise in the west.
The question is: is he good at anything else?
HIS FATHER, an ultra-ultra-Rightist, once said about him that he is quite unfit to be prime minister, but that he could be a good foreign minister. What he meant was that Binyamin does not have the depth of understanding needed to guide the nation, but that he is good at selling any policy decided upon by a real leader.
SOMETHING VERY important happened this week in the most unlikely of places: the Knesset.
On the agenda were three laws, one worse than the other.
One was about “governance”. Its main provision raises the “electoral threshold” – i.e. the minimum an election list needs to enter the Knesset – from 2% to 3.25%. The obvious intention is to expel the three lists which derive their votes from the Arab sector, and which hover around this level.
THERE IS an old Chinese curse that says: “May you live in historic times!” (If there isn’t, there should be.)
This week was a historic time. The Crimea seceded from Ukraine. Russia annexed it.
A dangerous situation. No one knows how it will develop.
AFTER MY last article about the Ukrainian crisis, I was flooded with passionate e-mail messages.
Some were outraged by one or two sentences that could be construed as justifying Russian actions. How could I excuse the former KGB apparatchik, the new Hitler, the leader who was building a new Soviet empire by destroying and subjugating neighboring countries?
sorry for posting that...
NEW ZEALAND HAS decided to change its flag. This was only briefly mentioned in the media here. But it is a significant example for us.
The old flag is based on the British one, the Union Jack, which signifies the union of England, Scotland and Ireland. The three different crosses are integrated in an intricate design.
But what does this flag mean for today’s New Zealanders? Very little. Sure, they are close to the United Kingdom and to the Anglo-Saxon civilization, but they are a new nation, a separate nation, with a separate history, geopolitical orientation and national character.
THERE IS nothing better than a scandal every week. A juicy scandal excites people, engages the media, takes our minds off matters like war and peace, occupation and apartheid. Like panem et circenses (bread and entertainment) in ancient Rome.
POOR JOHN Kerry. This week he emitted a sound that was more expressive than pages of diplomatic babble.
In his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations committee he explained how the actions of the Israeli government had torpedoed the “peace process”. They broke their obligation to release Palestinian prisoners, and at the same time announced the enlargement of more settlements in East Jerusalem. The peace efforts went “poof”.
THE DEATH of Ron Pundak, one of the original Israeli architects of the 1993 Oslo agreement, brought that historic event back into the public eye.
Gideon Levy reminded us that the Rightist rabble-rousers, in their furious onslaught on the agreement, called the initiators “Oslo criminals” – a conscious echo of one of Adolf Hitler’s main slogans on his way to power. Nazi propaganda applied the term “November criminals” to the German statesmen who signed the 1918 armistice agreement that put an end to World War I – by the way, at the request of the army General Staff who had lost the war.
In his book, Mein Kampf (which is about to lose its copyright, so that anyone can print it again) Hitler also revealed another insight: that a lie will be believed if it is big enough, and if it is repeated often enough.
IMAGINE A war breaking out between Israel and Jordan. Within two or three days the Israeli army occupies the entire territory of the Hashemite Kingdom. What will be the first act of the occupation authority?
Establish a settlement in Petra? Expropriate land near Aqaba?