I have suspected that for years. It has always seemed to me that the massive, multifaceted US support was essential to Israel’s unsustainable aggressions. But the title is a quote from Gideon Levy who actually knows what he’s talking about. He’s spent years pushing for peace.
It’s people like that who make Israel worth saving. And what makes Palestine worth saving. It’s what makes the human race worth saving. The hundreds and thousands who go beyond the hatred and anguish and desperation, especially their own, and try to understand others. The Palestinian and Israeli Bereaved Families For Peace. The Holy Land Trust. The Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center. The Library on Wheels for Nonviolence and Peace. Haaretz, the main Israeli news source, has much sterner criticism of Israeli actions than its US equivalent, the New York Times. The best reporting on the situation that I have seen, bar none, is 972mag.com, a large group of Israeli and Palestinian reporters and writers.
But what triggered me to write this right here and right now was the Independent’s report on Gideon Levy. (What follows actually excerpts only a small part of it.)
[H]e has done something very simple …. Nearly every week for three decades, he has travelled to the Occupied Territories and described what he sees, plainly and without propaganda. “My modest mission,” he says, “is to prevent a situation in which many Israelis will be able to say, ‘We didn’t know.’” …
Once, in Jenin, his car was stuck behind an ambulance at a checkpoint for an hour. He saw there was a sick woman in the back and asked the driver what was going on, and he was told the ambulances were always made to wait this long. Furious, he asked the Israeli soldiers how they would feel if it was their mother in the ambulance – and they looked bemused at first, then angry, pointing their guns at him and telling him to shut up.
“I am amazed again and again at how little Israelis know of what’s going on fifteen minutes away from their homes,” he says. “The brainwashing machinery is so efficient that trying [to undo it is] almost like trying to turn an omelette back to an egg. It makes people so full of ignorance and cruelty.” He gives an example. During Operation Cast Lead, the Israel bombing of blockaded Gaza in 2008-9, “a dog – an Israeli dog – was killed by a Qassam rocket and it on the front page of the most popular newspaper in Israel. On the very same day, there were tens of Palestinians killed, they were on page 16, in two lines.” [I can think of too many non-Israeli examples of exactly this process.] …
The historian Isaac Deutscher once offered an analogy for the creation of the state of Israel. A Jewish man jumps from a burning building, and he lands on a Palestinian, horribly injuring him. Can the jumping man be blamed? Levy’s father really was running for his life: it was Palestine, or a concentration camp. Yet Levy says that the analogy is imperfect – because now the jumping man is still, sixty years later, smashing the head of the man he landed on against the ground, and beating up his children and grandchildren too. “1948 is still here. 1948 is still in the refugee camps. 1948 is still calling for a solution,” he says. “Israel is doing the very same thing now… dehumanising the Palestinians where it can, and ethnic cleansing wherever it’s possible. 1948 is not over. Not by a long way.” …
He appeals to anybody who is sincerely concerned about Israel’s safety and security to join him in telling Israelis the truth in plain language. “A real friend does not pick up the bill for an addict’s drugs: he packs the friend off to rehab instead. …
Levy believes the greatest myth – the one hanging over the Middle East like perfume sprayed onto a corpse – is the idea of the current ‘peace talks’ led by the United States. … Now, he says, he is convinced it was “a scam” from the start, doomed to fail. How does he know? “There is a very simple litmus test for any peace talks. A necessity for peace is for Israel to dismantle settlements in the West Bank. So if you are going to dismantle settlements soon, you’d stop building more now, right? They carried on building them all through Oslo. And today, Netanyahu is refusing to freeze construction, the barest of the bare minimum. It tells you all you need.” …
He believes only one kind of pressure would bring Israel back to sanity and safety: “The day the president of the United States decides to put an end to the occupation, it will cease. Because Israel was never so dependent on the United States as it is now. Never. Not only economically, not only militarily but above all politically. … It isn’t only bad for Israel – it is bad for America. “The occupation is the best excuse for many worldwide terror organisations. It’s not always genuine but they use it. Why do you let them use it? Why give them this fury? Why not you solve it once and for all when the, when the solution is so simple?” [Elsewhere in the article: a two-state solution with fair borders, real rights, and security for Palestinians.] …
But then, as if it has been nagging at him, he returns abruptly to an earlier question. “I am very pessimistic, sure. … The Israeli society will not change on its own, and the Palestinians are too weak to change it. But having said this, I must say, if we had been sitting here in the late 1980s and you had told me that the Berlin wall will fall within months, that the Soviet Union will fall within months, that parts of the regime in South Africa will fall within months, I would have laughed at you.”
And then he says this:
“You have to be realistic enough to believe in miracles.”
And this:
“A whistle in the dark is still a whistle.”
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