How to live in peace with brutal reality

Gideon Levy’s three principles

After putting up a speech by a representative of the Palestinian State, and a speech by a representative of the Israeli State, I today want to put up a speech by a Jewish Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy, who takes a view that challenges the view of the Israeli State. My final quest will, some day, be to find a speech by a Palestinian commentator that challenges the stance of the Palestinian State. It is perhaps indicative of the chances of that when one observes that, following the Oslo Accords, Yasser Arafat was heavily criticised in Palestine for the concessions he had given, but was nonetheless hailed as a hero for trying. Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.

Levy is able to make some very hard-hitting points here, and (if you watch the vid) still raises mirth from his audience. It’s a very Jewish trait, to find dark humour in tragic circumstances. I do wonder how many laughs he’d be getting today. The link to the speech as given is at the bottom, courtesy of the Times of India. The transcript has been reworked by me into more colloquial English. Any misrepresentation is my fault.

It was only in the late ’80s that I started to travel to the Occupied Territories, quite accidentally, when I realised the biggest drama was taking place half an hour away from our homes, in the dark back yard of Israel. Almost no one was interested: all those crimes were taking place and we Israelis, most of us, if not all of us, do not want to know, do not know and, above all, do not care.

Israel’s surrounded itself with shields, with walls: not only physical walls but also mental walls. I’ll just give the three principles which enable us Israelis to live so easily with this brutal reality.

a) Most Israelis, if not all of them, deeply believe that we are the chosen people and, if we are the chosen people, we have the right to do whatever we want.

b) There were more brutal occupations in history, there were even longer occupations history, even though the length of the Israeli occupation is getting up to quite a record; but there was never in history an occupation where the occupier presented himself as the victim—not only the victim, but the only victim around. This also enables any Israeli to live in peace, because we are the victims. The other day, Professor Falk spoke about this dual strategy of Israel: of being a victim, on the one hand, and manipulating the other, on the other hand.

After what happened in Paris and in Copenhagen with the terror attacks, Benjamin Netanyahu came with the notion that all the Jews must come to Israel: it’s the safest place in the world for the Jews, it’s a shelter for the Jews in the world (which is wrong, because Israel today is the most dangerous place on earth for Jews, but let’s leave that to one side). It was only 24 hours later when he said Israel is under an existential threat from the Iranian bomb, and I asked myself, “How dare you call on Jews to come and join this suicidal project when the Iranians are going to bomb us?”But, in Israel, anything goes and both declarations were accepted as the only truth.

c) Here, I get to the third set of values which enable us Israelis to live in peace with the occupation, and this is maybe the most crucial one and the worst one: we say victimisation, we say chosen people (when I say victimisation, it goes without saying, we have to mention the Holocaust and the unforgettable Mrs Golda Meir, which the American Jewry had exported to Israel: this unforgettable woman said once that, after the Holocaust, the Jews have the right to do whatever they want).

But the third set of values is the most dangerous one, and this is the systematic dehumanisation of the Palestinians, which enables us Israelis to live in peace with everything, because, if they are not human beings like us, then, there’s not really a question of human rights; and if you scratch under the skin of almost every Israeli, you will find it there: almost no one will treat the Palestinians as equal human beings like us. I once wrote that we treat the Palestinians like animals, and I got so many protest letters from animal rights organisations, rightly so. But, at the end of the day, how many Israelis ever tried for a moment to put themselves in the place of the Palestinians, for a moment, for one day?  I want to give you two examples which will demonstrate this.

Many years ago, I interviewed the then candidate for prime minister Ehud Barak and I asked him a question which I tried to ask to whomever, whenever: “Mr Barak, how would it be if you had been born Palestinian?” and Barak gave me the only honest answer he could give me. He said that he would have joined the terror organisation.

What else could he have done? Would he have become a poet? He doesn’t know how to write poetry. Would he have become a pianist? He’s a pretty bad pianist; and I doubt he would have become a collaborator, because he is a fighter. It became a scandal, because how could you dare to put it to Ehud Barak to imagine what if he had he been a Palestinian?!

And, the second incident, briefly. The Second Intifada, the city of Jenin, the most closed city in the West Bank, real, total siege. I go out from Jenin, I come to the checkpoint. A Palestinian ambulance is parked there, with its red lights. I pull up behind him: no cars could get out of Jenin in those days, no cars could get in. I wait. The soldiers are playing belamon in the tent. Usually, I know it’s better not to get into a confrontation with the soldiers, because it always ends very badly. So I stayed in the car, but after 40 minutes I couldn’t take it any longer, and I got out of the car.

I first went to the Palestinian ambulance driver and asked him what’s going on. He told me: “That’s the routine. They keep me waiting for one hour until they come and check the ambulance,” and I couldn’t take it any more. I went to the soldiers: it became a confrontation, but one question in particular that I asked brought them to direct their weapons toward me: “What if it were your father lying in this ambulance?” This freaked them out: they lost control. How could I dare to compare their father with the Palestinian in the ambulance?!

This set of beliefs, that they are not human beings like us, enable us Israelis to live in so much peace with those crimes, ongoing crimes for so many years, having lost all humanity, values. I hear people today talk about Jewish values. I must be frank with you, I don’t know what Jewish values are; I know what universal values are. There are very clear, universal values, and there is very, very clear international law. For most Israelis, international law is very important, but not for Israel. Israel is a special case. Why is it a special case?

And, again, you get with all this set of values, with this living in denial (and here I want to get back to the topic of our panel: Is it good for Israel? No, it’s very corrupting, because, as long as the United States enables Israel to continue, obviously, the Palestinians are the first and direct, unbelievable victim of it. But, in the end of the day, what will Israel be after all those years? What is it already today? Where is it headed? And things are getting worse and worse, and therefore I have so little hope about change from within Israeli society, because things, as you might know, are tending more and more in the nationalistic, militaristic, religious direction, with very little hope that change will come from within. Why would Israelis go for change? What incentive is there? Why would they bother? Life is so good.

You should have seen Israel in the days when Gaza was bombed, when the beaches were crowded, the helicopters were passing on their way to bomb Gaza. Israeli TV hardly showed any images from there. Newspapers hardly wrote anything. I wrote one article about the responsibility of the pilots, and I needed bodyguards to get out of my home after this. The problem was that the bodyguards were settlers, and they argued with me all day long, until I saw that I was much more secure without the bodyguards than with them.

The last war in Gaza taught us also that Israel, which may be the only country in the world with three regimes (one for the Jews, one for the Arab citizens, and one, an apartheid regime in the West Bank and Gaza, one of the most brutal and cruel tyrannies in the world), even for the façade, even for this democracy, which I always thought is democracy for its Jewish citizens, I realised last summer, is a democracy for its Jewish citizens: but only if they think like the majority.

In conclusion, I want to tell you all that a few of us, very few, many too few, but a few of us are looking to the West: Europe and, then, the United States, with a great hope. Because we lost hope in Israel.

Gideon Levy, Israeli journalist, speaking at the 2015 National Press Club conference on The Israel Lobby. Is it good for the US? Is it good for Israel? (israellobby.org)