The despair of two great Israelis

[CANAAN51USA - Alfred De Grazia]

The despair of two great Israelis

Canaan vs. The Despair of Two Great Israelis

The greatly admired Israel leader, Uri Avnery, here gives us a
terminal explosion against the Israeli regime by Dov Yermiya
(Jeremiad) and pleads with Dov that we must never give up the slender
hope remaining for the sovereign states of Israel and Palestine. A
marvelous espression of desperate views – to which, however, I must
add: "Venerable Gentlemen: Israel and Palestine are presently going
the hopeless route. . the great pretense of the two-state solution.
Yet truly, you need not abandon all hope though the world seems
against us: Canaan, the 51st State of the USA, is the solution.
Dreadful Israel and tortured Palestine will respond to our solution in
all its promising detail, and you will feel young again.

Al de Grazia


Jeremiad
Received from Uri Avnery - August 1st, 2009
Adressed to: Dov Yrmiya

Dear Dov Yermiya,
I have received the distressing letter that you recently sent to a
limited number of friends. You paint the Israeli reality in dark – but
true – colors, and end by cutting your ties with it.

"Therefore I, a 95 year old Sabra (native born Israeli Jew), who has
plowed its fields, planted trees, built a house and fathered sons,
grandsons and great-grandsons, and also shed his blood in the battle
for the founding of the State of Israel,
"Declare herewith that I renounce my belief in the Zionism which has
failed, that I shall not be loyal to the Jewish fascist state and its
mad visions, that I shall not sing anymore its nationalist anthem,
that I shall stand at attention only on the days of mourning for those
fallen on both sides in the wars, and that I look with a broken heart
at an Israel that is committing suicide and at the three generations
of offspring that I have bred and raised in it."

SINCE I first met you, Dov, some fifty years ago, I have always
considered you the salt of the earth. You were born in a village, the
son of a farmer, were a fighter in the 1948 war and later a Colonel in
the army, a modest man, a moral person in every fiber.

In the first Lebanon War, you exposed the atrocities committed against
the Palestinian refugees in the Tyre-Sidon area, and your courageous
report shocked me no less than those of the Sabra and Shatila
massacre. You did not hesitate to break the silence, as the "Breaking
the Silence" youngsters are doing now, knowing full well that your
peers in the officers' corps would excommunicate you.

You are a man of my heart, Dov. That is why your words distress me so
much.

I think it important to share the statement of a man of your caliber
with those in our camp who spend sleepless nights worrying about the
situation of our state.

You start your letter by mentioning the founders of the Zionist
movement.

"If Herzl could come to life again and see what those who claim to
carry the flag of Zionism are doing, he would flee at once, miserable
and shocked, back to his grave. So would Chaim Weizmann and most of
the pioneers, the fathers and mothers of my generation. They were
people of conscience and morality, who held to the axiom that human
beings are decent and honest."

Most of your fierce accusations concern Israel's treatment of the
Palestinians. "And thus, for 42 years, Israel turned what should have
been Palestine into a giant detention camp, and is holding a whole
people captive under an oppressive and cruel regime, with the sole aim
of taking away their country, come what may!!!

"The IDF eagerly suppresses their efforts at rebellion, with the
active assistance of the settlement thugs, by the brutal means of a
sophisticated Apartheid and a choking blockade, inhuman harassment of
the sick and of women in labor, the destruction of their economy and
the theft of their best land and water.
Over all this there is waving the black flag of the frightening
contempt for the life and blood of the Palestinians. Israel will never
be forgiven for the terrible toll of blood spilt, and especially the
blood of children, in hair-raising quantities."

But I believe that the abysmal despair echoed in your words has other
roots, too. It is a feeling that troubles the heart of many of your
and my generation, the feeling that "they have stolen our state", that
there is no resemblance between the state which we dreamed of and
fought for and the thing that has taken its place.

When I think of our youth, yours and mine, one scene is never far from
my mind: the 1947 Dalia festival.

Tens of thousands of young men and women were sitting on the slope of
a hill in the natural amphitheater near Kibbutz Dalia on Mount Carmel.
Ostensibly it was a festival of folk dancing, but in reality it was
much more – a great celebration of the new Hebrew culture which we
were then creating in the country, in which folk dancing played an
important role. The dancing groups came mainly from the kibbutzim and
the youth movements, and the dances were original Hebrew creations,
interwoven with Russian, Polish, Yemenite and Hassidic ones. A group
of Arabs danced the Debka in ecstasy, dancing and dancing and dancing
on.

In the middle of the event, the loudspeakers announced that members of
the UN Commission of Inquiry, which had been sent by the international
organization to decide upon the future of the country, were joining
us. When we saw them entering the amphitheater, the tens of thousands
spontaneously rose to their feet and started to sing the "Hatikva",
the national anthem, with a holy fervor that reverberated from the
surrounding mountains.

We did not know then that within half a year the great Hebrew-Arab war
would break out - our War of Independence and their Naqba. I believe
that most of the 6000 young people who fell in the war on our side, as
well as the thousands that were wounded – like you and me – were
present at that moment in Dalia, seeing each other and singing
together.
What state did we think of then? What state did we set out to create?

What has happened to the Hebrew society, the Hebrew culture, the
Hebrew morality that we were so proud of then?

Yes, we did create a state. As the old song goes: "On the battlefield,
a town is now standing". We have brought millions of people to this
country. From a Hebrew community of 650 thousand we have grown into a
population of 7.5 million. A fourth and fifth generation speaks Hebrew
as their mother tongue. Our economy is large and solid, even in these
times of crisis. In several fields we are in the first rank of human
endeavor.

But is this the society, is this the state, which we saw in our mind's
eye on the day it was set up? Is this the army that you and I swore
allegiance to on the day it was founded?

Did we dream of this corrupt society, a society without compassion,
where a handful of the very rich live off the fat of the land, with a
large band of politicians and media people and other lackeys groveling
in the dust at their feet?
Did we dream of a state that is an isolated and shunned ghetto in the
region, lording it over an oppressed Palestinian ghetto-within-a-
ghetto?

There were days when we could stand up anywhere in the world and
proudly declare "I am an Israeli". No one can do that now. The name of
Israel has become mud. Since the Gaza War, in which our army poured
molten lead onto men, women and children, many Israelis avoid speaking
Hebrew in the streets of foreign cities and the IDF has ordered the
faces of some of its officers – those whose rank equals yours – be
obscured in pictures published in the media.
Why did this happen? When did this happen?

My aim is not to start a discussion with you about the fundamentals of
Zionism, both positive and negative. We might not agree. Nor shall I
enter into the question of whether everything really started in 1967,
with the intoxicating and corruptive victory, or whether the seeds of
disaster were sown earlier. On one thing I agree with you entirely:
that the fatal step was taken then, on the morrow of that war, when we
had the choice between the shining gold of peace and the base metal of
annexation, and stretched our hands out towards the latter.

My personal conscience is clean. I am proud that I was one of the few
in the country, and the sole voice in the Knesset, who proposed even
during the war to turn over the occupied territories to the
Palestinian people, so as to enable them to set up their state. This
unique opportunity was missed, as you point out in your letter,
because of the greed of the founders of the settlement movement, the
champions of a Greater Israel.

From there things rolled on, as in a Greek tragedy, to where we are
now, with an assorted crew of settlers, racists, nationalists,
messianic zealots and ordinary fascists in charge of the state,
turning the Knesset into a circus, undermining the Supreme Court,
perverting the army, imposing obscurantist religious laws, handing the
public treasury to unbridled tycoons, polluting the education system
with a primitive nationalist indoctrination, persecuting poor asylum
seekers, oppressing the national minority and planning military
attacks that will wreak death and destruction on civilian populations.
This is the state that you detest. I have no quarrel with you about
that.

This is the state that you despair of. About that I do have a dispute
with you.

You bear the name of the prophet who is nearest to my heart,
Yirmiyahu, the prophet of anger who called out: "Woe is me, my mother,
that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the
whole world … every one doth curse me!" (Jer. 15:10)

But Jeremiah was not only an accuser, he was also a healer: "to root
out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down – to build
and to plant." (Jer. 1:10)

You, Dov, have invested in this state much too much to turn your back
on it in a gesture of anger and despair. The most hackneyed and worn-
out slogan in Israel is also true: "We don't have another
state!"

Other states in the world have sunk to the depths of depravity and
committed unspeakable crimes, far beyond our worst sins, and still
brought themselves back to the family of nations and redeemed their
souls.

We and all the members of our generation, who were among those who
created this state, bear a heavy responsibility for it. A
responsibility to our offspring, to those oppressed by this state, to
the entire world. From this responsibility we cannot escape.

Even at your respectable age, and precisely because of it and because
of what you represent, you must be a compass for the young and tell
them: This state belongs to you, you can change it, don't allow the
nationalist wreckers to steal it from you!

True, 61 years ago we had another state in mind. Now, after our state
has tumbled to where it is today, we must remember that other state,
and remind everybody, every day, what the state should have been like,
what it can be like, and not allow our vision to disappear like a
dream. Let's lend our shoulders to every effort to repair and heal!

You have voiced the message of Jeremiah, the prophet of anger. I beg
you, give voice also to Jeremiah, the prophet of hope.
Dear Uri and Dov:

O young and powerful of spirit! Reassemble your troops; lead them on.
Conquer – with your Palestinian neighbors – the new State of Canaan,
Canaan State 51, USA! And through Canaan, you will achieve your Israel
fifty-fold. While the Jews of the world were scattered and planless,
the communities of early America were settling all about our America
in the name of the new Israels. Create and bring to fruition 51
lovable Israels!

Al de Grazia - August 4, 2009



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ALFRED DE GRAZIA