A
Bullet Fired For Every
Palestinian Child
By Yitzhak Laor
21 October, 2004
Counterpunch
Editors' Note:
This trenchant essay by Israeli novelist Yitzhak Laor was originally
submitted to the London Review of Books, which in the past has frequently
published Laor's writing. But they refused to run this skewering of
the Israeli Left with the LRB's editor chiding Laor that "in my
editorial judgment (to be pompous) this piece won't help anyone."
One of the times
I was detained (it was after a demonstration), I shared a cell with
a young burglar, all blood and broken teeth, beaten twice. The first
time was when he tried to escape, as detectives came to arrest him,
since attempted escapes had become a sort of free license for police
violence. The second time was a bit later when he was taken to hospital
to stop his bleeding. Handcuffed he entered the ER, chained to a cop,
and the doctor asked them both: "Did you two squabble?" The
burglar did what he had to do: he spat his blood right into the face
of the enlightened MD, and of course was beaten again, right there,
still handcuffed, under the indifferent eyes of the medical staff. I
liked my cellmate, I cannot forget his story, nor his pride. From that
day on, June the 8th 1982, the question "did you two squabble?"
became for me the image of the real description for the bystander.
A month after the
Intifada began, four years ago, Major General Amos Malka, by then No.
3 in the military hierarchy, and until 2001 the head of Israeli military
Intelligence (MI), asked one of his officers (Major Kuperwasser) how
many 5.56 bullets the Central Command had fired during that month (that
is, only in the West Bank). Three years later Malka talked about these
horrific figures. This is what he said to Ha'aretz's diplomatic commentator,
Akiva Eldar about the first month of the Intifada, 30 days of unrest,
no terrorist attacks yet, no Palestinian shooting:
Kuperwasser got
back to me with the number, 850,000 bullets. My figure was 1.3 million
bullets in the West Bank and Gaza. This is a strategic figure that says
that our soldiers are shooting and shooting and shooting. I asked: "Is
this what you intended in your preparations?" and he replied in
the negative. I said: "Then the significance is that we are determining
the height of the flames." (HaAretz, 11.6.2004).
It was a bullet
for every Palestinian child, said one of the officers in that meeting,
or at least this is what the Israeli daily Maariv revealed two years
ago, when the horrible figures were first leaked. It didn't much change
"public opinion", neither here nor in the West, neither two
years ago nor 4 months ago when Malka finally opened his mouth. It read
as if it had happened somewhere else, or a long time ago, or as if it
was just one version, a voice in a polyphony, hiding behind the principle
theme: we, the Israelis are right, and they are wrong.
Israeli political
society--including the Zionist Left, Labour, Meretz and Peace Now, all
currently disappearing because of this war--had been so deeply involved
in construction of anti-Palestinian consent during the first months
of the Intifada, that none of them -- neither their politicians, nor
their intellectuals -- were able to acknowledge such a story and say:
"Oops, we're sorry, we were misled."
And it is not only
about Major General Malka's bullet figures, of course. It is also about
the total dismissal of the Palestinian accusations during those months
of autumn 2000: nobody--not even the pro-Palestinians in the West--believed
them, when they tried to tell their story, that included the reality
of the 1.3 million 5.56 bullets fired at them, when they tried to tell
their version of how Israel made every possible effort to turn the unrest
of Fall 2000 into a bloodbath, to push the various factions to use arms,
to turn this into the final stage of unwriting Oslo. That was the goal
of Ehud Barak and his men, General Shaul Mofaz (then Chief of Staff,
now minister of defence) and General Moshe Ya'alon, the real mastermind
behind the plan -- to "burn onto the Palestinian mind" (his
own words) that they cannot beat us.
What appeared in
the liberal press in the West--and I don't even mean the New York Times--together
with sporadic reports from the scenes and reaction from the Israeli
official spokesmen was a "comfortable, balanced lesson": both
sides should not be violent, or should not use violence. "You two
squabbling" over there. By and large this construction of public
opinion everywhere was based on nothing like facts. It was based on
a long tradition of Western hostility towards the Arabs, but it was
cemented with the help of the Zionist Left writers and intellectuals.
A few weeks before
Camp David, summer 2000, during preparation for Camp David summit, Major
General Malka reviewed Arafat's positions for the Israeli cabinet members.
I said there was
no chance that he would compromise on 90 percent of the territories
or even on 93 percent. He is not a real-estate trader, and he is not
going to stop midway. Barak said to me: "You are telling me that
if I offer him 90 percent, he isn't going to take it? I don't accept
your assessment."
I said to him that indeed, there is no chance that he would accept it.
[] I told them [the cabinet members, all Labour and Meretz] that the
difference between me and them is that they are speaking from hope and
I am trying to neutralize my hope and give a professional assessment.
But Barak saw himself as able to make his assessments without assessments
from MI, because he is his own intelligence, and he thought he was smarter.
Afterward, it was convenient for him to explain his failure by a distorted
description of the reality. (Ha'aretz, 11.6.2004).
That distortion
of reality wouldn't be a realizable project, were it not corroborated
by the old Western colonial discourse of mistrust of the Arabs. But
it also needed, in a very interesting way, the Israeli Peace Camp's
intellectuals. None was more suited for this task than the Israeli writers
who built their careers in the West on being Peace loving people, without
ever specifying what peace means. However, the gap between the facts
and the effort to distort them was so wide that it didn't take too many
years to come to light. Akiva Eldar, who brought the could-be-sensational
interview with Malka, writes:
Malka insists that
even after the peace talks gave way to hostilities, MI did not revise
its assessments. Neither did the research units at the Shin Bet, the
Mossad, the Foreign Ministry and the office of the coordinator of activities
in the territories adopt the thesis that the Camp David summit had revealed
"the Oslo plot" [by Arafat]. (Ha'aretz, 11.6.2004)
So, it was the Zionist
Left's mission four years ago to either impose an impossible peace plan
on the Palestinians, or to depict them as responsible for the war that
would break out. This is how David Grossman did his job for Ehud Barak:
True, there is no
symmetry between the concessions the two sides can make. Israel holds
almost all the cards, while the Palestinians have more restricted options
Nevertheless, there is no escaping the sense that Arafat was the less
bold, less creative, and more stubborn of the two leaders. (Death as
a Way of Life).
It is not dialectical,
nor is it crooked thinking. It was the foreign Office theme, to frame
Arafat. That decision preceded even the war. It ran throughout the Oslo
years, when colonization deepened, the number of settlers tripled, lands
were expropriated, roads for Jews were paved in the Occupied Territories.
But when Camp David failed, regardless of anything else, they all, the
writers, the ambassadors, the senior columnists, got the same tip: put
the blame on Arafat. Read how Amos Oz described for the The Guardian's
readers the failure of Camp David in July 2000 and note how similar
is the way Arafat "inability" is being portrayed also here:
Ehud Barak went
a very long way towards the Palestinians, even before the beginning
of the Camp David summit; longer than any of his predecessors ever dreamt
to go; longer than any other Israeli prime minister is likely to go.
On the way to Camp David, Barak's proclaimed stance was so dovish that
it made him lose his parliamentary majority, his coalition government,
even some of his constituency. Nevertheless, while shedding wings and
body and tail on the way, he carried on like a flying cockpit, he carried
on. Seemingly Yasser Arafat did not go such a long and lonely way towards
the Israelis. Perhaps he could not, or lacked the fierce devotion to
making peace. (Even if Camp David Fails, this Conflict is on its Last
Legs', Guardian, 25 July 2000, my emphasis).
When he wrote for
the NYT he was even more vicious: "I am sitting in front of the
television in the living room, seeing Yasser Arafat receive a triumphant
hero's welcome in Gaza, and all this for having said no to peace with
Israel. The whole Gaza Strip is covered in flags and slogans proclaiming
the 'Palestinian Saladin' . . . My heart breaks." (NYT, 28.7.2000).
And he went on,
the same month, same newspaper:
Yet the Palestinians
said no. They insist on their 'right of return', when we all very well
know that around here 'right of return' is an Arab euphemism for the
liquidation of Israel. Mr Arafat doesn't insist on merely the right
to a Palestinian state, a right I fully support. Now he demands that
the Palestinian exiles should return not only to Palestine, but also
to Israel, thus upsetting the demographic balance and eventually turning
Israel into the 26th Arab country.
But four years later,
HaAretz revealed what every Palestinian negotiator had claimed for four
years.
In a lecture at
Princeton University in March, 2002, [Prof.] Mati Steinberg, [until
the middle of 2003 a special advisor to the head of the
Shin Bet] argued that the Camp David summit failed because of the dispute
over the Temple Mount--not over the issue of the right of return,
which was barely discussed at that summit and was born retrospectively
in Israel in order to create the internal consensus. (Ha'aretz, 11.6.2004).
Needless to say, Amos Oz never retracted, never apologized. On the contrary,
he sharpened his attacks on the Palestinians, very flattered by the
position he obtained with Ehud Barak, for a while at least, as a "soul
mate" for late night phone calls from the leader of the Labour
in his last days in power.
Those who read Oz's
prose can easily find in it that kind of "Brotherhood of the agonizing
strong males". Perry Anderson rightly described it as the Israeli
"Labour's traditional culture--the mixture of machismo and schmaltz
of which a figure like Amos Oz offers a typical embodiment."
I could go on forever
with quotes. But silence is unquotable. The way these protagonists,
representatives of the Peace Movement, as they are depicted in the Western
press, kept their mouths shut during the great massacres in Raffah or
Gaza, and before, during the massacres in Jenin, or other towns and
villages of Palestine, that silence is unquotable. Unless the Western
newspapers were to ask them: 'Are you for or against the IDF? Would
you speak out for or against this operation, or that one?' there would
be no answer. But they didn't ask, because they didn't want to know,
those Western newspapers, because the function of these writers was
never informative, nor intellectual.
Is it about bad
writing? Is it about bad journalism? Is it about paternalistic editors
who tollerate awful columns from such a provincial place where they
all squabble each other? No. It is far more serious. "Allow me
to tell a brief story, a private one." This is how David Grossman
opened one of his European columns, in 1998.
A very dear member
of my family, a survivor of the Treblinka death camp, arrived at my
wedding with a bandage on her forgotten forearm. She was covering her
tattooed number so as not to mar the celebration with a memento of the
Holocaust.
I understood then,
very sharply, how much all of us here in Israel are always walking on
a surface as thin as that bandage.
Only in Israeli
writing in the West--Exodus of course preceded "us"--does
one reflect in one's own wedding party on the fate of the Jewish people.
However this is not a story about a family, but about "politics
in Israel", told not by a survivor, or son to survivors, "second
generation". No. Every Israeli is a second generation within the
Western imagery of Israel, no matter what happens to the Palestinians.
Israel wouldn't succeed later in the Intifada (after Jenin) to brush
aside criticism in the Western press with the silly concept of "New
anti-Semitism", had it not had those cheap and vulgar "personal
stories" about "our life thin as a bandage". And it works
especially among Diaspora Jews, especially in NYC, who are, usually,
blackmailed three times with such kitsch: "How dare you being alive?",
"How dare you being against us?" "How dare you being
so better off than we are?" Needless to say that no Israeli newspaper
would have published such rubbish, about that aunt with the bandage
even if Grossman would submit it. Needless to say that no reviewer abroad
would pick on such an embarrassing and infantile "lesson of Holocaust".
Why is it important
to analyze this kind of journalism? Because it has long become part
of the image of "Modern Jew" in the West. We--no matter what
we do--represent something else. Would it be the same for a Palestinian
to have a seat in the same Pantheon? Of course not. He has to be at
least Edawrd Said in order to do so, an expert of "our" culture,
that is English literature, and/or Wagner. Otherwise he is not one of
us. But the "Modern Jews", that is Israelis, have a different
role and place in the matrix. They represent an "alternative history",
where the Jews were never expelled or destroyed, just traveled for a
while. No matter what they do, as long as they "look like one of
us, talk like one of us, think like of us" they please us.
No serious writing about the Middle East conflict within the Western
press can evade both the theme of "You two squabble over there"
and the role of the Israeli embodied in a certain "liberal"
Israeli writers writing about politics, totally uncommitted to politics.
In short, the "balanced
position" of newspapers such as The Guardian, Le Monde, La Republica
etc. was not achieved through the Zionist Left writers' argumentation,
but through their presence, like images, like voices, like sound bites.
Their thought had no importance, only the personal aspect. Even Amos
Oz the less personal of all, had to use his "personal credit card"
when depicting the Israeli as a victim of the Palestinians:
Already in 1967
I was one of the very few Israelis invoking the solution of two neighbouring
states, with Jerusalem as the capital city of both, reciprocal recognition
and mutual acceptance. Since then, for many years, my own people treated
me like a traitor. My children at school suffered all manner of insults,
accused of being the children of one ready to sell off his homeland.
[...] I pause to reflect. I remember how in the old days a single phone
booth would have sufficed to contain the entire national assembly of
Israeli peace activists. We could literally count ourselves on the tip
of our fingers, a tiny minority among minorities. Today everything is
different. More than half the nation is with us. [...] Yet the Palestinians
said no.
This is of course
a mixture of truth and fiction. Oz's children grew up in a Kibbutz and
if they suffered it was never because of his political positions back
in 1967. But that doesn't matter, he is a representative of a nation,
and as such he has a role within the European need for an Other that
is part of the I, not real other at all. One could easily begin here
an analysis of the way Israeli literature is being read and accepted
in the West . But we better forget the literature. The point is that
the reader of such critical newspaper, critical of Israel policy, sometimes
even critical of Zionism, that reader is surely appalled by what s/he
reads about Israeli racist citizenship laws, or about Israeli draconic
apartheid in the Occupied Territories, or about the death toll of Arab
babies in Israel compared with Jewish babies, but s/he is not anti-Israeli
like the Right Wing press. On the contrary. The liberal reader wants
to know that there are Israelis "like us". Ah, but there are
no Israelis like you, good liberals, because to be good liberal like
you, over here, one has to become a radical, or what you vehemently
condemn, an extremist. One cannot be a European liberal and support
Israeli Apartheid. One cannot be a European liberal and support a state
that prevents marriage between religions, etc. etc. In short Zionism
does not conform with values of liberalism. It is always closer, even
it is "Left", to Le Pen or Heider. It is a matter of minor
disputes. Even if you take the simple fact, that none of the writers
I quoted here, and their colleagues, has ever supported the refuseniks,
warmly supported by every simple minded European, we can understand
that intellectual lack within that discourse of Israeli writers on the
Left. Amos Oz can receive the most prestigious prizes in Barcelona or
Berlin, he can't really talk about peace, for the discourse of peace
in Israel traverses the old clichés that used to work before
Oslo, before the current Intifada, before Ehud Barak and his junta,
supported by the same Amos Oz, turned it to another part of history:
Apartheid in a world ruled by one super-power. Talks of peace with no
politics, no support of resistance, solidarity with the victims are
empty and hollow, fit for ceremonies, not a debate.
I am not saying that the readers of the liberal newspapers don't care
about such matters. On the contrary, they do care. They need an Israeli
to be against "all those things", they need a columnist to
do what a column sometimes does, "write what I think, exactly what
I think". Now we come back to peace and war. I am writing these
things during the atrocities the IDF is committing in the Gaza strip.
Less than a year
ago, A. B. Yehoshua received a Peace Award from the city of Naples.
The book for which he got the award was The Liberated Bride. It is not
about peace, to say the least. Tariq Ali got the same award, together
with Yehoshua, for a non-fiction book, on Bush and his war in Iraq.
I ask you to read carefully what A. B. Yehoshua said six month later,
to Ha'aretz, 6 months before the current atrocities taking place in
Gaza. [The italic parts within the text appeared only in the Hebrew
version of the article. The English editors of Ha'aretz chose not to
include in their own version of that interview:]
It's possible
that there will be a war with the Palestinians. It's not necessary,
it's not impossible. But if there is a war, it will be a very short
one. Maybe a war of six days. Because after we remove the settlements
and after we stop being an occupation army, all the rules of war will
be different. We will exercise our full force. We will not have to run
around looking for this terrorist or that instigator--we will make use
of force against an entire population. We will use total force. Because
from the minute we withdraw I don't want to know their names. I don't
want any personal relations with them. I am no longer in a situation
of occupation and policing and B'Tselem [the human rights organization].
Instead, I will be standing opposite them in a position of nation versus
nation. State versus state. I am not going to perpetrate war crimes
for their own sake, but I will use all my force against them. If there
is shooting at Ashkelon, there is no electricity in Gaza. We shall use
force against an entire population. We shall use total force It will
be a totally different war. It will be much harder on the Palestinians.
If they shoot Qassam missiles at Ashkelon, we will cut electricity to
Gaza. We shall cut communications in Gaza. We shall prevent fuel from
Gaza. We shall use our full force as we did on the Egyptian (Suez) Canal
in 1969. And then, when the Palestinian suffering will be totally different,
much more serious, they will, by themselves, eliminate the terror. The
Palestinian nation will overcome terrorism itself. It won't have any
other choice. Let them stop the shooting. No matter if it is the PA
or the Hamas. Whoever takes responsibility for the fuel, electricity
and hospitals, and sees that they do not function, will operate within
a few days to stop the shooting of the Qassams. This new situation will
totally change the rules of the game. Not a desired war, but definitely
a purifying one. A war that will make it clear to the Palestinians that
they are sovereign. The suffering they will go through in the post-occupation
situation will make clear to them that they must stop the violence,
because now they are sovereign. From the moment we retreat I don't want
to know their names at all. I don't want any personal relationship with
them, and I am not going to commit war crimes for their own sake. ("A
nation that knows no bounds", HaAretz weekend magazine, an interview
with A. B. Yehoshua, 18.3.2004).
It is not about
cheating the Europeans, nor selling them warmongering wrapped up in
peace phraseology, by writers who, at home, either encourage the army
to do atrocities or keep their mouth shut. No, it is about a bizarre
function of a "Peace loving writer from Israel", who has nothing
to declare but a heart full of grief, or anger, no information, nothing
but some incoherent beliefs, some "optimism" for the complacent
reader. And truth, where is the truth? Well, "you two squabble".
Yitzhak Laor is
an Israeli novelist who lives in Tel Aviv.