Open
Letter To Uri Avnery,
Noam Chomsky And Jimmy Carter
By Roger Tucker
28 April, 2007
OneState.net
This
essay is prompted by a piece, Bed
of Sodom, by Uri Avnery (1), posted on the Gush Shalom
website on April 21st. It is amusing and instructive that the article's
name provides its organizing metaphor, taken from the Old Testament,
but without acknowledging that the story is a Jewish version of the
older Greek myth that tells the tale of one Procrustes, who insisted
that one size fit all. The piece is a spirited defense of the two-state
solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, with Avnery contesting
that the now popular comparison of Israel with the former South Africa
is a force fit. No wonder Martin Luther said that "reason is a
whore."
For those who don't know,
Gush Shalom is the Israeli Peace Bloc, the oldest and largest, and one
might say, most prestigious "progressive" group on the Israeli
Left. Following the lead of Gush Shalom, pretty much the entire Israeli
left opposes the Occupation, decries apartheid, the wall, the deeply
racist character of Israeli society, the truly horrible and revolting
actions of the Israeli state against the indigenous people of Palestine,
and so on.
So far so good, but there's
a nasty, disease ridden and contagious fly in the ointment. Gush Shalom,
under the leadership of Mr. Avnery, is foursquare behind the so-called
Two State Solution, along with some strange bedfellows, such as the
hard line Zionist government and military, the American neo-cons, the
Republicrats, the puppet Palestinian "government," the "Christian"
Zionists, and the somewhat reluctant European nations. Strange bedfellows
indeed. (For links to numerous articles on the relevant subjects, click
on Zionism
and the Israel Lobby.)
How could this be? Bed of
Sodom is a strident, one might almost say desperate, attempt to rationalize
and sustain this fantasy. And how could a man as intelligent, knowledgeable,
well-intentioned and courageous as Uri Avnery be party to this travesty
of common sense? There is an answer, and it explains not only the Israeli
Left's clinging to this horses' ass of a "solution," but the
American and European Left's complicity in this tragic fraud. The answer
is a narrative, a mythology or religion of sorts, a seductive ideology
that has trapped tens of millions of decent people in its web - it is
called political Zionism, and at its heart, the core mythology, the
narrative that must not be questioned (lest ye fall afoul of the Inquisition),
is the cult of the Holocaust. (5)
The essential premise and
point of the "Holocult" is that the Jews are 'perpetual victims,'
who must have their own state if they are to survive. The now standard,
orthodox Shoah story is used to disguise and justify actions which are
in essence the same as those of the Nazis, but which nobody acknowledges
as such. As Avnery himself has written, “Yeshayahu Leibowitz,
the philosopher who was an observant orthodox Jew, told me once: “The
Jewish religion died 200 years ago. Now there is nothing that unifies
the Jews around the world apart from the Holocaust.”
A short but incisive rebuttal
of the Bed of Sodom was written by Virginia Tilley (2). (Included on
the linked page is a more extensive rebuttal by John Spritzler.) Ms.
Tilley takes a shot at answering the aforementioned question, but she
leaves out a bit of tantalizing history that is very telling. Early
on, Mr. Avnery befriended Yassir Arafat, the would be Fidel Castro of
a proposed Palestinian state. It seems that Mr. Avnery was infatuated,
perhaps to the point of idolizing Arafat, and he speaks of this friendship
as if it were the defining relationship in his life. Go figure.
Alright, let's attempt to
figure it out. Mr. Avnery, this heroic figure, this lion of a man, is
what I call a "closet," or "crypto" Zionist. So
are Mr. Chomsky and Mr. Carter, but we'll get to them later. The bottom
line of Zionism is the requirement that there be a "Jewish State."
Given that this State actually came into existence in the 20th Century,
a stepchild of the Western Enlightenment (and bastard child of the UN,
which thereby lost its legitimacy according to its own founding principles
- sacrificing the natural sovereignty, not to mention basic human and
civil rights, of indigenous peoples on the altar of a state and population
superimposed by dubious 'international legal' fiat. Israel had, perforce,
to masquerade as a "democracy," but if you're as fond of oxymorons
as I am, the notion of a "Jewish Democracy" must give you
pause.
Yassir Arafat, who managed
to lead the Palestinian people down the garden path to utter destruction,
provided Mr. Avnery, a man of conscience who was also a Zionist, with
a lifeline. Here was a true partner to people like himself who wanted
to have their cake and eat it too. Had Arafat not insisted on a separate
Palestininan state (of which he, of course, would be the leader) the
problem would have been resolved many years ago.
There is not the space here
to go into the myriad reasons why the Two State Solution is a total
chimera. A visit to www.one-state.net
will provide you with most of the articles
ever written on the subject, and this
page references all of the books. I highly recommend Obstacles
to Peace: A Reframing of the Palestinian - Israeli Conflict, 3rd Edition,
by Jeff Halper and Michael Younan, because any reasonably intelligent
high school kid, after perusing the excellent maps therein of the West
Bank, will easily grasp that the idea is absurd. The maps, and the accompanying
text, illustrate the infrastructure that the Israelis have created over
the years. It is now a sheer physical, geographical reality that utterly
precludes a viable Palestinian state, unless, of course, the Israelis,
were to pick up their marbles and leave, or just roll over and die.
Not to mention that it would take hundreds of billions of (mostly American)
dollars to create even the semblance of such a state - not a likely
eventuality.
Now let's turn to Noam Chomsky
(3). Also something of a hero, his is the uncompromising voice of the
elite American leftist intelligentsia. Fiercely attacked by the troglodytes
of America, as Avnery is in Israel, he has shown grit and courage in
the face of insufferable insults and unremitting attacks. His analyses
of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and shifting sands of the Middle
East has been nonpareil. And yet he is another closet Zionist. What
a shame.
With all of these people,
the bottom line is the continued existence of a Jewish entity, no matter
how truncated or humbled. Why do they hold on to this 19th Century colonialist,
racist, indeed fascist, ideal? They can't shake it off, this mesmerizing
notion, which was born as a byproduct of British Imperial strategy,
was then taken up in a fit of irrational desperation by liberal Jewish
intellectuals like Theodor Hertzl, and became solidified in response
to Auschwitz and Belsen-Belsen. Since then it has been nurtured, maintained,
and effectively marketed by some of the most ruthless, unscrupulous
and genocidal characters in history.
This is not a sideshow. The
Zionist disease drives the American lust for empire that imperils the
whole world, both its people and the planet itself.
And now we come to Jimmy
Carter, who needs no introduction. He is not the war hero turned peace
activist that Avnery is, nor the towering intellectual that Chomsky
is. But he is an ex-President and a Christian who actually practices
what he preaches. In spite of having being deeply sunk in the noxious
sewers of Washington, DC politics, and in spite of having been immersed
from childhood in the heartland of (a deeply pagan) Christian Zionism,
the man acts like a saint, and is admired as such by millions of people.
Obeying his conscience, he pointed out the rather obvious fact that
Israel is an apartheid state, extraordinarily similar to the former
South Africa. (4)
But President Carter was
on my list even before he published that book. For here was a man that
people would listen to, someone who had seen and heard enough to have
realized that the faux peace negotiations were a time honoured Israeli
tactic to forestall any possibility of peace until the job was done
- that job being the final expulsion and/or destruction of the Palestinians,
in order to finally establish Eretz Yisroel, Greater Israel. And he
had the moral authority, credibility and gravitas, not to mention the
audience, to speak the truth and be heard. What he actually did was
lift up the merest corner, an inch or so, of the carpet, and point to
a little bit of dirt. He didn't even mention that apartheid was part
and parcel of Israeli policy within Israel itself, nor did he say a
word about the ethnic cleansing going on - well, let's call a spade
a spade, the deliberate and methodical genocide that has openly been
Israeli policy for 60 years. And all this to further the fantasy of
a "two state solution." Another closet Zionist.
It is because these men are
among the best, that they are admirable, decent and well-intentioned
people that I take them to task. Were they to acknowledge the obvious,
be willing to suffer the pain involved in letting go of a cherished
but hopelessly flawed and self-defeating wish-fulfillment fantasy, they
could have an enormous effect on public opinion, perhaps bringing about
the necessary paradigm shift that would not only prevent further suffering
for millions of Palestinians, not to mention everyone else in the Middle
East, including the hapless Israelis themselves, but could be the only
thing that might forestall the looming spectre of WW III.
The laudable aims of the
idealistic, cultural and spirtiual Zionism that preceded the creation
of the Jewish State could yet be achieved, but only in the context of
what is, after all, the gold standard of modern nations, a democratic,
secular and pluralistic state, not a fascist, militaristic, racist,
ethnocentric, paranoid entity that can never be anything but a nuclear
armed bully, reviled and resisted in its immediate neighborhood, and
a permanent pariah in the world at large.
Sometimes the truth hurts,
as in an operation to remove a cancer. But it is the way to health.
Some people say to me "But you want to wipe Israel off the map."
My answer is always the same. "Please, someone, just give me the
eraser."
(1) Uri Avnery is former
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, "Ha'olam Haze" newsmagazine,
served 3 Terms as member of the Knesset (Israeli Parliament), founding
member of the Israeli council for Israeli-Palestinian peace, founding
member, "Gush Shalom" (Peace Bloc) - Independent Peace Movement,
Member of Samson's Foxes (commando unit) 1948 (twice wounded in action),
Member of the Irgun 1938-1942.
(2) Virginia Tilley, a professor
of Political Science, is the author of The One-State Solution : A Breakthrough
for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock, and is now working at
the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa.
(3) Noam Chomsky is the Institute
Professor Emeritus of linguistics at MIT. He has become widely known
— especially internationally — for his media criticism and
politics. Author of The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel
and the Palestinians, he is also co-author, with Gilbert Achcar, of
Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy.
(4) Avnery is battling the
growing perception that Israel closely resembles the former So. Africa,
and is at pains to point out the differences.
"One has to learn from
South Africa that there is nothing to be gained from appealing to the
conscience of the ruling people. Among the white minority in South Africa,
there was no real difference between Left and Right, between open racists
and liberals, who were but better disguised racists, with the exception
of a few white heroes who joined the fight for freedom.
Therefore, redemption could only come from the outside. And indeed,
world public opinion saw the injustice of apartheid and imposed a world-wide
boycott on South Africa, till in the end the white minority capitulated."
But he doesn't draw the obvious
conclusion, that the same thing must happen in Israel/Palestine. On
the contrary, he argues that such a boycott couldn't succeed. He quotes
his friend Adam Keller, "The entire world has imposed a blockade
on the Palestinian people. But in spite of the terrible misery of the
Palestinians, they have not been brought to their knees. Why do you
think that a boycott would break the Israeli public, which is far stronger
economically, so that they would give up the Jewish character of the
state?"
What he has conveniently
left out is the well known fact that without massive American support,
Israel wouldn't last a month, with or without a boycott. It is crucial,
therefore, that Americans wake up and take the lead in advocating a
single state. Were they to do so, the Israelis would accept the inevitable,
and far preferable idea, of one democratic, secular state for all the
people between the river and the sea, and the nightmare would end.
(5) Lest the reader think
that I am a "holocaust denier," let me put your mind at rest.
I don't believe there are any such people, unless they're locked away
in some mental asylum. I am, however, an admirer of the mainstream Holocaust
revisionist historians (a number of whom are languishing in prison for
being so audacious as to question the official story of the Cult). Here's
a very interesting article
on the subject. A here's a website
that publishes scholarly works in the field.
The writer is the Editor/Publisher
of www.one-state.net.
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