Speech given at the launch of AJPPP
Wednesday, 18 December, 2002 12.30pm
Garema Place Canberra. (December 2002)

My name is Avigail. I was born in Israel and migrated to Australia 11 years ago. I am a psychotherapist and counsellor. Since the start of the second Intifada in September last year, I have been speaking out in support of the Palestinian people. I have published most of my writings on the subject on my website, and in the last month and a half received a large number of responses. There are many supportive messages but also a great deal of opposition to my views. One of the complaints against my position, particularly from Jewish circles, is that I am too one-sided, that I emphasise too much the plight of the Palestinian people and not enough of the suffering of Israelis. I would like to share with you a message that I wrote to one discussion group in response to this criticism:

I am not just a Jewish woman I am also a former Israeli. I grew up in Israel, served my two years in the army and have seen and experienced realities that are sometimes not clear to Jewish people who have not lived in Israel or who have just visited it for a short time. I also left my whole family behind, and as you can imagine I care deeply about their well-being and safety.

I grew up in Israel learning the official version of history while at the same time witnessing and experiencing realities that didn’t fit with that history.

The reason I am speaking up now is because of two big misconceptions in the West, and unfortunately also among many Jewish communities. One, is that the Palestinians and Israel are somehow equal forces in this conflict. The second is that Israelis are ‘right’ and can do no wrong, and that therefore anyone who criticises Israel must have an anti-Jewish (or antisemitic) agenda.

The Palestinians are not an equal force to Israel by any measure. Israel is a military and nuclear superpower. There are not many armies out there that can defeat it. Israel spends around 75% of its national budget on the department of defense. Israeli army does not consist of paid reservists but of ordinary men who believe that they fight for the very survival of their families. It is a dedicated, skilled, well-equipped and extremely powerful military force.

The Palestinians, who lived in Palestine for thousands of years together with Jewish people mostly from Sepharadi and Mediterranean origin, have been removed from most of their land, they have been exploited economically quite ruthlessly by Israel from 1967 until the first Intifada. They have been subjected to a crippling and often arbitrary military rule, and have lived with none of the democratic and human rights that are available to Israeli citizens. In recent times Israel has destroyed much of the Palestinian infrastructure and their administration. It is a miracle that they manage to run anything at all at the moment. The Palestinians are an occupied people who have been gradually and systematically reduced to living in refugee camps and in conditions that no self-respecting Israeli or any of us would tolerate. The list of injustices and crimes against the Palestinian people is long.

My point is that we are not dealing with two equal forces, but with a formidable state that is trying to suppress an uprising by the people it has dispossessed, occupied and oppressed since 1948. We all studied at school that the Jewish underground movements who fought a dirty war against the British mandate before 1948 were heroes and freedom fighters. But the Palestinian fight for liberation and independence from Israeli occupation is conveniently called terrorism.

Despite what is said in the mainstream media and what is felt by many Israelis and Jewish people around the world, it is not Israel that is fighting for its survival. It is the Palestinian people.

The second misconception concerns the history of Israel. Israel has been behaving, (and I, myself, have grown up with this belief), as if it doesn’t know why the Palestinians and some of the Arab countries have been angry and resentful with it. This is also the message that gets communicated to the rest of the world. It is as if the Palestinians are just nasty, unreasonable antisemitic people who are bad to Israelis for no reason other than their Jewishness. This view amazes me but it does have to do with the politics of memory and of writing history. Israel has succeeded in obscuring historical facts and creating this skewed and incorrect impression about the conflict. I believe that this is deliberate and stems out of the discomfort Israel feels about its history.

The Zionist movement (my ancestors) have from the beginning disregarded the people who lived in Palestine (this is well documented — read Avi Shlaim’s The Iron Wall for example). From the beginning there was talk about relocating the non-Jewish population of Palestine, and the thought was that since they are no more than peasants they wouldn’t mind being moved somewhere else… There was never an intention of living together with this population but rather of taking their place.

The Zionist movement responded to the persecution of our people in the late 19th century, and was working to find a solution to the problem by creating a national home for the Jewish people. But this national home came at the cost of someone else. I believe that the fact that our people have suffered (and an unjustified, awful and terrible suffering it was without doubt) has never given us permission to cause suffering to others. From that time on in our history we stopped being only an innocent victim, and began to carry some burden of responsibility of our own.

The solution to the persecution problem could have been done differently without inflicting suffering on others. There were many many junctions along the way where a different, more peaceful and compassionate path could have been taken. But my Zionist forefathers didn’t know any better and almost always chose an aggressive, hard-line path. The history of the Jews in Europe has taught them that Jews cannot be safe living with non-Jews, and so their solution was to create an exclusively Jewish state. Acting out of survival caused them to ignore the injustice that they were beginning to create. Of course after the Holocaust few dared to question the direction that the Jewish state was taking, and the Palestinians have effectively been abandoned since.

Right now the Palestinians are facing a great danger — a combination of annihilation and expulsion. A war with Iraq is very dangerous for them as it is usually behind the smokescreen of war that genocides are committed. Israeli media and the government have managed to convince most Israelis that they are facing a mortal danger from the Palestinian people. This is a completely unreasonable view and yet most Israelis truly believe this. As absurd as it seems to those of us watching from the outside, Israelis will do whatever necessary to safeguard what they see as their very survival.

At a time like this it is vitally important to emphasise the plight of the Palestinians, and this is what I have been doing. Israel does not face any danger for its existence and it is the aggressor in this conflict. Palestinian attempts at retaliation such as suicide bombings are cruel and inexcusable and they are the action of the desperate. In my profession when we deal with domestic violence our first priority is to stop the violence and make sure the victim is safe. Only then we can begin to deal with the psychology and the wounds of the perpetrator. In our society no one blames a battered and abused wife if once in a while she tries to fight back, and no one would dream of casting her as the ‘bad guy’ in a domestic violence situation.

Unfortunately, the rules in international politics are far behind the modern laws of Western societies. The victim is crushed to the ground and Western governments are colluding in their silence and in their unquestioning support of Israel. When all the Palestinians are gone Israelis will have to live with their blood on their hands. I do wonder how they are going to live with this and what impact it will have on them.

Israeli aggression has to be stopped immediately and the Palestinian people must be protected before any serious negotiations for a long term solution can take place. Western governments must be pressured to intervene at once. If we do not, I believe that we will all live to regret it.

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