The rally was held on the afternoon of Saturday 10th January, outside the Israeli Embassy in Canberra. Other speakers included Bishop Pat Power, Keysar Trad, Rick Kuhn and Kevin Bray.

You can view a video of this speech on YouTube at http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=4bgCKHS97K0.

Some of you know that I was born and raised in Israel. I renounced my Israeli citizenship in 2001 as soon as I started to really grasp Israel’s history and the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Although I was always on the Left side of politics in Israel, I was by no means critical of Zionism and I didn’t understand the Palestinian/Israeli conflict at all. I was a typical Israeli, a product of Israel’s education system, its national scale brainwashing, and the lies it feeds its children about the country’s history.

I am speaking here today not really knowing what to say. What can anyone say in the face of such blatant carnage? What can anyone say in the face of such audacity that allows Israel to use the ludicrous excuse of ‘self-defence’ while committing ethnic cleansing in broad daylight? Are words useful to the hundreds who have been killed? The children who were never given a chance? The parents who if they manage to stay alive will somehow have to continue and live after all that? What words can I say that can offer anything to the people of Gaza and to the Palestinians who have been scattered to all corners of the globe because the Jewish people were determined to have an ethnically pure state? Can words stop a ruthless, heartless and bloodthirsty government that still has the nerve to hide behind the pretence of victimhood and self-defense?

The truth is that I would really like to be there, to help, to do something practical, and also to look in the eyes of Israeli soldiers, or more accurately, war criminals. It chills me to think that some of these might be people I went to school with.

In July 2006, just over two years ago, I wrote an article that got published in Electronic Intifada. In it I said: “I, and others... have warned the world repeatedly that there is nothing to expect from Israel other than more violence, more aggression, more oppression and more bloodshed. All we can expect is for Israel to continue to go around and around in circles, and in the process continue to destroy, kill, maim and traumatise.”

Back then I knew that unless the world forces Israel to end the occupation, something like what we see now was bound to happen. Israel needs war and needs enemies to keep going. It is a sick, psychotic society that barely holds together. The only thing that brings Israelis together is the feeling that they are under threat. And there is nothing that generates that more than a good war. But what we are seeing in Gaza is not war. War is between more or less equal armies. This is a massacre. Israel has already set its eyes on Iran, and the word on the street in Israel is that an attack on Iran is imminent. Israel is dragging out this attack on Gaza in an attempt to get a reaction from Iran that it can then use as an excuse to attack.

I am not surprised that 81% of Israelis are behind their government. Over the years people have tried to tell me that it is not the ordinary Israeli that is the problem, but their government. This may be true in some countries but not in Israel. All Israelis, men and women, are soldiers at one time or another in their lives. The 10,000 soldiers that the Israeli government mobilised for the ground attack in Gaza are ordinary Israelis who are doing their ‘miluim’, their reserve service. Israel’s military is not made up of mercenaries or career soldiers. The bulk of it is made up of the Israeli public. No Israeli should later be allowed to hide behind the excuse of ‘but I didn’t know’. With the small exception of the courageous and outspoken anti-Zionist peace activists in Israel, and the conscientious objectors who go to jail rather than commit Israel’s war crimes, I hold every Israeli accountable for the war crimes in Gaza and for the crimes committed since 1948.

Israelis do not think of Palestinians as human beings. They are nothing to them. Don’t think for a moment that children are killed by accident, just caught between the shells and the bullets. Israelis kill Palestinian children because they think of them as ‘future terrorists’, and because they want to destroy any hope that Palestinians might have for their future.

Israelis are ruthless killers, and trying to appeal to their humanity is like trying to negotiate with a shark. There is no point wasting time on negotiations. There is no one to talk to. Israeli society is insane. If it can’t stop itself it has to be forced to stop. The occupation must end. The Palestinians must be given a right of return. Israel does not have a moral or political right to exist as an ethnically pure Jewish state, certainly not at the expense of another people.

The world has been very patient, too patient at the cost of so many Palestinian lives, complicit in buying into the Israeli ‘poor me’ rhetoric. There is NO symmetry between Israel and the Palestinians, no matter how you twist the facts. Israel is an armed, unscrupulous and dangerous country with nuclear capabilities and a psychotic and perpetual need for war. The Palestinians are a people fighting desperately for freedom from oppression. They will not win this struggle for freedom without our help.

We must continue to protest, and we must expand the protest and not stop until the world finally imposes a decisive economic and political boycott on the rogue, racist and genocidal state of Israel.

I conclude with the words of Dorothy Naor who is an Israeli anti-Zionist peace activist. On Tuesday the 6th of January, she wrote:

“It is with a heavy heart that I write these past days, and today heavier than ever. So many people killed, so many with no place to run away to—like sheep to the slaughter. And the world just talks—no leader proposes sanctions on Israel, and George Bush as usual shows what an idiot he is by fully supporting Israel. Unfortunately, he still rules the roost. And I fear that Obama might not be much better.

“... it is as a human being that I am pained at the harm, the evil perpetrated on other human beings. I am pained by the ignorance and greed that allows this to happen—the ignorance of the larger part of the Israeli population, the greed, meanness, and evil of Israel’s leaders.

...

“Israel’s leaders are shooting themselves in the foot! They are distancing Diaspora Jews ... from Israel. That guarantees that Israel as it is today will eventually go down the drain, because it needs Jews to survive. For me the demise could not happen fast enough—not only because of what Israel has done and is doing to Palestinians, but also because this is a country that eats its children. God did not allow Abraham to sacrifice his only son, but Israel’s parents glibly sacrifice their children—and for what? They send them off to war and sacrifice them on the altar of their leaders’ greed for stealing more Palestinian land, and eradicating more Palestinians from this earth.

“... The people that go into politics in Israel are mediocre. They do not understand human nature. They do not care that Israel excels in killing. They are experts in lying, no better than Joseph Goebells was. They should remember, however, the conditions that Hitler left Germany in. All their lies, their use of force, all their military might will not bring security to a single Israeli.

“... The only hope that we have to live here in peace and security is to replace the kind of Zionist entity that Israel is, with a single, democratic state, with equal rights for everyone. And may it happen soon.”


Page content last modified: 13 January 2009