I sent this letter to Ha’aretz, The Guardian, The Independent, The Sydney Morning Herald and an indpendent web-based Israeli news service on 25th June 2002. I hope they will publish it. (June 2002)

My dear Israeli brothers and sisters,

I am writing to you from faraway Canberra, the Capital of Australia. It is 2.30am and I got out of bed because I could no longer resist the persistent call of this letter to be written right now. It did not want to wait until morning.

I was once one of you. On my mother’s side I am descended from Holocaust survivors. My grandmother lost two baby boys in the camps to hunger and disease. I was born and raised among you, your culture was my culture, your language my beloved language. I left you when I was 27 at the end of 1991 and migrated to Australia. I left because I was looking for an identity. One day I realised that although we have worked very hard in Israel to create a new Jewish identity, the truth is that we have not succeeded in moving very far from the identity of our persecuted ancestors. I realised that as an Israeli Jew I was still in essence defined by those who have hated the Jews. I could not go on living with an identity that was given to me by hatred and went away hoping to find a fresh and healthy identity for myself. It has been a difficult and painful journey emotionally but every tear and every moment of anguish and pain has been precious to me. They have given me back my life and have helped me find my purpose and identity.

My heart goes out to all of you these days. I see through the television screen the horror and destruction of the suicide bombings and other attacks by Palestinian militants. I send my deep condolences to all the families and friends of those who were killed and maimed in these attacks. I have very close family among you. The safety and well-being of my brother and his young family are particularly on my mind these days.

I know that from your point of view what the Palestinian extremists are doing is no different than what all other zorerim [Note] have always done to the Jews. It all seems like more of the same some kind of a horrible déja vu, does it not? I know what it felt like to live in Israel and believe that no one wants to let us live in peace. But my dear brothers and sisters I am writing to urge you, plead with you to open your minds and your hearts to the possibility that in fact what is happening to you now is not the same.

The Zionist movement from its early days has taken away from us the right to see ourselves only as victims. It is in its desperate attempt to save us all from persecution by creating a national home, that it turned us for the first time in modern history from victims into perpetrators. From its early beginnings, from Theodore Hertzl himself, the Zionist movement had intended consciously to disinherit the people who were already living in Palestine. It had no intention of coming and settling there together with them as our Sephardim ancestors did. They came to Palestine only to live close to the sites that were sacred to them and die and be buried in their beloved land. They had no other agenda and they lived respectfully with the local Arab population. The Zionist movement on the other hand was bent on transferring, expelling the majority of Palestinians to the neighbouring countries (Morris, 2002). The Palestinian people were seen as insignificant, primitive peasants who would not mind being uprooted from their villages and a way of life that they had known for thousands of years. The thoughts and actions of the Zionist movement were brutal, cold and heartless. They showed no compassion or sympathy and no sense of morality. The Zionist movement was motivated only by the single-minded survival-driven goal of creating a national home for the Jewish people as a solution to persecution. The fact that this solution came at the expense of someone else was not important.

This is a painful truth for me to realise because I grew up believing, as most of you probably still do, that we were good, noble, peace-loving and right. I know now that no matter how bad things were for us, our persecution and suffering have never given us the right to commit the appalling crime that we have committed.

My fellow Israelis, the history of Israel is not pretty. No matter how much we try to paint it in heroic colours and how much we try to move away from it or cover it up with progress, technology, literature and other achievements, it is not possible to build a sturdy and healthy building on a rotten foundation. While we were determined to thrive, revelling in our own achievements we were uprooting and destroying a whole culture. The suicide bombers are there to remind us of our true legacy. And they will not go away until you hear what they have to say. Unfortunately, in your understandable pain you are hearing the wrong message.

Did you know that our early leadership led by David Ben-Gurion drew a great deal of inspiration from Nazi Germany’s practices of moving whole ethnic populations for political gains? This information is taken directly from protocols of meetings of the Zionist leadership and the diaries of David Ben-Gurion (Morris, 2002).

I wonder how many of you know that in the 1948 war, called in Israel the ‘War of Independence’ and that the Palestinian people call ‘al-Nakba’, ‘the disaster’, we outnumbered the Arab armies by 3:2 and were far better equipped. How many of you know that we won that war simply because we were bigger and stronger? There was no ‘few against the many’ (Shlaim, 2001). It is a myth like so much of what is taught and celebrated in Israel as history. Have you heard of Operation Hiram during that same war? Do you know that we committed premeditated massacres, explusions and razing of whole villages, not just Dir-Yessin but also in Majd al-Kurum, al-Bi’na, Dayr al-Assad, Hahf, Safsaf, Jish, Sasa, Saliha, Ilabun and Hula? The massacres in these villages were committed mostly after the end of the fighting. Did you know that Israeli troops continued to commit atrocities including gang rapes in the 1950’s? As a woman this is something that I particularly did not want to hear. All this and much more is documented in your own archives. It is time to look openly and honestly at our own history. Ask questions and do not stop until you get answers.

It is not possible to change the past but you can change the present and the future. It is time to recognise the sins that we have committed against the Palestinians, ask them for forgiveness, invite them back into the country that was their own for thousands of years, and make the brave decision to begin a journey of healing together, and together create a life of peace and prosperity. If you start it right now such a journey will take at least one generation, if not two. So the sooner you begin the better are the chances of your children and grandchildren and of Palestinian children and grandchildren to live in true peace and harmony.

What is happening to you right now is inexcusible. No murder ever is. But it is happening for a reason. And the reason, for the first time in your history, is not to do with Jewishness. It is time for all Israelis to start recognising your own contribution to the situation that you are in now. And most of all, it is now time to select a healthy and courageous leadership, people who possess the capacity to lead you through a soul searching journey of healing. Military leaders cannot do it for you. Military leaders will give you military solutions. And military solutions (if they can even be called that) are short-lived and breed more problems. As Shlomo Artzi wisely sang, “no one has ever won any war”. A journey towards real peace will be painful but this pain is the pain that comes from the healer’s knife and it does end. The pain you are going through right now is senseless, unnecessary and most of all endless. It is the pain that comes from going around and around in circles.

You can choose what is good and noble in Jewish-Israeli culture and strengthen it. By healing you can also transform what is wounded, sick, angry, aggressive and paranoid within Jewish culture. You can redefine yourselves as I have done. If you want to live in peace start creating it by looking inwardly and by reaching outward with a hand of peace to everyone, even those who seem like sworn enemies and in particular to those against whom we sinned. Follow the brave legacy of the late Anwar el-Sadat.

There is no one else left to blame. What is happening to you now is merely the natural unfolding of a journey that our ancestors have begun in the 19th century. To change your destiny you need to change direction and choose a new journey. This is a time for unconventional thinking, and courageous action. I call upon you, beg you, as the people amongst whom I grew up, to wake up and create the life that you say you want.

Peace and light can come out of Jerusalem to show the way to a lost and confused world, as the ancient biblical prophecies tell. I believe that you can choose the path that will make this possible. It is in your hands.

With all my love,

Avigail Abarbanel
Canberra Australia
24 June, 2002

Footnotes

1. Zorerim is a Hebrew word meaning something like: “those who try to annihilate us and who make our life hell for no apparent reason”.

References

Morris, B., ‘Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948’, in Rogan, E. & Shlaim, A. (Eds.), The War For Palestine, Cambridge University Press, 2001, (pp. 37-59)

Shlaim, A., The Iron Wall, Israel and the Arab World, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.

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