Avigail Abarbanel : Jewish and Israeli responses to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict

This is the text of a talk I was invited to give to two University of the Third Age groups in Canberra in February and March 2004. (March 2004)

Introduction

My name is Avigail Abarbanel. I was born in Tel-Aviv, Israel in 1964. I served in the Israeli military from 1982 to 1984. I first trained as a Platoon Commander and later served as a professional draftsperson at the army’s central Headquarters in Tel-Aviv. I completed my service with the rank of Staff Sergeant.

Just over twelve years ago, in November 1991, I migrated to Australia with my former husband who was a Captain in the Israeli army. I was 27 then. In 1995 I completed my BA with Honours in Politics at Macquarie University. I did my honours thesis in the area of Holocaust studies under the supervision of Professor Colin Tatz at the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies.

In 1997 I started a Graduate Diploma in Psychotherapy. After finishing my studies I moved to Canberra with my second husband, Ian. I am now in my fifth year in private practice as a psychotherapist and counsellor.

My former husband and I decided to leave Israel because we felt a growing sense of discomfort with the direction the country seemed to be heading. It took a few more years before I began a serious process of soul-searching about my relationship with Israel and with my past there.

I grew up in a Zionist home. I was educated like everyone else in a Zionist education system, and all I knew was the Zionist version of Israel’s history. Of course we did not think of it as a Zionist version but simply as history.

Living in Israel I sometimes felt as if there were holes in the stories we were telling ourselves about ourselves. It also felt like we were protesting a bit too much. Growing up I witnessed the economic exploitation of Palestinian labourers, particularly in the building industry. The Palestinians who built our cities and worked in all the jobs Israelis didn’t want, were treated like they did not exist. I, like everyone else, was supposed to keep my distance so I always turned the other way. In Israel I witnessed deep racism against all Arabs and Arab culture, as an inseparable part of our day to day reality. I grew up reading children’s stories filled with descriptions of Arabs as stupid, unreliable and mindlessly evil. As an adolescent I began to feel a sense of discomfort with this racism and with many other things I witnessed but the indoctrination was so strong, that I did not really question very much. Even if I did question, I did not have enough knowledge to base my ideas on. I was often dismissed as ignorant, and as naive or too idealistic.

It was when I saw on Australian TV Ariel Sharon’s defiant walk to the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem in September 2000, the event that started the second Intifada, that I finally felt that I had to take a clear stand. I was appalled by what I saw as a clear provocation, a profoundly disrespectful macho act. I have always dreaded Sharon and this act to me was the last straw. It wasn’t long before I decided to renounce my Israeli citizenship. It was a matter of principle to me. I did not want to be considered even on paper, a citizen of a country that behaved like Israel. I did not want Palestinian blood on my hands.

From that time on I started a long journey of reviewing and relearning the history of my people. It was very difficult to let go of everything that I believed to be true especially when the new truths I was learning seemed so disturbing. I learned that Israeli governments throughout the last 56 years have lied to us consistently about pretty much everything. I felt personally betrayed but was also in turmoil, worrying that I was betraying my people and was doing something wrong. I was brought up to believe that all Arabs were subhuman and were not like us and there I was making friends with Arabs and with Palestinians. As a Jew, ‘airing the dirty laundry’ is the worst thing one can do. Debate within the group is allowed and even encouraged provided that dissenting views are kept internal and are not exposed to the ‘Goyyim’, which is seen as dangerous to the group. My own mother, a daughter of Holocaust survivors and a devout Zionist cut off all contact with me when she heard that I was renouncing my Israeli citizenship.

In this talk today I would like to offer you an overview of Jewish and Israeli responses to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. I chose this topic partly because I find it fascinating, and partly because I think that it could help clarify aspects of the dynamic around the conflict that are not clear to many people. In particular, the fear that many people have, that questioning Israel is identical to antisemitism.

I will start with a brief history of Zionism and the conflict and then discuss the responses starting with Jews outside Israel and conclude with a review of the responses inside Israel.

A Historical Review

The Palestinian/Israeli conflict did not begin with the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 or even with the war of 1948. It began with the birth of the Zionist movement in the late 1880’s. Theodore Herzl, an assimilated Jew and a journalist and playwright in Vienna is considered “the father of political Zionism and the visionary of the Jewish state”. Originally he was not interested in Jewish affairs. His interest began after covering the Dreyfus affair in France for his Vienna newspaper. Dreyfus was an officer in the French military who was framed for a crime he did not commit simply because he was Jewish. It was the virulent antisemitism that surrounded the case that began Herzl’s interest in the Jewish question.

The growing nationalism in Europe influenced Herzl and he began to see the Jewish problem from a nationalist perspective. He came to believe that Jews were not a religious group but a nation and that they were being persecuted because they were a nation without a home. Their homelessness or statelessness, as he saw it, was the reason that Jews were not equal citizens in their countries but rather unwanted guests. Experiences like the Dreyfus affair were seen as evidence that no matter how loyal Jewish people were to their countries and how well they served them, they were always treated like second rate citizens and were always vulnerable to antisemitic persecution by both the state and antisemitic elements in those countries. Official discrimination took the form of various laws in different countries that discriminated against Jews in areas like work and education. Unofficial harassment came in the form of regular pogroms on Jewish towns, a phenomenon that escalated in the late 1920’s in Eastern Europe.

Herzl’s idea was to purchase land somewhere in the world for the Jews to create a national home of their own. The Zionist movement originally flirted with the idea of Argentina but eventually the focus changed to Palestine because of the historical and religious connection that the Jewish people have to that part of the world. Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland. The Basel program stated: “The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law”. The Basel program deliberately used the word “home” rather than “state” but from that congress onward the clear and consistent aim of Zionism was to create a state for the Jewish people.

After the congress Herzl wrote in his diary: “At Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.”

The responses to Zionism in the Jewish community were mixed. Some very favourable, some very hostile and some sceptical. After the Basel congress the rabbis of Vienna sent two representatives to Palestine on a fact finding mission. The two rabbis telegraphed back, “The bride is beautiful but she is married to another man.” This late 19th century observation shows that it was evident for anyone to see that the land was populated. It stands in stark contrast to Golda Meir’s famous statement from years later: “A land without a people for a people without a land”.

The Zionist movement was well organised and determined. It began a systematic campaign to raise funds in order to acquire land in Palestine that was to become the basis for a future national home. At the same time the Zionists also engaged in international diplomacy with the Ottoman rulers of Palestine in order to try and pave the way for a future Jewish state. When the British mandate over Palestine began following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, the Zionist movement changed the focus of its diplomacy to Britain.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917, an unofficial and irresponsible document, was one of the outcomes of these efforts. The declaration was secured as a result of the diplomatic efforts and influence of Haim Weizmann, a scientist and an influential figure in the Zionist movement and Britain’s highest political circles. Weizmann’s efforts were directed at achieving British support for what he ambiguously termed a “Jewish Commonwealth”. He deliberately minimised the danger of organised Arab resistance in Palestine. On 2 November 1917 Foreign Secretary Arthur J. Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild a letter that said:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by the Jews in any other country.

From the Zionist point of view this declaration was an important victory and a step in the right direction. When I studied the history of Zionism in Israel the emphasis was always on the first part of the statement, ending with “…to facilitate the achievement of this object…” The last part dealing with respecting the rights of the non-Jewish communities I saw for the first time around two years ago when I read Avi Shlaim’s book, The Iron Wall.

From its onset the Zionist movement discussed the possibility of relocating the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. The thought was that because they were just peasants they wouldn’t mind. The behaviour of the Zionist movement in Palestine towards the indigenous people, Arabs, Jews, Muslims and Christians was very similar to the way most Western colonial powers treated indigenous people. Those European Zionist Jews who began to settle Palestine, looked down at the Palestinian population. They viewed them as primitive and backward and treated them with obvious disrespect. The Sepharadi Jews who lived in Palestine for hundreds of years began to feel very uncomfortable about this and many of them were very unsympathetic towards the Zionist aspirations, because they have always lived with the Arab population in peace and mutual respect and social and economic co-operation. The animosity that the Arab population began to feel towards the new settlers threatened to affect these relationships.

The settlement of Palestine continued in an organised way. Lands were mostly officially purchased, settlements and even cities were built and political, professional and community organisations were created. Occasionally groups of over-zealous Zionists would take over someone’s piece of land usually in areas that had an agricultural or strategic advantage and build an ad hoc settlement overnight in an attempt to create what was is called in Hebrew uvdot bashetach, facts on the ground. This method of taking land and settling it by force is called Homa umigdal meaning wall and watch tower because that is all that they built. These settlements, that were built illegally on Arab lands often sparked localised armed conflicts and some of them did not last. Israeli children have always been taught that these were pioneering and heroic acts unfairly attacked by ‘bad Arabs’. But they were in fact aggressive and imperialistic acts of simple theft that took no notice of the indigenous population and its rights.

The Zionist movement’s biggest advantage was that it was organised in a Western style and used Western style international diplomacy and lobbying methods to achieve its political goals. This helped the Zionists gain a great deal of favour with Western powers and ultimately paved the way to the Partition Plan, which was drawn unilaterally by the Zionist leadership and gained the support of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine.

The Palestinians who, like most indigenous people did not necessarily do things in a Western way, were repeatedly left behind and found themselves in the end with an imposed partition plan that divided their country between them and the Jewish people. Their attempts to fight the Zionists by force failed because the Zionists were better organised and equipped and had a clear and single-minded goal. The horrors of the Holocaust that were revealed at the end of the war in 1945 helped gain international support for the idea of a Jewish state. The Palestinians who trusted the Arab league to help with their cause, saw their rights and interests severely undermined and compromised.

In 1947 things in Palestine escalated to a civil war between the two peoples. At that time the British were already getting ready to leave the country. The war that the Israelis call the War of Independence and that the Palestinians call the Naqba (the disaster) took place between 29 November 1947 and 7 January 1949. In this war the Israeli forces substantially outnumbered all the Arab forces and were vastly better equipped. The war involved Plan D, which aimed to ‘cleanse’ the future Jewish state from as many Palestinians as possible.

The Israeli forces committed a dozen cases of rape that we know about. Usually there were one or two Palestinian girls involved and more than one soldier. In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder. It is likely that there were more cases and that these were the only ones reported because neither the soldiers nor the victims liked to report these events. The Israeli forces committed twenty-four massacres. The number of murdered ranged between four or five to a hundred. Operation Hiram in the North of Palestine involved a high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly manner. The Israeli forces razed 500 Palestinian villages to the ground. By the end of the war 700,000 Palestinians were made into refugees as a result of these actions.

(This part of the story has been particularly hard for me to come to terms with. The Israeli military has always claimed to uphold two basic principles: ‘Human Dignity’ and ‘Purity of Arms’ and when I was enlisted I was taught, like everyone else, that we as soldiers were expected to uphold these principles:

Human Dignity - “The IDF and its soldiers are obliged to honour human dignity. Each human being should be respected, regardless of race, creed, nationality, gender, status or social role.”

Purity of Arms - “The soldier will use his weapons and his might only to achieve his objective, to the degree that this is required for the purpose, and will retain his humanity even during battle. The soldier will not use his weapons and his might to hurt persons who are not fighters, or prisoners, and will do everything in his power to prevent an assault on their life, their body or their property.”

After believing all my life that the Israeli military was a dignified force, to then learn that it has committed crimes against humanity even back in 1948, was a devastating blow to me.)

At the end of the 1948 war, Israel declared itself unilaterally an independent and sovereign state.

The war of 1967 (the ‘Six Day War’) was launched by Israel on 5 June 1967. By the end of the war on 10 June Israel occupied the entire Sinai peninsula including the Gaza strip, the West Bank including East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The Palestinians who lived in the Gaza strip and in the West Bank became an occupied people. They have been subjected to Israeli military rule ever since and their economy became dependent on Israel. Life under occupation has been a nightmare for them.

3.3 million Palestinians are currently living under occupation. In the last ten years Israel has built settlements on Palestinian land that have fragmented the Palestinian territories in a way that does not enable the Palestinians to move freely on their own land. Families are cut off from each other and people cannot get to essential services or to their workplaces. Recently Israel has been building a wall that cuts deeply into Palestinian land. Thousands of olive trees were uprooted and many Palestinian families are now cut off from their agricultural lands and from one another. Israel’s actions seem to suggest a consistent tendency to expand its territory and the wall is another example. There is evidence that the wall does not function as a security barrier at all and critics inside and outside Israel believe that it is another grab for land. Israel’s wall effectively annexes more territory to Israel but without the population. Annexing land with its population will mean giving the people equal rights within the Israeli state, which is something Israelis do not want to do. As in 1948 they still want the land but without the people.

The reports that are pouring out of Israel describe regular harassment of Palestinians by armed settlers, the use of arbitrary bureaucracy to prevent Palestinians from access to clean water and building much needed sewage treatment plants and many other facilities needed for day-to-day functioning, the deliberate diversion of sewage from settlements like Ariel and from Israeli military camps through Palestinian villages, a harsh and arbitrary system of permits and checkpoints that controls every movement of Palestinians, regular and arbitrary confiscation of land and of facilities by the Israeli military usually with no explanation, random acts of cruelty and vandalism and much more. Israeli critics see these acts as a part of a systematic and deliberate policy to make life so difficult for Palestinians that many of them would have no choice but to leave. And many are indeed leaving. This is seen as a continuation of the ethnic cleansing which was started in 1948.

Late last year, the ‘Association for Civil Rights in Israel’ (ACRI) published a report, ‘The State of Human Rights in Israel 2003’ covering the period June 2002 to July 2003. The report addresses in detail the severe violations of human rights in the occupied territories and confirms reports that we have from other sources.

This historical account is based on the work of the Israeli historians, Professor Benny Morris (who I will discuss later on), Professor Ilan Pappe, Professor Avi Shlaim and Tom Segev. I deliberately focus on the work of Israelis in order to remove any suspicion of bias or unfair treatment of Israel. The accounts that these historians give us is based on Israel’s military archive documents and cabinet documents that have been declassified in the last 10 years. My brief description of the wall and of the way Palestinians are treated daily by the Israeli occupation forces are taken entirely from Israeli organisations like ‘New Profile’, ‘Gush Shalom’, ‘Yesh Gvul’ and from reports published in the Israeli broadsheet newspaper Ha’aretz.

Jewish and Israeli responses to the conflict

(By ‘Jewish’ I am referring to Jews living outside Israel and by ‘Israeli’ I am referring to Jews who are citizens of Israel.)

Jewish Responses

Jewish Extremism

One of the most simplistic but nonetheless interesting responses to the conflict comes from Jewish extremists. Jewish extremists are dominated by fear of antisemitism and by the memory of the Holocaust. In the tradition of the Zionist movement they believe that Israel is the only defence Jewish people have against antisemitism and another Holocaust. So although they prefer to live in the comfort of Western countries like the US, Canada Britain and Australia, they view their existence there as transitory. They believe that it is only a matter of time before the antisemites and Nazis come for them again. Based on collective Jewish memory of pogroms and discrimination and of having been abandoned or betrayed by their non-Jewish family members, friends, neighbours and colleagues and indeed the governments of their own countries, and of the rejection of Jewish refugees from most countries including Australia, they do not believe that they will ever be safe anywhere. Collective Jewish memory tells Jewish people that non-Jews cannot be trusted to stick by them if they are hunted again.

Because Israel is seen as the only escape route for Jews, the existence of Israel is all that matters to extremists, not whether it is a happy or a just or moral country. Although on their websites they try to deny the history of Zionism and of Israel, fundamentally it does not really matter to them very much. Like mainstream Zionists they believe that survival is everything and that it justifies any action as immoral as it might be. They do however, tend to claim that Israel has done nothing to the Palestinians. They sometimes claim that the Palestinians do not even exist as a people and that the whole conflict is nothing more than just another antisemitic ploy to annihilate the Jewish people.

Because their only focus is the survival of Israel, extremists are particularly threatened by Left-wing Jews and Israelis who they see as a major threat to Israel’s survival. They are also afraid that critics of Israel, like myself, only provide fuel to the antisemites. Jewish critics of Israel are seen as worse than non-Jewish critics. Non-Jewish critics to them fall simply under the definition of antisemites and since non-Jews are always potentially antisemitic there is nothing new there. But when Jews and Israelis join the critics camp they are seen as dangerous traitors and are labelled self-haters.

Like all extremists everywhere, their tactics involve intimidation, harassment by email, fax and telephone, death threats and smear campaigns. People like myself are labelled ‘self-haters’, Nazis, and antisemites. These groups use the internet to publicise hate lists. They publicise email addresses and details of their victims and encourage members of their groups to harass them. The aim of their personal attacks is to intimidate people like myself into silence.

Having been on the receiving end of this treatment, I find the extremists’ response particularly fascinating. I believe it shows that many Jews are still dominated by fear.

Mainstream Conservative Jewish Bodies

Most mainstream conservative Jewish organisations such as the ‘Jewish Board of Deputies’ and the ‘Australia Israel and Jewish Affairs Council’ (AIJAC), see things in much the same way as the extremists do. They do not go as far as threatening people but they do engage in attempts to silence any criticism of Israel’s actions by labelling it ‘antisemitism’.

In Australia this includes putting substantial pressure on ABC and SBS TV to only broadcast news and programs that depict Israel in a favourable way. Anything that shows Israel’s actions against the Palestinians as they are, anything that shows any sympathy towards the Palestinian people or that presents the effects of Israeli actions on them, any reports about Israel’s peace movement, are considered an anti-Israeli (and therefore antisemitic) bias. In Australia these Jewish organisations have considerable political influence and are directly affecting both the Labor and Liberal parties’ understanding and policies on the conflict. The leaders of both parties regularly try to silence any dissent from within their own ranks. The effectiveness of groups like ‘Parliamentary Friends of Palestine’ is severely limited because of this. The AIJAC have recently initiated a Parliamentary inquiry against an alleged anti-Israeli bias in SBS TV. The outcome of this is an atmosphere of fear and self-censorship by Australian journalists and members of Parliament who are afraid to speak up. The public therefore is prevented access to a more accurate and complete picture of events.

Conservative Jewish politics is dominant in Jewish schools in the West, where they still teach the Zionist version of history. Israel is treated as an almost sacred entity. The country and its military are highly revered and admired and are presented as if they can ‘do no wrong’. As a consequence the vast majority of young Jewish people these days support Israel without question. They also hold the view that any criticism of Israel is an expression of antisemitism. It is interesting to me that the synagogue in Canberra has a picture of David Ben-Gurion a prominent Zionist and a secular socialist on its sign. It shows that the people who built the synagogue and who use it do not see a distinction between their religious beliefs and their strong affiliation with the state of Israel.

Left-wing Jewish Organisations

Left-wing Jewish organisations have mushroomed in recent years all around the world in response to the escalation in Israel’s policies against the Palestinians. These organisations represent a wide spectrum of opinions but what they all have in common is ability to transcend traditional Jewish fears to varying degrees, and to question or debate the morality of Israel’s actions.

Groups on the far left believe in a one-state solution and in a full right of return for the Palestinian refugees, with the full understanding that this means the end of an exclusively Jewish state. Pointing out Israel’s human rights violations against the Palestinians is only the tip of the iceberg for this group. At this end of the Left-wing spectrum the belief is that Israel is an apartheid state and that without addressing the historical injustices committed against the Palestinians there will be no solution. Given the traditional Jewish view that Israel is the only defence against antisemitism, such groups show considerable courage. To the best of my knowledge this group includes only a few hundred Jews around the world. An example of a group belonging to this camp in Australia is the Brisbane based group ‘Palestinian/Jewish Unity’.
The largest camp among Left wing circles reacts directly against Israel’s occupation and inhumane treatment of the Palestinian people. They are concerned for the moral character of the state of Israel, which they often see as going against Jewish and universal human values. Most people in those circles believe that Israel should withdraw to the pre-1967 war borders and evacuate the illegal settlements. They condemn what they see as Israel’s brutal and immoral occupation and support Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the military and in the occupied territories. In these circles the preferred solution to the conflict after the withdrawal of Israel is the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. There are no clear opinions about the future of the status of Jerusalem. Members of these groups are not always prepared to face the media with their opinions. Despite their Left-wing views they prefer to see themselves as working from within the Jewish community and retain a loyalty to it.

Groups who are part of this camp have a strong internet presence, they organise protest rallies, discussion forums, newsletters and petitions. Their focus is on collecting data on what Israel does and distributing it and to some extent on pressuring the Israeli government to stop what it is doing. Examples in Australia are the Melbourne based ‘Australian Jewish Democratic Society’, and the Sydney-based ‘Jews Against the Occupation’ and ‘Jewish Voices for Peace and Justice’. I know that these groups would object to being bunched together under the same category but I believe that the differences between them are fairly minor. In my view it is quite common for groups on the Left to believe that they are more left-wing than they really are.
Some groups that are part of the centre Left, support the creation of a Palestinian state, the end to settlements and the evacuation of existing settlements. But their emphasis is on a separation between Palestinians and Israelis. To them the focus is not so much the morality of Israel’s actions or sympathy for the Palestinians but rather Israel’s security. It seems to me that many of these groups lack an understanding of the true nature of the conflict because they too know only the Zionist version of history. They underestimate Israel’s territorial aspirations and aggression, and still hold a somewhat romantic notion of Israel.

Ultra Orthodox Jews

The ultra orthodox group the ‘True Torah Jews’, who created the organisation ‘Jews Against Zionism’, have always considered the Zionist movement and the state of Israel a complete abomination.

Members of this group who live in Israel do not recognise the state of Israel, they do not take on Israeli citizenship and refuse to speak Hebrew. They are deeply devout, spiritual people who believe that the Jewish people have sinned against God by taking action into their own hands, by not trusting God and by living a secular existence. They believe that the Jewish people were exiled out of ancient Palestine as a punishment for not living according to God’s commandments and that they had no right to go back and create a national entity. Such an entity could only be created by God at the time of the coming of the Messiah and will be a part of the plan that God has for the whole of humanity. To them the only goal for a Jew is to live a spiritual life by the Torah, trust in God without question and accept their fate humbly no matter how hard it might be simply because it is not up to humans to judge God’s actions.

These sections of Judaism have been criticised heavily in Israel and I grew up hating them and seeing them as an enemy of the country. To the Zionists these Jews represent everything that they abhor. They see them as weak and passive. They are the ones the Zionists see as having walked like lambs to the slaughter without resistance. Since Zionism considers armed resistance as the only resistance they fail to see that maintaining a strong spiritual identity is in itself a significant form of resistance. These Jews represent the very image of the Jew that the Zionists were determined to eradicate at all costs because they symbolise to them Jewish weakness and victimhood.

Jewish members of non-Jewish international organisations

There are many Jews who are not members of Jewish organisations and have instead taken on membership of international Left-wing organisations. An example is ‘Deir Yassin Remembered’, an international human rights organisation fighting for the creation of a memorial on the site of the Deir Yassin massacre near Jerusalem. DYR is also trying to address the silencing campaign that tries to prevent the Palestinian story from being told. Half of the board members of DYR are Jewish. Another example is the Geneva based organisation ‘The Association for the Creation of One State in Palestine’.

Israeli Responses

The Israeli Right

The Settler Movement

The settler movement is one of the most challenging and hard to reason with groups in Israeli society. This movement is motivated by religious zeal and a conviction that God has given the whole of Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean to the Jewish people, and that conquering and settling the land is simply in accordance with Biblical decree. They do not worry about moral justification or human rights because they believe that they are simply carrying out God’s will for the Jewish people. The Palestinians to them are just another enemy of the Jews, joining a long line of traditional Biblical enemies like Pharaoh and Hamman (from the scroll of Esther) and that like them they should simply be eradicated. No mercy or negotiation is necessary.

Members of the settler movement are probably similar in mindset to the ones who committed suicide in Masada rather than fall into the hands of the Romans 2000 years ago. They will fight to the death and will willingly sacrifice their own lives and the lives of their children for their religious values. Like the suicide bombers on the Palestinian side, the settlers are dangerous because they believe they have nothing to lose.

In the last couple of years in particular the settlers have increasingly taken the law into their own hands. They regularly invade Palestinian villages and harass and intimidate their inhabitants, they shoot at them, destroy their crops and prevent them from working their land. The army does very little to prevent these attacks.

Because of the way the Israeli political system is constructed, the settler movement has political power that is disproportionate to their public support. In fact most Israelis see the settlers as trouble makers. They see them as responsible for the escalation in the conflict with the Palestinians, and have always resented the considerable resources that have been dedicated to protecting them and expanding the settlements. The more Right wing factions in the Likud Party including Ariel Sharon himself, are great supporters of the settler movement. Ariel Sharon’s government has long been criticised for being a ‘settlers government’. Settlements have not only been allowed to flourish, they have been directly encouraged by Israeli governments since the late 1980’s using big public campaigns that offered heavy tax breaks and benefits to young couples who were prepared to settle in the occupied territories.

Benny Morris

I have included Benny Morris with the Israeli Right although he considers himself to still be a Left-wing thinker. Benny Morris is a pioneer Israeli historian who has exposed Israel’s behaviour in 1948. He has revealed in his books that the Israeli forces committed massacres and rapes and that this was part of a deliberate effort to ‘ethnically cleanse’ as many Palestinians as possible from the area that was going to become the Jewish state. In his latest book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited published in December last year, he goes further than he has ever gone before. What is so important about Morris’ work is that it stands in stark contradiction to the official version of history that Israelis grow up on and believe.

Because most Israelis are only familiar with the official Zionist version of Israel’s history, they believe that Israel was innocent and did not commit any particular injustice against the Palestinians. Morris is creating a significant change in the Israeli political psyche. He knows the truth but still believes that the crimes we committed, in particular the deliberate and systematic ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Palestinians in 1948, whilst unfortunate, are justified because he thinks that we, the Jewish people were fighting for our survival. In a recent interview in the Ha’aretz newspaper he says,

We are the greater victims in the course of history and we are also the greater potential victim. Even though we are oppressing the Palestinians, we are the weaker side here. We are a small minority in a large sea of hostile Arabs who want to eliminate us. So it’s possible than when their desire is realized, everyone will understand what I am saying to you now. Everyone will understand we are the true victims. But by then it will be too late.

Morris puts his tribal affiliation ahead of his humanity. He says, “Preserving my people is more important than universal moral concepts.” He is creating a dangerous precedent in Israel. Like many on the Left, I have always hoped that once people knew the truth about our history they would wake up to the immorality of it and would begin to question and make amends. Morris’ views were a shock to me. I could see that common sense is not going to change anything from the Israeli side. While people are so deeply motivated by fear and trauma, reason will not easily prevail.

The Israeli Centre-Right

The Israeli public

In his book The Iron Wall Avi Shlaim argues that just before the 1967 war

…the entire nation succumbed to a collective psychosis. The memory of the Holocaust was a powerful psychological force that deepened the feeling of isolation and accentuated the perception of threat. Although, objectively speaking, Israel was much stronger than its enemies, many Israelis felt that their country faced a threat of imminent destruction. For them the question was not about the Straits of Tiran but about survival.

This statement is not only true for Israel of 1967 but it does in fact describe Israel today. The majority of Israelis believe that they are facing a threat to their survival. Despite the fact that this is a completely unrealistic perception most Israelis live with a deep fear of annihilation. From their perspective even if what is being done to the Palestinians is unfair and inhumane they truly believe that it is necessary because they are facing a mortal enemy. The fact that Palestinian extremists have been taking violent action against Israelis serves in the mind of most Israelis to justify this view and distort reality completely. Israel’s right-wing leadership is motivated by the same feelings, and this is the reason why they do not accept international pressure to calm down. Israelis believe they know the truth and that outsiders don’t, that for some reason no-one outside Israel understands that they are in constant threat of being driven into the sea or murdered en masse. When one-state supporters talk about the end of an exclusively Jewish state, most Israelis hear annihilation. That is because of the same idea that Israel is the only defence Jews have against antisemitism and a second Holocaust.

Many Israelis do not know their own history. We all grew up on the Zionist version of events that basically told us that we have done nothing wrong, that the Palestinians escaped in 1948 because of bad advice from their leaders and from the Arab countries, that we were always the few against the many and that we always pursued peace but had no partners because the Arabs have always had an unreasonable hatred towards us Jews and are not interested in peace. This version of history coupled with Jewish trauma and fear of annihilation explains why most Israelis are in favour of an aggressive Right-wing government and why they seem to support the treatment of the Palestinians.

There are many Israelis who want to have nothing to do with politics. My brother and his wife who live in Tel-Aviv and are representative members of Israel’s middle class, tell me that they do not watch the news and do not read newspapers. I seem to know more about what is going on there than they do.

Given the dire economic reality in Israel, the high level of unemployment and high cost of living as well as life’s normal hardships many Israelis say that they have enough on their plate and have no energy left to worry about politics. They feel hopeless and helpless in the face of what is going on in their country but they do not seek to understand any of it or get involved. Many would rather pretend that nothing is happening. They would like to go to coffee shops, shopping malls, work and pay the mortgage and try to be ‘normal’. Some people describe themselves as living as if there is no tomorrow. So although they are not involved they live with a sense of doom and that their existence feels to them temporary. Many middle class Israelis are leaving Israel, particularly young people who have finished their military service. It is impossible to get statistics on this from the Israeli government.

The reality in Tel-Aviv and other major cities in Israel is very different from the reality in the territories. This kind of escapism and avoidance is not unique to Israeli society. Critics in Australia say that the public here is complacent and is not interested in or active enough on political issues. However, Israelis and Australians are very different in one fundamental way. In Israel everyone (or almost everyone) is a trained soldier. At 18 every boy and girl joins the military for compulsory service of two years for girls and three years for boys. After the end of compulsory service everyone is expected to serve in the reserve force. (Women are exempted when they become pregnant.) So no matter how hard they try to avoid politics, for at least one month every year, every man under the age of 45 serves in the Israeli military, which since the 1980’s increasingly means taking up duties in the occupied territories and carrying out the occupation policy. In other words, this is not a case of a government carrying out policies somewhere far away that only a few know about, as in Australia’s detention centres for example. In Israel everyone is involved directly or indirectly in carrying out government policy.

This creates a strange paradox in the Israeli mind and a kind of a ‘split personality’. On one hand they try to be ordinary citizens, living their small lives, going to work, paying their mortgage and raising children but on the other, they are also members of the military and therefore active agents of the state.

When Israelis form political opinions they are much better informed about their government’s actions and policies in the area of security than any other nation. It is not easy to keep military secrets in a country where everyone knows everything or at least knows someone who does. So when Israelis stand behind Ariel Sharon and his policies they are all more accountable for their choice than the average Australian voter.

The ‘ordinary’ Israeli soldier

Most Israeli soldiers do what they are told and are not asking questions. But there is a new attitude that is growing in the ranks that is as interesting as it is dangerous. A pilot recently said in a letter:

…our heroism today in the air force of 2003 is not to endanger our lives either under anti-aircraft fire or when fighting enemy aircraft; our heroism today is expressed in that we succeed to overcome the catastrophic feelings that arise in us as a result of our being ‘professional assassins’ in the service of the State of Israel. Our heroism is to overcome all this with courage, and to get up every morning with a renewed choice to be good soldiers who are willing and ready to take upon ourselves any mission.

A new kind of definition is emerging for heroism and that is the ability to suppress one’s conscience and doubts and perform one’s missions despite them. When Nazi soldiers said that they only followed orders, they implied that they didn’t bother to think at all about the meaning of what they were doing. Here is a case where elite Israeli servicemen admit to thinking and understanding the meaning of what they do, but choose to suppress it.

The Israeli Left

The Israeli Centre Left

Tom Segev’s criticism of the Centre Left in Israel reveals a lot about this particular group. In his introduction to the book, The Other Israel, Segev argues that Israeli voices that protest against the occupation are not effective. He believes that this is because they are hijacked and exploited to “…serve the Israeli myth”. This is partly the fault of the group itself and not only of those who oppose it. He says,

[The exploitation of the Centre Left voice] is made possible because the voices of protest come from people who do not exclude themselves from the Israeli, Zionist collective, but rather try to change it from within. Many are themselves party to the self-righteousness that uses them in order to justify the occupation, the settlements, and the continuous abuse of the Palestinians’ human rights. Israeli political Zionism has invented a special term for this dilemma: “shoot and cry”. One can withdraw from the Israeli collective and emigrate - a difficult step. One can keep silent - this is also difficult. And so most of us shoot and cry. Most of us serve in the army and condemn the occupation. This is democracy at its finest, we tell ourselves. Many of us console ourselves with private acts of compassion in aid of this or that persecuted Palestinian… We all pat each other on the back when we meet at the right cafes and, of course, we all vote for the right parties.

I believe that these days what used to be the Centre Left is showing more courage. This is demonstrated by articles written by people like Yossi Sarid and Avraham Burg who are prominent left-wing Israeli politicians. They both feel and describe their turmoil and discomfort in criticising Israel’s policies internationally but they are doing it anyway. It shows that they are beginning to cross the emotional barrier made by their loyalty to the Israeli collective.

The ‘Courage to Refuse’ Movement

‘Courage to Refuse’ is a movement that has grown out of what the media referred to as ‘The Combatants’ Letter’ - a letter which was first published in January 2002 and was since then signed by hundreds of combat reserve soldiers in the Israel Defence Forces. The signers of the letter declare that they will not take part in any activity whose objective is to perpetuate the occupation, and hence they refuse to serve beyond the ‘67 borders. Over 280 of the signers have served prison terms for their refusal to serve in the occupied territories.

Recently a group of 27 pilots wrote a similar letter, which they presented to the Government. As a result, those who were in active duty were dismissed from service. Another group from one of Israel’s most prestigious commando units, ‘Sayeret Matkal’, have also expressed their opposition to Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians.

The weight of the pilots’ and of the ‘Sayeret Matkal’ declarations is probably hard to appreciate in Australia. In Israel pilots and members of the Sayeret are the most highly revered of all military personnel. Sayeret Matkal are highly trained commandos that are used for complicated and dangerous missions often outside Israel and in collaboration with the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. These people’s stories are the stuff of myths and legends in Israel. Their full identity is always kept secret. The quality of their training is one of the highest in the world. Australian special forces are trained by them regularly in order to learn from their experience.

The number of refuseniks is not large and the importance of their position is not in their ability to bring the Israeli military to a halt. Their position is important in two ways. One, because they have served the state of Israel in ways that are more significant than many other members of the military, they cannot easily be labelled ‘cowards’ or ‘traitors’. They carry the dignity of having served their country in the most honourable and courageous ways possible. Second, their statements are in fact testimonies of what they have seen and done. They are the kind of testimonies that will be used some time in the future when Israel stands trial for human rights violations and war crimes. When Jewish conservatives in Australia complain that criticism against Israel is nothing more than antisemitism, the testimonies of these incredible Israeli servicemen prove them wrong.

At the time of writing, the number of refuseniks as they are called has reached 594.

Yonatan Shapira, a pilot and operations leader in a squadron of Black Hawk helicopters, and one of the initiators of the pilots’ letter said the following in a speech he gave at Ben Gurion University in January:

Let’s go back now to the night between 22 to 23 of July 2002. It is late at night, the F16 squadron is at the air force base. The crew which is on-call consists of a pilot and a navigator. Scramble to Gaza. Waiting for the order to attack. The order is received. The bombs are dropped. Landing. De-briefing, and return to routine.

On this specific mission a one-ton bomb was dropped (equal to a hundred suicide bombs) on a house in the Al-Deredg quarter in Gaza, one of the most crowded neighborhoods in Gaza, indeed in the whole world.

During this action 14 human beings were killed and more than 150 others were wounded.

Four families, 9 children, 2 women and 2 men, were wiped out by the crew of the airplane that executed this mission and hit the target in the full belief that they were defending Israelis. They honestly believed this.

This is what Dan Halutz (commander of the air force) had to say about the mission: “I declare that everything taking place before the mission is justified according to my moral compass?” And to the pilots he said: “Sleep well tonight ? you executed this mission perfectly.”

We did not sleep well that night, and we continued not to sleep when: On August 31, 2002 - when Darama was annihilated and with him 4 children.

On April 8, 2003 - when Arbid and Al-Halabi were annihilated and with them 2 children and 5 adults.

On June 10, 2003 - During an attempt to annihilate Rantisi, a girl, a woman and 5 men were killed.

On June 11, 2003 - when Abu-Nahal was annihilated and with him 2 women and 5 men.

On June 12, 2003 - when Salah Taha and with him a one-year old infant, a woman and 5 men were annihilated.

And more, and more …

And also three months ago in a blitz of five attacks 2 wanted persons were wiped out and with them another 12 innocent people.

…So we did not sleep at night and we wrote this letter…

Shapira goes on to say:

…If I must kill a suicide bomber on his way to a terrorist attack, and even pay with my life for this, in the knowledge that I save other human lives - I will do this with all my heart. But none of the so-called selective annihilations was directed against a terrorist on his way to an attack (and the IDF corroborates this). So we must fight terrorism, but at the same time we must fight not to become more and more like the terrorists.

The fact that buses explode here, does not justify Sharon, Mofaz and Air Force Chief Dan Halutz’s decision to ‘unintentionally’ kill nine children in their sleep, and to sow terror in a population of millions who live under a reign of closures, curfews and checkpoints. A population enclosed by walls and camps, under the guns of an enormous and frightening army, equipped to the teeth with jet-planes which shake the skies, and attack-helicopters who time and again send rockets into cars and into the windows of houses, in crowded and destitute cities.

The thing that upsets Shapira the most is what he sees as the military’s betrayal of the principles of ‘Human Dignity’ and ‘Purity of Arms’. Shapira and his mates are now labelled traitors in Israel because they dare to expose to the world the truth of Israel’s actions against the Palestinians.

The refuseniks website contains the stories and statements of many servicemen most of whom served in the territories and have done things that they have come to feel are immoral and unjustified.

The Israeli Peace Movement

The Israeli peace movement consists of a large number of small groups. Organisations such as, ‘Yesh Gvul’, ‘Gush Shalom’, ‘New Profile’, ‘The Other Israel’, ‘The Movement Against Israeli Apartheid in Palestine’ (MAIAP), Taayush (Arab Jewish Partnership) and B’Tselem, are increasingly outspoken in their opposition to the occupation and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people. They frequently use the terms ‘apartheid’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in their narrative and they deeply object the separation wall. Links to the websites of these groups are available through my website.

The groups vary in their views and what they perceive to be a solution to the conflict but they all have one thing in common. They are deeply concerned about the future of Israel. They see the occupation and the treatment of the Palestinian people as something that is destroying the very fabric of Israeli society. Many of these groups organise demonstrations and try to cooperate with Palestinians inside and outside Israel. This in itself is a unique stand that challenges the innate racism in Israel against all Arabs and against Palestinians in particular. They have a strong web presence and run their own news services. They distribute articles and news and information about the situation in Israel several times daily.

Ye’diot A’haronot Israel’s most popular tabloid, reported a few weeks ago that Left wing activists in Israel are now targeted by the ‘Shin Bet’, Israel’s internal security service. Anyone who is active in a Left wing movement is now on a list, which is distributed to all the security staff in Israel’s international airport. Anyone on this list entering or leaving the country is now subjected to interrogations, strip searches and harassment. Apartments are searched, computer records confiscated and people are called to police stations to something called ‘clarifications’. These are forced meetings with Shin Bet staff members whose job is to intimidate and threaten the activists. For the time being they are using psychological intimidation telling Left wing activists to stop what they are doing and to warn their friends to do the same. Parents and friends of activists regardless of their positions and views are also a target.

Conclusion

Both Israeli Jews and Jews outside of Israel live in fear and have a sense that their survival is not guaranteed. This is because persecution trauma is an inseparable part of Jewish identity. However, because Israelis are different and have developed a unique identity as Israelis in the last 56 years, their responses to the conflict are not always identical to those of Diaspora Jews.

It is quite clear that the debate and dissent in Israel are much more vibrant and daring than the debate in Jewish circles outside Israel. Israelis are much more familiar with Israeli reality than the Jews outside of it, and can testify about what they themselves see and do in the name of their country. Israeli democracy has allowed debate and criticism whereas profound fear of antisemitism in Jewish communities outside Israel has been stifling and silencing debates.