Uri Avnery
17.1.09
The Boss Has Gone Mad
169 YEARS before the
lines, under the title “To
The German-Jewish poet was talking about
of Christian Europe. This is what he wrote (in my rough translation):
“For a thousand years and more / We have had an understanding / You
allow me to breathe / I accept your crazy raging // Sometimes, when the days
get darker / Strange moods come upon you / Till
you decorate your claws / With the lifeblood from my veins // Now
our friendship is firmer / Getting
stronger by the day / Since the raging
started in me / Daily more and more like you.”
Zionism, which arose some
50 years after this was written, is fully realizing this prophesy. We Israelis have
become a nation like all nations, and the memory of the Holocaust causes us,
from time to time, to behave like the worst of them. Only a few of us know this
poem, but
as a whole lives it out.
In this war, politicians
and generals have repeatedly quoted the words: “The boss has gone mad!” originally
shouted by vegetable vendors in the market, in the sense of “The boss has gone crazy
and is selling the tomatoes at a loss!” But in the course of time the jest has
turned into a deadly doctrine that often appears in Israeli public discourse:
in order to deter our enemies, we must behave like madmen, go on the rampage,
kill and destroy mercilessly.
In this war, this has
become political and military dogma: only if we kill “them” disproportionately,
killing a thousand of “them” for ten of “ours”, will they understand that it’s
not worth it to mess with us. It will be “seared into their consciousness” (a
favorite Israeli phrase these days). After this, they will think twice before
launching another Qassam rocket against us, even in response to what we do,
whatever that may be.
It is impossible to
understand the viciousness of this war without taking into account the
historical background: the feeling of victimhood after all that has been done
to the Jews throughout the ages, and the conviction that after the Holocaust,
we have the right to do anything, absolutely anything, to defend ourselves, without
any inhibitions due to law or morality.
WHEN THE killing and
destruction in
something happened in faraway
that was not connected with the war, but was very much connected with it. The
Israeli film “Waltz with Bashir” was awarded a prestigious prize. The media
reported it with much joy and pride, but somehow carefully managed not to
mention the subject of the film. That by itself was an interesting phenomenon:
saluting the success of a film while ignoring its contents.
The subject of this
outstanding film is one of the darkest chapters in our history: the Sabra and
Shatila massacre. In the course of
militia carried out, under the auspices of the Israeli army, a heinous massacre
of hundreds of helpless Palestinian refugees who were trapped in their camp, men,
women, children and old people. The film describes this atrocity with meticulous
accuracy, including our part in it.
All this was not even
mentioned in the news about the award. At the festive ceremony, the director of
the film did not avail himself of the opportunity to protest against the events
in
hard to say how many women and children were killed while this ceremony was going
on – but it is clear that the massacre in Gaza is much worse than that 1982 event,
which moved 400 thousand Israelis to leave their homes and hold a spontaneous mass
protest in Tel-Aviv. This time, only 10 thousand stood up to be counted.
The official Israeli Board
of Inquiry that investigated the Sabra massacre found that the Israeli
government bore “indirect responsibility” for the atrocity. Several senior
officials and officers were suspended. One of them was the division commander,
Amos Yaron. Not one of the other accused, from the Minister of Defense, Ariel
Staff, Rafael Eitan, spoke a word of regret, but Yaron did express remorse in a
speech to his officers, and admitted: “Our sensitivities have been blunted”.
BLUNTED SENSITIVITIES are
very evident in the
War.
soldiers died. The planners of
War II decided to avoid such a long war and such heavy Israeli casualties. They
invented the “mad boss” principle: demolishing whole neighborhoods, devastating
areas, destroying infrastructures. In 33 days of war, some 1000 Lebanese, almost
all of them civilians, were killed – a record already broken in this war by the
17th day. Yet in that war our army suffered casualties on the
ground, and public opinion, which in the beginning supported the war with the
same enthusiasm as this time, changed rapidly.
The smoke from
learn its lessons. And the main lesson was: not to risk the life of even one
single soldier. A war without casualties (on our side). The method: to use the
overwhelming firepower of our army to pulverize everything standing in its way
and to kill everybody moving in the area. To kill not only the fighters on the
other side, but every human being who might possibly turn out to harbor hostile
intentions, even if they are obviously an ambulance attendant, a driver in a
food convoy or a doctor saving lives. To destroy every building from which our
troops could conceivably be shot at – even a school full of refugees, the sick
and the wounded. To bomb and shell whole neighborhoods, buildings, mosques,
schools, UN food convoys, even ruins under which the injured are buried.
The media devoted several
hours to the fall of a Qassam missile on a home in Ashkelon, in which three residents
suffered from shock, and did not waste many words on the forty women and
children killed in a UN school, from which “we were shot at” – an assertion
that was quickly exposed as a blatant lie.
The firepower was also used
to sow terror – shelling everything from a hospital to a vast UN food depot,
from a press vantage point to the mosques. The standard pretext: “we were shot
at from there”.
This would have been
impossible, had not the whole country been infected with blunted sensitivities.
People are no longer shocked by the sight of a mutilated baby, nor by children
left for days with the corpse of their mother, because the army did not let
them leave their ruined home. It seems that almost nobody cares anymore: not
the soldiers, not the pilots, not the media people, not the politicians, not
the generals. A moral insanity, whose primary exponent is Ehud Barak. Though
even he may be upstaged by Tzipi Livni, who smiled while talking about the
ghastly events.
Even Heinrich Heine could
not have imagined that.
THE LAST DAYS were dominated
by the “Obama effect”.
We are on board an
airplane, and suddenly a huge black mountain appears out of the clouds. In the cockpit,
panic breaks out: How to avoid a collision?
The planners of the war
chose the timing with care: during the holidays, when everybody was on vacation,
and while President Bush was still around. But they somehow forgot to take into
consideration a fateful date: next Tuesday Barack Obama will enter the White House.
This date is now casting
a huge shadow on events. The Israeli Barak understands that if the American
Barack gets angry, that would mean disaster. Conclusion: the horrors of
inauguration. This week that determined all political and military decisions.
Not “the number of rockets”, not “victory”, not “breaking Hamas”.
WHEN THERE is a
ceasefire, the first question will be: Who won?
In
talk is about the “picture of victory” – not victory itself, but the
“picture”. That is essential, in order
to convince the Israeli public that the whole business has been worthwhile. At
this moment, all the thousands of media people, to the very last one, have been
mobilized to paint such a “picture”. The other side, of course, will paint a
different one.
The Israeli leaders will
boast of two “achievements”: the end of the rockets and the sealing of the
Gaza-Egypt border (the co-called “Philadelphi route”. Dubious achievements: the
launching of the Qassams could have been prevented without a murderous war, if
our government had been ready to negotiate with Hamas after they won the
Palestinian elections. The tunnels under the Egyptian border would not have
been dug in the first place, if our government had not imposed the deadly
blockade on the Strip.
But the main achievement
of the war planners lies in the very barbarity of their plan: the atrocities will
have, in their view, a deterrent effect that will hold for a long time.
Hamas, on the other side,
will assert that their survival in the face of the mighty Israeli war machine,
a tiny David against a giant Goliath, is by itself a huge victory. According to
the classic military definition, the winner in a battle is the army that
remains on the battlefield when it’s over. Hamas remains. The Hamas regime in
the
stands, in spite of all the efforts to eliminate it. That is a significant
achievement.
Hamas will also point out
that the Israeli army was not eager to enter the Palestinian towns, in which
their fighters were entrenched. And indeed: the army told the government that
the conquest of Gaza city could cost the lives of about 200 soldiers, and no
politician was ready for that on the eve of elections.
The very fact that a guerrilla
force of a few thousand lightly armed fighters held out for long weeks against
one of the world’s mightiest armies with enormous firepower, will look to
millions of Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims, and not only to them, like
an unqualified victory.
In the end, an agreement
will be concluded that will include the obvious terms. No country can tolerate
its inhabitants being exposed to rocket fire from beyond the border, and no
population can tolerate a choking blockade. Therefore (1) Hamas will have to
give up the launching of missiles, (2) Israel will have to open wide the
crossings between the Gaza Strip and the outside world, and (3) the entry of
arms into the Strip will be stopped (as far as possible), as demanded by Israel.
All this could have happened without war, if our government had not boycotted
Hamas.
HOWEVER, THE worst results
of this war are still invisible and will make themselves felt only in years to
come:
has imprinted on world consciousness a terrible image of itself. Billions of
people have seen us as a blood-dripping monster. They will never again see
state that seeks justice, progress and peace. The American Declaration of
approval of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”. That is a wise
principle.
Even worse is the impact
on hundreds of millions of Arabs around us: not only will they see the Hamas
fighters as the heroes of the Arab nation, but they will also see their own
regimes in their nakedness: cringing, ignominious, corrupt and treacherous.
The Arab defeat in the
1948 war brought in its wake the fall of almost all the existing Arab regimes
and the ascent of a new generation of nationalist leaders, exemplified by Gamal
Abd-al-Nasser. The 2009 war may bring about the fall of the current crop of Arab
regimes and the ascent of a new generation of leaders – Islamic fundamentalists
who hate
and all the West..
In coming years it will
become apparent that this war was sheer madness. The boss has indeed gone mad –
in the original sense of the word.