When we first saw a previous article by Israel Shamir, some of us quietly wondered if this man could be for real - or if some inventive Aryan had decided to let go of his emotions and Bonus" - the license to say what these days Gentiles cannot say without having the Marxist-inspired "Human Rights" moloch breathe down their necks.
Now it turns out that Israel Shamir is definitely real - and gifted in political perception. He is described as
". . . one of best-known and most respected Russian Israeli writers and journalists. He wrote for Haaretz, BBC, Pravda and translated Agnon, Joyce and Homer into Russian.
"He lives in Tel Aviv and writes a weekly column in the Vesti, the biggest Russian-language paper in Israel.
"He can be reached at shamiri_@netvision.net.il"
The sharp analysis below is something to behold. It is a startling treatise. Unfortunately for Shamir's plan to work, the Israeli "wolf" would have to turn into a "sheep" - which would be wishful thinking.
The white apartheid regime in Rhodesia and in South Africa, which were similar to the Israeli apartheid regime in its policies and tactics, tried Shamir's pipe liberal pipe dream. Look what happened to the Whites in Rhodesian Zimbabwe! Look what's happening to White South Africans under Black majority rule!
The Israeli power elite thinks that it can rule by the sword forever, having the Western countries infiltrated, befuddled and neutralized by their Zionist Fifth Column. As you read the essay below, you will sense that the end is approaching for them.
Too much blood has been spilled in the Middle East. Too much destruction, pain and humiliation has been inflicted on the Palestinians for too long by the Israelis. Only a bloody catharsis will allow a new and fresh beginning.
Keep that in mind as you are reading this liberal, self-searching essay:
[start]
Israel Shamir:
Dear friends,
Re: Uri Avneri's letter
Uri Avneri, of Peace Block, published in the net an article arguing that peace is still possible on the basis of Two Nations - Two States, removal of settlements and return of small amount of refugees into Israel, in order to sustain the Jewish character of the state.
Israel Shamir whose Acid Test was recently published in the net, wrote this response, while Vincent White and Ellen Cantarow edited this English version.
FUTURE IS NOW
Last September, just a few weeks before the eruption of intifada, I wandered over to Cinemateque square in the upscale area of Tel Aviv. In the cool breeze of late afternoon, a few dozen retirees with their families were having a nice outing. The old ladies knitted, kids drew flags on the big sheets of paper. This peaceful gathering was the commemoration by the Israeli peace camp of the seventh anniversary of the Oslo accords, and Uri Avneri was a keynote speaker. This handsome man with a noble head of white hair invoked, as he always does, his vision of two states coexisting in the Holy Land, an independent Palestine next to the Jewish state. Every word sounded right, but it was as exciting as yesterday's news, as entertaining as a rerun of an old TV serial. Not surprisingly, there weren't any young activists, as the traditional peace camp stopped to attract dynamic persons.
Mr. Avneri is recycling the same tired speech over the Net these days, focusing on the current Israeli latest scare, the Palestinian demand for the return of refugees. Please don't misunderstand me, Uri Avneri is a man of good intentions, a brave supporter of Palestinian rights, an activist doing more than his share and an efficient organizer. It's just that his political agenda is deader than a dodo.
Face the harsh truth: the idea of two states in Palestine is, and has always been, a bluff. After being partitioned for only 19 years, Palestine has been united for 33 years. No Israeli or Palestinian below the age of 40 even remembers the interregnum 1948-1967, which seems to Mr. Avneri to be a Paradise Lost. No Israeli politician, including the late lamented Mr. Rabin, has ever seriously considered relinquishing any part of historical Palestine. The endless negotiations have been a show designed to entice the public. 'The talks will be resumed soon', sung Arik Einstein 30 years ago, and the same song still goes on.
Meantime, behind the painted screen of 'temporary military occupation', the hard-nosed men confiscated fields and houses, constructed settlements and imprisoned thousands of Palestinians. A succession of leftist and rightist Israeli regimes perpetuated this legal fiction in order to deny the civic rights of the conquered population. It was a brilliant idea, worthy of the Jewish genius: to carry on the negotiations forever, and to give a lip service to the idea of two states.
Honesty forces me to tell you loud and clear: My Palestinian and Israeli friends, you were duped. They played a cruel game with you, teasing you with the empty promises like the one presently served by Mr. Avneri. There were - and there are two ways out of Palestinian serfdom. One is to beat Israel. The second one is to join it. The third way, of a new partition, is just an illusion, a juicy carrot tied in front of the donkey.
If I were a conspiracy-theory fan, I could imagine that these good people of the Israeli peace movement intentionally supplied the left leg to the shaky apartheid structure. By continually repainting the [old armistice] Green Line, they have endorsed the non-citizen status of the Palestinians in their own land. By calling the lands "Occupied territories", they exempted themselves from having to fight the exclusion of the Palestinians from the country's political life. By combating the annexation of the territories, they helped to concoct the joke of independent bantustans.
But the idea of such a conspiracy is just too mind-boggling. I do not think Mr. Avneri and the rest of peace camp received their briefings in the offices of the Shabak. They were just too keen to believe that this or other war criminal would conclude a fair peace with the Palestinians. The generals obliged and kept the illusion alive.
Even a kid watching James Bond movies eventually understands that the hero won't be eaten by crocodiles and won't die in the flames. There is even less reason to fear that an Israeli government would sign a just peace with Palestinians. They will always find a reason why not to do so.
What sort of 'peace' Israel might provide? In an article published in that popular keeper of the Zionist faith, the New York Times, (15.12.2000), a good American Jew named Richard Bernstein recommended to President-elect Bush a recent book by another pundit of that ilk, Robert Kaplan. He discloses the real Israeli peace plan:
"For decades I have heard that there would be either a Greater Israel, or a Palestinian state. It turns out there will be both: a Palestinian mini-state, without control over its skies or main highways, situated within a dynamic Israel that will continue to attract workers from across the border, making it the stabilizing force of Greater Syria".
Thank you, kind Bernstein and gentle Kaplan, for making it plain, that Israel and its American Zionist allies intend to keep the Palestinians forever locked in the reservations, competing for the work in the Jewish state with their brethren from Jordan and Syria. That is the peace that Israeli doves have been cooing about.
If it works, the US could adopt the idea, granting independence to the Afro-Hispanic US population with a capital in the South Bronx. The new state would consist of five hundred enclaves circled by superhighways and miles of reinforced concrete walls, and would contain all of the US's non-whites. If that's peace, I choose war.
And now that I think about it, I've changed my mind. I do not feel generous enough to give the Israeli peace camp the benefit of doubt as to their bona fides. Too often, they keep using that perky phrase, 'the Jewish state'. It's easy to understand why, as Mr. Avneri and his comrades came of age in the years of the crude biological racism, its ideologies created by Weininger, Nordau, Chamberlain and Hitler. They actually believe that a person belongs to a nation by a virtue of blood. For them, a Jew is always and forever a Jew, thus the notion of 'two states for two nations'. I think, they actually want to have a Jewish state.
Sorry to shock your best feelings, but the notion of 'a Jew' is a fiction, a phantom created by Nazi ideologues and perpetuated by Zionist mind. The real Jewish people of the Pale and ghetto are long gone, they have disappeared, they have been assimilated in America, Russia, France and elsewhere. Today we are something quite different - Americans, Russians and Palestinians of Jewish origin. Whatever our grandfathers had in the way of a national culture, we have lost. A Cohen from San Francisco is no more a member of the Jewish tribe, than a Jones from Atlanta is a Welshman, or a Mazzoni from New York is a Sicilian. The small, religious Jewish residual minority of Bne Brak and Brooklyn not only does not need the Zionist state: it doesn't even consider it "Jewish".
This phantom of a Jew survives on the external life-supporting machine. It is a strange but formidable coalition of American Jewish nostalgia for the lost Jewish life, functionaries of the Jewish organizations, Shoah businessmen, pumping cash out of Germany, charity collectors, Jewish Mafiosi, seeking a safe haven, right-wing Christian nutcases, believers in the Elders of Zion, practical military industries' salesmen. Their joint forces could not resurrect the Jewish people of old, but they brought forth the international Zionist super-Mafia, a materialized world plot, like in the Umberto Eco novel. However, this monster has nothing to do with us, real people in real Israel, where the word 'Jew' has no meaning.
Mr. Avneri, have you visited Maalot or Ophakim lately? In those towns you hardly encounter anyone that you would consider to be a 'Jew'. If you speak Ukrainian or Amharic, you might get by. The fact is that we have not two nations, but a variety of communities. The Moroccans of Ramle, the Russians of Ashdod, the software wizkids of Hertzliya Pituah, the millionaires of Caesarea, the settlers of Tapuah, the scholars of Mea Shearim, the Ethiopians of Ophakim, these wildly diverse communities constitute a Jewish nation only in the imagination of the Zionist establishment, the pre-'48 settlers and their aging children. 'The first Israel' has good reason for this flight of fantasy, as this minority still monopolizes power over the other communities and retains all its perks.
No outsider has ever succeeded in getting anywhere close to the center of power. There is hardly a Russian (20% of voters), or a Moroccan (30% of voters) in an independent position of power and influence in Israel. When an Oriental Jew was elected to a ceremonial post of President, the 'first Israel' went into mourning.
An unfortunate problem for the dominant elite is that they have run out of talent and ideas. They brought exclusivity to its extreme, and adoration of military to idolatry. The farce of general Sharon battling for power with his second-in-command general Barak, with the ancient murderer of Kana, Shimon Peres as a Great White Hope, is surely adequate proof of the first Israel's bankruptcy. The Zionist idea has collapsed; only blood and war keeps the Golem in motion.
Behind the smoke of racist illusions, we already live in united Palestine. The Green line exists only in our minds. It is in everyone's common interest to abolish it completely and establish equality before the law for everybody in all of Palestine (Israel), from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Then we can enjoy one law for both the native son of the land and a newcomer, as the Bible commands us. One law for a kibbutznik from Afikim, and for a fellah from Yatta.
It could happen years ago, if the Israeli left would not nurture the illusions of partition. Even in Jerusalem, no houses would have been demolished, no lands confiscated, if the Palestinian population of the city would participate in elections and send their deputies to the City Council. Without the Green Line, the horrors of occupation would long be ended, just as the military rule in the Palestinian Galilee was ended in 1966. The 40% of the Knesset elected by the Palestinians would have been able to cancel all discriminatory laws including the Law of Absentee Property and the present Law of Citizenship.
In a representative state, the return of Palestinian refugees does not have to be traumatic. If the refugees from Deheishe will move back to Sataf and Suba, just 10 miles away, if the peasants of Deir Yassin will come back, nobody will suffer. The peasants of Sheich Munis will receive a hefty compensation, at the expense of Tel Aviv University which is built on their land. Maybe they will use their compensation to build new houses next to the university, or just buy flats in Ramat Aviv Gimel. We can borrow a leaf from the Polish book of law: Poland restored the property to Jewish refugees, but did not permit the expulsion of the current tenants.
The removal of the Green line will actually be good for all of us, even for the settlers. They should be able to remain and live like equals in our commonwealth. Without the army to enforce their superiority, they'd either mend their evil ways and become good neighbors, or run away.
So how do we get to the Promised Land? We're already there! We already have one state, historical Palestine is unified. Stop the empty rhetoric of occupation and two states. We need no tricks, no 'creative solutions', just the good old universal suffrage, the "One Man -One Vote", as demanded our grandfathers in the Eastern Europe. They received it from the Gentiles 150 years ago, it is the right time to give now.
"It is useless to shout to the drowning moneylender "Give me your hand!" He has never given, and he won't now. Instead, shout: "Take my hand!" and he will clutch at it". This was the advise of the Sufi sage, Haji Nasr ad-Din. The Israeli establishment will never give anything. The Palestinians and their Jewish allies have to say, "Take it!" and demand that the Holy Land never be divided again.
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Thought for the Day - (. . . for emphasis!)
"The Zionist idea has collapsed; only blood and war keeps the Golem in motion."
Definition of a "Golem": In medieval Jewish legend, an automaton made to resemble a human being and given life by a magic incantation.