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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
'Just World News'
Tue, 04 Aug 2009
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/190809-Key-Zionist-pioneer-renounces-Zionism
I have it in my hand now.
I just learned, in this open letter published today by Uri Avnery, that Yermiya, recently renounced the ideology and practice of Zionism with these stirring words:
I, a 95 year old Sabra (native born Israeli Jew), who has plowed its fields, planted trees, built a house and fathered sons, grandsons and great-grandsons, and also shed his blood in the battle for the founding of the State of Israel,
Declare herewith that I renounce my belief in the Zionism which has failed, that I shall not be loyal to the Jewish fascist state and its mad visions, that I shall not sing anymore its nationalist anthem, that I shall stand at attention only on the days of mourning for those fallen on both sides in the wars, and that I look with a broken heart at an Israel that is committing suicide and at the three generations of offspring that I have bred and raised in it.
... for 42 years, Israel turned what should have been Palestine into a giant detention camp, and is holding a whole people captive under an oppressive and cruel regime, with the sole aim of taking away their country, come what may!!!
The IDF eagerly suppresses their efforts at rebellion, with the active assistance of the settlement thugs, by the brutal means of a sophisticated Apartheid and a choking blockade, inhuman harassment of the sick and of women in labor, the destruction of their economy and the theft of their best land and water.
Over all this there is waving the black flag of the frightening contempt for the life and blood of the Palestinians. Israel will never be forgiven for the terrible toll of blood spilt, and especially the blood of children, in hair-raising quantities...
Avnery's response is fascinating. He too is a veteran peace activist, and of about the same generation as Yermiya. But in the letter he is, I think, pleading with Yermiya not to renounce Zionism completely, but rather to reconnect with the "idealistic" Zionism that they both experienced during their youth.
He writes,
When I think of our youth, yours and mine, one scene is never far from my mind: the 1947 Dalia festival.
Tens of thousands of young men and women were sitting on the slope of a hill in the natural amphitheater near Kibbutz Dalia on Mount Carmel. Ostensibly it was a festival of folk dancing, but in reality it was much more - a great celebration of the new Hebrew culture which we were then creating in the country, in which folk dancing played an important role. The dancing groups came mainly from the kibbutzim and the youth movements, and the dances were original Hebrew creations, interwoven with Russian, Polish, Yemenite and Hassidic ones. A group of Arabs danced the Debka in ecstasy, dancing and dancing and dancing on.
In the middle of the event, the loudspeakers announced that members of the UN Commission of Inquiry, which had been sent by the international organization to decide upon the future of the country, were joining us. When we saw them entering the amphitheater, the tens of thousands spontaneously rose to their feet and started to sing the "Hatikva", the national anthem, with a holy fervor that reverberated from the surrounding mountains.
We did not know then that within half a year the great Hebrew-Arab war would break out - our War of Independence and their Naqba. I believe that most of the 6000 young people who fell in the war on our side, as well as the thousands that were wounded - like you and me - were present at that moment in Dalia, seeing each other and singing together.
What state did we think of then? What state did we set out to create?
What has happened to the Hebrew society, the Hebrew culture, the Hebrew morality that we were so proud of then?
Then, he pleads this:
You, Dov, have invested in this state much too much to turn your back on it in a gesture of anger and despair. The most hackneyed and worn-out slogan in Israel is also true: "We don't have another state!"
Other states in the world have sunk to the depths of depravity and committed unspeakable crimes, far beyond our worst sins, and still brought themselves back to the family of nations and redeemed their souls.
We and all the members of our generation, who were among those who created this state, bear a heavy responsibility for it. A responsibility to our offspring, to those oppressed by this state, to the entire world. From this responsibility we cannot escape.
Even at your respectable age, and precisely because of it and because of what you represent, you must be a compass for the young and tell them: This state belongs to you, you can change it, don't allow the nationalist wreckers to steal it from you!
True, 61 years ago we had another state in mind. Now, after our state has tumbled to where it is today, we must remember that other state, and remind everybody, every day, what the state should have been like, what it can be like, and not allow our vision to disappear like a dream. Let's lend our shoulders to every effort to repair and heal!
These are very weighty issues that these two longtime Zionists are debating.
I remember the evening I had back in early March with longtime Jewish-Israeli nonviolence activist Amos Gvirtz. Gvirtz is "only" in his late 60s or early 70s. But like Avnery and Yermiya he grew up in Israel.
He told me in March,
I became an anti-Zionist after Oslo, when the government expelled the Arabs of Jahhaleenn to make room for the big new settlement area if Maale Adummim... Like the Zionists, I believe we Jews need a state of our own. But unlike the Zionists I don't think this should be built on the ruins of someone else's home. So our state need not necessarily be right here.
Gvirtz, too, like Avnery, identified a strong link between the events of 1947-48 and the situation today-- though the nature of the link Gvirtz identified was very different from Avnery's: "The Nakba wasn't really a single event that happened in 1948, so much as a long-drawn-out process, that continues to this day." In other words, he was quite unwilling to neatly divide Israeli history, as Avnery still does, between the idealized, pre-lapsarian days of the 1947 Dalia festival and the post-lapsarian era that was inaugurated-- in Avnery's view-- only by Israel's conquest of the West Bank.
Obviously, this is a very weighty issue for Zionists and their supporters to grapple with. Did 1967 mark a notable break between a laudable past and a troublesome present? Or were there indeed, as Gvirtz and many other current non- and anti-Zionists have argued, many elements of continuity from the 1947 period right through to the present?
Anyway, I'd love to see the whole text of the latest Yermiya letter from which Avnery is quoting, if anyone can provide a link to it, preferably in English. The only recent English text that I could find by him online was this letter, published in the Communist weekly Zo Haderekh in June 2008.
In it, Yermiya was returning to Defense Minister Barak the invitation he had been sent to attend a ceremony to honor all veterans of Israel's 1948 "War of Independence".
He wrote,
As a veteran of the 1948 war, who was already wounded in face to face combat two weeks before the Declaration of the State, I feel obliged herewith to return the invitation to you, as Minister of Defence. I do so regretfully but see this as my duty.
I consider you, Ehud Barak, as one of the top military commanders and prominent political leaders who were responsible for converting the army from "the Israeli Defence Force" to an army of occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people and defender of the criminal settlements in their country.
40 years of occupation have utterly corrupted the Israeli army and all strata of Israeli society.They are both characterized by the nationalist 'east wind' [the east wind brings the chamsin and locusts - C.A.] which blows and kindles conflagrations of endless wars, which threaten our people and land with the third and final destruction. Your share in the responsibility for all this is enormous, and therefore I return your invitation to you, without thanks...
===
Israel's Own Psyche
Uri Avnery (Dateline Jerusalem)
11 August 2009
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?section=opinion&xfile=data/opinion/2009/august/opinion_august57.xml
On the morrow of the Six-day War, Amos Kenan came to my editorial office. He was in a state of shock. As a reserve soldier, he had just witnessed the emptying of three villages in the Latrun area. Men and women, old people and children, had been driven out in the burning June sun on a foot march in the direction of Ramallah, dozens of
kilometers away. It reminded him of sights from the
 Holocaust.
I told him to sit down there and then and write an eyewitness account. I rushed to the Knesset (of which I was then a member) and delivered the report to the Prime Minister, Levy Eshkol, and to several ministers, including Menachem Begin and Victor Shem-Tov. But it was too late – the villages had already been razed to the ground. In their place, the Canada Park was created later on with the help of that country, to its lasting shame.
Kenan's report is a human and literary document. It says much about its author, who died this week. Amos Kenan was a moral person.
The country was the center of his mental universe. It was the focus of his worldview, his life work and his actions. I don't hesitate to say: he was the lover of this country. In his youth, he belonged for a time to the "Canaanite" group and adopted some of their ideas. But he drew from them the opposite conclusions from those of their founder, the poet Yonatan Ratosh, who denied the very notion of Arab nationhood, as well as the existence of the Palestinian Arab people. Kenan, like me, was convinced that the future of Israel was bound up with the future of Palestine, because the common land commands a partnership of the two peoples. I first met him during the 1948 war, on one of my short leaves. At a friend's place, I bumped into the young soldier who was also 
on leave.
He was born in the country and had been a member of the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair ("The Youth Guard") movement, whose idealistic-moral ideology certainly helped to shape his character. Like many leftist youngsters at the time, he joined the Lehi (Stern Group) underground, which then had a pro-Soviet orientation. With the founding of the state, all Lehi members were drafted into the new Israeli army.
We discovered that we had similar ideas about the future of the newly founded state. We both believed that we had created not only a new state, but also a new nation – the Hebrew nation, which is not just another part of the Jewish Diaspora, but a new entity altogether, with a new culture and a new character. Since this nation was born in the country, it does not belong to Europe or America, but to the region of which it is a part, and all the peoples of this region are our natural allies.
On this basis we objected to the 1956 war, in which Israel put itself at the service of two tainted colonialist regimes, the French and the British. While the war was still going on, a group came together and decided to outline another path for the state. We called ourselves "Semitic Action", and apart from Kenan and myself, our number included the former Lehi leader Nathan Yellin-Mor, Boaz Evron and other good people.
Immediately after the 1967 Six-Day War, the same group set up an organisation called "Federation Israel-Palestine", in which Kenan also played a role. We advocated the immediate founding of the State of Palestine in all the Palestinian territories that we had just conquered, and the setting up of a federation of Israel and Palestine. Many who opposed this then, now recognize that it was the right idea at the right moment. In 1974, when I was the first "Zionist" Israeli to establish secret contacts with the PLO leadership, I tried, in accord with them, to set up a public body in Israel to continue the contacts openly. Several meetings were held, a lot of discussion took place, and nothing came of it. So we decided to take the bull by the horns: we published a call for the creation of an organisation for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The political aspect, important as it was, was only one of Kenan's many parts. He was a satirist, writer, poet, painter, sculptor, gardener, chef and who knows what else, a real renaissance person. But all these parts had one common denominator: the country.
Kenan was a man of quarrel and strife, who was quick to lose his temper and become aggressive. He had a tendency to hurt those who loved him. "There is only one way not to quarrel with you," I once told him, "and that is to cut off all relations and not to speak with you."
The last time we quarreled was when Gush Shalom called for a boycott on the products of the settlements. Kenan refused to join, ostensibly because we included the Golan settlements. "I don't want to give up the Golan wine," he said half in jest. But he hated the settlements, not only because they were built to obstruct peace with the Palestinians, but also because they symbolised in his eyes the general uglification of the country. He told me once that when looking out of the window of an aircraft he had suddenly realized that "the State of Israel has destroyed the Land of Israel."
In her semi-biographical book about her husband, which appeared not long ago in Hebrew, Nurit Gertz talks about his difficult childhood, when his father was in a mental institution. I suspect that throughout his life, he suffered from a hidden fear that he might inherit the disease. That may explain his bouts of alcoholism. Fortunately for him, he had an extraordinary mother, Mrs Levin, a short, vigorous and resolute woman who raised Amos and his two younger brothers practically on her own.
The only times I saw his face soften was when he was looking at Nurit or their two daughters, Shlomtzion and Rona. I could forgive him all the offensive and abusive attacks, because his creative talent was so much more important. He already disappeared from the landscape some years ago, when he fell victim to Alzheimer's disease. Actually, he faded away together with the culture he had helped to create.
The Hebrew culture, which was born in the early 40s died in the 60s. The heavy losses of our generation in the 1948 war and the mass immigration that flooded the state in its first few years meant the death of this unique culture and its replacement by the banal Israeli culture as it is now.
Amos Kenan's death marks the exit of one of that Hebrew culture's last remaining exponents. At Kenan's funeral, not a single representative of official Israel was present.
Uri Avnery is an Israeli peace activist. He served three terms in the Israeli parliament (Knesset), and is the founder of Gush Shalom peace
movement.
