Listen to the heroes of Israel
John Pilger | 26.02.2010 19:46 | Palestine | Repression | Social Struggles | World
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger reminds us of the struggle by an extraordinary few in Israel against the repression and lawlessness of the occupation of Palestine. They are the inspiration to break the loud silence in the Jewish diaspora.
I phoned Rami Elhanan the other day. We had not spoken for six years and much has happened in Israel and Palestine. Rami is an Israeli graphic designer who lives with his family in Jerusalem. His father survived Auschwitz. His grandparents and six aunts and uncles perished in the Holocaust. Whenever I am asked about heroes, I say Rami and his wife Nurit without hesitation.
Soon after when we met, Rami gave me a home videotape that was difficult to watch. It shows his daughter Smadar, aged 14, throwing her head back, laughing and playing the piano. “She loved to dance,” he said. On the afternoon of 4 September, 1997, Smadar and her best friend, Sivane, had auditions for admission to a dance school. She had argued that morning with her mother, who was anxious about her going to the centre of Jerusalem. “I didn’t want to row,” said Nurit, “so I let her go.”
Rami was in his car when he turned on the radio to catch the three o”clock news. There had been a suicide bombing in Ben Yehuda shopping precinct. More than 200 hundred people were injured and several were dead. Within minutes, his mobile phone rang. It was Nurit, crying. They searched the hospitals in vain, then the morgue; and so began, as Rami describes it, their “descent into darkness”.
Rami and Nurit are two of the founders of the Parents Circle, or Bereaved Families Forum, which brings together Israelis and Palestinians who have lost loved ones. “It’s painful to acknowledge,” he said. “but there is no basic moral difference between the [Israeli] soldier at the checkpoint who prevents a woman who is having a baby from going through, causing her to lose the baby, and the man who killed my daughter. And just as my daughter was a victim [of the occupation], so was he.” Rami describes the Israeli occupation and the dispossession of Palestinians as a “cancer in our heart”. Nothing changes, he says, until the occupation ends.
Every “Jerusalem Day” – the day Israel celebrates its military conquest of the city – Rami has stood in the street with a photograph of Smadar and crossed Israeli and Palestinian flags, and people spit at him and tell him it was a pity he was not blown up, too. And yet he and Nurit and their comrades have made extraordinary gains. Rami goes to Israeli schools with a Palestinian member of the group, and they show maps of what ought to be Palestine, and they hug each other. “This is like an earthquake to children who have been socialised and manipulated into hating,” he said. “They say to us, ‘You have opened my eyes’.”
In October, Rami and Nurit sat in the Israeli High Court while the state counsel, “stammering, unprepared and unkempt,” wrote Nurit, “stood like a platoon commander in charge of new recruits and refuted... the allegations”. Salwa and Bassam Aramin, Palestinian parents, were there, too. Tears streaked Salwa’s face. Their ten-year-old daughter Abir Aramin was killed by an Israeli soldier firing a rubber bullet point-blank at her small head while she was standing beside a kiosk buying sweets with her sister. The judges seemed bored and one of them remarked that Israeli soldiers were rarely indicted, so it would be best to forget it. The state counsel laughed. This was normal.
“Our children,” said Nurit at a rally last December to mark the anniversary of the Israeli assault on Gaza, “have learned this year that all the disgusting qualities which anti-semites attribute to Jews are actually manifested among our leaders: deceit, greed and the murder of children... What values of beauty and goodness can we squeeze into such a sophisticated apparatus of brainwashing and reality distortion?”
Rami now tells me the High Court has decided to investigate the case of Abir Aramin after all. This is not normal: it is a victory.
“Where are the other victories?” I asked him.
“In America last year, a Palestinian and I spoke five times a day in front of thousands. There is a big shift in American public opinion, and that’s where the hope lies. It’s only pressure from outside Israel – from Jews especially – that will end this nightmare. People in the West must know that while there is a silence, this looking away, this profane abuse of Israel’s critics as anti-Jew, they are no different from those who stood aside during the days of the Holocaust.”
Since Israel’s onslaught on Lebanon in 2006, its devastation of Gaza in 2008-9 and Mossad’s recent political murder in Dubai, the criminality of the Israeli state has been impossible to disguise. On 11 February, the influential Reut Institute in Tel Aviv reported to the Israeli Cabinet, which it advises, that violence had failed to achieve Israel’s ends and had produced worldwide revulsion. “In last year’s Gaza operation,” said the report, “our superior military power was offset by an offensive on Israel’s legitimacy that led to a significant setback in our international standing and will constrain future Israeli military planning and operations...”. In other words, proof of the murderous, racist toll of Zionism has been an epiphany for many people; justice for the Palestinians, wrote the expatriate Israeli musician Gilad Altzmon, is now “at the heart of the battle for a better world”.
However, his fellow Jews in Western countries, particularly Britain and Australia, whose influence is critical, are still mostly silent, still looking away, still accepting, as Nurit said, “the brainwashing and reality distortion”. And yet the responsibility to speak out could not be clearer and the lessons of history – family history for many - ensure that it renders them culpable should their silence persist. For inspiration, I recommend the moral courage of Rami and Nurit.
John Pilger
Homepage:
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=567
Comments
Hide the following 4 comments
The psychopaths who own western capitalism
26.02.2010 19:55
John Pilger speaks of the matter of Israel's perverse dispossession, persecution and genocide of Palestinians in the violent, illegal occupation of their territory.
But the problem goes far beyond this. We have had the Vietnam War on a pack of lies and we are currently engaged in illegal, aggressive, immoral and violent wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan whilst threatening aggression against Iran and meddling in the affairs of several other countries - also on the basis of demonstrable lies.
Continuing to pedal on the treadmill in the hope that the power it provides to this ugly machine owned and run by PSYCHOPATHS is NOT going to deliver a better future or a better world for ourselves and our children and grandchildren.
For Australians specifically, one significant implication of this corrupt state of affairs is that the long-term commitment of the Victorian government to supplying Melbourne's water by de-salination (an absurdity beyond belief! and soon to follow in other states of Australia) has absolutely nothing to the strategic best interests of the country or even common sense, it has everything to do with corrupt, back-door financial support for the freak-state of Israel through Israel's ownership of the de-salination technology. A supplement to the annual $3bn provided by the US in order to ensure that Israel provides a strategic foothold for the domination of middle-east oil supplies for the benefit of the PSYCHOPATHS who own western capitalism.
For more information on the problem of Israel take a look at
Allen L. Jasson
e-mail:
allen.jasson@rightofchoice.com
a reply to a stupid comment
26.02.2010 20:53
I lived in melbourne for 4 years, the water issues are becoming catasphoric. A short drive out of the city, farmers were having to cull their entire livestock because there was simply no water there. It gets worse and worse each year as the waterbed is used more and more. To lesson people's impact on the environment by getting fresh water from the sea would be a godsend.
To say that the victorian government are doing it for business reasons is immoral, insulting, arrogant and totally ill informed. There is a genuine need to improve water supply in many parts of australia, particuarly the rural areas around melbourne. Your arrogance makes me sick.
furious
My reply to "furious"
27.02.2010 11:14
"Furious" on the other hand, demonstrates his/her level of education by the use of the expressions such as "totally uneducated" and "totally ill informed"; a reflection of countless hours parked on the sofa slurping up American culture and a repertoire of coined insults to hurl at anyone who has the "arrogance" to question the deities who control her/his life such as "the victorian government". This particular deity, in fact, conforms to the pattern of EVERY bloated and sycophantic government of Australia since Whitlam and long before him in NEVER taking an action that is NOT "for business reasons". This is a sitiation which "Furious" would understand if he/she had any awareness of the current obsession by the people who own western capitalism with Neoliberalism and "free" market forces, an economic policy which, championed by a corrupt corporate media, has an overwhelming tendency to concentrate wealth, disempower democratic politics and contrive a network of artificial international arrangements (such as control of water supplies by private companies) that serve to subjugate all governments of all nations and their people to the interests of the people who own western capitalism.
If "Furious" had ANY awareness of "the real world" she/he might be connecting the dots, for example, that relate the machinations of companies like Monsanto working to patent genes of such things as varieties of jasmine rice (which has been grown by Asian farmers for thousands of years) and force farmers to use them by default in the establishment of legal precedents involving contamination of their crops by the patented varieties, the bankrupting of Haitian rice farmers by dumping cheap rice into their economy, driving them into subservience living in crowded cities working for wages of $2 a day to supplement the American cheap labour force, and then to reach some possible plausible explanation for the bald absurdity that a drought-prone country like Australia should be using the precious irrigation waters of the Murray, Murrumbidgie and darling rivers to grow RICE!!!.
But reading and thinking is all too hard for "Furious" who finds it easier to gain some gratification in the clumsy expression of moral outrage in having lambasted be for my "immoral" behaviour of "insulting" the deities who have FOR BUSINESS REASONS taken his/her country into an illegal, immoral, violent and aggressive war that has destroyed a nation (Iraq), murdered a million of it's people, displaced a further 4 million as internal and external refugees and reduced the vast majority of the rest to a standard of living grossly degraded from that they enjoyed for all the years of Saddam Hussain's AMERICAN CREATED dictatorship. All of it based on a string of pretexts and "reasons" which were easily discernable as false in 2003 and have been demonstrably and repeatedly proven false in the years between. No doubt "Furious" belongs to the "put it behind us" and "move on" crowd.
So putting that small question of relative "moralities" aside to return to the 'higher priority' question of Australia's water shortage, where millions of families mourn the demise of their gardens, each on a quarter-acre block in the endless, reckless, suburban sprawl that yearly consumes more of the nation's precious little arable land and rainforest in the enrichment of corrupt politicians and developers in the re-zoning game. "Furious" should take time to contemplate the scandalous level of incompetence and the lack of imagination and foresight in a nation and it's successive governments in a 200 year history that boasts it's last major national project as the post-WW2 Snowy Mountains Scheme conducted by immigrant refugees, which only in the past 10 years has connected north to south by rail, still hasn't standardised the rail gauge across the country and still transports most if its goods nationally by road at terrible cost in maintenance and road deaths. Given that the Perth to Kalgoorlie pipeline, was completed more than a hundred years ago and is a classic prototype for a model (technologically 100 years advanced) that could bring the vast, unused freshwater supplies of Australia's monsoonal north to the populace south, one would think it could spoon-feed the nascent vision of a fledgeling nation. But knowing what Australians are today, furious in their outrage against people who criticise their government, I am not at all surprised that "Furious" is defending the plan for de-salination plants as a practical solution "to improve water supply in many parts of australia, particuarly the rural areas around melbourne". No doubt, in his/her imagination de-salination connects with irrigation and his/her 'education' includes no chemistry. But anyway, it will do until the droubt breaks, as it always does in Australia's natural, long climatic cycle, and then the whole issue will be forgotten again and the cities will go on sprawling until the NEXT cycle.
Allen L. Jasson
quoting a kook
05.03.2010 03:34
cotton socks