Israel Palestine Infos
Uri Avnery
February 26, 2011
A
Crazy Prophet
“WHY DON’T the masses
stream to the square here, too, and throw Bibi out?” my taxi driver exclaimed
when we were passing
The masses will not
stream to the square, and Binyamin Netanyahu can be thrown out only through the
ballot box.
If this does not happen,
Israelis can blame nobody but themselves.
If the Israeli Left is
unable to bring together a serious political force, which can put Israel on the
road to peace and social justice, it has only itself to blame.
We have no bloodthirsty
dictator whom we can hold responsible. No crazy tyrant will order his air force
to bomb us if we demand his ouster.
Once there was a story
making the rounds: Ariel Sharon – then still a general in the army – assembles
the officer corps and tells them: “Comrades, tonight we shall carry out a
military coup!” All the assembled officers break out in thunderous laughter.
DEMOCRACY IS like air –
one feels it only when it is not there. Only a person who is suffocating knows
how essential it is.
The taxi driver who spoke
so freely about kicking Netanyahu out did not fear that I might be an agent of
the secret police, and that in the
small hours of the morning there would be a knock on his door. I am writing
whatever comes into my head and don’t walk around with bodyguards. And if we did
decide to gather in the square, nobody would prevent us from doing so, and the
police might even protect us.
(I am speaking, of
course, about
We live in a democracy,
breathe democracy, without even being conscious of it. For us It feels natural,
we take it for granted. That’s why people often give silly answers to public
opinion pollsters, and these draw the dramatic conclusion that the majority of
Israeli citizens despise democracy and are ready to give it up. Most of those
asked have never lived under a regime in which a woman must fear that her
husband will not come home from work because he made a joke about the Supreme
Leader, or that her son might
disappear because he drew some graffiti on the wall.
The Knesset members who
were chosen in democratic elections spend their time in a game of who can draw
up the most atrocious racist bill. They resemble children pulling off the wings
of flies, without understanding what they are doing.
To all these I have one
piece of advice: look at what is happening in
DURING THE whole week I
spent every spare moment glued to Aljazeera.
One word about the
station: excellent.
It need not fear
comparison with any broadcaster in the world, including the BBC and CNN. Not to
mention our own stations, which serve a murky brew concocted from propaganda,
information and entertainment.
Much has been said about
the part played by the social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, in the
revolutions that are now turning the Arab world upside down. But for sheer
influence, Aljazeera trumps them all. During the last decade, it has changed the
Arab world beyond recognition. In the last few weeks, it has wrought miracles.
To see the events in
All my adult life I have
advocated involved journalism. I have tried to teach generations of journalists
not to become reporting robots, but human beings with a conscience who see their
mission in promoting the basic human values. Aljazeera is doing just that. And
how!
These last weeks, tens of
millions of Arabs have depended on this station in order to find out what is
happening in their own countries, indeed in their home towns – what is happening
on Habib Bourguiba Boulevard in Tunis, in Tahrir Square in Cairo, in the streets
of Benghazi and Tripoli.
I know that many Israelis
will consider these words heretical, given Aljazeera’s staunch support of the
Palestinian cause. It is seen here as the arch-enemy, no less than Osama bin
Laden or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But
one simply must view its broadcasts, to have any hope of understanding what is
happening in the Arab world, including the occupied Palestinian territories.
When Aljazeera covers a
war or a revolution in the Arab world, it covers it. Not for an hour or two, but
for 24 hours around the clock. The pictures are engraved in one’s memory, the
testimonies stir one’s emotions. The impact on Arab viewers is almost hypnotic.
MUAMMAR QADDAFI was shown
on Aljazeera as he really is – an unbalanced megalomaniac who has lost touch
with reality. Not in short news clips, but for hours and hours of continuous
broadcasts, in which the rambling speech he recently gave was shown again and
again, with the addition of dozens of testimonies and opinions from Libyans of
all sectors – from the air force officers who defected to Malta to ordinary
citizens in bombed Tripoli.
At the beginning of his
speech, Qaddafi (whose name is pronounced Qazzafi, whence the slogan “Ya
Qazzafi, Ya Qazzabi” – Oh Qazzafi, Oh Liar) reminded me of Nicolae Ceausescu and
his famous last speech from the balcony, which was interrupted by the masses.
But as the speech went on, Qaddafi reminded me more and more of Adolf Hitler in
his last days, when he pored over the map with his remaining generals,
maneuvering armies which had already ceased to exist and planning grandiose
“operations”, with the Red Army already within a few hundred yards from his
bunker.
If Qaddafi were not
planning to slaughter his own people, it could have been grotesque or sad. But
as it was, it was only monstrous.
While he was talking, the
rebels were taking control of towns whose names are still engraved in the
memories of Israelis of my generation. In World War II, these places were the
arena of the British, German and Italian armies, which captured and lost them
turn by turn. We followed the actions anxiously, because a British defeat would
have brought the Wehrmacht to our country, with Adolf Eichmann in its wake.
Names like Benghazi, Tobruk and Derna still resound in my ear – the more so
because my brother fought there as a British commando, before being transferred
to the Ethiopian campaign, where he lost his life.
BEFORE QADDAFI lost his
mind completely, he voiced an idea that sounded crazy, but which should give us
food for thought.
Under the influence of
the victory of the non-violent masses in Egypt, and before the earthquake had
reached him too, Qaddafi proposed putting the masses of Palestinian refugees on
ships and sending them to the shores of Israel.
I would advise Binyamin
Netanyahu to take this possibility very seriously. What will happen if masses of
Palestinians learn from the experience of their brothers and sisters in half a
dozen Arab countries and conclude that the “armed struggle” leads nowhere, and
that they should adopt the tactics of non-violent mass action?
What will happen if
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians march one day to the Separation Wall and
pull it down? What if a quarter of a million Palestinian refugees in
Until now, the answer was
simple: if necessary, we shall use live fire, helicopter gunships and tank
cannon. No more nonsense.
But now the Palestinian
youth, too, has seen that it is possible to face live fire, that Qaddafi’s
fighter planes did not put an end to the uprising, that Pearl Square in Bahrain
did not empty when the king’s soldiers opened fire. This lesson will not be
forgotten.
Perhaps this will not
happen tomorrow or the day after. But it most certainly will happen – unless we
make peace while we still can.