Uri Avnery
26.7.09
Yes, You Can!
FIRST, AN honest
disclosure: I loved the Shepherd hotel very much.
In the first years after
the Six-Day War, I was a frequent guest there. My work in the Knesset demanded
that I stay in Jerusalem at least two nights every week, and after the war I switched
from the hotels of West Jerusalem to those in the Eastern part of the city. My
favorite was the Shepherd. I felt at home there.
The charm of the place lay
in its special atmosphere. It is located in the middle of that ancient Arab
town which itself aroused my intense curiosity. Its rooms have high ceilings
and old furniture, and it was run by remarkable people - two elderly Arab
ladies who were educated in Beirut and steeped in Palestinian-Lebanese culture.
The area surrounding the hotel
is the neighborhood of the al-Husseini clan. The holdings
of this vast extended family, with more than 5000 members, comprise the greater
part of the Sheikh Jarrah quarter, which also
includes the legendary Orient House.
The al-Husseini family is one of the handful of aristocratic
Jerusalemite families, and perhaps the most respected one (its members certainly
think so). For centuries the family has filled at least one of the three most
important positions in the town: those of Grand Mufti, mayor and the notable in
charge of the Islamic shrines. Shepherd was built by Hajj Amin
al-Husseini, the mufti who led the Arab Rebellion in
the 1930s and became the Arab the Hebrew community most loved to hate.
I spent hours in
conversation with the two ladies, learnt a lot from them and grew very attached to the place. It was a sad day for me when it
was closed.
I don’t know how this
property fell into the hands of the American millionaire, the Bingo king whose declared intention is to set up Jewish settlements all
over the Arab town. Now he wants to build a housing project in the grounds of
the Shepherd.
But that’s enough of him.
My business is with Binyamin Netanyahu.
NETANYAHU’S AIM is to Judaize Jerusalem. This week he boasted that in his last
term in office, ten years ago, he had set up the fortified Jewish neighborhood of
Har Homa.
To Har
Homa – whose real name is Jebel Abu Ghneim, Mountain of the Father of Sheep – I also have a
sentimental attachment. I spent many days and nights in the struggle to prevent
the creation of the monstrous housing project that looms there now.
The leader in this
struggle was another Husseini – the unforgettable
Feisal. I held him in high esteem. I don’t hesitate to say that I loved him. He
was a nobleman in the real sense of the word: a scion of nobility but modest in
his manners, generous and approachable, a man of peace but fearless in his
confrontations with the occupation troops, a real Palestinian patriot, moderate in his opinions, wise and courageous. He was the
son of Abd-al-Kader al-Husseini,
the leader of the Arab fighters in the Jerusalem district in the 1948 war, who
was killed in the battle for the “Castel” near the city. I had no part in that
battle, but I passed by a few hours later in a relief convoy for the besieged
Jewish part of Jerusalem. Like most of my comrades, I respected him as an
honorable enemy.
The site of Har Homa, for those who have
already forgotten, used to be a unique place of beauty between Jerusalem and
Bethlehem, a rounded hill covered with a dense wood. The destroyers of
Jerusalem – that brutal coalition of real estate sharks, fanatical Zionists,
American millionaires and religious mystics – had decided to eliminate that
last spot of beauty in order to build a dense, fortified and particularly ugly
Jewish settlement. Under the leadership of Feisal and Ta’amri,
the former husband of a Jordanian princess, a tent camp was set up. When the
bulldozers started to cut down the trees and level the top of the hill, we held
dozens of demonstrations and vigils. In one of them I suffered a hemorrhage and
would have ended my life there and then, if a Palestinian ambulance had not
succeeded in reaching me in that road-less stone desert and got me to the
hospital in time. So I have a sentimental attachment to the place.
THE SHEPHERD provocation
is a part of the tireless effort to “Judaize”
Jerusalem. In simple words: to carry out ethnic cleansing. This campaign has
been going on for 42 years already, from the first day of the occupation of
East Jerusalem, but the timing of this particular operation results from
tactical considerations.
Netanyahu is facing heavy
American pressure to freeze the settlements in the West Bank. He is quite
unable to do so, as long as he remains at the head of the coalition he himself
chose, which consists of Rightists, religious zealots, settlers and outright
fascists. He has offered several “compromises”, all based on various fraudulent
ploys, but the Americans have learnt the lessons of the past and did not fall
into any of his traps.
His Siamese twin, Ehud
Barak, is busy leaking to the media “news” about a grandiose operation: at any
moment, with one stroke, like Alexander and the Gordian knot, the dozens of
settlement “outposts” that have been set up since 2001 with secret government
support will be uprooted. But except for the media people themselves, hardly
anyone believes that this will really happen. Certainly not
the settlers, judging by their knowing smiles.
So what to do in order to
avoid having to dismantle the outposts? Netanyahu, the King of Spin, has a solution:
a new provocation to draw attention away from the last one. The Shepherd hotel
is now diverting the world’s attention away from the hills of “Judea and
Samaria”. When you have a toothache, you forget about your bellyache.
What, he says, the Goyim
want to stop us building in Jerusalem, our Holy City?! Our eternal capital,
which has been reunited for all eternity?! What Chutzpah! Will they prohibit
Jews from building in New York?! Will they forbid Englishmen to build in
London?!
Netanyahu really hit his
stride when he declared that any Arab can live in West Jerusalem, so why should
a Jew not build a home in East Jerusalem?
Clear and to the point – and absolutely false. When Netanyahu says
things like that, it is hard to know whether he is spreading lies consciously
(though they can easily be exposed), or if he believes his falsehoods himself.
Thus, for example, he claimed to remember the British soldiers in front of his
home when he was a child – when the last British soldier left the country a
year before he was born.
The truth is that with extremely
rare exceptions, no Arab can acquire an apartment in West Jerusalem, not to
mention building a house there – though large sections of the Western part of
the city consist of former Arab neighborhoods, whose inhabitants fled or were
driven out during the 1948 war. The former owners of the houses in these
quarters (including Talbiya, Katamon,
Dir Yassin), who found refuge in East Jerusalem, were
not allowed to return to their homes when Jerusalem was “united” in 1967,
neither were they paid compensation (as I proposed in the Knesset).
But Netanyahu does not
care so much whether people believe him or not. This week, like every other
week since he returned to power, he was fully occupied with survival. In order
to survive, the coalition must remain intact. To achieve this, he must show
that he does not “fold” under American pressure. No better place to prove this
than Jerusalem.
About Jerusalem, as
official spokesmen never tire of telling us, about Jerusalem there is a
national consensus. From wall to wall. From left to extreme
right.
However, this myth is long
dead. No such consensus exists. Right now, most Israelis are ready to return
the Arab quarters of East Jerusalem to Palestinian rule in return for real
peace. I know of no Jewish mother who is ready to sacrifice her son in a war
for the Shepherd hotel.
I BEG to contradict yet
another myth that is being propagated relentlessly by our media: that a
national consensus against President Obama is forming.
As we say in classical
Hebrew: No bears and no forest. Or more colloquially: No birds and no shoes.
Many Israelis, very many,
hope that Barack Obama will do for them what seems impossible without him:
bring them peace. They have despaired of our political system, of both the
coalition and the opposition, of both Right and Left. They are convinced that
only an outside force can realize this hope.
If indeed Obama does
clash with Netanyahu over his refusal to freeze the settlements in the West
Bank and his insistence on continuing to build in East Jerusalem, it is for
Obama’s victory that many Israelis will be praying. They know that in this
battle, it is not Netanyahu but Obama who represents the true interests of
Israel.
The question is whether
Obama has the power to follow through, as no preceding president since Dwight
Eisenhower has done.
Netanyahu does not
believe so. His American partners – the defeated Republicans,
the Neocons who are now in hiding, the almost-silent
Evangelical preachers – this defeated camp is hoping to recover its fortunes by
encouraging the Jewish lobby and the Israeli government to provoke Obama.
Netanyahu, who has mobilized Congress against the White House in the past,
believes that he can do it once again.
Our newspapers are
gleefully reporting, with charts and graphs to bear them out, that Obama’s
standing in America is sinking. It is not hard to divine that most of this
information emanates from Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign
Office, the same source that is feeding the American media with reports of the
growing opposition of the Israeli public against Obama. Soon the American media
will show Israeli protesters waving posters with Obama in SS uniform, as happened
with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin before him.
The battle is not about
20 outposts, nor about 20 apartments in the grounds of the Shepherd hotel.
Every house in every West Bank settlement serves one supreme purpose: to
destroy any possibility for peace. Every Israeli house in East Jerusalem serves
the same sublime aim. The opponents of peace know that no Arab leader will ever
sign a peace agreement that does not designate East Jerusalem as the Palestinian
capital, and no Arab leader will ever sign a peace agreement that does not assign
all of the West Bank to the State of Palestine.
A historic responsibility
rests on the shoulders of Barack Obama: not to fold, not to give in, not to
“compromise”. To insist on the total freeze of the
settlements, as a first and necessary step towards peace. For his sake, and for ours too.
As an Israeli, I feel
like calling out to him: Yes, You Can!
The
Preparations
For
the evacuation
Of
the
“Outposts”
Are
an exercise
To
deceive
The Americans.
The
building
In
the occupied territory
Of
THAT
is the reality.
GUSH
SHALOM
Ad
published in Haaretz
July
24, 2009