Israel Palestine Infos
Uri Avnery
June 5, 2010
Kill a Turk and Rest
ON THE high seas, outside territorial waters, the ship was stopped by the navy.
The commandos stormed it. Hundreds of people on the deck resisted, the soldiers
used force. Some of the passengers were killed, scores injured. The ship was
brought into harbor, the passengers were taken off by force. The world saw them
walking on the quay, men and women, young and old, all of them worn out, one
after another, each being marched between two soldiers…
The ship was called “Exodus
But the person in charge was Ernest Bevin, a Labour Party leader, an arrogant,
rude and power-loving British minister. He was not about to let a bunch of Jews
dictate to him. He decided to teach them a lesson the entire world would
witness. “This is a provocation!” he exclaimed, and of course he was right. The
main aim was indeed to create a provocation, in order to draw the eyes of the
world to the British blockade.
What followed is well known: the episode dragged on and on, one stupidity led to
another, the whole world sympathized with the passengers. But the British did
not give in and paid the price. A heavy price.
Many believe that the “Exodus” incident was the turning point in the struggle
for the creation of the State of
I AM not the only one who was reminded of this episode this week. Actually, it
was almost impossible not to be reminded of it, especially for those of us who
lived in
There are, of course, important differences. Then the passengers were Holocaust
survivors, this time they were peace activists from all over the world. But then
and now the world saw heavily armed soldiers brutally attack unarmed passengers,
who resist with everything that comes to hand, sticks and bare hands. Then and
now it happened on the high seas –
In retrospect, the British behavior throughout the affair seems incredibly
stupid. But Bevin was no fool, and the British officers who commanded the action
were not nincompoops. After all, they had just finished a World War on the
winning side.
If they behaved with complete folly from beginning to end, it was the result of
arrogance, insensitivity and boundless contempt for world public opinion.
Ehud Barak is the Israeli Bevin. He is not a fool, either, nor are our top
brass. But they are responsible for a chain of acts of folly, the disastrous
implications of which are hard to assess. Former minister and present
commentator Yossi Sarid called the ministerial “committee of seven”, which
decides on security matters, “seven idiots” – and I must protest. It is an
insult to idiots.
THE PREPARATIONS for the flotilla went on for more than a year. Hundreds of
e-mail messages went back and forth. I myself received many dozens. There was no
secret. Everything was out in the open.
There was a lot of time for all our political and military institutions to
prepare for the approach of the ships. The politician consulted. The soldiers
trained. The diplomats reported. The intelligence people did their job.
Nothing helped. All the decisions were wrong from the first moment to this
moment. And it’s not yet the end.
The idea of a flotilla as a means to break the blockade borders on genius. It
placed the Israeli government on the horns of a dilemma – the choice between
several alternatives, all of them bad. Every general hopes to get his opponent
into such a situation.
The alternatives were:
(a)
To let the flotilla reach
(b)
To stop the ships in territorial waters, inspect their cargo and make sure they
were not carrying weapons or “terrorists”, then let them continue on their way.
That would have aroused some vague protests in the world but upheld the
principle of a blockade.
(c)
To capture them on the high seas and
bring them to
As our governments have always done, when faced with the choice between several
bad alternatives, the Netanyahu government chose the worst.
Anyone who followed the preparations as reported in the media could have
foreseen that they would lead to people being killed and injured. One does not
storm a Turkish ship and expect cute little girls to present one with flowers.
The Turks are not known as people who give in easily.
The orders given to the forces and made public included the three fateful words:
“at any cost”. Every soldier knows what these three terrible words mean.
Moreover, on the list of objectives, the consideration for the passengers
appeared only in third place, after safeguarding the safety of the soldiers and
fulfilling the task.
If Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, the Chief of Staff and the commander of the
navy did not understand that this would lead to killing and wounding people,
then it must be concluded - even by those who were reluctant
to consider this until now – that
they are grossly incompetent. They must be told, in the immortal words of Oliver
Cromwell to Parliament: “You
have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... Depart, I say; and
let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”
THIS EVENT points again to one of the most serious aspects of the situation: we
live in a bubble, in a kind of mental ghetto, which cuts us off and prevents us
from seeing another reality, the one perceived by the rest of the world. A
psychiatrist might judge this to be the symptom of a severe mental problem.
The propaganda of the government and the army tells a simple story: our heroic
soldiers, determined and sensitive, the elite of the elite, descended on the
ship in order “to talk” and were attacked by a wild and violent crowd. Official
spokesmen repeated again and again the word “lynching”.
On the first day, almost all the Israeli media accepted this. After all, it is
clear that we, the Jews, are the victims. Always. That applies to Jewish
soldiers, too. True, we storm a foreign ship at sea, but turn at once into
victims who have no choice but to defend ourselves against violent and incited
anti-Semites.
It is impossible not to be reminded of the classic Jewish joke about the Jewish
mother in Russia taking leave of her son, who has been called up to serve the
Czar in the war against Turkey. “Don’t overexert yourself’” she implores him,
“Kill a Turk and rest. Kill another Turk and rest again…”
“But mother,” the son interrupts, “What if the Turk kills me?”
“You?” exclaims the mother, “But why? What have you done to him?”
To any normal person, this may sound crazy. Heavily armed soldiers of an elite
commando unit board a ship on the high seas in the middle of the night, from the
sea and from the air – and they are the victims?
But there is a grain of truth there: they are the victims of arrogant and
incompetent commanders, irresponsible politicians and the media fed by them.
And, actually, of the Israeli public, since most of the people voted for this
government or for the opposition, which is no different.
The “Exodus” affair was repeated, but
with a change of roles. Now we are the British.
Somewhere, a new Leon Uris is planning to write his next book, “Exodus
MORE THAN 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson declared that every nation must act
with a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind”. Israeli leaders have never
accepted the wisdom of this maxim. They adhere to the dictum of David
Ben-Gurion: “It is not important what the Gentiles say, it is important what the
Jews do.” Perhaps he assumed that the Jews would not act foolishly.
Making enemies of the Turks is more than foolish. For decades,
This is Chapter 2 of “Cast Lead”. Then we aroused most countries in the world
against us, shocked our few friends and gladdened our enemies. Now we have done
it again, and perhaps with even greater success. World public opinion is turning
against us.
This is a slow process. It resembles the accumulation of water behind a dam. The
water rises slowly, quietly, and the change is hardly noticeable. But when it
reaches a critical level, the dam bursts and the disaster is upon us. We are
steadily approaching this point.
“Kill a Turk and rest,” the mother says in the joke. Our government does not
even rest. It seems that they will not stop until they have made enemies of the
last of our friends.
(Parts of this article were published in Ma’ariv,