Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 00:31:39 -0600 (MDT)
Subject: A letter to Uri Avneri 



A letter to Uri Avneri

Michelle Gubbay

July 15, 2001

Dear Uri Avneri:

I write this to you because the underlying questions you raise in the
Gush Shalom "Theses for a New Peace Camp," and then raise in a
different fashion in your article "Oh, What a Wonderful Unity!" are
ones that preoccupy my mind night and day - and they preoccupy many
of us, so I am sending this round on some e-mail lists, as a
contribution to the general discussion.

We - Jews, some of us - wake and look around and ask, "What nightmare
is this in which we live now? This is not how I recognize my legacy,
what have we become?"

In "Unity," you ask, how do Israeli Jews go about their daily lives
caring nothing for the human plight of the Palestinians, and seeing
themselves as the ones most suffering and most besieged? In
the "Theses," you ask specifically, why did the mainstream "peace
camp" collapse, along with the collapse of the peace negotiations at
Camp David?

I compose this letter over several days, while the situation worsens.
Now the report has been leaked that details Sharon's program for all-
out war. When you receive this - when someone else reads it - will
Sharon have launched the massive assault he has been planning, doing
all he can to goad on the next suicide bomb, which will be his
excuse? Is there any way to stop him?

There is much urgent work to do, and urgent are the ideas which give
us direction or possibility, that underlie the actions we take, the
slogans we raise, the leaflets we write.

Briefly, who I am: I am an American Jew, 50 years old. My father was
from Calcutta, my mother born in Alexandria, Egypt. Both of them came
to Canada, where I was born, via London. Although we were not
Ashkenazi, my childhood realm was shattered by an early, gulped-down
knowledge of the Holocaust. I left home at 18, pulled at the end of
the 1960s to the energy for change in the United States. I have been
involved my entire adult life in movements for freedom both here and
internationally, many of these years as a colleague of the late
Marxist-Humanist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya. (Anyone interested in
Dunayevskaya's work can write to Freedom Voices, P.O.B.268919,
Chicago, IL 60626.)

I am a writer, that is, someone who believes that words are alive.

Would that words could be so alive that they would wake Israeli Jews -
 including many formerly aligned with the mainstream peace camp -
from what you call the self-hypnosis in which the majority wander,
parroting myths and slogans that are comforting in their
familiarity: "We have no partner for peace"; "The Arabs only know the
language of war."

You ask, "How does an entire people in a democracy behave as if
hypnotized?" and "How do the free media . turn themselves into the
organs of a uniform, primitive propaganda?" What you describe is not
unique to Israel, but rather is the common reality of a population at
war. I don't doubt your assessment that one contributing factor to
the pervasiveness of a war mentality (you cite it as THE cause) is
the ease of retreat to the known, historically-grounded Jew-as-victim
stance, in contrast to the difficulty of venturing into the unknown.
I can think of many situations, not limited to Israel, where people
retreat to the pull of the old - the old ways of thinking and being
and doing - rather than venture forth to the new. It's the underlying
story of the escaped Hebrew slaves wandering in the desert where the
pull of the old idols is great, the longing for the old way of life.
In that founding legend, the old way of life was slavery to a foreign
oppressor. Now it is the longing for a supposedly simpler time when
Jews were victims, and sympathetic and heroic in their victimhood.
The reality is that the State of Israel today is Goliath in the
region, but wants still the image of the brave and youthful David.

Israeli Jews had not been prepared to venture into the unknown, not
by Barak, not by the intellectuals aligned with Peace Now. They had
been fed illusions since the Oslo agreements, and before, that the
ever-expanding Jewish settlements and the daily, violent restrictions
and humiliations enforced on Palestinians by the occupying Israeli
Army were not an obstacle to peace. Then came the misinformation and
propaganda concerning Barak's "generous" offer at Camp David . and
thus, when Sharon took his stroll on Temple Mount, and the first
stone throwers were gunned down by Israeli soldiers, and the intifada
erupted: "We offered peace and the Palestinians responded with
violence."

The terrorist suicide bombings began again, and each bomb became an
echo of all the others that have ever exploded in Israel and changed
day into nightmare, teenagers and old men into severed body parts and
blood. Thus the horrors of each - each horrible enough - were
magnified, and history was mangled with all the mangled bodies.

What I'm trying to say is that this business of the pull back to the
old ways of thinking and doing and being is made up of many factors.
To what I've mentioned so far, throw into the cauldron of poisons:
Israeli acceptance of a highly-militarized culture, and the
entrenched forces vested in the continuance of that militarized
culture and state; Saddam Hussein's missiles cheered on in the
Palestinian camps; large doses of anti-Arab racism. Toss in all the
economic contradictions of "globalization," Palestinians as a cheap,
subservient labor force, and the Israeli need for control of West
Bank aquifers - as long as there is no concept of a new way of
sharing the land and its resources. Heave in Islamic fundamentalism,
and Jewish fundamentalism, and anti-Jewish propaganda in the Arab
world, and all the multiple divisions within Israeli society that
were so recently bubbling to the surface but now have been squelched,
with the Israeli rulers, as rulers everywhere, happy to suppress
internal contradictions and unite the people against an external foe.

All of that brewing together . and no new vision had ever been
offered that was powerful enough to shake enough people loose from
racism, historic trauma, propagandizing, comfort, and fear.

In your "80 Theses for a New Peace Camp" you aim for such a vision.

You cover the span of the twentieth century, telling history through
the lens of the assertion that the Israeli national narrative and the
Palestinian national narrative are and always have been
contradictory. You argue that it is the task of the Israeli peace
camp to "lead public opinion to a brave reassessment of the
national 'narrative' and rid it of false myths."

There is much I agree with in what you write, including that last
statement. I also disagree with many facets of the presentation, for
I see the history as multi-layered, rather than the single sequential
line you present. I read the history as filled with contradictions on
all sides, discontinuities as well as continuities, and factors such
as economics, regional developments and global politics intermingling
with the narratives you concentrate on.

I would contend that, if we are making a survey of history as the
ground for the future, we cannot focus alone on the continuity of
conflicting narratives, but need to focus on those historic moments
of discontinuity when an acceptance of "the" narrative was in flux,
in question, even if only briefly or in part. What was the dynamic
there, whereby people could and did question the ideology they had
been raised with - who questioned? when, why? It is the dialectic of
that process that we need to enter into and try to develop.

Furthermore, we need to unbury the history of Jewish-Arab solidarity
in pre-state Palestine, and the early (minority) tendency within
Zionism that encompassed Jewish-Arab solidarity at its heart, that
conceived a Jewish haven existing together with an Arab national-
cultural revival. This was an expansive view of the land and its
resources, a view of a new way of life emerging from a common
struggle against imperialism and autocratic regimes. There were both
Jews and Arabs who advocated such a revolutionary cooperation between
the two peoples; some were assassinated by members of their own
people for this advocacy. No less a figure than Martin Buber, one of
the major Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, fought for
this perspective, and after 1948 lamented the tragedy that it had not
been achieved and critiqued the Israeli government for its second-
class treatment of its Arab citizens and its attitude to the
Palestinian refugees. (This is hardly something that every Israeli
schoolchild learns, any more than he or she has traditionally learned
about the Palestinian Naqba!)

I see that expansive vision springing forth again today in the people-
to-people solidarity work that you and other Israelis fighting the
Occupation are engaged in. It finds current voice in the principles
of the Coalition of Women for a Just Peace, principles which don't
separate a demand for the end to Occupation from opposition to the
militarism that permeates Israeli society, and a call for inclusion
and justice for Palestinian citizens of Israel, equality and
participation for women, social and economic justice, and integration
in the region. I agree with the Coalition principles that these are
not separate issues, but parts of one integral whole. The vision
cannot be for a narrow, cold peace, a "First World" Israel next to
a "Third World" Palestine (and with its own Third World Palestine
within), because that will be no peace at all. To forecast such a
scenario is to feed one more set of poisoned illusions.

Uri Avneri: You end your article "Oh, What a Wonderful Unity!" with a
call for intellectuals aligned with peace to fulfill their historic
role. One part of that role, in my view, is to single out and develop
the highpoints that arise in the movement from practice. Here, I
think of the deep revolutionary humanism inherent in the banner
raised by the Coalition of Women for a Just Peace, when they
demonstrate jointly, Israeli and Palestinian women together. That
banner reads: "We refuse to be enemies." It is a banner of action and
Reason that demands attention.


Inseparable from all the principles for which the Coalition
stands, "We refuse to be enemies" says: We do not accept the
definitions and choices imposed on us. We recognize that there are
people and forces whose interests are served when we see each other
as enemies, whose power is threatened when we reject their interests
as our own. We refuse to accept the fault line of nationality as the
ultimate line of loyalty and division and we refuse the war
manipulations from any side. We recognize together that the
Palestinian people suffer under a violent, brutal Israeli Occupation
that must be ended, and that the Palestinian people have suffered
historic injustices in their homeland that we must work together to
rectify and make whole. We recognize each other as women, as human
beings who strive for these ends, and who - all of us - deserve to
live lives of self-determination and peace.

What is the concept, other than this? A narrow peace, a peace defined
without reference to social and economic justice, is one more
illusion. On the other hand, what is (once more) presenting itself
today as "the" "radical" perspective is one that negates any mutual
recognition of two peoples; it is a political agenda that veers
towards supporting any action and any group or state power, no matter
how oppressive, as long as it is opposed to the Satanic force
of "Zionism."

Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli mother who lost a daughter to a
suicide bomber, spoke to the June 8 Women in Black demonstration in
Jerusalem. She said: "For me the struggle is not between Palestinians
and Israelis .. My sisters are the bereaved mothers, Israeli and
Palestinian, who live in Israel and in Gaza and in the refugee camps.
My brothers are the fathers who try to defend their children from the
cruel occupation, and are, as I was, unsuccessful in doing so.
Although we were born into a different history and speak different
tongues there is more that unites us than that which divides us."
Maha Nasser, President of the Union of the Palestinian Women
Committees, read her words and replied with her own story of being
arrested one night by Israeli soldiers, for no clear reasons, and
hauled off to jail, forced to leave alone her two young children,
whom she had been bathing. She wrote: "You raised all the feelings of
human ties that relate us as humans."

Is there yet a way for such solidarity to turn back the disasters
that loom on the horizon?

Yours, Michelle Gubbay

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