Two articles from Le Monde:
The
Deliria of Anti-Israeli Hatred
By Claude Lanzmann
Translated by Douglas
French original: "Les délires de la haine anti-israélienne"
(Claude Lanzmann, Le Monde, 2002/05/09)
The
Deliria of Anti-Palestinian Contempt
By José Bové, Rony Brauman and Nahala Chahal
Translated by Douglas
French original: "Les délires du mépris antipalestinien"
(José Bové, Rony Brauman and Nahala Chahal, Le Monde, 2002/05/16)
The
Deliria of Anti-Israeli Hatred
By Claude Lanzmann
Translated by Douglas
French original: "Les délires de la haine anti-israélienne"
(Claude Lanzmann, Le Monde, 2002/05/09)Israel has no patrons, no American soldier ever shed his blood in the place of an Israeli soldier. And how many countries in the world, Arab ones and others, depend as much as or more than Israel on American aid?
Hatred predates that from which it pretends to arise or to originate. In choosing to leap to the defense of Yasser Arafat, his chest puffed out and his pugnacious mustache presented in the streets of Ramallah to the television cameras and flash bulbs as if to so many bullets of faceless killers, José Bové thought he was declaring that the side he had so ostensibly chosen was that of absolute Good, with no discussion possible.
He had never set foot in Israel in his life — save to land there and dash with eyes closed to the territories into the presence of the Grand Recluse. Of the history of Israel and Zionism, of the Shoah, of the hundred-year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, of the reasons and chain of events that were to lead to the present situation, he knew nothing, nor did he want to. Never had man been so at one with himself or seemed so sure of his actions or cause, save perhaps that stubborn old abbé Pierre whom our new José resembles more than a little, above all in his (anti) global notoriety.
At his sides, the "brigade" of so called "internationals," women and men, members of the International Civil Committee for the Protection of the Palestinian People (CCIPPP), resolved to hole themselves up inside, making a rampart of their own bodies around Arafat and his Keffieh, lit by the flickering light of a candle (in the Holy Land, candles are not rare) like a wise man in the caves of Bethlehem, a Christlike scene if there ever was one (which was no accident).
One wondered how the Raya, the members of his government and his chief of staff, the hundred CCIPPP who volunteered for promiscuity, cold, hunger and darkness, were able to manage to remain all together in such a subterranean and crowded space, especially because according to the releases they were giving the press, radio, television and Internet, of which they have perfect mastery, the presidential complex (Mouqata'a) was being annihilated under the implacable cannonade of Israeli tanks.
We know to-day that no such thing ever happened: the were in reality surrounded by reinforced vehicles, most of the buildings remained untouched and no "international," thank Heavens, lost his life.
In Spain, the story was quite different. Real men from real international brigades, German, French, American, etc., died in the thousands, heroically, in the battles of Teruel, Albacete, Madrid, Barcelona, Malaga. We can forgive the CCIPPP for living in scarcely epic times, with no grandeur or utopia, in which they are destined for parody. This does no justify going from parody to posture, to exaggeration, to lying and propaganda, to bearing false witness.
It has to be said: there was no lack of incendiary, false testimony, starting from the beginning of operation "Defensive Sheild." On April 16, Le Monde published two full pages, with all the reverence that this paper has for culture, three long essays by authors who were moreover members of the self-proclaimed International Parliament of Writers, a status supposed to stamp all their words with the seal of irrefutable truth: the Spanish Juan Goytisolo, the South-African Breyten Breytenbach, the Nigerian Wole Soyinka (Nobel Prize for literature 1986), all part of a delegation of the said Parliament which, invited by the Palestinians and presenting itself as a supposedly impartial fact-finding commission, arrived "in the occupied territories and in Israel" between 24 and 29 March.
I’ll say nothing here of Goytisolo who, as judge and party during so many years, ought to have recused himself as a witness. Nothing either of the Nigerian nobelist, so obviously embarrassed for having to write his thanks from "the relative peace of California" after such a lightening trip and so aware of the fragmentary and one-sided nature of his impressions that he hides, throughout four columns, behind mythological fables: Odysseus-Arafat in the Cyclopes cave, prisoner of the blinded giant Polyphemos (read: Sharon, who "so much resembles Polyphemus, even in his appearance.") It is no doubt the wily Odysseus who will triumph.
Breytenbach isn't playing tricks. He prefers a frontal attack, an open letter to general Sharon, addressing the Israelis first off as "Herrenvolk," a term used by the Nazis to refer to themselves (literally "people of the lords," or "people of the masters"), adding a condition to the insult that only redoubles it: "I am sorry if my allusion to Israel as Herrenvolk offends because of echoes of a recent past in Europe when so many Jews were victims of the Final Solution." Why "so many Jews"? The number is known.
Breytenbach, we know, is a poet. Perhaps he was one. Today he is no more than a rhetor carried away by his own bluster: he has neither any real feeling nor any authentic compassion for the Palestinians. Possessed, haunted with void, he can only measure the scale of his utterances, but, incapable of giving up or retreating, he reacts by escalating and exacerbating matters (by the bye, that exactly describes Hitler's mechanism of decision making: he proclaimed his worst resolutions to be irrevocable because his heart was empty).
Like José Bové, Breytenbach had never set foot in either Israel or Palestine: "I only briefly saw Israel, coming and going, after spending one night in the Intercontinental David hotel at Tel Aviv, luxurious but soberly deserted…" he writes without joking. Deserted because the "martyrs," wrapped in explosive belts discourage the gathering of tourists in palace lobbies. After two nights and four days, here then is the conclusion at which Mr. Breytenbach arrived: "We are submerged in the horror of what you do […] atrocities […] bloodbath […] massacre of innocents […] war crimes […] crime against humanity […] a land shamelessly stolen […]," nothing more than stammering of ordinary victimizing propaganda.
But the poet must show himself: Breytenbach suddenly goes from Charybdis to Scylla, that is to say from Sharon to Netanyahou, and speaks to the former in these terms: "You think cynically that you can get by so long as you go along with supposed vital interests of the United States. I think that you could care less for Jaffa and American interests. Of course, you must despise them for their crude materialism and their ignorance of the world. It's true, your used car salesman Netanyahu used this technique for crude propaganda even more openly, as if he were a dirty finger twisting the clitoris of a swooning American public."
Why must the finger of Benyamin Netanyahu necessarily be dirty? Why must a clitoris be twisted? Why would twisting, which is painful by definition, bring about a swoon? One could spend days figuring out Breytanbach's private urges. Whatever the case may be, his apprehension of political relations in the terms of sexual domination permits every inversion. A bit further on, the poet brutally invokes the name of Sharon, not saying so much as spitting: "The snorting of your Washington bosses…" It is the hatred of Israeli sovereignty which is nakedly expressed here. It is the very idea of the existence and legitimacy of the State of Israel which is called into question by such insults.
Israel, Mr. Breytenbach, has no patrons. No American soldier ever shed his blood in place of an Israeli soldier. And how many countries in the world, Arab ones and others, depend on American aid as much or more than Israel? Now, why this contempt for "used car salesmen"? The Netanyahus are a highly cultivated family of German Jewish origin that gave three sons to Israel: Bibi, the so called "salesman," Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and Prime Minister, Gabi, a doctor in Jerusalem and Yoni, the hero if Entebbe, commander in chief of an elite unit of Tsahal, who lost his life at the airport in the Ugandan capital during the extraordinary rescue operation of the Air France flight high-jacked by the German Red Army faction in 1976. I once had in my hands Yoni's letters faithfully assembled by his two brothers (who were themselves also members of the same staff commandos): an elevation of mind with the most rigorous ethics struggled inside him against an anguish Mr. Breytenback will never know.
Our three musketeers made the same trip. They had to undergo, in the words of one, "the belligerent nastiness of Israeli checkpoints which have little to do with security." For the others, there was the bother of having to change cars and to carry their baggage for several tens of meters during the transfer process through the no man's land which separates the various zones.
The transfer is nothing new: I remember being in the same position in Jerusalem myself, long before the six-day war in 1967. Traveling from Arab Jerusalem, which was then under Jordanian control, to Jewish Jerusalem or the reverse, could only be done on foot over a stretch of 300 to 400 meters with every one dragging at the ends of his arms his heaviest bags. And this was a rare privilege. There was only one entrance: the Mendelbaum gate which is invisible today.
Of course, the checkpoints, the hassling identity verifications, the long, sometimes endless waiting lines, all that exists. I showed it and hid nothing with the full cooperation of the Israeli army in several sequences of my film Tsahal. Of course, the Palestinians in the Gaza strip who work in Israel are stopped every day coming and going. Of course, Mr. Breytenbach, this has something to with security and only with security: terror, ambushes, assassinations, are also an old custom in Israel and Israel protects its lives as much as it can. You seem to think that barbarians are uprooting olive trees for fun and that they bulldoze houses or dynamite them out of pure sadism.
These are the drawbacks to high-speed humanitarian tourism. You have time only for the bell to toll once and you want to hear the indictments of the Palestinian spokesmen only, well worn-in indictments, dramatized and replayed on stage day after day for 54 years, feeding freshly each time on their old irritations and historic lies.
Why for instance did your informers not tell you, Mr. Breytenbach, that the uprooted olive trees were those on the roadsides? Marksmen hide behind their leaves and take flight when the deed is done.
But a man's got to do what a man's got to do: the only reason for the travels of the distinguished "parliamentarians" consisted in confirming the beliefs of the leaders of amateurish and generally righteous thinking in denouncing Israel, its essence and existence being confused, like Evil's incarnation. This is why they practice malignant inversion from term to term, accumulating negative signs: "Your prehistoric tanks (sic)," "the primitive spectacle of armed positions under camouflage and Israeli flags on command posts" (Breytenbach), nazifying Tsahal, hitlerizing Sharon, changing the Palestinians into defenseless victims, casting back onto Israel responsibility for the situation.
No mention is made in their writings of the negotiations of Camp David and Taba, of the accords that everyone thought were practically final based on the propositions of Ehud Barak (the restitution of the whole of the territories to the Palestinian Authority, double sovereignty over Jerusalem, Israeli recognition of a debt to the refugees and the return of the certain number of them, etc.) That is a fact which the intoxication and refutations of anti-Israel propaganda, distributed via the Internet from Mouqata'a by a French actor and active member of the CCIPPP, will not change: the Palestinian state was going to be created, a vast majority of Israeli citizens agreed to it. Never had the country felt so close to peace or wanted it so much.
Arafat wanted nothing of this peace because it would have been the result of negotiations, because it would have bound him as well to painful compromises, because it would have implied a true and unalloyed recognition of the State of Israel beside the Palestinian State, the renunciation of two-timing, of double-talking, of the other iron in the fire which is terrorism, finally the end of irredentism.
The internationalization of the conflict has always been the goal of the Palestinian leadership. I remember Ahmed Shoukery, Arafat's predecessor, plainly telling Jean-Paul Sartre (a "Parliament by himself") and me, in March of 1967 in Gaza, then under Egyptian control, that he preferred all out war, if not world war, to any attempt at settlement with Israel.
It is also the reason why it was crucial to maintain the cancer of refugee camps, maintained solely by UNWRA — "a creation of American imperialism," Sartre told Jamal Abdel Nasser, who didn't deny it. The Six Day War was to break out three months later!
The carelessness of writers and intellectuals for whom the existence of Israel is the original sin has as a corollary the refusal to take prior events into account. Not a word about the brutal unleashing of the second so-called "Al Aqsa" Intifada (and no one, today, seriously puts his faith in the fable of Pavlovian reflexes piqued by the presence of "Polyphemos" on the Temple Mount) which aimed precisely through death and real spilt blood to internalize what I have just spoken of, which has as an immediate consequence the electoral defeat of Ehud Barak and the advent of Sharon, all while radically changing the nature of the confrontation and the psychology of the combatants.
For this time, contrary to what happened during the first Intifada, the Palestinians controlled the territories and had an armed force. It was no longer a war of stones but a real war despite the disproportion of military resources which has so been so emphasized. The rules for shooting, for opening fire, the use of various types of bullets (plastic, rubber and rubber bullets), was in the previous years, I can attest, rigorously and talmudically codified, generally respected and observed: soldiers did not shoot real bullets until they felt their lives in danger. That was early on and often during the beginning of the second insurrection. Profoundly weary of war, the young soldiers of Tsahal reacted with violence in the combats in which they had to perform: who wants to be the last dead in war or the first in peace?
The paradox of this war — and it's doubtless the major flaw in Oslo which left the difficult and crucial problems for the end — is such that it was all the more bitter because peace seemed achieved. By putting into effect the worst strategy of victimizing terrorism — human bombs who go to their deaths to create the most abominable carnages, the Palestinians took the escalation of the conflict for a true quantum leap.
When the "colonists" were murdered, it was already unbearable to read in the papers, buried at the corner of the page: "a colonist woman was killed" or worse yet "a colonist baby was strangled," as if the double stigma of Jew and colonist allowed one to understand the murder, justified it and did not warrant our attention.
When it became the "martyrs" turn to blow themselves up, practically every day and several times a day in Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Netanya, Haifa, in the discos, markets, buses, marriage and communion halls, synagogues, the event rapidly became routine. One had to look for it in the back of the paper as if it were self-evident that the Israelis had to pay with their lives for the simple fact of living in Israel. This time, it was not only the "colonists" who were attacked, but all of Israel. It was all of Israel that became a "colony" and death duly brought and administered meant nothing more than the savage demand for Greater Palestine, the manifest desire for the eradication of Israel.
No government, no State in the world would have tolerated the planned massacre of its citizens without reacting. The grand visionaries, and even Barak, who was known in Tsahal as a "practical visionary," had failed. Sharon-Polyphemos' eyesight was perhaps short, but he decided to do what the Israelis expected of him: to put an end, for once, to the terror, to root out those who carried it out from where they stood, in the places from which they ran their death operations.
Contrary to what Wole Soyinka would have us believe, the Prime Minister was not blind: he knew whom and what to look for. It was clear that the reoccupation of Palestinian townships and of the mazes which are the refugee camps would not happen without often pitiless combat.
The suicide or rather homicide attacks destroy the possibility and until then the idea of "the rules of war." The young Israeli recruits were sure to be lynched if they were taken prisoner, and in Jenin, it was after 13 of them, lured by an booby-trap, were torn to shreds by a "martyr," after it was confirmed that all — even cadavers — were traps loaded with explosives, that the decision to bomb was made.
As Alain Finkielkraut has said so well, "Israel had no other choice than to try by itself to suppress terrorism. A military operation is not deemed illegitimate because there is no military solution. […] One cannot at once terrorize people and ask them to obey the Geneva conventions scrupulously" (La Croix 17 April). Until there is a new order, and even if some inevitable exactions were committed, Tsahal, one of the rare conscription armies in the world, is neither a group of thieves nor a gang of murderers.
While operation "Defensive Shield" was unfolding, French diplomats, guided by the geo-strategists of the Socialist Party, enthusiastically allied themselves with the worst UN resolutions. Only five countries, including the Czech Republic of Vaclav Havel, who had provided Israel with the arms for its war of independence, would oppose them. What was barely masked in the dozens of articles and petitions calling for the introduction of an international force was the desire to put an end to the intolerable Israeli sovereignty.
Some, who had nary a word to denounce the suicide attacks and the loss of Jewish life, angelically pleaded with Israel not "to lose its soul." Others, with neophyte intrepidity, skipped a step, calling for a "Palestinian citizenship": the reader will remember that the author of this statement, ardent sovereigntist in France, called for no less than the self-dissolution of the State of Israel into a purely Palestinian entity which would generously consent to tolerate "the good Jews" and to grant them Palestinian citizenship. A return to the status of those otherwise known as the dhimmi, which was that of the Jews in the Arab countries long before the creation of Israel!
These dreams must end. There will be no foreign intervention. Israel is at once a democracy and a world power. World powers know this. Perhaps the framework has now changed profoundly, and an agreement is closer and will be less difficult than we imagine.
One final word, which concerns the "colonies" and relates in the final analysis to the question of the Other. Many among the "colonists" — and above all the most religious among them — maintain a mystical relation with the biblical lands which they call "Eretz Israel." The sovereignty of Israel is less important to them than the right to live on this land, to remain where they are. A certain number of them, and this I know since I showed it in my film Tsahal, would accept being known as foreigners in the future State of Palestine. Just as there are Israelis living in France, Italy or in the United States, why, they must ask, should the future Palestine be the only country forbidden to them?
Claude Lanzmann is a filmmaker and director of the review Les Temps Moderns.
The
Deliria of Anti-Palestinian Contempt
By José Bové, Rony Brauman and Nahala Chahal
Translated by Douglas
French original: "Les délires du mépris antipalestinien"
(José Bové, Rony Brauman and Nahala Chahal, Le Monde, 2002/05/16)That the author of the film "Shoah" should show such insensitivity to the sufferings of a people — that is what is disturbing.
Ignorant, narrow-minded, arrogant: that is the stereotypical portrait drawn by the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann (Le Monde 10 May), of those militants who mobilized peacefully to block the advance of Israeli tanks against the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.
The review, Les Temps Modernes, which he runs, once supported the peoples' rights to justice and self-determination. Today, Lanzmann permits himself to assail with contempt those for whom this cause remains one of ardent importance. In a long essay, he deigns to mock the actions of these groups of citizens without mentioning, let alone condemning, the colonialist policies in the West Bank and Gaza that have been methodically developed by the Israeli authorities. He deems negligible the doubling of those Jewish colonies in the occupied territories since the signing of the Oslo accords, all while deploring the "humanitarian tourists" ignorance of the "reasons and concatenations which led to the present situation." A sad lapse.
Still, no government or political organization was doing and no humanitarian organization could do what these groups have accomplished. Their actions held open the vice in which the Israeli government had planned to crush the president of the Palestinian Authority. These citizens, from five continents, stopped the invasion and probably the destruction the Ramallah hospital. Thanks to their permanent presence on the scene, the hospital was able to continue to operate as well as it could.
For their tenacity and courage (they needed it, Mr. Lanzmann, contrary to what you seem to think), these groups symbolically broke the isolation of the besieged Palestinians. They did not end this colonial war but they showed, in the diversity of their origins and the clarity of the positions, that the demand for justice, without hatred or Manicheism, remains truly alive in all corners of the planet.
It is in this unbreakable will to show that resistance to oppression is a fundamental right that their legitimacy resides. More than anyone, by maintaining with their paltry means a link between encircled Palestine and the rest of the world, these groups shall have worked to defuse the spiral of hatred in which the Middle East finds itself.
No, Mr. Lanzmann, it is not "anti-Israeli hatred" that spurred these people on. Peaceful strait shooters, they sought nothing more than a just peace. Comparing them to "the true [sic] men of true international brigades," debasing them as "false witnesses" and manipulators is simply showing a bottomless contempt for the sufferings of a population and for those who do not give in before this fact. Contrary to what you say in a peremptory tone, Claude Lanzmann, these men and women have visited Israel, met with Israelis and discussed the conflict at length with them. Their initiatives could never have taken place without the mobilization of Israeli pacifists.
No, Mr. Lanzmann, it is not the side of "absolute good" that we have chosen. It is, more prosaically and above all more fundamentally, that of the defense of the national rights of the Palestinians as recognized by the UN. You seem to forget that one also finds Israeli citizens on this side, human rights militants, officers and soldiers, intellectuals who doubtless, in other times, could have been readers of Les Temps modernes. What's more, even they, arise against the propaganda that you relate with such ease.They know, as the world knows, save yourself, that a long time ago the Palestinians of the Gaza strip lost the right to work in Israel. They know that there were negotiations at Camp David were none and that it was Ehud Barak who brutally broke off the Taba parleys (where a real peace plan was put on the table, in truth), in fear of losing the elections.
No, Mr. Lanzmann, no one believes that "barbarians uproot olive trees for fun, that they destroy houses with bulldozers or dynamite them out of pure sadism." They are soldiers who do this because they have orders to do so. And these are scandalous orders that Israeli conscientious objectors refuse to carry out.
If you'd bothered to spend a few days in the occupied territories, if you had sought to see what daily life looks like there, you who claim to know the reality of the Middle East so well, you would be ashamed to distort it as an "indictment by Palestinian spokesmen, an indictment rehearsed and dramatized." You would have understood a long time ago that Israeli security has no other future than that of justice rendered to Palestinians and, in the immediate future, the assurance of their safety.No, Mr. Lanzmann, the reason that the writers who wrote on the Debates page of Le Monde traveled to Israel was not to "denounce Israel, its essence and existence confused like the incarnation of Evil." Nothing in their speech nor in that of that of the volunteers on civil assignments allows you to attribute that stupid and odious thought to them. Their aim is none other than to bear witness to an unbearable state of affairs and to reduce, as much as possible, the disproportion of the forces present by addressing the public.
That the author of the film Shoah should show such insensitivity to the suffering of a people, that the editor of Les Temps modernes should appear so hermetically closed to the human and political scandal of an occupation which has lasted for 35 years, this is what is truly disturbing. But enough talk of this, for these are your contradictions after all.
Remains the conflict, of which the exit seems to grow more distant every day. With the arrival in power of general Effi Eitam, a hothead racist partisan of "Greater Israel" and with the recent declarations of the Prime Minister, it is sure that the blockade, the bombings, the administrative detentions and other collective punishments will continue, that repression will continue to take the place of politics.
Ariel Sharon's rejection of any fact-finding commission, even exclusively American, into the attack on Jenin is an eloquent message to this effect.
It is the side of eradicators, this jusqu'auboutiste kamikaze strategy that you support today. Why?
The Israeli army, we willingly agree, "is neither a gang of thieves nor a band of murderers." It is an army of occupation. That is enough to justify the reprobation, not of Israel as such, but of its expansionist policies. This country, you write, "is a democracy and a power." A power, certainly. Who could deny that? But a democracy? Not so long as it oppresses another people.
For that is really what is at issue: the right to have rights. It is the founding principle of all decent politics that the volunteers on civil assignments and the writers went to defend at the side of the Palestinians in Ramallah. It is wounding to see that, in the name of Sartre ("a Parliament by himself", you wrote), you cover with insults and sarcasm the men and women who mobilized for the only worthy fight: that of freedom and justice.
José Bové is an International Relations official with the Peasant Confederation
Rony Brauman is a doctor, former president of Doctors without Borders. He teaches at the Paris Institut d’études politiques.
Nahala Chahal is Coordinator of the International Civil Campaign for the Protection of the Palestinian People.[Posted 2003/01/16]
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