No Law, No Peace
I’ll draw to a close by quoting the words of an Israeli I greatly admire and respect. He is Major General (now retired) Shlomo Gazit. For about two decades he was the head of research at Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence. That meant he was the world’s leading authority on the reality of the Arab military threat to Israel’s existence. In 1973 he was called upon to become the Director of Military Intelligence, with a brief to make sure there could never again be an intelligence failure of the kind that had occurred in the countdown to the war of that year. He was, in short, the man to whom the government of Israel turned for salvation in the aftermarth of what it perceived at the time, wrongly, to be a real threat to the Zionist state’s existence. Shlomo didn’t want the job but he took it out of duty. I got to know him in 1980 when I was the linkman in an exploratory, secret dialogue between Arafat and Shimon Peres, who was then hoping to become prime minister and deny Menachem Begin a second term in office. In our conspiracy for peace, Shlomo Gazit was advising Peres. (I call it a conspiracy because if Prime Minister Begin had been aware of what we were doing, he probably would have had Peres and Gazit hanged as traitors and me shot).
Over coffee one morning I took a deep breath and said to Shlomo: “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all a myth. Israel’s existence has never, ever, been in danger.”
Through a sad smile he replied: “Alan, the trouble with us Israelis is that we’ve become the victims of our own propaganda.”
I end the Prologue to Volume One of my book with that Gazit quote. (The Prologue is titled Waiting for the Apocalypse). I didn’t tell my readers how that conversation continued, but I’ll tell you. I said to Shlomo, “Would you object if I said the name of the game is saving Israel from itself?”He replied, “No.”
In my opinion the question today is not so much how can Israel be saved from itself, but how can the Jews(not to mention the rest of us) be saved from Zionism?
At this point the Gentile me takes a deep breath as he steps into a mine field….. Most of Israel’s Jews and many Jews of the world are in desperate need of some shocking and awesome therapy. What, really, do I mean?
It’s long been my view that most Israelis and Jews everywhere don’t want to know the truth of historyas it relates to the creation of the Zionist state and its policies. The truth is apparently too uncomfortable and morally challenging. Over the last two and three years I’ve discussed this phenomenon with some of my dearest Jewish friends, including Dr. Hajo Meyer who I quoted earlier. He was born in Germany, served in the Jewish underground, was captured by the Gestapo and transported to Aushchwitz. In a recent conversation, he said he had come to the conclusion that his Jewish people – traumatized by the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust and brainwashed by Zionism’s exploitation of it – were sick and beyond reason. That, I believe, as Hajo does, is why it has been, and still is, impossible for most Jews – Israelis and others – to engage in rational discussion about who must do what and why for justice and peace in the Middle East.
About the shocking and awesome therapy required, I’ll say this much. There needs to be a declaration by the international community, led by President Obama, to the effect that the days of the double-standard are over, and that Zionism will now be called and held to account for its crimes – not only its most recent crimes in the Gaza Strip, but the crime on which the Zionist state was founded, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
I’ll conclude (well almost) with a question a question to which I don’t pretend to know the answer. In the wake of Israel’s latest demonstration of state terrorism, could it be that charging some of is political and military leaders with war crimes and prosecuting them would be the catharsisneeded to open very many if not all Jewish minds to the idea that Zionism - not the Arabs and other Muslims – IS their real enemy; and that silence is not the way to refute and demolish a charge of complicity in Zionism’s crimes?
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