Israel Palestine Infos
Uri Avnery
December 17, 2011
“With Friends Like These…”
MY GOD, what a bizarre
lot these Republican aspirants for the
What a sorry bunch of
ignoramuses and downright crazies. Or, at best, what a bunch of cheats and
cynics! (With the possible exception of the good doctor Ron Paul)”.
Is this the best a great
and proud nation can produce? How frightening the thought that one of them may
actually become the most powerful person in the world, with a finger on the
biggest nuclear button!
BUT LET’S concentrate on
the present front-runner. (Republicans seem to change front-runners like a
fastidious beau changes socks.)
It’s Newt Gingrich.
Remember him? The Speaker of the House who had an extra-marital affair with an
intern while at the same time leading the campaign to impeach President Bill
Clinton for having an affair with an intern.
But that’s not the point.
The point is that this intellectual giant – named after Isaac Newton, perhaps
the greatest scientist ever – has discovered a great historical truth.
The original
To which a humble Israeli
like me might answer, in the best Hebrew slang: “Good morning, Eliyahu!”
Thus we honor people who have made a great discovery which,
unfortunately, has been discovered by others long before.
FROM ITS very beginning,
the Zionist movement has denied the existence of the Palestinian people. It’s an
article of faith.
The reason is obvious: if
there exists a Palestinian people, then the country the Zionists were about to
take over was not empty. Zionism would entail an injustice of historic
proportions. Being very idealistic persons, the original Zionists found a way
out of this moral dilemma: they simply denied its existence. The winning slogan
was “A land without a people for a people without a land.”
So who were these curious
human beings they met when they came to the country? Oh, ah, well, they were
just people who happened to be there, but not “a” people. Passers-by, so to
speak. Later, the story goes, after we had made the desert bloom and turned an
arid and neglected land into a paradise, Arabs from all over the region flocked
to the country, and now they have the temerity – indeed the chutzpah – to claim
that they constitute a Palestinian nation!
For many years after the
founding of the State of
(To which I replied in
the Knesset: “Mrs. Prime Minister, perhaps you are right. Perhaps there really
is no Palestinian people. But if millions of people mistakenly believe that they
are a people, and behave like a people, then they are a people.”)
A huge propaganda machine
– both in
I myself have spent many
hundreds of hours trying to convince Israeli and foreign audiences that there is
a Palestinian people and that we have to make peace with them. Until one day the
State of
Until Newt came along
and, like a later-day Jesus, raised it from the dead.
OBVIOUSLY, HE is much too
busy to read books. True, he was once a teacher of history, but for many years
now he has been very busy speakering the Congress, making a fortune as an
“adviser” of big corporations and now trying to become president.
Otherwise, he would
probably have come across a brilliant historical book by Benedict Anderson,
“Imagined Communities”, which asserts that all modern nations are invented.
Nationalism is a
relatively recent historical phenomenon. When a community decides to become a
nation, it has to reinvent itself. That means inventing a national past,
reshuffling historical facts (and non-facts) in order to create a coherent
picture of a nation existing since antiquity. Hermann the Cherusker, member of a
Germanic tribe who betrayed his Roman employers, became a “national” hero.
Religious refugees who landed in
Indeed, Newt would profit
from reading a book by a Tel Aviv University professor, Shlomo Sand, a kosher
Jew, whose Hebrew title speaks for itself: “When and How the Jewish People was
Invented?”
Who are these
Palestinians? About a hundred years ago, two young students in
PARROTING THE straight
Zionist propaganda line – by now discarded by most Zionists – Gingrich argues
that there can be no Palestinian people because there never was a Palestinian
state. The people in this country were just “Arabs” under Ottoman rule.
So what? I used to hear
from French colonial masters that there is no Algerian people, because there
never was an Algerian state, there was never even a united country called
The name “
For centuries,
It would certainly be
ironic if the members of the “invented” Palestinian nation were expected to ask
for recognition from the members of the “invented” Jewish/Israeli nation, at the
demand of a member of the “invented” American nation, a person who, by the way,
is of mixed German, English, Scottish and Irish stock.
Years ago, there was
short-lived controversy about Palestinian textbooks. It was argued that they
were anti-Semitic and incited to murder. That was laid to rest when it became
clear that all Palestinian schoolbooks were cleared by the Israeli occupation
authorities, and most were inherited from the previous Jordanian regime. But
Gingrich does not shrink from resurrecting this corpse, too.
All Palestinians – men,
women and children – are terrorists, he asserts, and Palestinian pupils learn at
school how to kill us poor and helpless Israelis. Ah, what would we do without
such stout defenders as Newt? What a pity that this week a photo of him, shaking
the hand of Yasser Arafat, was published.
And please don’t show him
the textbooks used in some of our schools, especially the religious ones!
IS IT really a waste of
time to write about such nonsense?
It may seem so, but one
cannot ignore the fact that the dispenser of these inanities may be tomorrow’s
President of the
As for now, Gingrich is
doing immense damage to the national interests of the
Alas, he is not the only
extreme rightist seeking to embrace
One of our ancient sages
coined the phrase: “Not for nothing does the starling go to the raven. It’s
because they are of the same kind”.
Thanks. But sorry. They
are not of my kind.
To quote another proverb:
With friends like these, who needs enemies?