Ok, a quick rundown of a few things, mainly some interviews with Avram Burg in the recent news, as well as some fun & instructive pictures to share.
Here's the first, by popular demand;
olive harvest in Rujeeb Village, Nablus Region
Here is the first picture, and it is in reference to maps and borders, and they way we see ourselves and others; who is in and who is out, so to speak.
So, a middle Eastern history section, pretty uncontroversial, right?
Well, then there is this
a separate Israel history section- wait, I thought that Israel was actually IN the middle east, right? Well, physically it is, but conceptually, it ain't. Remember what Hezl said way back when;
"We can be the vanguard of culture against barbarianism." (One Palestine Complete, p. 150)
The Zionist project required dividing the local population and shifting the demographics by a combination of immigration of Jews from Europe and ethnic cleansing of the existing non-Jewish inhabitants, the Palestinians... In 1917, when Lord Balfour of Britain promised a homeland for Jews in Palestine, Jews were 8 percent of the population. One of the founders of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, argued that the relationship with colonial powers was mutual: “We should there form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism... [Europe] would have to guarantee our existence.”
And if you think that only this one bookstore made this distinction, think again; here is another bookstore
and here is a popular online DVD rental website, and look what it says;
See there? You can rent films from Israel, or films from the Middle East, but not both! Too bad!
Now, why am I pointing this out? Because we're talking abotu more than just an occupation, it is a way of thinking and looking at ourselves and others ('the other') and the world that is at stake here. When whites colonized south Africa, they could never convince anyone that SA was not part of Africa; Even in the same bookstores that make the distinction between the middle east and Israel, books on SA apartheid dominate the Africa section;
So South Africa remained Africa, mostly due to the preponderance of actual Africans still there, a fact that has been altered in Israel/Palestine and parts of the Americas, due to successful campaigns of ethnic cleansing, dispossession and even genocide, particularly in the case of Native American tribes. How many peoples have vanished, and the identity of their lands with them in the centuries?
So this brings me to Avram Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset, labor-party Zionist sabra, who has now become a non-Zionist, if not an anti-zionist. He has been interviewed much lately, so here's a rundown on some things he has said;
on maps, borders, and the defense of Europe, from a Haaretz interview by a not so happy Ari Shavit;
AS:In the book you both ask and answer. "I feel very strongly," you write, "that there is a very good chance that a future Knesset in Israel ... will prohibit sexual relations with Arabs, use administrative means to prevent Arabs from employing Jewish cleaning ladies and workers ... like the Nuremberg Laws ... All this will happen, and is already happening." Didn't you get carried away, Avrum?
AB:"When I was Speaker of the Knesset, I heard people talking. I conducted in depth conversations with members from all parts of the House. I heard people of peace say I want peace because I hate Arabs and can't stand to look at them and can't tolerate them, and I heard people on the right use Kahanist language. Kahanism [referring to the ultranational doctrine of Rabbi Meir Kahane] is in the Knesset. It was disqualified as a party, but it constitutes 10 and maybe 15 and maybe even 20 percent of the Jewish discourse in the Knesset. These matters are far from simple. These are roiling waters."
AS:I will tell you frankly. I think we have serious moral and psychological problems. But I think that the comparison with Germany on the eve of the rise of Nazism to power is baseless. One example: There is a problem with the place of the army in our lives and with the place of the generals in our politics and in the relations between the political echelon and the army. But you are likening Israeli militarism to German militarism, and that is a false comparison. You describe Israel as a Prussian Sparta living by the sword, and that is not the Israel I see outside. Certainly not in 2007.
AB:"I envy your ability to read the situation as you read it. I very much envy you. But I think we are a society that in its feelings lives by the sword .... It is not by chance that I make the comparison with Germany, because our feeling that we are obliged to live by the sword stems from Germany. What they deprived us of in the 12 years of Nazism necessitates a very large sword. Look at the fence. The separation fence is a fence against paranoia. And it was born in my milieu. In my school of thought. With my own Haim Ramon. What is the thinking here? That I will erect a big wall and the problem will be solved because I will not see them. You know, the Labor movement always saw the historical context and represented a culture of dialogue, but here we have terrible pettiness of soul. The fence physically demarcates the end of Europe. It says that this is where Europe ends. It says that you are the forward post of Europe and the fence separates you from the barbarians. Like the Roman Wall. Like the Wall of China. But that is so pathetic. And it is a bill of divorce from the vision of integration. There is something so xenophobic about it. So insane. And it comes just at a time when Europe itself, and the world with it, has made such an impressive advance in internalizing the lessons of the Holocaust and has fomented a great advance in the normative behavior of nations."
AS:The truth is that you are a salient Europist. You live in Nataf but you are all Brussels. The prophet of Brussels.
AB:"Completely. Completely. I see the European Union as a biblical utopia. I don't know how long it will hold together, but it is amazing. It is completely Jewish."
AS:And this admiration you show for Europe is not accidental. Because one of the riveting things in your book is that the sabra Avrum Burg turns his back on being sabra and connects very deeply with some sort of yekke [a reference to Jews of German origin] romanticism. Zionist Israel comes across as a vulgar baron in the book, whereas German Jewry is the ideal and the paragon.
AB:"You are dichotomous, Ari, and I am inclusive. You slice off and I try to contain. Therefore I do not say that I am turning my back on being sabra but that I am turning in a different direction. And that is true. Completely true."
And here are some choice portions from another interview inthe New Yorker;
In “Defeating Hitler,” Burg writes that one of the most dispiriting aspects of Israeli political conversation is the constant reference point of the slaughter of six million Jews in the nineteen-forties. “The most optimistic years in the state of Israel were 1945 to 1948,” he said to me. “The farther we got from the camps and the gas chambers, the more pessimistic we became and the more untrusting we became toward the world. It was a shock to me. Didn’t we, the politicians, feed the public? Didn’t we cheapen the sanctity of the Holocaust by using it about everything? Some people say, ‘Occupation? You call this occupation? This is nothing compared to the absolute evil of the Holocaust!’ And if it is nothing compared to the Holocaust then you can continue. And since nothing, thank God, is comparable to the ultimate trauma it legitimatizes many things.” Burg said that contemporary Israelis “are not at the stage to be sensitive enough to what happens to others and in many ways are too indifferent to the suffering of others. We confiscated, we monopolized, world suffering. We did not allow anybody else to call whatever suffering they have ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide,’ be it Armenians, be it Kosovo, be it Darfur.
“In the last years, Israeliness has confined itself for itself only and lost interest almost for what happens in the world,” he went on. “For me, Israel is shrinking into its own shell rather than struggling for a better world. Who is responsible for identity? The ultraOrthodox. They sit in the yeshivot”—the religious schools. “Who is responsible for our fundamental relation to the soil? The settlers. The two tribes responsible for the spiritual dimension and the territorial dimension are anti-modern Israel.”
Burg is ambivalent about the kind of support that the Israeli government has traditionally received from the United States government and the American Jewish community. His views, in fact, are not far from those expressed in a controversial article published last year in the London Review of Books, by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, denouncing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for subordinating American policy to Israeli interests and, by doing so, radicalizing public opinion in the Arab world.
more later, thanks for reading, I gotta go pick some olives!
;-)