My parents left to a vacation in Karlovy Vary. It was planned before the war, so they are not "refugees". But before he left, my father said:
— "If they bomb our home in Nesher, call us. We'll fly to Moscow."
It was a joke, of course.
Still, i can't escape the thought that that's just what our enemy wants us to do - to go back to Moscow.
I was born in Moscow and lived there for eleven years. I love that city. I love the Russian language and the Russian culture. I have family and friends there. I can find a job there. But i just can't think of going to Moscow in terms of "going back", certainly not in the sense of "going back home". My home is here.
I had an email discussion about this war with Mira, my pen-pal from United Arab Emirates. She's a devout Muslim; she's also very intelligent, and quite modern and liberal and feminist too. She says that Arabs - including herself - support Nasrallah, because everything that he says becomes a fact, while the Israeli government lies all the time. While i can't accuse my governement of excessive honesty, i find it rather disappointing that there are people who openly support someone just because he's sincere about being a murderer of innocent civilians. The discussions with her put me back in proportion, though - i'm not talking about the numbers, the fact that we killed much more Lebanese than Hizballah killed Israelis, but the fact that something doesn't make sense in all this.
I mean, seriously - can't we end it in a few minutes? Don't we know where those Katyusha's are shot from? Can't we just destroy the launchers? Why do we bomb civilians so hardly? Did they really all have launchers in their backyards?
Trouble is, no-one will ever take responsibility. Even if a government commission will list every single failure and human rights violation in this war, the generals and the politicians will keep getting their fat salaries and they will have bodyguards that look like Armani models until the rest of their life. An international court won't help either - how can anyone trust them when they chase Serb criminals religiously, but don't dare to touch Saddam, the Assad family or Kim Jong Il?
Someone must be laughing at our naïveté here.
5 comments:
Your friend, Effie Eitam, doesn't have the slightest regret for bombing civilians. In fact, it is part of his agenda, and of what he conceives as the "Jewish morality".
He wrote recently (July 18) that (in free translation): "the third aim (of the Israeli airstrike) is to intimidate, making clear to anyone who has agressive thoughts against Israel that the price to be paid by them, their country and their residents will be unbearably high" [link; my emphasis]. He even goes on to say that all of these aims are "possible and justified morally and legally".
I am writing this, since I know you voted for the National Union, but I have no idea why.
Why were you willing to compromise for a fascist-cannibalistic party only because you are against evicting settlers?
Meahev - i read your comments.
> But... what about your "friends"?
> Why do they persistently keep
> calling the craddle of Jewry
> - "the West Bank"?
What friends? Only the Anti-Zionist Communists in Israel (חד"ש, שלום עכשיו, גוש שלום) call it the West Bank (הגדה המערבית). Everyone else calls them יהודה ושומרון.
> If they called Kosovo by its
> real name - Kosovo and Metohia
> - the more curious people soon
> would find that territory had
> been the property of the Serbian
> Orthodox Church much before the
> Albanians populated it.
Yes, well, i'm not very well informed about Kosovo, but to the best of my knowledge Albanians did populate it about 500 years ago*. And Arabs populated Judea and Samaria even earlier. Not to recognize this is just blindness. However - and i'm sorry if i disappoint you - there is a certain difference between Serbia and Israel here: If Serbia loses Kosovo, it will go from ~80,000 sq km to ~70,000 sq km and will still remain an independent country with its own identity (and, as you said once, two more-or-less friendly sister countries nearby - R. Srpska and Crna Gora). So nothing threatens the existence of the Serbian nation.
Israel is a different issue. Israel is so small that it can't lose any piece of land without putting its own existence in danger. The "West Bank" is ~5000 sq km and Israel is ~20,000 (depends on who's counting). As far as i know, Albanians don't have any intentions to annihilate the whole Serbian nation. The Arab terrorists, on the other hand, clearly state that the founding of Israel was a mistake and that it must be destroyed. They are trying to do it in this very moment.
> the more curious people soon
> would find that territory had
> been the property of the
> Serbian Orthodox Church much
> before the Albanians populated it.
I know that Kosovo is very important to Serbia historically;
I know that Albanians did some very bad things to Serbs in Kosovo;
I know that they may have received support from Iran;
I know that NATO was very harsh too;
But - are there enough Serbs in Kosovo to justify its remaining in Serbia? (Quick! Quick! You have the chance to change my mind here, there are no Albanians around).
> Or, to make it simple - Israel
> is making an example of Lebanon.
> Israel is trying to show to other
> Arab countries (mainly to Iran
> and Syria) what will happen if
> some of them tries to hurt Israel,
> even in a minor way.
It's not the stated goal - the stated goal is to destroy or at least disarm Hizballah. But in practice we also intend to do something that in Hebrew is called להחזיר את ההרתעה - "to restore the dettering" - to remind the Arabs that our army is strong. I'm genuinely sorry that innocent Lebanese civilians must die on the way. There must be a better solution - peace, for example.
> The fact that the whole world
> "knows" that Serbs are the "new
> Nazies" - tells much more about
> that "brave new world" then about
> "evil-from-hell" Serbs.
That's really bad. I think that i told you once - i heard much more good things about Israel in the international media than i heard about Serbia. There's a unbelievable anti-Serbian campaign in every form of media. If you read any paper that is not printed in Serbia or Russia, then it seems that absolutely nothing good ever came out of Serbia and it just can be right.
----
* Please correct me if i'm wrong with the numbers anywhere.
** Although there was a considerable influx of Arabs about hundred years ago, but i don't have the numbers.
bwmtuqg
Yaar,
I wrote a reply to you, but it was lost somehow ...
Anyway, i'll try to restore it, even though i don't have the muse now:
I voted for the National Union, because, as weird as it sounds, they are the most humane party around*. I didn't vote for the "fascist cannibals" Eitam, Orlev, Eldad and Eilon "only" because i am against evicting settlers. That's the whole point - Meretz and Peretz call themselves "humanists", but still think that it's perfectly fine to throw people - their own people! - away from their homes without providing a good reason**. And now the same Peretz sits in his nice air-conditioned office in the Kiria and orders the same soldiers to bomb the houses of Lebanese with the people inside them.
So how is he better than Eitam? Eitam could choose better words for his essay, but what he writes, Amir Peretz does. The National Union never advocated any more violence than we do now in Lebanon - and they are not a part of the coalition.
Given the choice, i'd vote for them tomorrow too.
Who else can i vote for? The corrupt Likud? The ruin that is Labor? Kadima, who has more professional advertisers than professional statesmen? Meretz, who call themselves humanist social-democrats, but hate the settlers' guts just because they don't vote for them? Please think about it for a second.
No other group in Israel was as misunderstood as the settlers. Yes, they are grossly over-represented in the Knesset; yes, they still receive disproportionate budgets; yes, their lifestyle is quite different from that of the majority. Is that a reason to throw them away from their homes for purely political reasons? Did they do anything wrong except living on land which was occupied on the same day as the land on which stands the university in which you study***?
There won't be any peace here as long as there are people who think that it's OK to do it in Israel, but keep their mouth shut about China, India, USA, Russia, Turkey and many other countries that settle occupied territories.
----
* Except their disgusting stance on gay rights. There are much worse places than Israel to be gay, however, so i still voted for them.
** And the reason they did provide proved to be wrong. Peretz, for example, said that the Disengagement will annihilate the Palestinians' motivation to shoot Kassams. If you still think that the Disengagement gained us anything, you are in deeper sleep than A. Sharon. Good morning, then.
*** Yes, i know that technically Mount Scopus was "Israeli" before 1948. So did Kfar Darom and Gush Etzion.
dwaqbk
Hi Amir,
I have already read your post about why you voted for the National Union. I understand we disagree about the settlers, but that wasn't my point in my last comment.
Just to make things clear, I think the reason why the settlers should be thrown away from their houses (and I don't find any particular reason to use a euphemistic expression here) -- though they should be compensated for their loss -- is that the people who lived in the territory where they live are still alive, and still have the right to reclaim their stolen property. Nevertheless, as time goes by, in a generation or two, this claim will be more and more meaningless since the status of the settlements will be much the same as the rest of Israel -- a country built on historical injustice (yeah, just like many others countries -- what a miserable company to belong to).
Meretz are really hypocrites about the settlers, but the reason for my animosity towards settlers (especially "ideological" ones) is their complete disregard for the human rights of the expelled people on whose territory they live, and their physical aggresion against the Palestinians who are still there.
I agree with you completely that in practice Amir Peretz is no better that Eitam. Both are war criminals, and presently Peretz is the deadlier one.
When I said "only because &c." I didn't mean that it is a "single-issue settlers' party", but that if you sympathize with the injustice done to the settlers, I don't understand how can you be indifferent to the suffering of innocent civilians in Lebanon. I know you are not indifferent, as you wrote yourself: "Why do we bomb civilians so hardly? Did they really all have launchers in their backyards?" My point was that in the scale of injustice, bombing innocent Lebanese civilians (and en-passant evacuating aroung 600,000 residents who live south to the Litani) seems to you a lesser crime than evicting Israeli settlers from their homes while recompensating them for their damage.
You gave a nice list of failing political parties, both morally and legally, if I may quote Eitam. What you are missing out are the non-Zionist parties: Hadash, Balad and Da`am. Against the terror of madmen like Peretz, Olmert, Netanyahu &c. who have no regard for human life, the only alternative I can find is a political agenda that's built on cooperation between Jews and Palestinians.
By the way, I was also against the "hitnattqut", but evidently out of different reasons. As I don't consider the occupied territories a part of Israel, I think the settlers should have had the option to remain behind.
Kol tuv,
Yaar
Hi Amir,
> I have already read your post
> about why you voted for the
> National Union.
?? Strange. Where did it go then? I can't see it now. I'm getting sick of this crappy Blogger.com (hi, Blogger.com developers/managers - i hope that you're reading this).
> the people who lived in the territory
> where they live are still alive,
> and still have the right to reclaim
> their stolen property.
Every Arab who had to be thrown away from his home to build an Israeli settlement should be fairly compensated in some way, immediately. The same goes for all innocent civilians who were hurt by Israel in all the wars. That's a lot of money and work, but i have no problem with having my tax money spent on that. It should be number one priority.
The thing is, that not all settlements were built on land that was stolen from people who lived on it. To the best of my knowledge, and please correct me if i'm wrong, Gush Katif was built on empty land and now most of the land that we evacuated is still unused - just like the ruins of Yamit.
And vice-versa: the settlement in which i live - Givat Yearim - is "perfectly kosher", as it is within the holier-than-the-Pope "Green Line", but actually it was built on the lands of a "deserted" Arab village called Jab'a. So is Kibbutz Tzuba nearby. So is Ramat-Aviv (Sheikh-Munis)*. So is Ashqelon (Majdal). So is Nesher (Hawasa). This list can go on. What's the big difference between 1947 and 1967? Oh, you already answered that:
> the rest of Israel -- a country built
> on historical injustice (yeah, just
> like many others countries -- what
> a miserable company to belong to).
At least you are consistent and agree with me that there really is no difference.
What can we do about it? You have a choice - if you think that living here is wrong, then leave. I came here by my own choice, and i stay here by my own choice.
If you want to stay here to fix this country, then please don't expect me to be orthodoxly humanist and endlessly compassionate to the suffering of the Lebanese, just in the sake of equality. Humanism is not just equality - feeling more compassion for your own people is human too. There are places much worse than Israel or Lebanon to be a human being, go fix them. I'm sorry if i'm cynical here, but that's how it is. In fact, there are worse places than Israel to be an Arab - most of the Arabic countries, for example.
> Meretz are really hypocrites about
> the settlers, but the reason for my
> animosity towards settlers (especially
> "ideological" ones) is their complete
> disregard for the human rights of
> the expelled people on whose territory
> they live ...
See above. Gush Katif was built on empty land and its settlers lived in peace with Gush Katif Arabs. Have you been there before the destruction? I've been there, i've seen them holding hands and smiling. Of course you won't see that on the TV.
> ... and their physical aggresion against
> the Palestinians who are still there.
And i have a problem with the physical aggression of some Arabs towards Israelis in Tel Aviv, Netanya and elsewhere. Not every Jewish settler in Asher Weissgan and not every Arab is a terrorist.
The violence is indeed the problem - not homes with red slated roofs.
> My point was that in the scale
> of injustice, bombing innocent
> Lebanese civilians (and en-passant
> evacuating aroung 600,000 residents
> who live south to the Litani) seems
> to you a lesser crime than evicting
> Israeli settlers from their homes
> while recompensating them for their damage.
If evicting Israeli settlers from their homes at least served any positive purpose then i would think that it's not too bad, but it didn't do anything good. It was 100% damage and 0% benefit.
Bombing of Southern Lebanon at least has some theoretical purpose - destroying the Hizballah. As the days pass, however, i believe my government less and less. It seems to me that Olmert doesn't really know how to destroy Hizballah, but is just trying to please the public, which is quite disgusting.
I still hope that Hizballah will be destroyed though.
> What you are missing out are
> the non-Zionist parties:
> Hadash, Balad and Da`am.
When i read that, i started imagining another cynical reply, but then i read the Hadash platform on their website and was pleasantly surprised - at least on paper i agree with most of it, except the settlers issue, of course. First of all, i always had a deep respect to Dov Hanin as an environmentalist (i used to listen to his lectures on globalization on Galey Tzahal). Also - they want to lower the interest rate and taxes on labor? When exactly did they turn from Communists to Libertarians?? Even Beilin, the "Social-Democrat" puppy, says that taxes should be raised. That's curious ...
But sorry - the settlers issue is still important to me and i can't vote for them.
> the only alternative I can
> find is a political agenda
> that's built on cooperation
> between Jews and Palestinians.
Me too. Give me a name of a Palestinian that wants to cooperate with me and i'll make peace with him. But not Sari Nuseiba or the "Geneva accord" people - throwing Jews away from their homes is not cooperation.
> I think the settlers should have
> had the option to remain behind.
Me too. Don't think that i am blind to demographic data.
We have more in common than you think. I am not your oldskool right wing nationalist, although i often sound like one.
----
* I actually heard that some professors in the Tel-Aviv University are ashamed of the fact that they work on land that was stolen from Arabs. Feel free to ignore this comment, however, because i don't have a source for that.
mmurk
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