Uri
Avnery
December 17, 2011
“With
Friends Like These…”
MY
GOD, what a bizarre lot these Republican aspirants for the US presidency
are!
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 Newton
discovered the Law of Gravity. Newton
Leroy Gingrich has discovered something no less earth-shaking: there is an
“invented” people around, referring to the Palestinians.
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 Israel, this was the official line.
Golda Meir famously exclaimed: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian
people!”
(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 Israel and
abroad – was employed to “prove” that there was no Palestinian people. A lady
called Joan Peters wrote
a book (“From Time Immemorial”) proving that the riffraff calling themselves
“Palestinians” had nothing to do with Palestine.
They are nothing but interlopers and impostors. The book was immensely
successful – until some experts took it apart and proved that the whole edifice
of conclusive proofs was utter rubbish.
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 Israel recognized the PLO as the
sole representative of the “Palestinian people”, and the argument was laid to
rest.
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 America and destroyed the native
population became a “nation”. Members of an ethnic-religious Diaspora formed
themselves into a “Jewish nation”. Many others did more or less the same.
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 Istanbul, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the future
Prime Minister and President (respectively) of Israel, wrote a treatise about the
Palestinians. The population of this country, they said, has never changed.
Only small elites were sometimes deported. The towns and villages never moved,
as their names prove. Canaanites became Israelites, then Jews and Samaritans,
then Christian Byzantines. With the Arab conquest, they slowly adopted the
religion of Islam and the Arabic Culture. These are today’s Palestinians. I
tend to agree with them.
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 Algeria.
Any takers for this theory now?
The
name “Palestine”
was mentioned by a Greek historian some 2500 years ago. A “Duke of Palestine” is mentioned
in the Talmud. When the Arabs conquered the country, they called it “Filastin”,
as they still do”. The Arab national
movement came into being all over the Arab world, including Palestine – at the same time as the Zionist
movement – and strove for independence from the Ottoman Sultan.
For
centuries, Palestine was considered a part of
Greater Syria
(the region known in Arabic as 'Sham').
There was no formal distinction between Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians
and Jordanians. But when, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the
European powers divided the Arab world between them, a state called Palestine
became a fact under the British Mandate, and the Arab Palestinian people
established themselves as a separate nation with a national flag of their own.
Many peoples in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America
did the same, even without asking Gingrich for confirmation.
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 United States of America. Given the
economic situation, that is not as unlikely as it sounds.
As
for now, Gingrich is doing immense damage to the national interests of the US. At this
historic juncture, the masses at all the Tahrir Squares across the Arab world
are wondering about America’s
attitude. Newt’s answer contributes to a new and more profound
anti-Americanism.
Alas,
he is not the only extreme rightist seeking to embrace Israel. Israel has lately become the Mecca of all the world’s racists. This week
we were honored by the visit of the husband of Marine Le Pen, leader of the
French National Front. A pilgrimage to the Jewish State is now a must for any
aspiring fascist.
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?
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário