Of ROBERT FISH
www.independent.co.uk
It seemed somehow fitting that the first news of Uri Avnery's passing came to me from one of Israel's staunchest enemies, the leader of the Lebanese Druze Walid Jumblatt. A legend that brings sad news of another legend, a socialist preparing to mourn a fellow socialist, which expresses its condolences for the ninety-four-year-old Israeli political philosopher. The same philosopher who, a time, he had been a German Jewish schoolboy, Helmut Ostermann, who refused to give the Nazi salute to Hitler at school, but what it had become, according to the message I had received from Jumblatt, “a mind absolutely indispensable for the understanding of fascism, the greatest destructive factor of the 20th century.” Words by Jumblatt. “Avnery,” he then added [Jumblatt], “he also understood the meaning of Zionism, another ignoble theory based on apartheid, nothing more than an offshoot of fascism.”
Uri Avnery he had a very serious heart attack over the weekend and died on Monday morning. He considered himself a Zionist, or at least a believer in a left-wing Israel, courageous but humble “beacon of light among the nations,” a type of nation to which, in our hearts, I'd like to believe. He was among those Israelis who we, liberals with a tender heart, we hurried to visit as soon as we got in Israel, because they said what we wanted to hear.
“Tell Jumblatt to break the sentences into paragraphs,” Avnery had told me when I left his apartment in Tel Aviv, six years ago. “He concentrates everything in very long sentences and I can barely breathe.” Advice given to Jumblatt from a man who often made one-sentence paragraphs, an annoying habit of the tabloid press, that though, sometimes, manages to get the message across quite well.
I have to admit that Uri Avnery was one of my heroes in the Middle East (there aren't many) and his story could be the subject of a film, even if there will be no Spielberg to direct it: writer, journalist, leftist, veteran of the Israeli army in the war for national independence, which is then, and he never forgot it, the same war he chased away 750.000 Palestinians from their homes and their lands. He played chess with Arafat during the siege of Beirut in 1982 (you can bet on it, these will be the first two paragraphs of today's obituaries) do not search newsletter, angry but with a gentle cynicism, they went out every Friday afternoon, condemning Netanyahu for his hypocrisy and racism, Sharon for his hatred towards the Palestinians, letters that left from Tel Aviv, from a room cluttered with books, close to the sea but in a modest and quiet street, where Avnery could meditate and roar.
He was a little deaf when we met again (and for the last time) six years ago, but he had spoken so quickly, and with perfect sentences, that my fountain pen had literally flown across the pages of the notepad, until I ran out of ink and had to steal his ballpoint pen. I still have those notes, with the ink going from my black to his blue, where he is speaking, at full speed, in Hamas, with whom he had often met, furious that the Gaza issue had been turned into a drama of missile attacks and reprisals.
“Whenever one of the two sides wants to start shooting again, it will,” he had said. The ink had just changed color on the page. “A Gush Shalom [that Avnery had founded] five years ago we had a sticker printed with the writing: ‘Talk with Hamas.’”
This is not intended to be an obituary of Uri Avnery, even if this custom has the great journalistic merit of being a story with a beginning, an intermediate part and an end. Precisely because Avnery's warnings and foresight have always been so relevant, absolutely in line with today's news coming from the Middle East, they can be repeated again today, as if the old left-wing warrior were still alive. And here is my notepad, six years old but still very relevant, who still calls for peace with the Palestinians, peace with Hamas and generosity and a Palestinian state on the old borders of 1967 (more or less a few km. square) and believes that Israel could have peace tomorrow, next week. If Netanyahu wanted it. “The misfortune of being an incorrigible optimist,” This is how he describes his situation to me. Or maybe an illusionist?
His family had fled Nazi Germany and taken refuge in Palestine. I went back to see him again, he who had played chess with Arafat, after the massacre of more 1700 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, a war crime committed by Christian Phalangist allies of Israel, under the gaze of Israeli soldiers, who had not attended. “How could Jewish Holocaust survivors and their children allow such a thing to happen to the Palestinians??“, I had asked Avnery. Avnery, at the time, he just had 63 years. His reply deserves to be reported, word for word.
“I'll tell you something about the Holocaust. It would be nice to believe that those who have suffered have been purified by suffering. But it's the opposite, [suffering] it makes them worse. Li corrupts. There is something about suffering that creates a kind of selfishness. Herzog [the Israeli president at the time] he gave a speech on the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but he spoke only of the Jews. How could he not remember the others, many others, who suffered there? Sick people, when they feel pain, they can't talk about anything other than themselves. And when such monstrous things happened to your people, you feel that no one can compare to it. You have a sort of moral power of attorney,' permission to do whatever you want, because nothing can compare to what happened to you. This is a moral immunity that is very well felt in Israel. Everyone is convinced that the IDF [the Israeli army] is much more humane than all other armies. 'Purity of arms' was the motto of the Haganah armed forces in '48. But that was never absolutely true.”
And Avnery had been a member of that army, seriously wounded in the war 1948; he had also become a Knesset parliamentarian, but he had been threatened by the Israeli government after his meeting with Arafat in Beirut. According to Israeli ministers he should have been tried for treason. I think Avnery was quite proud of this. His bitchy personality, irritating and courageous, she did not disdain the occasional political martyrdom, something modern socialists are even too terrified to consider.
Six years ago, when I had last met Avnery, and until the days before his death, Netanyahu had angered the old Israeli soldier of 1948. “What is the purpose of the Gaza war?”, I asked him in 2012, because in the recent history of Israel there has always been a war in Gaza and the last one, in November of that year, he had killed 107 civilians in Gaza and four civilians on the Israeli side. E “what they were doing, At that time (e, I suppose, even today), Netanyahu and his government?” I asked him.
Avnery's eyes lit up and he answered me: “She thinks she knows what[Netanyahu and his government] they want and she thinks they want peace, and that, consequentially, their policy is stupid or absurd. But if you thought that they don't care about peace and that what they want is a Jewish state that stretches from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, then what they do makes sense, up to a certain point. The problem is that what they want is leading us to a dead end…. If they annex the West Bank, just as they did with East Jerusalem, it won't make much difference. The problem is that in this territory, which is now controlled by Israel, il 49% of the population is Jewish and the 51% Arab and this gap will widen more and more, every year that passes, because the birth rate of the Arab population is much higher than ours. And so the real problem is: if this policy continues, what kind of nation will come out of it? It is already a state based on apartheid today, total apartheid in the occupied territories and ever-increasing apartheid in Israel, e, if this trend were to continue, it will be total apartheid across the nation, it is undeniable.”
Avnery then continued to argue dejectedly: “if civil rights were recognized for Arab residents, there would be an Arab majority in the Knesset and the first thing they would do would be to change the name, from 'Israel' to 'Palestine', and all the efforts [of the Zionists] of the last 130 years would be in vain. Ethnic cleansing would be impossible in the 21st century,” Avnery assures me. I wonder.
He often spoke of the death of “left" Israeli. “They had hibernated, he told me,when Ehud Barak, the leader of the Israeli Labor Party, he had returned from the Camp David peace talks 2000, where he proclaimed himself leader of the 'pacifist camp' and told us that we no longer had any interlocutor for peace." This was the death blow. It wasn't Netanyahu who spoke like that, but the leader of the Labor Party. This was the end of “Peace Now.”
Perhaps, what he added immediately afterwards should be written on Avnery's tomb. “When I met Arafat in 1982” (and would meet him many more times) “the cards were all on the table. The maximum and minimum terms of the Palestinians were always the same: a Palestinian state alongside Israel, including the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem as the capital, small territorial exchanges and a symbolic solution to the refugee problem. Ma [this proposal] lies on the table like a withered flower..."
Avnery was always convinced that Hamas would accept the same proposal. He had spoken in front of them, of Gaza, In the 1993, “I was there, in front of 500 bearded sheiks, and I spoke to them in Hebrew. Afterwards they applauded me and invited me to lunch.” “For them,” Avnery had explained to me, “Palestine is a ‘waqf' and cannot be transferred, but a truce can be sanctified by God. If they offered a truce of 50 years, a me, personally, that would be enough.” Right,” he told me, “Hamas' program involves the destruction of Israel, but abolishing a poster is a very difficult thing to do, perhaps that the Russians have ever abandoned the communist manifesto? the PLO did it.”
In the 2012, I ended my article on the eighty-nine-year-old Avnery by observing that “in Israel there are quite a few liberals who hope that Uri Avnery lives for others 89 years." Ora, There are even fewer liberals left and Avnery didn't even live for another six years. A Tel Aviv, next month, there will be no 95th birthday for him. You will celebrate it, Avnery's friends and enemies, they should announce that Avnery is dead. But immediately after add: “and long live Avnery!”
Source: www.independent.co.uk
Link: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/uri-avnery-dead-israel-palestinian-talks-yasser-arafat-peace-middle-east-process-a8499181.html
Selected and translated by Markus for www.comedonchisciotte.org