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Working in Israel for a
just peace between the Palestinians and Israelis is not an easy job, to say
the least. Israeli activists are embedded within the belly of the beast, and
are permanently submitted to tremendous pressures: the pressures of the national
consensus, the pressures of social (and sometimes) political repression, the pressures
of despair and discouragement, and the pressure to lose hope and to leave.
This is why, throughout
the last six decades, so many good activists have left the country. Who can
blame them? Who knows what price each of these activists had to pay for their
militancy? A personal price, a family price, a professional price. To swim
against the stream is extremely exhausting and energy consuming, and one has
the full right to decide to get out of the stormy and muddied waters. Some of
my best friends, and even political teachers, decided to leave the country in
the first years of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, feeling that
it was too difficult to confront a consensus of the whole society, including
its liberal-left, with only a couple dozen individuals.
But others decided to
stay and to fight. At the beginning in a total state of isolation, yet
gradually with few additional hundreds, and then thousands, and then tens of
thousands. Until we became—first in 1982 and then in 1988—part of a broader
movement of hundreds of thousands, expressing the majority of Israeli public
opinion. For those who decided to remain in the country, it was worthwhile and
rewarding.
However, the political
situation deteriorated once again in 2000, and, following the Camp
David fiasco, a new consensus was created around the big lie of
Ehud Barak. The “peace camp” was reduced, once again, to what Uri Avneri calls
the “small wheel,” i.e. the more radical wing, without the “big wheel”
represented by Peace Now and other pragmatic-peaceniks. Without the big wheel
to push, the small one has a limited task: to protest and to express its
solidarity with the victims of the Israeli wars and occupation.
Nevertheless, this
small wheel did not desert the field of struggle against occupation and
colonization, or, in July 2006, against the new aggression in Lebanon.
Between 5,000 to 10,000 Israelis demonstrated regularly in the streets of Tel
Aviv to say “no to occupation,” “no to the war!” They made a choice to stay and
to continue to be active, in their country, in the belly of the beast. They
should be respected for that.
Taking the case of
former Israeli activists who have decided to leave the country out of despair
or personal considerations as the example of what should be done is
unacceptable. Indeed, it is a legitimate choice, but no more.
I don’t think it is
accidental that a majority of those who are hailing the decisions of Ilan Pappe
and the late Tanya Reinhart to leave the country, and presenting their decisions
as the “only true revolutionary way to resist,” belong to the ultra-radical
anti-Israeli current in the international movement, often close to and in
collaboration with mere anti-Jewish and negationist (Judeocide-denial) groups. They
use Ilan’s decision—of course, without his consent—to prove that the Israeli
people are 100 percent bad, corrupt and don’t deserve to even exist on the face
of earth.
Such an attitude is
fundamentally in opposition to the one defended by most of the Palestinian
national liberation movement activists, who have endlessly expressed how
important it is for the Palestinians to have Israeli partners, even if, at
certain times, these are no more than symbolic partners. They know that they
will be the main losers if the Wall will be hermetically sealed between Arab
and Jews, and the nightmare of a “clash
of civilizations” will become a reality. The existence of Jews who are fighting
with Muslims, of Israelis joining forces with Palestinians, is a hole—even if,
in these difficult moments, only a symbolic one—in the fence which our enemies
are building around the Palestinian people, a breach in the Wall meant to
divide mankind between Judeo-Christian civilization and Muslim barbarism.
In that sense, it is
not only an anti-Semitic position, but also a severely anti-Palestinian one.
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