Gerald Kaufman: We cannot allow these murders to go unpunished
It has struck me many times that my friends on the American left differ from their Labour compatriots here in the UK only on one fundamental issue: Israel.
I have often wondered if it's perhaps the fact that both the US and the Israelis settled their lands from the indigenous peoples that gives Americans an insight into the Israeli way of thinking, or reasoning, that we here in old Europe do not possess.
Speaking as someone who lives in a country that once had an Empire, I find it astonishing that in 2006 there is still a nation that talks of settlements and outposts. It seems the language of a long ago time, best forgotten.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because there was a case in the UK the other day, I write about it here, in which the IDF have been found by a British jury guilty of deliberately shooting 22 year old British peace activist Tom Hurdnall with the intention of killing him. The case is huge over here as the intentional killing of a civilian is a war crime.
There is an article in today's Independent by Gerald Kaufman that I felt I had to post. I apologise for what is in effect simply copying and pasting, but I think it's an important read. And if I only provide a link within two days The Independent will make you pay for this, which I think should be read by everyone.
This gives some indication of the way this is playing here.
In a marvellous book of essays, "The Slopes of Lebanon", the great Israeli novelist Amos Oz advanced an audacious thesis. He contended that the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis in the Holocaust - they included many members of my own family - must not be used as justification for the oppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis.
Recent Israeli governments, led first by Ariel Sharon and now by Ehud Olmert, have launched a new twist on the argument refuted by Oz. They operate actively on the policy that the murder of 1,000 Israeli Jews by Palestinian terrorists allows the Israeli forces to do anything they think fit in what their government claims is national self-defence. Over the past few days they have killed 13 Palestinians, including a five-year-old girl.
Those of us who believe in a two-state solution, a secure Israel alongside a free and internationally recognised Palestine, are denounced as sympathisers with terrorism - or, in cases such as mine, self-hating Jews - if we attack the appalling suppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis.We point out that the evacuation of the Gaza Strip by Israeli troops last summer was not a move towards a two-state solution but simply self-defensive action. We point out that Olmert's plans to base Israel's permanent border by the year 2010 on the illegal Israeli wall is not a peace formula but an imposed settlement that the Palestinians will never accept. We point out that every withdrawal of funding from the Palestinians by the European Union and the US increases support for Hamas among the Palestinians. We point out that the road map for peace in the Middle East, of which our own government is a key initiator, is moribund. We are all but ignored.
But, when it comes to the murder of Britons by trigger-happy Israeli soldiers, the self-serving apologia of Israeli atrocities by right-wing Israelis and their sympathisers loses all credibility.
New territory is opened by the verdict of the inquests in Britain that the British peace activist Tom Hurndall and the British film-maker James Miller were murdered by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip. As Britons we have the right to require action by our own government when our own nationals are stated by legal authorities in our own country to be the victims of homicide by a foreign power. If the Speaker allows me when the Commons reconvenes next Tuesday after the Easter recess, I shall be asking my friend and colleague Jack Straw what action he proposes to take about the murder of Hurndall and Miller.
It seems to me that we have three choices. We can ask for these killers to be extradited for prosecution under war crimes legislation in this country. After all, even Colonel Gaddafi agreed eventually to the Libyan Lockerbie killers being put on trial. Alternatively, we can demand that these homicidal Israeli soldiers be prosecuted for war crimes before an international court, as Slobodan Milosevic was. If the Israelis co-operate in neither of these courses, then we should impose sanctions on what would be a rogue government.
Those of us who have visited the Palestinian territories in recent months know that there is an element in the Israeli armed forces which is trigger happy and well nigh out of control. Last November I led the first ever British Inter-Parliamentary Union delegation to the Palestinian National Authority. Twice, during our period there, our group of three members of the Commons and two members of the Lords was held at gunpoint by Israeli soldiers, even when we had explained our mission.
I pointed out to my Parliamentary colleagues that we were being subjected to only transitory harassment, that we were going home on Friday, while for the Palestinians this was their life, much worse, and permanently. And of course brief annoyance for a British team of parliamentarians is less than a minute fraction of what happened to Hurndall and Miller. But it is a meaningful symptom.
Apologists for the Israeli government say that that country is a democracy. So what? The United States is a democracy, yet it almost routinely tortures prisoners held in violation of international law at Guantanamo Bay. A democratically-elected French Government suppressed the Algerians for years.
This current Israeli government, posing as moderate when it is extremist, is, like President Bush's administration in Guantanamo, also in violation of international law. I look to my own British government to take action on behalf of its own murdered nationals and their families. They must ensure that the Israeli government is made to abide by international law and international decency.
The author is Labour MP for Manchester, Gorton, and former Shadow Foreign Secretary, 1987-92
2 comments:
Sadly, Amos Oz has dramatically changed his tone. Here is an open letter I wrote to him in response to his July 19, 2006 piece for the LA Times.
An Open Letter to Amos Oz
July 20, 2006
To Amos Oz:
On Monday, July 17, I attended a rally outside of the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco, organized by Jews for a Free Palestine, Break the Silence and Jewish Voice for Peace, which has Jewish American and Israeli members. While it may be true that some participants in “the Israeli peace movement” have become less vocal in their criticisms of Israel over the past 8 days, it is certainly not the case, as the title of your July 19 LA Times article declares, that “Hezbollah Attacks Unite Israelis.” Yes, “this time,” too, there are voices of outrage by Israeli peace activists desperately trying to be heard. But I am not writing this to quibble with you over that point. We should not only be looking to voices of Israelis to bolster up our protest of Israel’s indescribably horrific, criminal acts.
I am writing because I left that rally sobbing and nauseous and frustrated. Frustrated at the similarities between the ways the protesters on both sides of the street were using our voices. If I could erase the images of bombed bodies and cities from my eyes, the sounds of sirens and explosions from my ears, I might have found the parallel chants comical. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, the occupation’s go to go!” “Ho, ho, hey, hey, Israel is here to stay!” But living as far away as I am from the attacks, I have a responsibility to keep those images and sounds in the forefront of my consciousness and conscience, lest it become far, far too easy to go about my daily “business as usual,” pausing occasionally to watch the “spectacle” on the nightly news while I “munch popcorn.” These are actions you described, Amos Oz, in a beautiful essay you wrote in 1987. The essay is called “Hebrew Melodies” and is part of a collection titled The Slopes of Lebanon. I found your book the day after the rally as I was searching desperately for voices that, in tune with the human consequences of military actions, strive to protest not just in content but also in form. Not just by screaming but by also helping us to look closer, to look deeper, to connect, to be moved.
I spent a few hours typing your essay into a Word document and sending it to everyone I know. Imagine my surprise and sadness to wake up the next morning and discover that while I was sending your words through cyberspace to my miniscule audience, you were publishing new, deeply disappointing, words to be read by millions. While many of us do not agree with all of what you have had to say over the years, your voice is trusted across the political spectrum as someone who does not write from knee-jerk ideological perspectives. There is a lot of power and potential in that -- and so I am begging you to re-visit the words you wrote almost 20 years ago and to use your voice again in that vein. I am shocked by the coldness of the LA Times article.
In “Hebrew Melodies” you discuss the amnesia that came in the wake of the 1982 war on Lebanon. You now say that the current attacks are taking place under completely different circumstances than those of 1982. In responding to the article you wrote yesterday I would like to remind you of some of your own words that, to me, are actually frighteningly relevant for today.
“The guilt for Lebanon lies not with Begin alone, and certainly not just with Eitan and Sharon, who carried out his orders (or carried out his orders and then some). We will have to grit our teeth and admit that this war was a war of the people. The people wanted it and the people (most of them) supported it, took pleasure in it, and hated the handful who were opposed. At least that is how it was until the war got “bogged down”…There are times when I forget a little, when I try to persuade myself that the “people” learned a lesson, that they have learned—the hard way—the limits of power, that there’s a catch in a philosophy based on violence. There are times when I think that “it” can’t happen again.”
It is happening. This time, you have joined “the people” and are using your powerful voice to convince us that this is a different “it.” That this is a justified war, a war of self-defense. Of course, as you described in 1987, there were voices in 1982 trying to convince us of the same. What will it take, Amos Oz, for this war in 2006 to be considered “bogged down”? Are 300-and-counting dead civilians not enough? Do we need another BBC report on Phalangist slaughter? Do we need more anti-war activists to be murdered? Do we need the dead body count to rise into the tens of thousands until you and all those who stand “united” behind Israel (regardless of their nationality) can see the obscene destruction of Lebanon and its inhabitants as an extraordinarily exaggerated escalation of violence?
“It is time to go back to the beginning—the beginning of the war.”
In 1982, Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to Great Britain, was shot. Israel took advantage of this event to launch a full-scale attack on the PLO, to take place on Lebanese soil. Hezbollah was born. In 2006, four Israeli civilians were wounded and two Israeli soldiers were captured. Israel took advantage of this event to launch a full-scale attack on Hezbollah. In 1982, Begin spoke of the advantages of “a war of choice,” a stance you found despicable. In 2006, Olmert is speaking of “a war of self-defense”. So are you. Your essay, “Hebrew Melodies,” provides great insight as to the perceived difference you are claiming between these wars. In 1987 you wrote:
“Missing [from the 1982 war as opposed to the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973] is the fear that the war may descend upon our own red-tiled roofs here at the kibbutz. Unlike earlier wars, no one bothers to clean out the bomb shelters or to reinforce the windowpanes with strips of masking tape, to wash the heavy blackout curtains or to make up a duty roster for the infirmary… The results of this war are clear from the outset, and, in any event, not one sliver from it will reach us here. The whole war will be taking place in another country, and may Allah have mercy on them… This time Israel will have a war deluxe…this time it’s not the whole nation that is at war; it is just the army, the government, and the newspapers.”
In 2006, this is not the case. Although Hezbollah is not nearly as powerful as Israel (or, if it is, it is not abusing its power to nearly as great an extent), it is managing to bring some of the effects of war onto Israeli soil. This makes it much easier for Israel to gain support for its claims that it is acting in self-defense, a legitimacy that it needs all the more after the international shame of the Lebanon War of 1982.
Beginnings are a tricky matter. Where you choose to start your tale can drastically change the story, even without changing any of the other established facts. Much happened between 1982 and 2006 that neither you nor the Israeli government are talking about as you try to hold on to waning world support while the violence continues to escalate and hundreds of thousands of people are made homeless refugees. (I have to ask again, is this not yet “bogged down” enough for you?) South Lebanon was illegally occupied from 1982 to 2000, enabling Israel to exploit Lebanese resources, most notably water. (In 1987, you wrote about your friend A. who in 1982 suggested that “maybe we should keep everything up to the Litani, so we’ll have enough water for our country.”) To this day there are hundreds of thousands of land mines planted by Israel in Lebanese soil, the locations of which they refuse to disclose so that they might be deactivated. In 2004, there was a prisoner exchange. There could have been one in 2006. Do you really think, Amos Oz, that in the absence of the trigger event being pointed to for justification of Israel’s terrifying acts another one would not have been found?
Sometimes I find myself thinking/saying, “while I understand people who are, I am not sympathetic to Hezbollah’s methods.” But then I think perhaps that is because I am not living in Lebanon. Perhaps that is because it is unimaginable to me what it is like to live in a war zone, in a constant state of terror, homeless, family and friends dying every day, the world around me literally crumbling to the ground. Perhaps then I, too, would feel a surge of hope at a group not willing to back down when Israel lets its muscle be felt. It’s easy from afar to sum the moral of the story up in a paternalistic, moralistic sigh: “Now, now, Hezbollah. I know Israel is being monstrous, but you should know better than to provoke a lightly sleeping monster.” And perhaps it is because Israel has not been able to keep this war entirely off of its roofs that you, too, are finding yourself in a state of terror. Perhaps this is why you have forgotten what you learned in 1982. I have lived a privileged life: I have never felt tremors greater than those of the San Andreas fault. But I agree with you on one thing you wrote in the LA Times: “there can be no moral equation between Hezbollah and Israel.” Both sides have and continue to destroy and to terrorize. And while it is always a tragic set of circumstances when one is led to compare atrocities, those committed by Israel and Hezbollah are, in fact, not equal. Not at all. Israel has much more military might (not least because of money, missiles and political backing provided by the United States) and has caused much more human (including civilian), property and environmental destruction.
In 1987, you wrote: “The entire population of Sidon—men, women, and children—was ordered to leave their houses and to assemble at the seashore. Air force planes were sent, wave after wave, to bomb the firing sites in the Rashidiyeh and Ein-al-Hilwah refugee camps and Sidon itself. The trouble was that those gun emplacements happened to be in the midst of densely populated side streets, and thousands suffered death and destruction. (“Well, who told those bastards to hide behind old women and children?”).” Now it is you who are claiming--without any of the outraged sarcasm that dripped on the page printed in 1987--that “Hezbollah missile launchers are too often using Lebanese civilians as human sandbags.”
In 1987, you spoke of a young man whose name you had forgotten but whose words had stayed with you. Do you still remember yourself remembering his words, Amos Oz? They are powerful:
He said that there was going to be a blitzkrieg in Lebanon and, as a result of the quick and easy victory, Lebanon would become West Bank Number 2. First they’d occupy half of Lebanon to prevent Katyusha attacks. Then they’d say there was no one to give it back to because there was no one to talk to. Later, they would say that perhaps there was someone to talk to, but that without a stable and durable peace we will return nothing. Whereupon they would say: What’s the noise all about? What occupiers are you talking about? What occupation? Why, all we did was liberate the biblical portion of the tribe of Asher. And then a squad of rabbis would be sent to renovate the ruins of an ancient synagogue in Nabatiyah or a Jewish cemetery in Sidon. After that, a settler’s group from Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) will set up house there in order to pray at the grave of Queen Jezebel. And then lands will be expropriated for military maneuvers and installations. These lands will be held by paramilitary settlement groups with such names as Cedar Trees and Leaders, to prevent incursions by local fellaheen into restricted military areas. These settlements would support themselves by growing cherries for export, and when they were handed over to civilian authorities they would live on tourism and skiing in the snowy Lebanese mountains. The centrist United Kibbutz movement would refuse, at first, to set up kibbutzim north of the generally accepted boundary, the “Katyusha range,” along the Litani River. The Ha Shomer Hatzair Kibbutz Movement would agree to settle only within a “cosmetic distance” of several hundred meters from the old border. In the early years, only Gush Emunim followers would settle north of the Litani. The rabbinate would decree that the Bible forbids us to turn our ancestral inheritance over to the Gentiles, and that decision will receive wide support because this ancestral inheritance also happens to be very important for defense and very strategic as well as rich in water and arable land, which will gradually be expropriated. Apart from that, they will say that no one except ourselves has a historic right to Lebanon, which was, after all, the artificial creation of French imperialism and, when you get down to it, there is no such thing as a Lebanese people anyway: Lebanon already exists in Syria. Besides, the Arabs already have enough territory, and if they don’t like it, they can lump it and go back to their own countries. The upshot of all this will be that, twenty years later, the right will refuse to relinquish a single inch, while the left, taking a balanced, realistic stand, will propose a territorial compromise: annex only the territory up to the Litani and return the rest in exchange for a true, stable, and lasting peace with appropriate security arrangements. That’s what will happen.
It is now 20 years later, a good time to revisit that young man’s prophesy. I have some final questions for you, Amos Oz, as I try to remain as close as I can to these atrocities while sitting safely in the belly of a mighty empire. In places and times when the wail of the air-raid sirens is not drowning out all other sound, do you still hear the “old-time Hebrew melodies”? Do they still ring out as ambiguous “tribal codes,” causing you to wonder “what emotions…those cloying tunes [are] meant to arouse or to silence”? Do you still offer the answer “that we are beautiful, gentle people, righteous, pure, and sensitive, completely out of touch with our actions; that we will be forgiven because our pure and poetic hearts know nothing about the filth that is on our hands; that the evening scent of roses will come to perfume the stench of dead bodies that will pile up by the hundreds and thousands in the days to come”? Can you, today, in between (or far away from) the sounds of war hear the strains of “We love you, precious Homeland/ in joy, in song, and toil/ Down from the slopes of Lebanon to the shores of the Dead Sea/ We will rake your fields with plows…”?
I have been inspired by your own poetry, Amos Oz, and so I will end this letter with those words you wrote that inspire me, that I only just came to know a few days ago, almost 20 years after you first shared them with the world:
“among the victims of the Lebanon War was “the Land of Israel, small and brave, determined and righteous.” It died in Lebanon perhaps precisely because, in Lebanon, its back was not to the wall…After Lebanon, we can no longer ignore the monster, even when it is dormant, or half asleep, or when it peers out from behind the lunatic fringe. After Lebanon, we must not pretend that the monster dwells only in the offices of Meir Kahane; or only on General Sharon’s ranch, or only in Raful’s carpentry shop, or only in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It dwells, drowsing, virtually everywhere, even in the folk-singing guts of our common myths. Even in our soul-melodies. We did not leave it behind in Lebanon, with the Hezbollah. It is here, among us, a part of us, like a shadow, in Hebron, in Gaza, in the slums and in the suburbs; in the kibbutzim and in my Lake Kinneret—“O Lake Kinneret mine, were you real or only a dream?...” That which you have done—whether it be only once in your life, in one moment of stupidity or in an outburst of anger—that which you were capable of doing—even if you have forgotten, or have chosen to forget, how and why you did it—that which you have done and regretted bitterly, you may never do again. But you are capable of doing it. You may do it. It is curled up inside you.”
Struggling against amnesia,
Cecilia Lucas
cecilialucas@gmail.com
PS. There are, of course, vital connections I have not discussed here between what is happening in Lebanon, what is happening in Gaza, what is happening in Iraq, what is happening in Afghanistan. Many people far more informed about the histories of these conflicts that I am have been writing about these connections. I thank them for insisting on that larger picture and urge readers who care about these conflicts and about the people living in these parts of the world to seek out their words.
This posting is so good that I have emailed you as I want to put it on the front page.
Even if you never ever respond, thank you for posting this.
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