Ariel Sharon’s World Legacy

There is a social taboo on cursing the dead. But in the case of Ariel Sharon, there is a general consensus that he was a brutal thug and people are saying that openly. I struggle to say something about the man without betraying my utter disgust with his legacy of warmongering and power grabbing. “Brutal thug” is the nicest descriptive I find in the kindness of my heart to fling at the man in parting. I look at the cherubic smile on his bulldog face in the picture and wonder what makes it evoke such revulsion deep in my soul.

The man had a physical presence that was difficult to dismiss, a corpulence of bovine proportions that lent credence to the Palestinian mothers’ usage of his name to threaten their misbehaving babies. I never met Sharon in person. Yet every time I saw him on TV I had the urge to use the standard Boy Scout trick when threatened by a wild boar or an angry bear: to project an expanded body image myself by spreading my arms up with a sheet or a coat hanging from them while banging vigorously on a pot to intimidate the wild animal and drive it back from me.

Then I get an inkling of a rationale for my hateful attitude: Sharon nearly tricked me into choosing to abandon my native home. My wife, an American citizen, and I had another option to living in Israel. With his rapid climb to prominence in Israel’s political life we made a well thought-out plan, or so we thought at the time: If and when Sharon gets to lead Israel, we would leave, we promised ourselves. When the time came and the man’s inevitable rise to Israel’s premiership materialized we sat and reassessed our commitment again. Quickly, we concluded that in making our previous calculations we had evidenced undeserved trust in the Israeli electorate. Israel as a whole was becoming a sinister collective and it was a mistake to have placed our trust in it. In weighing our steps we had made a mistake in giving the reins of decision-making on our future to a society that defined itself as exclusive of us in the first place. We were not Jews and the vast majority of Israel’s citizens saw the state of Israel and its society as Jewish and understood that to exclude the likes of us. Whichever way we looked at it and hard as we tried it was impossible to balance the contradiction of a “democratic and Jewish state.” It just was too heavy at the base for us to balance it on its head so that we would fit in it. It left us out in the cold. So how had we dared put our future in the hands of an apartheid society mired deeper by the day in the violence, blood and slime of occupation of our brothers and sisters. The sweetest recurrent wet dream of Zionism had always been to dislodge me off of my native land. And here I was putting the decision on my sacred right to live on my land in the hands of Sharon and his fascist fans. What an illogical decision had my wife and I made! We reversed that decision on the spot and set ourselves a much more challenging goal: to help expose the falsity of Israeli democracy to the world and to challenge the world to meet its moral responsibility vis-à-vis the lie.

It can be said in Sharon’s defense that he was innocent of any sense of right or wrong. His acts of violence seemed to be like those of an unthinking being, not unlike a slug’s unawareness of what its actions might do to others. Or even like those of an inanimate object, an independent robot programmed to do harm. Not only that the concept of right and wrong didn’t count in calculating the outcome of its actions but that such concept wasn’t there in the first place. It gave the man a certain appearance of innocence, almost like a child’s. Except that a child displays readiness to learn, a quality that invites lecturing, reprimand and punishment. Here there was a self-evident uselessness of such interventions. The man did what he did because violence and harming others was in his nature not because he willed it.

Blood didn’t seem to soil Sharon’s hands. Hiis hands were always that way; it was part of his constituency. Very early in his military career, the grand master of Israel’s independence saw through Sharon clearly and advised him to abandon his studies and to pursue his natural bend for killing. Sharon never forgot or changed the track that Ben Gurion set him on. He went on from Qebya to Gaza to Sabra and Shatilla to Jenin, When his murderous legacy clashed with accepted international standards of behavior, the world had to adjust itself to his reality: Israel’s Labor government under Barak sent a thousand policemen and fired 1.3 million bullets in October of 2000 to guard him on his provocative visit to Al-Aqsa grounds. Belgium changed its laws to get him of the hook of Sabra and Shatilla war crime. And president George W. Bush praised him as a “man of peace.” Sharon just took it all in his stride and continued killing Palestinians and Arabs. His admirers saw all of this in a positive light. To them he was not a scary beast but a step beyond in lacking blame: To them he was a machine: They called him “The Bulldozer.” In my imagination the apt simile took hold when he, in the form of a D-9 Caterpillar, went over Rachel Corrie with the blade once then reversed to verify the kill.

Clearly, the man lacked a conscience. But what does that say about all the world leaders and media commentators who continue to pile accolades on the dead war criminal? Perhaps it just shows how low the world had sunk in its efforts to observe proper diplomatic protocol. But what does it say about Israel as the country that had chosen him as its leader and that continues to follow in his path to this day. After all, Netanyahu and Lieberman are practicing what Sharon had preached. Except that Sharon’s style of random violence is now being codified as Israeli law and adopted as mainstream policy.

All in all, John Kerry, the American Secretary of State, summed up the man’s legacy accurately: “Ariel Sharon’s journey was Israel’s Journey.” With America, as personified in its current president for example, spouting off its automotive mantra of “Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, has the right to defend itself,” Sharon’s journey has become America’s journey as well. It is on its way to becoming the world’s journey.

Castrate Them All

This morning’s portion of news articles collated by Dorothy Naor of Newprofile is alarming: Palestinian physicians are officially maligned in Israel. Take a look at Haaretz: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.553504

 

Channel 10’s main news broadcast last Wednesday evening reported that the National Civilian Service Administration had ordered its religiously observant women volunteers not to work after 9 P.M. According to the news broadcast, this decision was made by the Lehava anti-assimilation organization after “reports were received about intimate relationships between young women performing their national service and Arab physicians in the hospitals where they volunteered,” as reported on the Nana 10 online portal. The website quoted one of the rabbis as having said in the past, “I’m hearing horrible stories about good girls.” The head of the National Civilian Service Administration made sure to mention that the decision was made with the blessing of the minister in charge, Naftali Bennett.

And Palestinian lawyers are targeted for detention left and right in the OPT. http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/anas-bargouthi-released-2013-10-23

Of the classic elite triad in Palestinian society only architects go scot-free. Here is the likely plot for snaring the sneaky buggers (Pardon the vulgarity, but I am a physician and it irks me to see lesser professionals escape Israel’s dragnet):

It all started in the city of Sakhnin where the regional planning committee is located. It is made up exclusively of Arab representatives of the Arab member communities. Thank goodness the Interior ministry had appointed a Jewish head for the group with all the attendant arbitrary powers to restrain their freakiness. Someone has to hold the reins lest these scums of the earth with degrees in architecture from sundry East European make-believe institutes despoil our women and sully the purity of our virgin girls. Haven’t you heard of Arab physicians on night duty luring Jewish nurses to bed so often that the responsible ministry had to issue an edict banning those innocent girls from working night shifts? It is a shame we have to resort to such self-punishing steps to guard the purity of the race in this specific case. At least in Yehuda and Shomron, where our female lawyers and judges are at risk of being lured by Palestinian imposters that call themselves lawyers, we can put them in preventive detention forever or, at least, till our women drop from their excited hormonal highs.

And now we have these fake architects. Look at all the mini minarets and domes that so many of their planned palaces have. If those are not phallic symbols I don’t know what is. Look at a village like Arrabeh! Not one but eight mosques, for Gosh sake! And each with its own pointed high minaret or two. What is that all for if not to spite us? Every time I drive by I experience the pain that they surely intended to cause us. Personally, I am not sure if I find it all that exciting. But think what an imaginative young woman could feel. And what Arab village home doesn’t have those suggestive multiple arches. Look at the fancy sweep each pillar between the arches fans out to hint at in the deeply suggestive sexuality of their entire architectural style. What does the upward flare of each column say but ‘climax!’

Speaking of which, think of the three consecutive earthquakes that shook Tiberius over the week. What is that if not the work of Palestinian architects and engineers. They are digging their tunnels from the basements of their homes in Gaza clear across to Iran. Who said it doesn’t shake the foundations of our vulnerable country? Palestinian engineers and architects are an existential threat to the Jewish state in more ways than one. Something has to be done about all of that. It has to be stemmed at source, nipped in the bud, in the filthy minds of their jihadist architects. The Knesset should be able to pass a law to castrate all Arab architects and civil engineers. Period!

Preparing The Way For Truth And Reconciliation

A Review of Beyond Tribal Loyalties –Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activities.

Avigail Abarbanel, Editor; Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 2012.

Of late, the atmosphere in The Middle East has been murky; indeed murkier than usual. Violent weather systems and desert sandstorms have replaced the once promising Arab Spring. Forecasters predict hurricanes brewing out of control with more death and destruction for all of us. All around, sanity is ebbing fast. So it was no small matter for me to find a refreshing reservoir of lucidity in the midst of the mass mania. I chose to retreat from the raucous media incitement to this humble attempt at collective enlightenment initiated and overseen by my psychotherapist friend Avigail Abarbanel. The war mentality reigning all around us lent a sense of unreality to the straightforward 25 individual accounts of awakening to the lure of peace, justice and equality in Palestine/Israel. These together with a Foreword by the philosopher Sara Roy and an Introduction and Afterward by the editor, constitute this unique contribution to modern peace literature in the Middle East.

In her introduction, Abarbanel admits to having a hidden agenda. In recruiting the significant list of Jewish peace activists as contributors to her project, she outlined for them the task at hand: Each was to cover his or her background, the evolution of their views, what caused them to move in the direction they have chosen, and what price they have paid for their exceptional choices. She wanted to “know what is different or special about these activists that they are prepared to do this [peace activism] when the vast majority of Jews do not.” In the afterword she follows up on her set agenda delving into the contributed material with an ambitious plan to discover the magic factor that unites all of her fellow Jewish peace activists. She attempts to determine a single explanation, a shared turning point or a pivotal event common to all. As appropriate for a psychologist, she discovers the answer within the realm of the psychological makeup of the activists:

I realized that there is in fact something that all the activists in this book have in common: they all have the capacity to tolerate difficult emotions. I call this “emotional resilience.”

Then Abarbanel proceeds to expound the subtleties of such a psychological trait.

As I went through the book, I first jumped around enchanted by the pieces of the half dozen contributors I knew in person before attempting to read the book in an orderly fashion. By then I had set a private scheme of my own. I wanted to construct a model Jewish peace activist, the average character that would emerge from adding up all 25 contributions and selecting for common attributes that a clear majority if not all of them do have. I decided to fall back on my limited but good founding in mathematics and came out with the following average character, the representative Jewish career peace activist:

The figure that emerged is akin to the proverbial horse designed by a committee: She is usually a woman who grew up in a liberal Jewish family. Her parents were mostly of the PEP (Progressive Except on Palestine) variety with solid WIZO and JNF credentials, accepting and propounding their dominant communal mythology and undisputed gospel, both that of the Old Testament and of the Zionist doctrines with all the required founding ‘truths.’ These included the Promised Land being “a land without a people for a people without a land,” the Palestinians’ placid departure in 1948 despite their ill will and violent nature, and the benign and peaceful nature of the state of Israel. The family’s constricted constellation has a multitude of missing segments, often larger than the remaining ones, due to the atrocities of the Holocaust, facts that justify faithful solidarity with Israel as the homeland for all Jews in the face of the ever-present threat of genocide against them by the hateful Goyim and with the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) as the protector of all Jews.

So far the figure is hardly distinctive. She also follows the standard routine of most Jewish youth born and raised abroad of visiting Israel for a vacation, for study, for a summer camp or for a volunteer service experience. Then our woman goes on to higher education and is exposed to the wider world. Somewhere along the way she is exposed to a different point of view about the Israel-Palestine conflict: She meets Palestinians and is surprised to find that they are human, she reads a book by the likes of Edward Said or Avi Shlaim or is otherwise exposed to an alternative source of information with ‘subversive content.’ That blows the cover off of her former solid Hasbara world. The cognitive dissonance within her cries for resolution and she commits to finding the truth for her self. From there the descent into pro-Palestinian activism is inevitable leading even to espousing the right of Palestinians to speak for themselves and  to following their lead in such campaigns as BDS. Punishment for such a sin is not long in coming in the form of exclusion from the tribal fold and the loss of former friendships.

It is worth repeating that the above is a composite character that lacks an exact fit to any of the 25 contributors. In fact it differs distinctly in several details from the editor herself, evidence, if such is needed, of the uniqueness and individuality of free spirits and revolutionaries. Yet the contributors sharing in this celebration of humanitarian activism seem not to break out of the narrow mold of their pre-enlightenment Zionist condition: They seem to share an unconscious tethering to Israel as the focus of their activism with little attention to other worthy indigenous causes even when the similarities to the Palestinian condition scream for attention. Tossed on many shores by the tsunami of the actualization of the Zionist colonial project, the indigenous Palestinians are acutely aware of the commonality of their cause. Many strive to join forces in their struggle to other disinherited indigenous groups. Thus, despite the presumed focus of the volume on Israel and Palestine, and Hazel Kahan’s casual mention (p. 231) of Australia’s Aborigine policies, I find it strange that none of the American, Canadian or Australian contributors addresses the issues of Native Americans and the Aboriginals in conjunction with the dispossession of the Palestinians. Peter Slezak (p 82) reflects on the subject of the “unreflexive, self-celebratory group affiliation” of the Jewish people at large and brings up the debate about Hanna Arendt’s exceptional deviation from such standard narrow focus. And Lesley Levy wonders (p. 87) “why I am spending so much time and energy on this issue when there are so many other desperate causes in the world.” She seems to conclude that the answer is to be found in her “yearning to cry out: ‘Not in my Name!’” Still, the narrow focus of attention of the entire group on Israel-Palestine to the disregard of the many valid associations one can make to other disinherited natives leaves a gaping hole in their mantle of humanitarian concern and bars them all from true sainthood.

Zochrot, the Israeli leftist peace movement, is currently organizing a unique event in a nearby pine forest and recreational park known to most Israelis as South Africa Forest located halfway between Nazareth and Tiberius. The plan is for a group of Jewish former JNF activists to meet in person with a group of Palestinians. What is unique about the JNF former supporters is that they are South African and that they had formerly contributed to planting and maintaining the forest and park named proudly after their country. The Palestinians are internal refugees from the destroyed village of Lubya on whose remains the forest stands and whose existence and heritage the forest is meant to hide. The repentant former contributors to the crime of ‘communicide’ will offer an apology to the refugees of Lubya for desecrating their village with the JNF camouflage and ask for forgiveness. This is an example of the required Truth-and-Reconciliation style process required for laying the foundation for a single secular and democratic state in Israel-Palestine. “Beyond Tribal Loyalties” is a preliminary step towards such a process.

RACIST

Some five years ago I wrote disparagingly of Shimon Gapso’s open racism.

http://a-doctor-in-galilee.blogspot.co.il/2008/11/whoring-in-karmiel.html

At the time he tried to woo his constituency, the residents of the city of Upper Nazareth, on the occasion of the last mayoral elections by resorting to venomous diatribes against the city’s Arab citizens. His main competitor at the time, Ronen Plut, used  the same scare tactic of warning the electorate of the danger of Arabs sullying the purity of their Jewish city. When he lost to Gapso, Plut apparently gave up, sold his home to Arabs and moved to a purer locality. He had expressed his discomfort at the fact that those same Arabs had not forgotten that till the 1950's they had owned the land on which Upper Nazareth was built. So, I presume, he told them and Gapso to shove it.

Gapso is at it again. But now I feel I owe the man an apology. He has exonerated himself in the most logical of arguments. In an op-ed piece in Haaretz http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.540278  he writes:

“Upper Nazareth is a Jewish city and it’s important that it remains so. If that makes me a racist, then I’m a proud offshoot of a glorious dynasty of “racists’” who started with the “Covenant of the Pieces ...”

He then proceeds to list a long roster of Jewish historical figures and of Zionist heroes to whom he wants us to compare him. I find it difficult to argue with the man.

To start with, my last name, “Kanaaneh,” is the Arabic version of the biblical “Canaanites.” Apparently it was my ancestral land that his (and perhaps the reader’s) good Lord promised to Moses, commanding him to cleanse it of its then current inhabitants. You, kind reader, will understand why He and I never really got along after that. And I don’t mean Shimon Gapso; he is too powerful for me to take head-on: He belongs to the dominant political stream which is working diligently in the Knesset in the most democratic of ways to obliterate my cultural identity as a Palestinian and to outlaw my obscene secret thoughts, such as feeling sad on Nakba Day. It is the good Lord that I have a bone to pick with. If Gapso’s Yahweh orders him and his ilk to “cleanse the land of its current inhabitants,” Allah commands me and my crowd to “kill them wherever you meet them and drive them out from where they have driven you out; for persecution is worse than killing.” (Chapter 2, verse192.) And mind you, there are more of us, Allah’s fans, than there are of you, Yahweh’s clique. I am discounting the Christian Zionists, of course, since they want to convert or slaughter all of us, but especially all of you, Gapso!

But I remain hopeful especially now with prime minister Netanyahu’s new obsession with genetics and DNA testing to determine who is really a Jew.

http://mondoweiss.net/2013/08/netanyahu-may-require-dna-tests-to-prove-immigrants-have-a-jewish-bloodline.html

If and when one’s rights devolve back to the sequences of his amino acids, Gapso may loose out. In these parts, we determine one’s roots through the female line of genetic evolution. So while his figurative Jewish grandmother stuck to her faith but fooled around with Arabs and Berbers in Spain and North Africa (take a look at him, will you!) my Canaanite grandma converted to the Jewish, then to the Zoroastrian, the Christian and the Islamic faiths but fornicated only with the locals. You can judge for yourself, dear reader, who has the purer bloodline.

Then I check on my man online. Lo and behold, Gaspo is reported to have admitted to launching a campaign against himself with fabricated attacks against his character by particularly unpopular leftist and Arab politicians. I told you I have no desire to tangle with the man!

Then the weekend paper arrives and, as usual, I check the magazine first: The cover story is a 13-page spread about the “Most influential cultural figures” in Israel. I leaf through the piece: Some 17 critics and journalists attempt to encapsulate for us the significant achievements and outstanding public images of ten (actually 13) prominent cultural icons, each with four alternative deputies. I smile at each of the prominent men and women expectantly but none smiles back at me. I fail to discover the name of a single Palestinian/Arab man or woman in the entire list. Perhaps that is to be expected when none of the critics/journalists is Arab. I go on line and check the full list of 100 most influential cultural figures.

http://www.haaretz.com/culture/israeli-culture-s-100-most-influential-people?listId=7.973777&page=1#100%20most%20influential

I waste another half hour but not a single Arab is to be encountered. And this is in Haaretz, the most liberal and best established paper in the land. I struggle with the existential meaning of this for me, a citizen of a country where I have zero impact on its culture. Finally I settle for a wimpy explanation: “It is a matter of definition,” I reassure myself.

Gapso is a more daring man than I am. He makes a list of all those with whom he wants us to associate him starting with Abraham and Moses, skipping through to Theodor Herzl, and ending with Ben-Gurion. He has one word for the whole lot: “RACIST.” Of course, he must be mistaken or misguided. But if I do the same, and believe me, from where I stand, I am tempted, for the straw man he constructs is very convincing, then I am anti-Semitic.