Taken for a Ride by the Israeli Left

Taken for a Ride by the Israeli Left
Steven Friedman and Virginia Tilley, The Electronic Intifada, 26 January 2007

A Response to Uri Avnery

...it may seem odd that many people working hard for a stable peace in Israel-Palestine find Mr. Avnery so immensely irritating. The reason stems from his moral contradictions, all too common to liberal Zionism: that is, while taking an unflinching moral stand against racist abuses of Palestinians, he somehow drops the same principles in assuming that Israel itself has a right to preserve its "Jewish character" at the expense of Palestinian rights. For it is all too obvious that sustaining an "overwhelming" Jewish majority in Israel, essential to preserving its "Jewish character," requires that Israel sustain a whole cluster of racist practices, such as giant Walls to keep people from mixing and not allowing Palestinian exiles to return.

Liberal Zionists who cling to Mr. Avnery's analyses consistently trip over this moral fallacy. They want the occupation to end and find oppression of Palestinians morally abhorrent, and some even believe that discrimination against Palestinian Arabs must end. But they don't want Israel's status as a state run for only one ethnic group to end. They must therefore endorse whatever discrimination is deemed essential to preserving Israel's Jewish majority, particularly in keeping those Palestinians expelled from what is now Israel from ever coming back. In this view, Israel itself is morally okay -- a "miracle," as David Grossman recently put it -- or it would be okay if its leaders hadn't stupidly stumbled into military occupation after the 1967 war.

The result of this conundrum is moral chaos. While bald ravings about ethnic cleansing by racists like Avigdor Lieberman are considered repellent, the earlier ethnic cleansing that gave birth to Israel is considered acceptable -- a convulsion of war violence that has (it is never explained how) been morally transcended. The solution, in this view, is not to redress that founding sin but simply to stabilize Jewish statehood, which is understood mostly as relieving Jewish-Israeli fear of attack or annihilation. Recognizing that some modicum of justice is required to achieve this "peace", the liberal-Zionist goal is to create a Palestinian state next door (safely demilitarized, of course, and not necessarily within the 1948 green line).

It takes a special kind of denial to hold onto this worldview, especially in light of fresh histories like Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which demolish the soothing fantasy that Israel's history of ethnic cleansing was an accident of war. This isn't surprising in itself: nationalist myths everywhere dismantle slowly. But Mr. Avnery does not fall into the classic category. He exposed Zionist crimes before anyone else. Yet he has never lost his affection for Jewish statehood or his dedication to preserving Israel's Jewish majority in Israel. He knows that, in 1948, Zionist troops ruthlessly terrorized and expelled hundreds of thousands of defenceless Palestinians from their villages and threw them out of the country. But he believes that the agenda of preserving the Jewish-Israeli society that he treasures not only mandates but grants moral authority to not allowing them back.

It is from this muddle of contradictory tenets that Mr. Avnery approaches the "apartheid" charge, given new publicity by President Carter's recent book. In a recent Counterpunch essay, "Freedom Ride: Israel and Apartheid", he rejects any lessons the comparison suggests for a one-state solution in Israel-Palestine.


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This article was widely submitted to the many “alternative” websites that regularly publish Uri Avnery’s writings, including his piece “Death of a Myth” which is critiqued here. Most either ignored it or refused to publish it, revealing the esteem in which the tiny Zionist left in Israel – of which Avnery is the figurehead – is held by Western radicals. Miftah was one brave exception.

Uri Avnery’s original article, “Death of a Myth”, can be found at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7850

A Reply to Uri Avnery's 'Death of a Myth'
Miftah
Date posted: May 17, 2005
By Jonathan Cook

I couldn’t help but chuckle as I read Uri Avnery’s recent offering, "Death of a Myth", about the deathbed confession of Naomi Shemer regarding "Jerusalem of Gold", her song that became a second Israeli national anthem after the Six-Day War of 1967.

The Israeli public was apparently duped: Shemer had plagiarised the song from a Basque lullaby she had heard a few years earlier. Her defence was that the melody had been absorbed into her subconscious.

As Avnery implicitly admits, no one was more fooled than he. At the time of the Six-Day War, he was a member of the Knesset and unsuccessfully tried to pass a law to have the song replace the national anthem, "Hativkah" or "The Hope".

It would be nice to believe Avnery’s account of his behaviour and motives in the late 1960s in relation to promoting this "immortal song" as he calls it. But I suspect this retrospective view of his thinking around the time of the Six-Day War is another dose of the myth-making which Shemer indulged in for most of her life.

The evidence? Let’s consider the following account of Avnery’s position - not with the benefit of nearly 40 years of personal hindsight but from a book written a few years after 1967. Fouzi el-Asmar, an Arab intellectual from Lod who was much persecuted by the Israeli authorities, was working in Tel Aviv’s leftwing media with Avnery at the time of the Six-Day War.

In his book "To Be an Arab in Israel" (unfortunately, long out of print), el-Asmar recalls the extremely fearful and tense popular atmosphere in Israel just before the outbreak of war - and the extreme change of mood that swept the country after Israel’s rapid victory over the Arab armies arrayed against it.

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It is fortunate for Avnery that this book, one of the few accounts of the early Israeli left written in English by an Arab citizen, has been almost impossible to obtain since it was printed in 1976.

No one should hold it against Avnery that he has changed his positions repeatedly during the nearly six decades of Israeli history. But let him not judge the confessions of Naomi Shemer until he is a prepared to make a confession or two himself.