WHO is the victim, who is the executioner.

[bryan at indymedia.org.il]

The letter [below] by Prof. Emmanuel Farjoun, is a response to Ari
Shavit's article in Ha'aretz that Palestinians are performing "ethnic
cleansing" on settlers, but the Israeli left does not protest. Parts of
Emmanuel's response were published in Ha'aretz. The full text, translated
into English, is given below. 
------------------------------------ 

WHO is the victim, who is the executioner. 
************************************************* 

Ari Shavit, a man who is proudly loyal to his nation, wonders why the
left in Israel remain silent in view of the murder of Israeli settlers in the
West Bank.(Ha'aretz, 28.6.01) I will answer in my own name, knowing
full well that even within the left my voice represents a minority, albeit not
insignificant. 

I keep my silence in view of the continual killings of settlers in the West
Bank and Gaza, since in my opinion the whole colonization project of
the Gaza strip and the West Bank is a war crime that makes my blood
boil. To me each and every adult settler is an independent participant in
this war crime, in the robbery of lands, in the shameful exploitation, in the
repression of the most elementary 
human rights of the Palestinians, and in the continual killing and torture
that have been going on for more than 34 years. 

Each settler is an active participant in the discrimination 
in all areas of life. The apartheid regime that Israel created after the war
of 1967 in the occupied territories using the military and the settlers is
certainly the moral and practical equivalent of the slavery that was
enforced on many African peoples. This enslavement also took place
with the active participation of their own chiefs. It is also similar to the
South African apartheid regime in whose enforcement many black
policemen took part. 

It is well known that sometimes slaves react with extreme violence
against their masters. 

One has only to read the book "The confession of Nat Turner" by W.
Styron to see some examples. Rape and wanton murder were part and
parcel of such slave revolts, which interestingly enough were quite rare. 

In South Africa during the Apartheid Regime one saw terrible torture
and burnings of suspected black collaborators and policemen. - But lo,
the organizations and mass movements that called for the liberation of
the slaves did not spend a lot of time in protesting these violent and
brutal acts. 

These sometimes terrible atrocities by slaves against their masters serve
to demonstrate that a slavery regime corrupts and destroys not only the
masters but also the spirit and morality of the slaves themselves, the
direct victims of slavery. 

To call as Ari Shavit does the violent and sometimes murderous struggle
by three million persons who are deprived of minimal rights, are
stateless, are often deprived of water, even of food and are certainly
deprived of the minimal freedom of movement, to call such a struggle
'ethnic clensing', as Shavit calls it is really to express disdain for the
underdog. By the same token the American Indians have performed
ethnic cleansing against the whites, and in South Africa, the blacks who
struggled to regain territories and land lost during decades and centuries
of land robbery, are also performing ethnic cleansing. 

Could Ari Shavit give another example a bit removed from himself of an
ethnic cleansing propagated by stateless victims who are occupied for
decades against one of the strongest and richest countries of the globe ? 


IT IS NOT ONLY THE Israeli Left that thinks that the Israeli state
under various governments is transgressing international law and running
contrary to international agreements that were in fact approved by Israel:
It not only the left who consider the head of our government a probable
war criminal who has been engaged in systematic killing for the last fifty
years.. We have all seen the BBC program 
about Sharon's crimes in Lebanon, and even an Israeli government
commission has found him partly responsible for the massive killing of
completely innocent civilians in Shatila refugee camp. 

SHARON in his advanced age begins maybe to feel the heavy burden of
the murderous power that he has employed for the last fifty years,
starting in his early days with retaliation acts in the village of Kibyeh
through Sabra and Shatila, and finishing with the later F-16 bombing at
the heart of the dense inner city of Nablous. But his crimes are not
specific to him. He feels perfectly comfortable with his government allies,
many of whom took part in similar and possibly worse crimes. 

Maybe Mr. Shavit will understand my attitude towards the killing of
settlers by a small metaphor: When I see a woman being violently and
continually raped, defending herself by sticking her fingers or even a pair
of scissors into the rapist's eyes, I may gasp or be taken aback for a
moment by her violent reaction, but at the same time I know full well
who is the rapist and who is being raped, and how serious is the crime.
Further, when during the very act, the rapist forces on his victim
negotiation of the exact amount of his withdrawal, instead of leaving her
alone, I give him no credit points for his offer to leave only 10% of his
body inside her, and even this provided she behaves nicely and does not
complain the next day to the police. 

No, I give him no credit points for this kind of partial reconsideration of
the situation. 

The continued occupation of the disgusting apartheid regime that
subjects three million people, of whom a million and a half are children,
to the arbitrary power of occupation, suppression of rights and countless
restrictions, will be paid each year with higher and higher interest rates
by the two societies: In the continual corruption on both sides, by the
enormous strengthening of the religious extreme ideologies and groups,
by the flight of the best brains and trained people and the obstruction of
education and professionalization on all levels, by the flight of many
sensitive people who cannot bear the continual violence and inhuman
discrimination and barbaric degradation of many aspects of life. 

We will all pay dearly when both societies will break up into struggling
groups pulling in opposite directions or alternatively both societies will
unite themselves around false visions of revenge, destruction of the other
side, liberation of the holy lands and holy sites and other real estate
dreams. 

As long as the cynical and shameful exploitation of the three million
Palestinians is made possible by the concentration zones A and B and C
to which they are confined, and by total control of food and other
products, as long as the beautiful hills and valleys of the West Bank lure
and wet the appetite of a large part of the Israeli society, the road
forward to further modern development will be greatly obstructed.
Further, the possibility of falling backward to religious, cultural and
eventually scientific-technological degradation a-la-Iran or Afghanistan is
real and in fact developing every day. 

It is possible to claim with some justification that in its initial phase the
occupation brought some real and substantial, if immorally gotten, gains
to the Israeli society and even to the Palestinian one. But this stage has
long passed. Now we are all bogged down in its muddy waters while
many of our leader still attempt to bring back the glorious initial days of
profitable occupation. 

The initial exhilaration of this occupation drug has turned into woeful
drug addiction with all its usual criminal consequences and frustrating and
hopeless attempts to liberate oneself from the worst aspects without
really giving it up. 

Now we are paying heavily in the astonishing indifference of large
sections of our society to modern development, by a huge turn to the
most narrow and degrading form of religious "learnings", by the
proliferation of religious schools in which nothing beyond the Talmud is
taught, where science in general and biology in particular is despised and
avoided as terrible heresy. It is clear to me that the denial of the
biological theory of evolution is as as dangerous to Israeli society as,
say, the denial of the holocaust to European socio-political culture. 

The Israeli religious movements, with cunning instinct, understand very
well that the this lure of West Bank real estate, the messianism of
Greater Israel, and hopes of glory via total control of the whole Land
and its peoples by the Jews is the best block on the modern
development of the Israeli people, a development which to them
represents the worst danger. They happily direct attention to the lure of
"riches", real-estate and religio-cultural, in material possession of land
and workers, and away from the only real source of richness: Modern
scientific-technological and cultural progress, towards which many
Israelis have started leaning heavily, and with spectacularly good results. 

Thus they are carried in their extreme nationalism and chauvinism not
only by religious and all too materialistic greed and dedication to the
"Land of Israel", but also by the understanding that racism and factual
and legal assertion of the inferiority of everything non-Jewish is the
biggest block on the road they fear most: The road to further modern
technological and cultural-cosmopolitical development of Israel both in
the areas of human and social rights and the political-economical
domain. 


No, nothing justifies indiscriminate killing. Not even this shameful
occupation. Even the aim of liberation does not sanctify all the means
employed on the way. After all the logic of sanctification of the means
via the holy aims turns the sometimes immoral means themselves into
new holy aims and oftentimes pushes the real final aims into the remote
background. But the movement against occupation in Israel was created
to battle a specific thing, a specific state inflicted violence and
discrimination, and not to fight against any transgression of moral codes.
We are here to defend to victims of state policy, not the abused
neighbors, neither to protest against the killing of land robbers such as
the settlers, be they the more extreme version of Goldstein, the mass
murderer of 32 peaceful Palestinian prayers in Hebron, or the more mild
land confiscators who fence off the Palestinians from the ancestral lands. 

Yes, the Israeli occupation increases every day the corruption of the
Palestinians, just as slavery has always corrupted and destroyed many of
its victims, not the least by blocking most of the possible roads for their
normal human development on par with the times. 
The results of this corruption will be and are being criticized, principally
by brave Palestinian voices, and loudly I hope. But as long as the crimes
of continual collective rape that Israel perpetrates in the West Bank and
Gaza have not ended, my voice of protest against the crimes of the
slaves themselves, the crimes of the prisoners of the concentration zones,
of the new ghettos, blocked away by Israeli tanks from any free
development and movement, my voice will be but a whisper in
comparison to my unrelenting anger against the collective executioner:
The governments of Israel and their collaborators from all the levels of
the Israeli and Palestinian societies. 


Emmanul Farjoun, 17.2.01 

(Prof of Mathematics, 
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) 

Bryan Atinsky
IMC-Israel
Engish Editorial Coordinator
http://www.indymedia.org.il