Dan
On Tue, 16 Apr 2002 19:04:16 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:
>This seems like something that may have been posted
>here before; my apologies if so.
>
>My understanding is that Oz acknowledged that "C" was
>Sharon when this was published in a book of his. A
>correction if I'm wrong is welcome.
>
>***
>
>ABOUT THE SOFT AND THE DELICATE By Amos Oz
>
>(interview with Ariel Sharon published in the Israeli
>daily Davar, Dec. 17, 1982)
>
>"You can call me anything you like. Call me a monster
>or a murderer. Just note that I don't hate Arabs. On
>the contrary. Personally, I am much more at ease with
>them, and especially with the Bedouin, than with Jews.
>Those Arabs we haven't yet spoilt are proud people,
>they are irrational, cruel and generous. It's the Yids
>that are all twisted. In order to straighten them out
>you have to first bend them sharply the other way.
>That, in brief, is my whole ideology.
>
>"Call Israel by any name you like, call it a
>Judeo-Nazi state as does Leibowitz. Why not? Better a
>live Judeo-Nazi than a dead saint. I don't care
>whether I am like Ghadafi. I am not after the
>admiration of the gentiles. I don't need their love. I
>don't need to be loved by Jews like you either. I have
>to live, and I intend to ensure that my children will
>live as well. With or without the blessing of the Pope
>and the other religious leaders from the New York
>Times. I will destroy anyone who will raise a hand
>against my children, I will destroy him and his
>children, with or without our famous purity of arms. I
>don't care if he is Christian, Muslim, Jewish or
>pagan. History teaches us that he who won't kill will
>be killed by others. That is an iron law.
>
>"Even if you'll prove to me by mathematical means that
>the present war in Lebanon is a dirty immoral war, I
>don't care. Moreover, even if you will prove to me
>that we have not achieved and will not achieve any of
>our aims in Lebanon, that we will neither create a
>friendly regime in Lebanon nor destroy the Syrians or
>even the PLO, even then I don't care. It was still
>worth it. Even if Galilee is shelled again by
>Katyushas in a year's time, I don't really care. We
>shall start another war, kill and destroy more and
>more, until they will have had enough. And do you know
>why it is all worth it? Because it seems that this war
>has made us more unpopular among the so-called
>civilised world.
>
>"We'll hear no more of that nonsense about the unique
>Jewish morality, the moral lessons of the holocaust or
>about the Jews who were supposed to have emerged from
>the gas chambers pure and virtuous. No more of that.
>The destruction of Eyn Hilwe (and it's a pity we did
>not wipe out that hornet's nest completely!), the
>healthy bombardment of Beirut and that tiny massacre
>(can you call 500 Arabs a massacre?) in their camps
>which we should have committed with our own delicate
>hands rather than let the Phalangists do it, all these
>good deeds finally killed the bullshit talk about a
>unique people and of being a light upon the nations.
>No more uniqueness and no more sweetness and light.
>Good riddance.
>
>"I personally don't want to be any better than
>Khomeini or Brezhnev or Ghadafi or Assad or Mrs.
>Thatcher, or even Harry Truman who killed half a
>million Japanese with two fine bombs. I only want to
>be smarter than they are, quicker and more efficient,
>not better or more beautiful than they are. Tell me,
>do the baddies of this world have a bad time? If
>anyone tries to touch them, the evil men cut his hands
>and legs off. They hunt and catch whatever they feel
>like eating. They don't suffer from indigestion and
>are not punished by Heaven. I want Israel to join that
>club. Maybe the world will then at last begin to fear
>me instead of feeling sorry for me. Maybe they will
>start to tremble, to fear my madness instead of
>admiring my nobility. Thank god for that. Let them
>tremble, let them call us a mad state. Let them
>understand that we are a wild country, dangerous to
>our surroundings, not normal, that we might go crazy
>if one of our children is murdered - just one! That we
>might go wild and burn all the oil fields in the
>Middle East! If anything would happen to your child,
>god forbid, you would talk like I do. Let them be
>aware in Washington, Moscow, Damascus and China that
>if one of our ambassadors is shot, or even a consul or
>the most junior embassy official, we might start World
>War Three just like that!"
>
>......We are talking while sitting on the balcony of
>the pretty country house belonging to C. which is
>situated in a prosperous Moshav. To the west we see a
>burning sunset and there is a scent of fruit trees in
>the air. We are being served iced coffee in tall
>glasses. C. is about fifty years old. He is a man well
>known for his (military) actions. He is a strong,
>heavy figure wearing shorts but no shirt. His body is
>tanned a metallic bronze shade, the colour of a blond
>man living in the sun. He puts his hairy legs on the
>table and his hands on the chair. There is a scar on
>his neck. His eyes wander over his plantations. He
>spells out his ideology in a voice made hoarse by too
>much smoking:
>
>"Let me tell you what is the most important thing, the
>sweetest fruit of the war in Lebanon: It is that now
>they don't just hate Israel. Thanks to us, they now
>also hate all those Feinschmecker Jews in Paris,
>London, New York, Frankfurt and Montreal, in all their
>holes. At last they hate all these nice Yids, who say
>they are different from us, that they are not Israeli
>thugs, that they are different Jews, clean and decent.
>Just like the assimilated Jew in Vienna and Berlin
>begged the anti-Semite not to confuse him with the
>screaming, stinking Ostjude, who had smuggled himself
>into that cultural environment out of the dirty
>ghettos of Ukraine and Poland. It won't help them,
>those clean Yids, just as it did not help them in
>Vienna and Berlin. Let them shout that they condemn
>Israel, that they are all right, that they did not
>want and don't want to hurt a fly, that they always
>prefer being slaughtered to fighting, that they have
>taken it upon themselves to teach the gentiles how to
>be good Christians by always turning the other cheek.
>It won't do them any good. Now they are getting it
>there because of us, and I am telling you, it is a
>pleasure to watch.
>
>"They are the same Yids who persuaded the gentiles to
>capitulate to the bastards in Vietnam, to give it in
>to Khomeini, to Brezhnev, to feel sorry for Sheikh
>Yamani because of his tough childhood, to make love
>not war. Or rather, to do neither, and instead write a
>thesis on love and war. We are through with all that.
>The Yid has been rejected, not only did he crucify
>Jesus, but he also crucified Arafat in Sabra and
>Shatila. They are being identified with us and that's
>a good thing! Their cemeteries are being desecrated,
>their synagogues are set on fire, all their old
>nicknames are being revived, they are being expelled
>from the best clubs, people shoot into their ethnic
>restaurants murdering small children, forcing them to
>remove any sign showing them to be Jews, forcing them
>to move and change their profession.
>
>"Soon their palaces will be smeared with the slogan:
>Yids, go to Palestine! And you know what? They will go
>to Palestine because they will have no other choice!
>All this is a bonus we received from the Lebanese war.
>Tell me, wasn't it worth it?
>
>"Soon we will hit on good times. The Jews will start
>arriving, the Israelis will stop emigrating and those
>who already emigrated will return. Those who had
>chosen assimilation will finally understand that it
>won't help them to try and be the conscience of the
>world. The 'conscience of the world' will have to
>understand through its arse what it could not get into
>its head. The gentiles have always felt sick of the
>Yids and their conscience, and now the Yids will have
>only one option: to come home, all of them, fast, to
>install thick steel doors, to build a strong fence, to
>have submachine guns positioned at every corner of
>their fence here and to fight like devils against
>anyone who dares to make a sound in this region. And
>if anyone even raises his hand against us we'll take
>away half his land and burn the other half, including
>the oil. We might use nuclear arms. We'll go on until
>he no longer feels like it...
>
>"...You probably want to know whether I am not afraid
>of the masses of Yids coming here to escape
>anti-semitism smearing us with their olive oil until
>we go all soft like them. Listen, history is funny in
>that way, there is a dialectic here, irony. Who was it
>who expanded the state of Israel almost up the
>boundaries of the kingdom of King David? Who expanded
>the state until it covered the area from Mount Hermon
>to Raz Muhammad? Levi Eshkol. Of all people, it was
>that follower of Gordon, that softie, that old woman.
>Who, on the other hand, is about to push us back into
>the walls of the ghetto? Who gave up all of Sinai in
>order to retain a civilised image? Beitar's governor
>in Poland, that proud man Menahem Begin. So you can
>never tell. I only know one thing for sure: as long as
>you are fighting for your life all is permitted, even
>to drive out all the Arabs from the West Bank,
>everything.
>
>"Leibowitz is right, we are Judeo-Nazis, and why not?
>Listen, a people that gave itself up to be
>slaughtered, a people that let soap to be made of its
>children and lamp shades from the skin of its women is
>a worse criminal than its murderers. Worse than the
>Nazis...If your nice civilised parents had come here
>in time instead of writing books about the love for
>humanity and singing Hear O Israel on the way to the
>gas chambers, now don't be shocked, if they instead
>had killed six million Arabs here or even one million,
>what would have happened? Sure, two or three nasty
>pages would have been written in the history books, we
>would have been called all sorts of names, but we
>could be here today as a people of 25 million!
>
>"Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty
>work for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary,
>to deport them, to expel and burn them, to have
>everyone hate us, to pull the rug from underneath the
>feet of the Diaspora Jews, so that they will be forced
>to run to us crying. Even if it means blowing up one
>or two synagogues here and there, I don't care. And I
>don't mind if after the job is done you put me in
>front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life.
>Hang me if you want, as a war criminal. Then you can
>spruce up your Jewish conscience and enter the
>respectable club of civilised nations, nations that
>are large and healthy. What you lot don't understand
>is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet,
>far from it. True, it could have been finished in
>1948, but you interfered, you stopped it. And all this
>because of the Jewishness in your souls, because of
>your Diaspora mentality. For the Jews don't grasp
>things quickly. If you open your eyes and look around
>the world you will see that darkness is falling again.
>And we know what happens to a Jew who stays out in the
>dark. So I am glad that this small war in Lebanon
>frightened the Yids. Let them be afraid, let them
>suffer. They should hurry home before it gets really
>dark. So I am an anti-Semite? Fine. So don't quote me,
>quote Lilienblum instead. There is no need to quote an
>anti-Semite. Quote Lilienblum, and he is definitely
>not an anti-Semite, there is even a street in Tel Aviv
>named after him. (C. quotes from a small notebook that
>was lying on his table when I arrived:) 'Is all that
>is happening not a clear sign that our forefathers and
>ourselves...wanted and still want to be disgraced?
>That we enjoy living like gypsies.' That's Lilienblum.
>Not me. Believe me. I went through the Zionist
>literature, I can prove what I say.
>
>"And you can write that I am disgrace to humanity, I
>don't mind, on the contrary. Let's make a deal: I will
>do all I can to expel the Arabs from here, I will do
>all I can to increase anti-semitism, and you will
>write poems and essays about the misery of the Arabs
>and be prepared to absorb the Yids I will force to
>flee to this country and teach them to be a light unto
>the gentiles. How about it?"
>
>It was there that I stopped C.'s monologue for a
>moment and expressed the thought passing through my
>mind, perhaps more for myself than for my host. Was it
>possible that Hitler had not only hurt the Jews but
>also poisoned their minds? Had that poison sunk in and
>was still active? But not even that idea could cause
>C. to protest or raise his voice. After all, he said
>to have never shouted under stress, even during the
>famous operations his name is associated with..."