Reader Comment

We’ve Failed The Test

Our article Israel: Whose Land Is It? provoked wide debate. Continuing this debate, Al Shindagah publishes correspondence from two leading Israeli commentators

Among the colourful revellers on Allenby street, while sitting at a crowded cafe on a merry-making Tel Aviv night, a vision came to me, an image of an angel in battle-dress writing on a wall the three damning
words, “Mene, Tekel Ufarsin.” My Angel-English dictionary offers a translation: “You were tested and you failed.”

These are the darkest days for the people of Israel. They are ominous because it seems that all of our lamentations and protests against injustice and the entire struggle of our Jewish ancestors for human
rights have turned out to be about as genuine as a three-dollar bill.

In 1968, as a young Jewish Russian kid, I scrawled on the walls of my native Russian city, ‘Hands off Czechoslovakia’. The beautiful deep voice of the Jewish Russian poet Alexander Galitch intoned: “Citizens, our Motherland is in danger, our tanks are on foreign soil!” Russian Jews demonstrated in Red Square against the invasion and were beaten up by the police. We protested against Russian tanks in Budapest and Prague and Kabul, because we were Russian citizens who valued honor above loyalty, humankind above kinship. At the same time Jewish American kids were demonstrating against their country's intervention in Vietnam, and Jewish boys and girls in Europe were struggling against racism.

Years have passed, and now it is Jewish tanks on foreign soil. It is a Jewish army murdering civilians, demolishing houses, and imposing siege on hungry villages. Our crimes have exceeded Russian crimes committed in Chechnya and Afghanistan, American crimes in Vietnam, and Serb crimes in Bosnia. Surely Israeli intellectuals are demonstrating en masse, and American Jews are raising their voices against the American-armed killers of Palestinians, and surely Russian Jews are protesting for the human rights of the enslaved Gentiles of the Holy Land?

No fear, our literati are busy indeed, as they exalt the courage of our Jewish soldiers, they venerate the steady hand of our Jewish snipers, and they glorify the immense humanity of us Jewish folk who could
pulverise all the Gentiles of Palestine, but kindly limit ourselves to a few hundred wounded and maimed a day. My grandfather in the Pale of Settlement railed against the restrictions on the free movement of Jews in the Russian Empire, while in our generation Anatoli Sharansky shone as a leading voice for human rights. Now that we have our own country, we fence Gentiles into reservations and concentration camps which put the Pale to shame. A Palestinian cannot go to the next village without the Jewish ausweis, he is forever checked by our Checkists. He can only dream of the sea which washes the
shores of his ancestral home - we don’t let Palestinians pollute the Jewish purity of our beaches.

For how many years have Jews in Europe protested against the crime of anti-semitic discrimination in employment and education? Now that we have realised the dream of our own Jewish state, we have cleverly devised a complex system of state-enforced discrimination. In the national electricity company, there are six Gentiles out of 13,000 employees, 0.0004%. Palestinians form forty percent of the population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, but only one out of four has the right to vote. There are no Gentiles in the Supreme Court, or in the Air Force, or in the secret services. There is not even one Gentile on the board of that oh-so-liberal Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz.

Our proud record of honor in the Diaspora is now being re-written by our own hands. It seems that we didn’t fight for human rights, just for the rights of Jews. Yea, we struggled for freedom of movement and freedom of choice - for Jews only. Sure we laboured mightily for universal suffrage, but we meant the right of vote for Jews only. We don’t mind invasion and occupation as long as it is us who invades and occupies. The sight of a child raising his hands in fear in front of machine gun-toting thugs grieves us only if it is a Jewish child. The Gentile kid can be shot at will.

When Bialik wrote “The Devil did not invent a fit punishment for the murder of a child”, he actually meant “a Jewish child”. When he was horrified by a pogrom, he was actually crying that the violence was directed against Jews. Now we know that there’s actually nothing wrong with a pogrom per se. Several weeks ago, the Jews of Upper Nazareth committed a pogrom against the Gentiles in Nazareth, but was even one pogromchik brought to justice? Police were kind enough to help out by murdering a few of those who dared to protest. Still worse, pogroms against Ramallah and Beth Jallah were committed with the help of helicopter gunships and tanks.

Tsarist Russia, 'the land of pogroms', was much hated by our grandfathers. Still, a hundred years of Russian pogroms against the Jews caused fewer casualties than the number murdered during the past weeks. The most horrible pogrom of Kishinev claimed 45 dead and 600 wounded. During the current intifadeh, more than 300 have been killed and many thousands wounded. After every pogrom in Tsarist Russia, the Gentile Russian intelligentsia angrily condemned the perpetrators. In the Jewish state, hardly a few dozen of our own brave thinkers gathered at the recent demonstration in Tel Aviv to protest against today's folly, while the Hebrew Writers Union has actually endorsed the military onslaught.

In 1991, the majority of Russian Jews helped to end communism and supported the right of private ownership. Ah, but what they actually had in mind was Jewish private property, since we confiscate Gentile property with the greatest of ease. Go through the best areas of Jerusalem, wander through Talbieh, Old Katamon and the Greek and German colonies, and admire the marvellous palaces. They all belonged to Christians and Muslims - Germans, Armenians, Greeks, British, Russians, Palestinians. All of that Gentile property was confiscated and bestowed upon Jews. During the last weeks alone, hundreds of acres of Palestinian property have been confiscated and scores of Arab houses have been seized or demolished.

The Russian Jewish media-lord Gusinsky came to Israel last year and sang his fervent support for the Jewish state. At the same time he begged the world to help him fight the Russian authorities who were trying to wrest the Russian TV station from his clutches. But by supporting Israel, Mr. Gusinsky proves that indeed he does approve of state confiscation, so long as it is Jews who are doing it! He is certainly against Jews being arrested ? but the Palestinians can rot in prison forever...

We Israelis have succeeded in undermining the respect of history for the Jewish leadership of many struggles around the world for democracy, human rights and equality.

What didn’t we not like about the German Nazis? Their racism? Our own racism is not less popular and not less poisonous. The Russian Israeli newspaper “Direct Speech” recently asked hundreds of Russian Jews about their feelings towards the Palestinians. Typical answers were: “I would kill all Arabs”, “All Arabs should be eliminated”, “Arabs must be expelled”, “An Arab is an Arab. They all have to be eliminated”. Equally evil responses probably wouldn’t have been found by a street poll of Berlin in 1938, as the Nazis didn’t come up with the idea of the Final Solution until 1941.

Shall we call a spade a spade? We Jews have been fighting racism as long as it was someone else's racism. We were against death squads and the Sonderkommando while we were the ones being attacked. Our own killers, the Jewish Sondercommando, are the object of our tender admiration. The
Jewish state is the only place in the world which legitimises its death squads, which implements an official policy of assassinations, which practices medieval torture as a routine. Don’t worry, dear Jewish
readers, we only torture and assassinate Gentiles!

We were against the ghetto when we were confined a ghetto. Now the most liberal Israeli peace plan calls for the creation of a few Gentile ghettos walled by barbed wire, surrounded by Jewish tanks and
Jewish-owned factories at the fence, where the Arbeit will macht the Gentiles frei. We shall give those ghettos their independence, but not before we remove all sources of income and sustenance, not to mention water.

Israelis are brainwashed from kindergarten to believe that they belong to the Chosen People, who are Uber Alles. They are indoctrinated to think that the Palestinians are not fully human, who can therefore be killed and their belongings expropriated without a pang of conscience. The Palestinians are wrong about Israel never living up to any UN resolutions, as we’ve proved that Zionism is indeed a form of racism. Even the internationalist education which we Russian Jews received in the Soviet Union has not been able to withstand the poison of Zionist propaganda about Jewish superiority. How I regret the moral collapse of our Russian community in the Holy Land!

As the angel writes his fiery words, just as the prophets called upon our people to repent, Israel is now faced with a stark choice. We can choose the path of Nineveh, to repent, to return the stolen property, to give full equality to the oppressed, to stop the murders and the discrimination, and hope to be forgiven by God, if not for our sake, then for the sake of our cats and dogs. Or we can persist in our evil ways, as did the people of Sodom, and wait for the flood of fire and burning sulphur to rain down upon us from the angry heavens of Palestine.