Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Uri Avnery is a well-known Israeli
peace activist, writer and journalist.
He came to Israel from Germany in 1933, when he was 10,
his family fleeing Hitler's rise to power.
As early as 1947,
he proposed an alliance of Jews and Arabs
to create what he called "a semitic community and common market."
"HaOlam Hazeh," a leftist magazine
he founded and edited for 40 years
repeatedly proposed a secular Israel
as part of a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
And he proposed similar ideas in the Knesset,
the Israeli Parliament, where he was a member for 10 years.
Because of his outspokenness, he's faced attempted kidnappings,
assaults, and an assassination attempt.
In 1982, he inflamed the Israeli right
by becoming the first Israeli to meet Yassar Arafat
in war-torn Beirut.
And they continued their relationship for many years, until Arafat's death.
In 1993, Avnery founded the Israeli peace organization, "Gush Shalom,"
Which he continues to lead today.
We are a very egocentric people.
Maybe every people is, but we are a little bit more.
I think
Israelis have been conditioned by the Jewish past
as it is being taught in Israeli schools
and of course, by the Holocaust,
into a kind of psychology of "The whole world is against us.
We against the whole world."
And this has a very serious impact
on our behavior as a nation.
We don't care very much what other people think about us.
We very much want them to think good things about us.
But we don't care very much what they think anyhow.
Everybody has been brainwashed into believing
that we are the most moral army in the world.
This has become a kind of trademark:
"The most moral army in the world."
And, therefore, people cannot conceive
why other people
look at the War, and at Israel, in a different way.
And we now see that reporters, Israeli reporters
from everywhere in the world
are reporting about this.
That public opinion in this and that country
has fundamentally changed. That we are not anymore the "little David"
fighting for its life
against dozens of nations who want to destroy us
but rather, we've become the Goliath.
Israelis know next to nothing about Palestinians and Arab culture.
They don't learn a word about it in school
or in university.
In the army, they hear the opposite.
There's no respect for the Palestinians
in Israel,
except in very small circles.
No respect.
No respect for Arab culture.
No respect for Arab religion.
And this is part of the general picture.
You see, we are living in a colonial situation.
I say "colonial" in quotation marks, because
I don't think you can compare our situation
and our conflict with anything which ever happened in the world.
It's unique.
I've never lived through a war yet in this country. I don't want to live through a war with Iran ...
We have seen many wars.
We are used to wars more than we are used to peace.
We are not used to peace, because we have never seen peace
in this country.
But another war is always a possibility,
because another war is always the easiest way out.
Israelis are not afraid of war.
Israelis are afraid of peace.
In Israel, there is now
incredible, unparalleled sensitivity to the loss of life -- of Israeli life.
This being so, you can only fight either of two kinds of wars.
Either an air war, in which no foot soldiers will be employed at all.
Just creating destruction by aerial bombardment.
This is one possibility.
And the other is, by destroying everything in front of your army.
Both ways mean huge civilian losses.
Go back to America.
The early settlers would have been quite unable to behave the way they did
if they had not considered the Red Indians, the Native Americans, as savages,
as non-people. As people who can be dispossessed
and driven out, or killed, without any compunction
because we, the whites, belong to a superior race
and to a superior culture.
And this is an unavoidable component
of any colonial situation.
And we have this, too.
If the Palestinians would have been equal to us,
if we would have to look at the Palestinians eye to eye,
level,
we could not do what we are doing.
Peace has to be made between two peoples.
Two nations.
And if you demonize one nation of the two,
then you are not bringing peace closer, but you push it away.
It's actually immaterial whether you demonize the Palestinians or demonize the Israelis.
Either way, you ...
diminish the chances of peace.
You don't make peace with devils.
You make peace with people like you,
who you more or less accept as people like you.