At the beginning of this very
busy week there was a public uproar in the U.S. when Los Angeles Clippers owner
Donald Sterling was heard saying very racist things about blacks. Among other
things Sterling had said that "In Israel, the blacks are just treated like
dogs."
Sterling probably heard that the
State of Israel imprisons without trial thousands of refugees and asylum
seekers from Africa, far away among the Negev desert sands, and that Israeli
cabinet ministers express pride that such is their policy and promise to
continue pursuing it. Perhaps he also heard that even Ethiopians who are
Israeli citizens and are officially recognized as Jews suffer quite a bit of
discrimination and prejudice in Israel; that
in many places there are people who refuse to rent them apartments and that
some call them "apes” and “monkeys".
Anyway, Sterling evidently liked what he heard of the treatment of blacks in
Israel, and he considered it a good model for white Americans to emulate.
The vile racist remarks of
Donald Sterling did not go without an appropriate response. After several days
of public outrage, the NBA commissioner banned Sterling for life from all games
of this League, and in addition imposed on him a fine of 2.5 million Dollars,
to be passed on to charity.
In the same week, there was
in the United States another public storm, also derived from publication of a recorded
conversation. In the final accord of his failed peace efforts, Secretary of
State John Kerry sounded a warning that if Israel does not end its occupation of
the Palestinian territories nor give civil rights to their residents, it might
become an Apartheid state.
Kerry was careful not to assert
that Israel is already an Apartheid state - as is claimed by quite a few
people, including a growing number of Jewish students on the campuses of
American universities. Nor did Kerry assert - as did former President Jimmy
Carter – that the situation in the Occupied Territories, as distinct from Israel
itself, constitutes an Apartheid situation because there are separate roads for
Israelis and for Palestinians and two different and completely separate legal
systems for the two populations living in the same area .
All Kerry did was to sound a
warning, as a worried friend, about what might happen in the future if the
State of Israel does not change the direction of its current policy. However, in
the mainstream American public opinion and political system, the coupling of
the words "Israel" and “Apartheid" was quite enough to kick up a
major storm. After several days, Kerry was forced to apologize and retract that
word. (At least, he was not required to pay a fine...)
To clarify and emphasize that
Israel is in no way an Apartheid state and that all such assertions are nothing
but malicious anti-Semitic slurs, Prime Minister Netanyahu hastened to announce
his strong support for a bill which would make it a matter of Basic Law that the
State of Israel is a Jewish state. Not a "Jewish and Democratic State"
as stated in laws which the Knesset passed at earlier times. This time it would
be unequivocally A Jewish State, period.
Meanwhile, it seems that
indeed “the threat of peace has receded" (a saying attributed to the late
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir). Which means that Israeli soldiers are probably going to continue for
very much longer to patrol the streets of Hebron and closely guard the settler enclave
established at its heart. One of these soldiers,
named David Adamov and serving in the Nahal Brigade, made headlines this week. Outside a settler-occupied
house he had pointed his gun at a 15-year old Palestinian boy and shouted very
rough abuse, and the scene was captured on camera by a Palestinian activist who
placed the video on the net.
Just at the time when this
film came up on the net, the soldier was sent to the military jail. His fellows
thought there was a connection between the two things – which was a mistake. In
fact, the soldier was imprisoned because in addition to shouting abuse at a Palestinian
and threatening him, he also shouted abuse at his Israeli commanding officer
and threatened him and then went to physically assault him. But the mistaken information
spread very rapidly, and soon there was created a Facebook page called "I,
too, am David of the Nahal" and seventy-five thousand people expressed
their like for this page. In direct
contravention of military orders, uniformed soldiers of many other units posed
with their faces covered by signs supporting David of the Nahal and posted
these photos on the net. Reportedly, the military authorities feel deeply
concerned about “the first digital mutiny" and the unbearable ease by
which soldiers equipped with smart phones
can bypass the chain of command. For his part, Minister Naftali Bennett of the Jewish
Home Party rushed to climb the
bandwagon, stating “I, too, would have acted like David of the Nahal”.
According to military
correspondents, the upsurge of support for the wayward soldier stems from
frustration among the soldiers sent to "restore order" and face the growing
unrest among the Palestinian population - while at the same time being
instructed by their commanders to restrain themselves and avoid killing Palestinians.
The leaders of Israel’s military have taken to heart the lessons of two
Intifadas – particularly, that mass funerals in towns and villages and refugee
camps are likely to ignite the Third Intifada. Members of John Kerry’s team,
who gave a candid anonymous interview to Nahum Barnea in Yedioth Ahronot and
analyzed the reasons for their failure, had said bitterly: "There had not
been a sense of urgency, not deep feeling of the need to reach an agreement.
Only in times of war is there such a sense of urgency. It seems we need another
Intifada in order to create the kind of circumstances which will facilitate progress
in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians". But the soldiers on
the ground, those to whom David of the Nahal became a hero, have no interest in
considerations of high strategy. If sent into a hostile Palestinian territory with
guns in their hands, they want an authorization to use these guns, intifada or
no intifada.
On the other side of the
political spectrum, a group of activists who began collecting on the net signatures
under the simple slogans "I'm not David of the Nahal" , feeling
no need to add anything to this statement. Conversely Sarit Michaeli, the
veteran spokesperson of B'Tselem , appropriated the slogan "We are all David of the Nahal":
"It's time we all stop playing games. In face of the reality of the
occupation, we create with our own hands the next Davids, throwing them into impossible situations. The
incident never really ends. Any forceful act of pointing a gun might achieve a
momentary 'calm' - but the continuation of the situation in which the IDF rules
over the civilian population in Hebron and the rest of the Occupied Territories
will inevitably lead to the next confrontation, which in some cases will be
recorded by cameras and get into public awareness. Those who stridently demand
to ‘let the IDF win’ are just perpetuating a lie. As though there is any
possibility of really winning such a fight, in which troops are repeatedly sent
to oppress a civilian population which does not want their presence."
The 19 year old Uriel Ferera,
who was born in Argentina and lives in Beer Sheba, did not agonize over whether
his commanding officers would allow him to open fire when facing Palestinians.
He took the firm decision not to enter into such a situation in the first place,
and informed the military authorities of his refusal to enlist. Uriel Ferera is
an unusual figure among the young conscientious objectors who signed the recent
"High School Seniors' Letter” - an ultra-Orthodox student of a yeshiva seminary,
who declares his refusal to join the army is not for reasons of wanting to continue
his Torah studies , but specifically because he is not ready to serve in an army
of occupation.
Last Sunday, Uriel Ferera came
to the Induction Base in Tel Hashomer , bearing the refusal letter which he was
going to hand to recruiting officers. He
was escorted to the gate by dozens of cheering young activists, by his very
supportive parents and family members, and by the father of Omar Saad, the Druze
musician who had already been sent seven times to prison for his own refusal to
enlist. Thence he was taken straight to Military Prison Six, where he refused
to put on a military uniform and promptly got an additional eight days, to be
served in the isolation ward. Ferera told his lawyer that the prison
authorities refuse to allow him and Omar Saad to stay in the same part of the
prison. "They seem very unwilling to let us to be together."
When I shared on Facebook the
video showing Uriel Ferera walking towards the gates of the recruitment base,
accompanied by his fellows, there came after a few minutes a furious reaction from
a right-winger: "Today is Holocaust Day! Are you not ashamed to post such
a thing on such a day?" Indeed, the date set out in Uriel Ferera’s call-up
order was the day which is marked in Israel as Holocaust Memorial Day.
Virtually the only lesson
drawn from the Holocaust in the official speeches of this Memorial Day is the
need for the State of Israel to maintain a mighty military power against enemies who plot a new
Holocaust . To the late Golda Meir is attributed the saying "After the
Holocaust, nobody in the world can accuse us", and also this year
ministers and deputy ministers and Knesset members repeated this argument in
various forms, against anyone criticizing Israel’s treatment of the
Palestinians.
It is not easy for a Palestinian
to express empathy with the suffering of the Jews at the time of the Holocaust in
Europe. Quite a few Palestinians succumb to the temptation for a gut response:
"There had never been a Holocaust, and anyway you are Nazis yourselves."
On Holocaust Memorial Day this week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu
Mazen ) broke through this barrier and made the most clear and unequivocal statement
on the subject ever made by a Palestinian leader: "What happened to the
Jews in the Holocaust is the most heinous crime to have been committed against
humanity in the modern era. The Holocaust is a reflection of the concept of
ethnic discrimination and racism which the Palestinians strongly reject and act
against". The official statement went out conspicuously, on all the
Palestinian news agencies . The Prime Minister of Israel was not really
impressed. "First of all, Abbas must abrogate his agreement with
Hamas" responded Netanyahu, turning back to the routine sparring and "blame
game" about the responsibility for the failure of the negotiations (which
does not truly interest anybody) .
In Budapest this week there
was an unexpected mass attendance at the Memorial March marking seventy years to
the mass murder of Hungarian Jewry. For quite a few non-Jewish Hungarians, this
event had an all too relevant political implication – in a country where an extreme
right registered an alarming growth in the recent general elections. In other
European countries, Far right parties tend to target mainly the Muslims, and such
parties often foster ties of friendship and deep brotherhood with Israeli
settlers on the West Bank. But in Hungary, where there are not many Muslims,
the extreme right sticks (with considerable success) to the traditional targets
– the Jews and the Gypsies . In the face of anti-Semitic speeches made in the Hungarian
Parliament and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries, a lot of Hungarians who
are deeply worry about their country’s
future turned up at the Holocaust Memorial March in Budapest – rather
surprising the representatives of the Government of Israel who initiated the Budapest
procession .
Late on the night after
Holocaust Memorial Day, some unknown people came to the village of Fureidis -
the only Arab village to remain in place after 1948 on the Mediterranean coast of Israel. These uninvited
guests spray-painted on the wall of the local mosque a Star of David
accompanied by the words "Destroy all Mosques!” and for good measure punctured
the tires of dozens of cars. Like in dozens of previous cases, the country’s
leaders duly condemned the act, but as in previous cases Israel's acclaimed security
services exhibited a lack of ability to
identify and apprehend the perpetrators.
On the day after the hate
crime, Fureidis residents held a general strike and thousands of them went out
on a protest demonstration in the streets of the village. Dozens of residents
of neighboring Zichron Yaacov came over,
holding such signs as "We Support Our Neighbors" , "Bibi,
Bennett and Lapid - the Criminals Must be Stopped!" , and “Hate Crimes are
Terrorism”. " Zichron Yaakov resident Yoel Ben-Artzi said :"We heard
that our our neighboring village had
been attacked, and we came to express solidarity with the inhabitants. Such
acts threaten not only our Arab neighbors, they also threaten us Jews."
Messages and letters of support
to Prisoner of Conscience Uriel Ferera can be sent by fax to +972-(0)4-9540580
Or by mail to:
Uriel Ferera
Military ID 8004295
Military Prison 6
Military Postal Code 01860
IDF
Israel
