[NYTr] Avnery: "Clash of Civilizations" - The Mother of All Pretexts

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Gush Shalom - Oct 13, 2007
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1192288533


The Mother of all Pretexts

by Uri Avnery

WHEN I hear mention of the "Clash of Civilizations" I don't know
whether to laugh or to cry.

To laugh, because it is such a silly notion.

To cry, because it is liable to cause untold disasters.

To cry even more, because our leaders are exploiting this slogan as a
pretext for sabotaging any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian
reconciliation. It is just one more in a long line of pretexts.

WHY WAS the Zionist movement in need of excuses to justify the way it
treated the Palestinian people?

At its birth, it was an idealistic movement. It laid great weight on
its moral basis. Not just in order to convince the world, but above all
in order to set its own conscience at rest.

>From early childhood we learned about the pioneers, many of them sons
and daughters of well-to-do and well-educated families, who left behind
a comfortable life in Europe in order to start a new life in a far-away
and - by the standards of the time - primitive country. Here, in a
savage climate they were not used to, often hungry and sick, they
performed bone-breaking physical labor under a brutal sun.

For that, they needed an absolute belief in the rightness of their
cause. Not only did they believe in the need to save the Jews of Europe
from persecution and pogroms, but also in the creation of a society so
just as never seen before, an egalitarian society that would be a model
for the entire world. Leo Tolstoy was no less important for them than
Theodor Herzl. The kibbutz and the moshav were symbols of the whole
enterprise.

But this idealistic movement aimed at settling in a country inhabited
by another people. How to bridge this contradiction between its sublime
ideals and the fact that their realization necessitated the expulsion
of the people of the land?

The easiest way was to repress the problem altogether, ignoring its
very existence: the land, we told ourselves, was empty, there was no
people living here at all. That was the justification that served as a
bridge over the moral abyss.

Only one of the Founding Fathers of the Zionist movement was courageous
enough to call a spade a spade. Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote as early as 80
years ago that it was impossible to deceive the Palestinian people
(whose existence he recognized) and to buy their consent to the Zionist
aspirations. We are white settlers colonizing the land of the native
people, he said, and there is no chance whatsoever that the natives
will resign themselves to this voluntarily. They will resist violently,
like all the native peoples in the European colonies. Therefore we need
an "Iron Wall" to protect the Zionist enterprise.

When Jabotinsky was told that his approach was immoral, he replied that
the Jews were trying to save themselves from the disaster threatening
them in Europe, and, therefore, their morality trumped the morality of
the Arabs in Palestine.

Most Zionists were not prepared to accept this force-oriented approach.
They searched fervently for a moral justification they could live with.

Thus started the long quest for justifications - with each pretext
supplanting the previous one, according to the changing spiritual
fashions in the world.

THE FIRST justification was precisely the one mocked by Jabotinsky: we
were actually coming to benefit the Arabs. We shall redeem them from
their primitive living conditions, from ignorance and disease. We shall
teach them modern methods of agriculture and bring them advanced
medicine. Everything - except employment, because we needed every job
for the Jews we were bringing here, which we were transforming from
ghetto-Jews into a people of workers and tillers of the soil.

When the ungrateful Arabs went on to resist our grand project, in spite
of all the benefits we were supposedly bringing them, we found a
Marxist justification: It's not the Arabs who oppose us, but only the
"effendis". The rich Arabs, the great landowners, are afraid that the
glowing example of the egalitarian Hebrew community would attract the
exploited Arab proletariat and cause them to rise against their
oppressors.

That, too, did not work for long, perhaps because the Arabs saw how the
Zionists bought the land from those very same "effendis" and drove out
the tenants who had been cultivating it for generations.

The rise of the Nazis in Europe brought masses of Jews to the country.
The Arab public saw how the land was being withdrawn from under their
feet, and started a rebellion against the British and the Jews in 1936.
Why, the Arabs asked, should they pay for the persecution of the Jews
by the Europeans? But the Arab Revolt gave us a new justification: the
Arabs support the Nazis. And indeed, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj
Amin al-Husseini, was photographed sitting next to Hitler. Some people
"discovered" that the Mufti was the real instigator of the Holocaust.
(Years later it was revealed that Hitler had detested the Mufti, who
had no influence whatsoever over the Nazis.)

World War II came to an end, to be followed by the 1948 war. Half of
the vanquished Palestinian people became refugees. That did not trouble
the Zionist conscience, because everybody knew: They ran away of their
own free will. Their leaders had called upon them to leave their homes,
to return later with the victorious Arab armies. True, no evidence was
ever found to support this absurd claim, but it has sufficed to soothe
our conscience to this day.

It may be asked: why were the refugees not allowed to come back to
their homes once the war was over? Well, it was they who in 1947
rejected the UN partition plan and started the war. If because of this
they lost 78% of their country, they have only themselves to blame.

Then came the Cold War. We were, of course, on the side of the "Free
World", while the great Arab leader, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, got his
weapons from the Soviet bloc. (True, in the 1948 war the Soviet arms
flowed to us, but that's not important.) It was quite clear: No use
talking with the Arabs, because they support Communist tyranny.

But the Soviet bloc collapsed. "The terrorist organization called PLO",
as Menachem Begin used to call it, recognized Israel and signed the
Oslo agreement. A new justification had to be found for our
unwillingness to give back the occupied territories to the Palestinian
people.

The salvation came from America: a professor named Samuel Huntington
wrote a book about the "Clash of Civilizations". And so we found the
mother of all pretexts.

THE ARCH-ENEMY, according to this theory, is Islam. Western
Civilization, Judeo-Christian, liberal, democratic, tolerant, is under
attacked from the Islamic monster, fanatical, terrorist, murderous.

Islam is murderous by nature. Actually, "Muslim" and "terrorist" are
synonymous. Every Muslim is a terrorist, every terrorist a Muslim.

A sceptic might ask: How did it happen that the wonderful Western
culture gave birth to the Inquisition, the pogroms, the burning of
witches, the annihilation of the Native Americans, the Holocaust, the
ethnic cleansings and other atrocities without number - but that was in
the past. Now Western culture is the embodiment of freedom and progress.

Professor Huntington was not thinking about us in particular. His task
was to satisfy a peculiar American craving: the American empire always
needs a virtual, world-embracing enemy, a single enemy which includes
all the opponents of the United States around the world. The Communists
delivered the goods - the whole world was divided between Good Guys
(the Americans and their supporters) and Bad Guys (the Commies).
Everybody who opposed American interests was automatically a Communist
- Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Salvador Allende in Chile, Fidel
Castro in Cuba, while the masters of Apartheid, the death squads of
Augusto Pinochet and the secret police of the Shah of Iran belonged,
like us, to the Free World.

When the Communist empire collapsed, America was suddenly left without
a world-wide enemy. This vacuum has now been filled by the
Muslims-Terrorists. Not only Osama bin Laden, but also the Chechnyan
freedom fighters, the angry North-African youth of the Paris banlieus,
the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the insurgents in the Philippines.

Thus the American world view rearranged itself: a good world (Western
Civilization) and a bad world (Islamic civilization). Diplomats still
take care to make a distinction between "radical Islamists" and
"moderate Muslims", but that is only for appearances' sake. Between
ourselves, we know of course that they are all Osama bin Ladens. They
are all the same.

This way, a huge part of the world, composed of manifold and very
different countries, and a great religion, with many different and even
opposing tendencies (like Christianity, like Judaism), which has given
the world unmatched scientific and cultural treasures, is thrown into
one and the same pot.

THIS WORLD VIEW is tailored for us. Indeed, the world of the clashing
civilizations is, for us, the best of all possible worlds.

The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is no longer a
conflict between the Zionist movement, which came to settle in this
country, and the Palestinian people, which inhabited it. No, it has
been from the very beginning a part of a world-wide struggle which does
not stem from our aspirations and actions. The assault of terrorist
Islam on the Western world did not start because of us. Our conscience
can be entirely clean - we are among the good guys of this world.

This is now the line of argument of official Israel: the Palestinians
elected Hamas, a murderous Islamic movement. (If it didn't exist, it
would have to be invented - and indeed, some people assert it was
created from the start by our secret service.) Hamas is terroristic,
and so is Hizbullah. Perhaps Mahmoud Abbas is not a terrorist himself,
but he is weak and Hamas is about to take sole control over all
Palestinian territories. So we cannot talk with them. We have no
partner. Actually, we cannot possibly have a partner, because we belong
to Western Civilization, which Islam wants to eradicate.

IN HIS book "Der Judenstaat", Theodor Herzl, the official Israeli
"Prophet of the State", prophesied this development, too.

This is what he wrote in 1896: "For Europe we shall constitute (in
Palestine) a part of the wall against Asia, we shall serve as a
vanguard of culture against barbarism."

Herzl was thinking of a metaphoric wall, but in the meantime we have
put up a very real one. For many, this is not just a Separation Wall
between Israel and Palestine. It is a part of the world-wide wall
between the West and Islam, the front-line of the Clash of
Civilizations. Beyond the wall there are not men, women and children,
not a conquered and oppressed Palestinian population, not choked towns
and villages like Abu-Dis, a-Ram, Bil'in and Qalqilia. No, beyond the
wall there are a billion terrorists, multitudes of blood-thirsty
Muslims, who have only one desire in life: to throw us into the sea,
simply because we are Jews, part of Judeo-Christian Civilization.

With an official position like that - who is there to talk to? What is
there to talk about? What is the point of meeting in Annapolis or
anywhere else?

And what is left to us to do - to cry or to laugh?