Excellent letter. I found this additional letter by the same author:
Dear Aaron Lerner,
Thank you for your letter. First it is much simpler to find me on the internet by my name: Just put in Solly Ganor in Google or any other search engine and you will find 281 entries there, involving my activities, writings and lectures around the world.
By the way, if you would like to see my web site, you will find it under entry # 1, Solly Ganor Remembrance.
Concerning my letter, conversation on the beach, I just wrote it to a friend of mine in San Francisco and never thought it will blossom into this avalanche of information. However, perhaps it is good that many more people read it than just a few.
I wrote down the conversation between the Arab youth and myself about half an hour after our meeting. Since I didn't have a tape recorder I couldn't recount it word by word. I am a writer and I wrote it more for myself than for anyone to read. I go to the mosque quite often, because it is a very picturesque place and you have a fantastic view from there.
I just went there to enjoy the view and the conversation with the young Arab was something that was just an addition. Living in Israel since the war of Independence and having fought the Arabs in five bloody wars, I didn't think that what the young Arab said was something extraordinary. We all know what they think of us, and what is lately happening to their young people. Never before were they ready to commit suicide en mass. Had they acted that way during the war of Independence in 1948, I am not sure if the outcome of the war would have been the same. The reason I wrote it down was because the conversation portrays our situation in its full grim reality. Anyone, who saw the jubilant crowds dancing in the streets in all Palestinian towns and villages on September eleven, will realize the hatred of the Palestinians towards us and the West in general. Quite often you hear them speak of the Christians as 'Crusaders'. I assume they adopted that old epitaph from president Bush's speech about a year ago in which he pronounced that he is now on a crusade against El-Qaida. The word 'crusade' brings old and triumphant stories to the Muslim mind, of ancient wars, but ones, where Islam defeated the crusaders and threw them out of the Holy Land. It is the crusaders that they are after now once more, but this time they threw in the Jews as the crusader's partners. It is ironic, because the crusaders were the ones who initiated the progroms of the Jews of Europe on their way to the Holy Land, murdering any Jew, man, woman, or child they came across. The masses of the Palestinians and the Arabs in general are not educated. They are much more prone to indulge in fantasies and make believe than people in the West realize.
I am afraid that as much as we would like to find a modus vivendi with them, a Palestinian state next to Israel, it won't happen. While in our schools it would be inconceivable to teach our children hatred against the Arabs, their learning books are so full of hatred and defamation of the Jew that seventy percent of the young students are willing to become shihads. How do you fight something like that?
Besides, who are we to make peace with? Fatah, Hammas, The Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Hizbala or perhaps El-Qaida? They are all players in the Palestinian game. They all have one thing in common though, they will never recognize the right of the Jews to live here and they think that they have discovered a cheap and efficient way, to defeat it us: The 'suicide bomber'. And as the Americans have recently experienced, they too are not immune. The French have recently discovered a group of Arabs who planed to topple the Eiffel tower. Too bad they didn't, because perhaps the Europeans would wake up the way America woke up after
September eleven.
I am a Holocaust survivor and survived because of my optimism, but it is hard to be an optimist under these circumstances.
The current Israeli joke is 'What is a Pessimist'?
The answer is:' An optimist with lots of experience'. That says it all.
Still, who knows, I went personally went through much, much worse situations in my life. So I still hope.
With best wishes for the coming year,
Shalom, Solly Ganor
imra.org.il |
