Apparently, Israeli terrorist groups started the practice of enlisting children in the 1930s.
guardian.co.uk
'I used to be a terrorist'
Another atrocity, another brutal retaliation. Yesterday,
Israel plunged deeper into a new spiral of violence. Uri
Avnery, war hero and peace campaigner, tells
Jonathan Freedland that the cycle cannot be broken
until Israelis and Palestinians accept they have
different versions of history; David Grossman
describes life amid the terror
Jonathan Freedland
Guardian
Tuesday December 4, 2001
He is a 78-year-old Israeli patriot, a veteran of the 1948 war of
independence and the proud bearer of a scar given to him by
three Egyptian bullets. He has served three terms in the
Knesset and is a national legend in his home country.
Yet don't look to Uri Avnery for a typical Israeli reaction to the
latest calamities to befall his land. Nothing about Avnery is
typical. He will not endorse yesterday's Israeli onslaught on the
Gaza headquarters of Yasser Arafat, with whom he says he
shares a special "bond". The two met as Israeli shells rained
from the sky during the siege of Beirut in 1982, making Avnery
the very first Israeli politician to shake hands with the
Palestinian leader. He has no time for the current talk of
removing Arafat and replacing him with a more pliable leader.
"Arafat has the same standing among Palestinians as George
Washington in America or David Ben-Gurion in Israel: he is the
father of the nation," says Avnery. "He led them on a long march
for 40 years from the brink of oblivion to the threshold of their
own state." Israel should forget its fantasies of re placing him;
Arafat is the only man with the moral authority to make peace.
Nor will Avnery serve up the standard-issue condemnation of
Palestinian violence, even after a weekend in which 25 Israelis,
many of them teenagers, were killed by a string of suicide
bombs. Instead, he says he understands the killers; he even
identifies with them a little. "After all," he says, "I used to be a
terrorist myself." To cap it all, Avnery delivered that remark
yesterday - at a London ceremony to celebrate his receipt later
this week of the alternative Nobel peace prize, awarded by an
international jury in Stockholm.
It all adds up to the unique mix of soldier and peace activist,
ex-terrorist and radical dove that has made Avnery one of the
most intriguing, controversial and divisive characters in Israeli
history. Since the founding of the state, Avnery has been a
self-styled conscience for Israel - whether as a serving politician
or acid-penned editor for 40 years of Ha'olam Hazeh, a satirical,
political magazine that served as a Hebrew Private Eye.
A national hate-figure, regularly denounced as a traitor, he has
spent a lifetime thinking the unthinkable. For five decades he
has been the raging voice in the wilderness, complete with the
ancient prophet's white beard, condemned by almost all who
hear him.
But never quite dismissed. For Avnery's life story reads like a
history of the Jewish 20th century. He was the son of refugees
from Hitler's Germany, fleeing to Palestine in 1933 (he still has
the accent to prove it). Five years later, aged just 15, he joined
the Jewish underground against "colonial British rule", fighting in
the Irgun, the rightwing group headed by Menachem Begin.
That CV should have made Avnery a Sharon-style Likud
hardliner. But that's not how it worked out. Even before the
Jewish state was created in 1948, he began to see the other
side - to see how things looked from the Palestinian point of
view. Asking Israelis and Palestinians to do the same, to
understand each other's national "narratives", is now his life's
work, carried out through his organisation Gush Shalom, or
Peace Bloc.
"You now have the fifth generation on both sides born into the
conflict, which impacts on every sphere of their lives. They have
two completely separate narratives, which can describe the
same set of events, and yet which could have happened on two
different planets."
Take this weekend. "For the Israelis, these were terrorist
outrages committed by criminals under the direction of the tired,
corrupt Arafat. For the Palestinians, these same events were
acts of liberation committed by heroes, led by the father of the
nation, Yasser Arafat."
The two sides are so far apart, they cannot even understand
what the other side thinks or feels. He constantly tries to put
himself into the shoes of the Palestinians and, he says, his
background helps. When he ponders the current wave of terrorist
violence, he remembers his own mentality as a young man in
the Irgun.
"My own memories from that period are a very good guide for me
today. We joined those who fought, not those who didn't," he
says, explaining why young Palestinians are flocking to the flag
of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. If they didn't fight, those groups
would become irrelevant. If Arafat was not associated with
resistance to the Israeli occupation, Palestinians would leave
him, too, says Avnery: "He would be a general without an army."
This is not new, he says: this is the dynamic of any people
fighting occupation.
Equally, he remembers that the extremist Jewish groups melted
away the moment the United Nations promised a Jewish state in
1947. If Israel and the United States made clear now that the
Palestinians would get a Palestinian state on all of the West
Bank and Gaza (with any small border changes mutually
agreed) then, he believes, the likes of Hamas and Jihad would
go the way of the Irgun and Stern Gang: they would become
redundant overnight.
The immediate priority is for an end to violence, which he
believes has to be imposed by an external, international
presence enforcing a ceasefire. Then there should be talks,
aimed at creating a Palestinian state, compensation for refugees
displaced in 1948 and a sharing of Jerusalem - the west as
Israel's capital, the east as Palestine's. And Israel needs to
make this move dramatically, not drawn out over several years.
He quotes David Lloyd George: "You cannot leap over the abyss
in two jumps."
Later, there needs to be a truth and reconciliation process where
both peoples can at last look at each other. He wants the
Palestinians truly to realise and accept "the impact the
Holocaust has on every Jew in the world today" and for Israelis
to understand the naqba , the catastrophe that Palestinians
believe befell them in 1948.
"I saw what happened," he says. "I saw more than most people
because I was in a mounted commando unit which went around,
all along the front. So I saw the naqba as it happened: I've been
in [emptied] Arab villages where the food was standing on the
table and it was still hot... I came out of this war completely
convinced that we must make peace with the Palestinian
people."
He started saying it right away, even in the early years of the
state when such talk was heresy - when Golda Meir denied
there was any such thing as a Palestinian people. The result
was a string of arson attempts and bombings against his
magazine offices, a serious beating which left two arms broken
and, in 1975, an assassination attempt. Later, it emerged that
Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, had officially
branded Avnery and Ha'olam Hazeh as Public Enemy No1.
Today, he keeps up the scathing rhetoric that earned him his
radioactive reputation. In denouncing the loyalty of diaspora
Jews to Israel, he says: "If Israel elected the House of Caligula,
I'm sure American Jewry would follow it with total support."
But, if they listened closely, many Jews and Israelis would find
Avnery is not quite the treacherous monster of modern myth.
For one thing, he insists he is not an anti-Zionist: he says he is
a post-Zionist, one who recognises the movement for a Jewish
state had many "beautiful" aspects as well as darker ones. He
speaks with great passion for Israeli society and Hebrew culture,
describing himself as a patriot. He disagrees strongly with
Edward Said's previous advocacy of a single, binational state for
both peoples: "Nationalism is still a very strong force," he says,
and both sides should not be denied a state of their own.
Most appealing of all, he retains his optimism even in this hour
of darkness. He says the difference between a psychotic and a
neurotic is that the former says two and two equals five, while
the latter admits two and two is four but is angry about it: "Israel
is moving from the psychotic to the neurotic phase," finally
facing up to the reality of what happened in 1948 and after.
And does he, at 78, believe he will see all his dreams and
schemes realised? "Oh, yes. I've decided not to die until all this
happens." |
