[GushShalom] Avnery column & two Gush Shalom statements in Haaretz

[Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc)]

GUSH SHALOM  pob 3322, Tel-Aviv 61033 www.gush-shalom.org

[Avnery confronts the Defence Minister with a piece of "remembered 
history", and learned something new himself, about how he 
unknowingly had once saved the life of Moshe Dayan. Find in the end 
also the text of two ads published by Gush Shalom.]

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Uri Avnery
16.8.03

			“Hero in War and Peace”

     Sometimes a single sentence is enough to reveal a person’s 
mental world and intellectual profundity. Such a sentence was uttered 
by Shaul Mofaz, the Minister of Defense, some days ago during a visit 
to the Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip.
      “With our enemies, it seems, no shortcuts are possible. Egypt 
made peace with Israel only after it was defeated in the Yom Kippur 
War. That will happen with the Palestinians, too.”
    This means that there is no political solution. There is only war, and 
in this war we must “defeat” the Palestinians. A simple, simplistic, not 
to say primitive, view.
     But the revealing sentence is: “Egypt made peace with Israel only 
after it was defeated in the Yom Kippur War”.
     Revealing, because it utterly contradicts the almost unanimous 
view of all the experts in Israel and around the world – historians, 
Arabists and military commentators. These believe that the exact 
opposite is true: Anwar Sadat was able to lead Egypt towards peace 
only because he was admired as the commander who had defeated 
Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Only after the Egyptian people had won 
back their national pride were they able to consider peace with the 
enemy (with us).
     When the war broke out, the Egyptians did something that amazed 
the world and shook Israel: they crossed the Suez Canal and 
overcame the celebrated “Bar-Lev line”. Everybody considered this a 
brilliant military feat. The stupidity of Israeli army intelligence and the 
arrogant complacency of Prime Minister Golda Meir allowed the 
Egyptians to achieve total surprise, destroy a large number of tanks 
and pin down the Israeli Air force. The Minister of Defense, Moshe 
Dayan, was in shock and talked about the “destruction of the third 
Jewish state”. (In traditional Jewish historiography, the first two Jewish 
states are symbolized by the first and second temple in Jerusalem.)
     In the course of the war, the tide turned and, in the end, the Israeli 
army crossed the Canal into Egypt. At the end of the war, Israeli 
troops were established on the western shore, but large Egyptian 
forces remained to their rear, on the eastern side. This week a long-
delayed official study by the Israeli army was leaked. It declares 
unequivocally that Israel had “not won that war”.
     But the professional military analysis is not so important in this 
context. What is important is how the events appear to the Egyptian 
consciousness and affect their actions since then.
     I succeeded in reaching Cairo on the morrow of Sadat’s sensational 
visit to Jerusalem, and found myself in a city drunk with joy, in some 
kind of delirious popular carnival. Over the main streets stretched 
hundreds of slogans celebrating the act of the president. Every 
commercial corporation felt duty-bound to hang such a slogan with a 
peace message.    
    The one slogan that outnumbered all others was “Anwar Sadat: Hero 
of War and Peace”.
     The Egyptian people would not have supported peace, if they had 
considered it a surrender to the diktat of an arrogant enemy. Only the 
crossing of the Canal four years earlier, which Egyptians consider one 
of the greatest victories in all the 8000 years of their history, enabled 
them to accept the agreement as a compromise between equals, 
without loss of honor. Like many other nations, the Egyptians – and all 
other Arabs – consider national dignity the most important treasure.
     Perhaps Mofaz should go to Cairo and visit the round building that 
houses the museum of the Ramadan War (as Arabs call the Yom 
Kippur War). There he will see an exciting, emotion-laden display of 
the crossing of the Canal. Every day the place is thronged with people, 
especially school-children.
     If one wants to draw a parallel between the Egyptians and the 
Palestinians, as Mofaz tries to do, the conclusion would be: only after 
the Palestinians win back their national self-respect, will they be able 
to make peace with Israel. The first intifada, which Palestinians 
consider a victorious struggle against the immense might of the Israeli 
army, allowed them to accept the Oslo agreement. Only the second 
intifada, which has already proved that the Israeli army cannot subdue 
the Palestinian uprising, enabled them to accept the Road Map, which 
is supposed to bring about peace between the Israeli and the coming 
Palestinian state.
     On a related topic: On the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the 
Yom Kippur War, Israeli newspapers are full of revelations about it. 
Among them is the disclosure that I saved the life of Moshe Dayan. 
That surprised me, as it would have surprised Dayan, if he were still 
living. But it appears to be true.
      The facts are revealed by Amir Porat, the former communication 
officer and personal confidant of Shmuel Gonen (universally known as 
“Gorodish”), who was in charge of Southern Command during the war. 
Later, when the public was looking for a scapegoat for the terrible initial 
defeat, the main blame was put on Gorodish. He was dismissed from 
his command and nobody was prepared to listen to his side of the 
story. All the media boycotted him.
     This man, who practically overnight had fallen from the height of 
glory (as one of the heroes of the 1967 Six Day War) to the depths of 
ignominy, was in despair. He blamed Dayan for the injustice done to 
him. In the end he made an appointment with him, planning to shoot 
him and then himself.
     At the very last moment, one day before the fateful meeting, 
Haolam Hazeh correspondent Rino Tzror arranged a meeting between 
us. At the time I was editor-in-chief this newsmagazine, the only 
medium in the country that was truly independent of the establishment. 
We had a reputation for supporting the underdog and challenging the 
powers that be. I talked with him at length. During the whole 
conversation he toyed with his pistol. 
     Gorodish was very far from my political views, he was a right-wing 
person, an out-and-out militarist, but I became convinced that the 
official inquiry into the war had indeed done him a shocking injustice. 
Therefore I promised to help him getting his side of the story across. 
He saw that the whole world was not closed to him. Having someone 
listening to his side of the story and promising to publish it relieved his 
despair and made him give up the idea of killing Dayan and committing 
suicide. I published a large article under the headline “The Israeli 
Dreyfus”. 
     This affair has its ironic side. In the whole of Israel, no one was 
more opposed to Dayan than I. More than anyone else (except Ben-
Gurion and his sidekick, Shimon Peres) Dayan laid down in the 1950s 
the anti-Arab tracks on which Israel is moving to this very day. In the 
pages of Haolam Hazeh I attacked him relentlessly, writing hundreds of 
articles against him, exposing his illegal traffic in stolen archeological 
finds and his private peccadilloes that endangered the security of the 
state. And in the end it appears that I saved his life.  
     Back to the main point: The Yom Kippur War did not lead to the 
“destruction of the third state”, as Dayan had prophesied, but to peace 
with Egypt, after its national honor had been restored. If Sharon and 
the army command succeed in disrupting the hudna (truce) and bring 
about the renewal of the intifada, they will not break the Palestinians, 
who will refuse to submit. And after large-scale bloodshed, Yasser 
Arafat will make a speech in the Knesset, as did Sadat, the “Hero of 
War and Peace”.
                                \\// //\\ \\// //\\ \\//      
  
[weekly ad - Haaretz, August 15]

		WHO MADE THE DECISION?

Question: Who gave the order to carry out the “targeted killing” in the 
Askar refugee camp near Nablus, killing four people? And, after that, 
who gave the order to kill the Jihad militant in Hebron? Everybody knew 
that these executions would be followed by acts of revenge, and that 
the hudna (truce) was liable to be shattered.

The hudna is like a bicycle: either you move forward or you fall.

Instead of taking advantage of the hudna in order to come closer to a 
political solution, the Sharon government avoids any positive step: it 
releases prisoners who were about to be release anyhow, leaves 
hundreds of checkpoints in place and removes three for the cameras, 
continues to build the Choking Wall and threatens to open the Temple 
Mount by force.

But if the hudna will collapse – who will be blamed?


[special ad Haaretz - August 15]

			TWO STATES –
			ONE COMMON FUTURE

In view of Sharon’s tricks, it is important to state again:

There is no solution to the conflict other than the establishment of 
Israeli-Palestinian peace based on the co-existence of two independent 
and sovereign states, the State of Israel and the State of Palestine, on 
either side of the Green Line, with their capitals in Jerusalem.

Gush Shalom, one of the pioneers of the idea of “Two States for Two 
Peoples”, believes that this is the realistic solution for the historic 
conflict.

We reject categorically Sharon’s policy of deceit. He talks about “an 
end to the occupation” and “a Palestinian state” – when all he means 
is Palestinian enclaves, cut off from each other, on half the area of the 
West Bank. 

We shall continue to fight against the building of the “separation wall” 
that is designed to realize this aim of the Sharon government.

Peace – Not Occupation!

Partnership – Not Separation!

								GUSH SHALOM

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\\photos - of actions or otherwise informative 
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\\the columns of Uri Avnery - in Hebrew, Arab and English
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