[GushShalom] Avnery column & two Gush Shalom statements in Haaretz
Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc)
info at gush-shalom.org
Sun Aug 17 00:36:21 IDT 2003
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 persons
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 Sadats 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 Sharons 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 Sharons 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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