[GushShalom] About ignorance and the moral dimension - 2 articles

[Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc)]

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

[] Gideon Levy  in today's Haaretz: The price of ignorance   
    "There is an Israeli price to the many concealed Palestinian dead."
[] "It is the refusers who have introduced a moral dimension into the            
     public discourse" - Uri Avnery in his weekly column

[Just heard that the sentence of the five Ocupation Objectors is expected 
Sunday and that pacifist Yoni Ben-Artzi's sentence is once more 
postponed; meanwhile  Meretz KLM Yosi Sarid says right now on TV to 
expect thousands of new refusers now that the too easy firing orders no  
longer only refer to Palestinians but also to leftists...]      
  
[] Gideon Levy  in today's Haaretz: The price of ignorance   

English
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/376717.html
 
Hebrew / òáøéú
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArtPE.jhtml?itemNo=376556&cont
rassID=2&subContrassID=3&sbSubContrassID=0

The price of ignorance 
By Gideon Levy 
Haaretz, Dec. 28 2003

The suicide bomber at the Geha Junction, Shehad Hanani, was from Beit 
Furik, one of the most imprisoned villages in the territories that is 
surrounded by earth roadblocks on all sides. It's a place where women in 
labor and the sick have to risk walking through fields to get to the hospital 
in adjacent Nablus. At least one woman in labor, Rula Ashatiya, gave birth 
at the Beit Furik checkpoint and lost her infant. Few Israelis are capable of 
imagining what life is like in Beit Furik: the almost universal 
unemployment, poverty, endless siege and humiliations of life inside a 
prison. A young man like Hanani, who was 21, had no reason to get up in 
the morning other than to face another day of joblessness and humiliation. 

However, Israelis have little interest in knowing the lay of the land from 
which terror springs. The Israeli media have next to nothing to say about 
life in Beit Furik. By the same token, few Israelis heard about the killing of 
the suicide bomber's relative, Fadi Hanani, 10 days ago in Nablus, just as 
they hadn't heard about all the killings of Palestinians in the past few 
months. Life in Beit Furik and the killing in Nablus do not justify a suicide 
bombing at a bus station, but whoever wants to fight terror must first and 
foremost improve life in Beit Furik.

Israel counted "81 days of quiet" without terrorist attacks. But there is no 
greater lie than this. The quiet was only here. During this "quiet," dozens 
of Palestinians were killed, and almost no one bothered to report it. That is 
how it becomes possible to speak of quiet and then claim that the 
Palestinians disturbed it. The fact that the media does not speak of 
Palestinian deaths does not mean that they did not happen. The eight 
Palestinians who were killed last week in one day at Rafah, for example, 
killing along the lines of a medium-sized terror attack, together with 
destruction that is to an extent unknown in Israel, weren't enough to 
generate any interest here last week. They barely got a mention. The 
international community dealt prominently with this frightening killing, and 
the United Nations secretary-general issued a special statement 
condemning them. There was only one place where the entire event was 
ignored - the country whose soldiers perpetrated the killing. The images of 
giant bulldozers and tanks demolishing more and more houses, and the 
scenes of the dead and 42 wounded, among them women and children, 
being taken to hospitals in Rafah were hardly shown in Israel. 

The mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth, for example, mentioned the 
killing in Rafah in a sub-headline to a very small item on an inside page 
that dealt with the minor injuries sustained by a settler couple in the Gaza 
Strip settlement of Nisanit as a result of a Qassam rocket. This is how the 
national agenda is determined. Such disgraceful coverage of such a lethal 
operation by the IDF might evoke other regimes, in which the public is 
shown only what the authorities want it to see.

This has nothing to do with media critique; it's about our image. A society 
that disregards loss of human life, caused by its own soldiers, is a tainted 
society. A society that conceals from its citizens vital information of this 
kind is undercutting their sense of judgment. The situation is further 
compounded when one examines the attitude of the Israeli society toward 
its victims: there aren't many societies that immerse themselves in 
bereavement so intensely. What we have, then, is a dual morality: we 
count only our own dead, all the rest don't exist.

Concealing information has another ramification: if we don't know, there is 
no one to ask why. The eight Palestinians were killed in Rafah during the 
destruction of the tunnels without the question being asked as to whether 
this mission was justified at any means, at any price. 

This is a deliberate aim. It permits presenting the Palestinians as the only 
guilty party, and it falls on fertile ground. The majority of the public 
doesn't want to know what the IDF is really doing in the occupied 
territories. But the media, therefore, are in serious breach of their duty. 
Both those who support the occupation and those who are against it are 
entitled to get complete information about the price it exacts. The 
presentation of killing as such a marginal matter also sends a dangerous 
message to Israeli soldiers: there is nothing terrible about killing more and 
more Palestinians

On Thursday, 15 passersby were wounded in the targeted killing of Islamic 
Jihad activist Makled Hamid in Gaza. Last week, three children, one of 
them five years old, were killed in Balata refugee camp, near Nablus. The 
week before, three children were killed on one Saturday in Jenin and in 
nearby Burkin. Two Palestinians were killed recently along the fence in 
Gaza, trying to enter Israel to find work. Six Palestinians were killed in 
Rafah in the previous tunnel operation in the middle of the month. 
Increasing numbers of children were shot to death near the Qalandiyah 
refugee camp. All of these cases rated barely a mention in the media. But 
behind each Palestinian victim is family and friends, and hatred springs up 
from their graves.

Ibrahim Abd el Kadr, from Qalandiyah, who a few months ago lost his 
eldest son, Fares, when the fourteen-and-a-half-year-old was shot in the 
head by soldiers, swore to take revenge. Is it so difficult to understand 
him? 

There is, therefore, an Israeli price to the many concealed Palestinian dead. 
They are incentives to terrorism. Their exclusion from our agenda cannot 
make the results of their killing disappear as well. Would Hanani have 
carried out his killing operation at Geha Junction if he had grown up in 
humane conditions and if his relative had not been assassinated? That 
question should be very disturbing to us. In the meantime, though, it's not 
even on the agenda.  
  
 
[] "It is the refusers who have introduced a moral dimension into the            
     public discourse" - Uri Avnery in his weekly column

Uri Avnery
27.12.03

òáøéú òì ôé á÷ùä àå á÷øåá áàúø

			The Categorical Imperative

     Some years ago, when the jury for the annual Israel Prize announced its 
award to Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, I decided to invite him to give a 
lecture to the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, the group that 
established the first contacts with the PLO.
     "I am ready to come," he said, "on one condition: I shall speak only 
about the duty to refuse to serve in the occupied territories." For him, that 
was the alpha and omega of the fight against the occupation.
     I told him that he was free to speak about whatever he saw fit, even if I 
myself did not quite share his view.
     (The lecture, by the way, had an unexpected result. In his usual 
provocative style, Leibowitz compared the Special Units of the Israeli army 
to the Nazi SS. His words were published, aroused a storm of protest and 
the prize jury wanted to cancel the award, whereupon Leibowitz himself 
announced that he refused it.)
     Since then I had an ongoing debate with myself about this hard and 
painful subject.
     I am not a pacifist, in the sense of totally refusing to bear arms. My 
heart is certainly with Yonathan Ben-Artzi, who is standing trial now 
because of his uncompromising pacifistic stand. He is a wonderful and 
admirable youngster. But as a member of a generation that experienced the 
war with the Nazis, I cannot accept the principle that every war is evil. 
Once the Nazis had taken hold of Germany and started to carry out  their 
aggressive designs, there was no way of stopping them other then  by 
force of arms.
     As long as there is no world order and no world government, no world 
legislature or world police (all of which I hope will be in place by the end of 
 the 21st century), no country can do without with a defense force. And as 
long as there is no world government that enables every people striving 
for liberty to attain its goal by peaceful means, freedom-fighters will need 
to use arms.
     But Leibowitz was no pacifist. He did not advocate a general refusal to 
bear arms, but the refusal to serve the occupation. He believed in the moral 
value of this refusal, in the duty of every moral person to draw a line 
between himself and an unjust regime and to declare that he will not lend 
his hand to a policy that is inhuman, immoral and illegal by its very nature. 
He also believed that the personal example of the objectors was bound to 
influence the general public.
     This approach is beset, of course, with several pitfalls, which made me 
hesitate.
     First, it undermines the democratic order. The army is supposed to 
serve the legal government that was elected by the citizens. If you refuse 
to follow the orders of the legal government, you shake the very 
foundations of democracy.
     Second, you legitimise the same actions by your opponents. According 
to the "categorical imperative" of Immanuel Kant, you have to behave "as 
if the principle by which you act were about to be turned into a universal 
law of nature". If A has the right to refuse to serve the occupation, B has 
the right to refuse to remove settlements.
     Third, you corrupt the army. If all moral people leave the army, it will 
remain in the hands of the immoral ones. The checkpoints will be manned 
exclusively by Arab-haters, operations will be executed by sadists. But if 
the decent people remain in the army, they can influence its spirit, 
preventing by their very presence injustices and atrocities, or, at least, 
bringing them to light.
      I have always had a lot of respect for conscientious objectors. I know 
how much courage is needed for a young person (and an old one, too) to 
withstand the social pressure of family, comrades and neighbors and to 
bear the consequences. I am impressed much more by such moral fortitude 
than by physical heroism in battle, when you know that all the people are 
behind you. (And I speak as one who has served in a so-called "elite 
unit".) 
     Therefore I have always supported an individual's right to refuse. But I 
myself was not ready to call upon young people to follow this line. My 
position was that persons must decide for themselves where they will best 
serve the fight against the occupation - inside or outside the army.
     But I feel that my position is changing. 
     First of all, many soldiers have convinced me that it is almost 
impossible to withstand the pressure inside the army. The brainwashing is 
intense and unrelenting; those in the higher ranks are more and more like 
robots with blunted senses, the products of the occupation; not to 
mention the members of the religious academies connected with the army, 
Arab-haters and settlers with "knitted kippas" (associated with the 
extreme right-wing national-religious party.)
     Second, the occupation itself has become a monster that nobody can 
serve without losing his humanity. When the members of the "cream of 
the Israeli army", the Sayeret Matkal (General Staff commandos) say so 
and refuse to go on, their testimony is persuasive. When the Airforce 
combat pilots revolt against their commander, who has said that he "feels 
nothing but a slight bump" when he releases a bomb that kills women and 
children, respect is due to them. When five 19-year old youngsters choose 
to go to prison rather than enjoy the freedom of the occupiers, Kant 
himself would have saluted them. The protest against an immoral regime is 
a categorical imperative.
     Does this refusal prepare the ground for the refusal of right-wing 
soldiers? There is, of course, no symmetry between freedom-lovers, who 
refuse to take part in an ongoing injustice, and the settlers, who are 
themselves part of the injustice. But if one recognizes the right to refuse 
for reasons of conscience, one must apply Kant's principle to them, too. If 
there ever is an evacuation of the settlements, the right of a soldier to 
refuse to take part for reasons of conscience must be assured.
     Is this a blow against democracy? Most certainly. But this is a blow for 
the good. Israeli democracy is being whittled away with every day of 
occupation. We are witnessing an continuous decline: the government 
has become Sharon's kindergarten, the Knesset attracts general contempt, 
the Supreme Court has largely become an instrument of the occupation, 
the media are marching in step. It is the refusers who have introduced a 
moral dimension into the public discourse.
     The accumulation of refusals, with one act inspiring the next and one 
military unit influencing another, is bound to have a lasting effect on the 
general public. It is both an expression of change and a stimulus for 
change.
     But above all, the act of refusal shines like a beacon in the darkness. It 
drives out the despair that has infects every part of the collective body. It 
restores faith in the State of Israel and its younger generation.
     Of course, the objectors are few. They are a small minority of the people 
and the army. But the course of human history would have been quite 
different without such minorities - people who had the courage to march 
on when the chorus of conformists shouted: "Stop!"
     And not least: these people allow us to be proud again. A nation that 
has sons like these can have hope.    


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