topic by
Lynette
4/7/2002 (24:48) |
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Letter From Israel
by Ran HaCohen
April 1, 2002
The Auschwitz Logic
Sorry to disappoint some of my readers: terrorists haven't got me yet. Yesterday (Saturday) in Tel-Aviv they were close, but no cigar. A minute ago, my parents called from Haifa saying they just survived another attack. 'May they move next to your home', an American reader identifying himself as 'Baba' recently wished me. Thank you, dear Baba. Inside every 'anti-terrorist' there is always a little terrorist yearning to come out. One can only imagine what you would do with your destructive energies, had you been living in a besieged refugee camp in Palestine rather than in a cosy American domicile.
Jose Saramago, the great Portuguese writer and winner of Nobel Prize for literature, visited Ramallah last week (24.3), days before the present Israeli re-invasion. He came with a delegation of the International Parliament of Writers (IPW), together with Russell Banks (USA), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Breyten Breytenbach (South Africa), Bei Dao (China), Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Vincenzo Consolo (Italy), and Christian Salmon (IPW Executive Director). The IPW also runs an appeal for peace in Palestine, where 'the entry points to villages have been walled over, civilian population movement is paralysed, ghettos and reservations are created, where only tanks patrol and helicopters over-fly the area on a permanent basis'. While in Ramallah, Saramago took the ghettos-and-reservations analogy a step too far and compared it with Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the Nazi death camps. Later, IPW distanced itself from Saramago's words.
Saramago's comparison has done it: at last, Israel had its desired spin. No one asked what Saramago had seen to make him use such an appalling analogy. Ramallah was forgotten immediately, only Auschwitz was left. The entire liberal intellectual main-stream - from playwright Yehoshua Sobol to rhinocerised Ha'aretz journalist Ari Shavit - did its best to attack and discredit Saramago. How vociferous can one be when shouting consensus slogans.
And how quiet can one be when a critical word is required. Of Israel's countless writers and poets, of the entire glorious literary milieu, only six persons bothered to sign the IPW appeal, long before Saramago's words. One of the six is an Israeli Arab (translator and writer Mohamad Ghanayem), three are Israeli Jews of oriental origin (writer Shimon Ballas, children's books writer Ronit Chacham, poet Sami Shalom-Chetrit), and of European origin we have poet Yizchak Laor and playwright Matti Meged. Have you ever heard of them? Probably not. But you probably did hear of Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and their ilk. Now you know why. They did not sign the appeal. But they would be more than happy to attack Saramago, I am sure.
The Auschwitz Logic
So this is the Auschwitz logic in a nutshell. Ramallah is not Auschwitz. Israel is not the Third Reich. We have no death-camps and we haven't massacred one third of the Palestinian population in gas chambers. Therefore, everything we do is quite all right. We may fill the occupied territories with tear gas and blood, we may kill and injure and torture and blackmail and dispossess, we may surround millions by electric fences and tanks in tiny enclaves, we may hold them under siege and daily bombing, we may make pregnant women walk to hospitals, and we shoot ambulances too, don't we. But as long as we fall even an inch short of the atrocities of Nazi Germany, it's all fine and good, and don't you dare make the comparison.
People sometimes say that the Better is the greatest foe of the Good. Israel is now demonstrating how the Greater Evil is Evil's best friend.
And many thanks to Adolf Hitler, for setting such insurmountable standards.
The Save-Arafat Logic
A recent subset of the Auschwitz logic. Europe is warning Israel: don't kill Arafat. The United States is soothing: Israel has pledged not to kill Arafat. How magnanimous of Sharon. He can bomb ambulances and raid hospitals, shoot journalists and cut water supply to entire towns, but as long as he doesn't touch Arafat, it's all right. In return for Israel's pledge not to kill Arafat, the world has given him a carte blanche to kill all other Palestinians. Sharon couldn't ever ask for more.
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