FOR US ISRAEL IS NOT A METAPHOR

by Gianfranco Spadaccia

(Notizie radicali, 18.03.1987)

 

At the heart of the radical choice, the condition and rights of individuals and peoples. We believe that democracy in Israel, though imperfect, is a precious asset that need to be protected.

Not long ago, two different points of view were proposed, one in a report by Giovanni Negri and the other in a statement by Alex Langer before the Radical Congress, concerning the Palestinian and Jewish questions and their interrelationship. I use the term ''point of view" almost in its etymological sense, almost in the meaning of different and therefore not incompatible outlooks that do not rule each other out even though they involve different choices and attitudes.

Alex Langer chose, as the focus of his attention and as the focal point of the Jewish and Palestinian question and of the entire question ot the Middle-East, the state of Israel, its nature, its concrete choices and its responsibilities. How can we be insensitive to Alex Langer's point of view when he compares his vision of an ideal Israel, his "second" and "great" ideal homeland with concrete reality and with Israel's concrete "reason of State", sometimes present, in any case ruthless, we who so often have fought at Langer's side against reasons of State in the name of such ideals?

True, when one considers the question from this angle and when one believes in democracy and in the lawful State, the state of Israel appears to be deplorably in contradiction with its very nature and with its own democratic legality; how tenuous is its link with democracy, how little it respects the law and rights! To the non-religious, it appears to be intolerably Godly-minded and even arrogant in presuming to impose Hebraism on its citizens. To those who are antimilitarist and non-violent, how ugly the militarization of society and the ideology it generates appear, not to mention the war that this country has chosen and is forced to carry through. Finally, if one is Jewish and has lived in one's own flesh and blood and experienced the diaspora and the persecution of one's own people, one has the right to say "never again, never again, whatever the cost", but then one cannot very well dismiss the diaspora and the suffering of other peoples, that of the Palestinians for a start, as one might do with a guilt complex.

His is therefore a legitimate point of view. In fact, speaking for myself, I would even say that this point of view and a large number of his observations, which were singularly expressed, are well-founded and relatively true and valid. Moreover, it is not a coincidence that one of the first female Israeli citizens to enroll in the Radical Party was Shulamit Aloni, the leader of a party of no more than four deputies which is fighting in Israel in the name of democracy, in the name of secularism, in the name of civil rights, for Palestinians particularly, and in the name of interracial and interreligious co-existence.

But we, who have never let ourselves be influenced or taken in the new leftist myths, myths that have occasionally appeared to us bearing a tragic likeness to those that gave rise to fascism during the thirties, we have felt the need to choose another point of view, the one that Giovanni Negri presented in a detailed, sound and reasonable manner at the Congress. From this point of view, one has a different picture : in the foreground one sees the actual living conditions, the actual rights of indidivuals and peoples, the conditions and the rights of Jews and of the Jewish people, the conditions and rights and of the Palestinians and of the Palestinian people, but also the conditions and rights of persons and peoples of this tormented Middle-Eastern region, i.e., Arabs (Syrians, Libyans, Iraqis, Jordanians), Persians, Christians, Maronites, Armenians, Kurds... I write "conditions" and "rights" in the plural and with a small letter, and I found it necessary to add the word "actual". Abstractions, which, incidentally, are always written in the singular with a capital letter (Revolution, Freedom, Liberation, the Right to Self-Determination, Independence, the Nation...) are of no interest to me.

This point of view above all highlights something that other points of view conveniently conceal : the fact that, even today, some Jews are persecuted, kept in ghettos ,sequestrated and even killed for the simple reason that they are Jews. This is the case in the U.S.S.R., in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iran, in Irak, in the Maghreb countries. In a world and within a leftist movement where the main preoccupation is to present Israel, and consequently the Jews, as the persecutors, it seems impossible to keep this in view and concern oneself with these Jews who are pursued and persecuted.

But there is another truth that is veiled, kept under cover, when one sees the problem from the other point ot view. That these 17% of Palestinians who have agreed to live in Israel and to become its citizens are subject - sadly, this is true - to racial and religious discrimination; that the Palestinians in the occupied territories of the West Bank are subject - sadly, this too is true - to suffering and the injustice of a harsh military occupation; but that, notwithstanding this sad reality, the minority of Palestinians in Israel and the maiority of Palestinians in the occupied territories benefit from living conditions which are infinitely more comfortable and enjoy basic rights that are respected to a far greater extent than in the case not only of the Palestinians who have chosen to live in these Arab countries, but also of of these same Arab countries. That is all there is to be said. Our point of view does not exclude the rights of the Palestinians living in camps in Lebanon, who were massacred by the Shiites (or was this once again the fault of the Israeli army?), the rights of the refugees tied to the P.L.O., to its ideology and its exclusively military and militarist praxis, the rights of the Palestinians in Jordan who live and work in this State and who now constitute the overwhelming majority.

Our point of view does not discriminate against any race by excluding the rights (human, civil, political) to life, to freedom and to democracy of the Syrians, Iragis, Iranians, Libyans - subject to regimes led by fanatical and intolerant minorities which have availed themselves of absolute powers of life and death against all rules and principles of humanity - as well as of States which call themselves "moderate" but which, still today, deny their citizens any kind of concession in respect of rights and democracy.

It is precisely when we see the conditions and rights of these peoples that it strikes us that Israel's democracy, as imperfect as it may be, ever proclaimed and ever contradicted, as fragile as it is resistant to the point of being able to withstand the impact of international tensions, the zealotry of a handful of religious minorities, foreign isolation and war, its power policy and the manoeuvres of its secrete services, this democracy is a treasure to be defended and protected. It should be regarded as an anchorage and a source of hope, not only for Israel, but for Palestine and the Palestinians, for the Arab people of the Middle-East themselves.

We want to develop a policy with human rights and democracy as guide-values. A policy that.does not consider freedom and liberation possible without these values. We are fed up with these romantic struggles in support of liberation movements which subsequently lead to the most atrocious forms of oppression. We are fed up with "freeing" the Vietnamese from the corrupted political classes in the South and from American occupation to then expose the urban population of Saigon to genocide or the gruelling experience of the boat-people; we are fed up with liberating the Cambodian people to turn them over to Pol Pot and his savage revolution; we are fed up with freeing the Iranians from the S.C.I.A. to turn them over to the loving care of Khomeiny and his ayatollahs.

It is not true that we could not have foreseen all this. A liberation that is born in terror first generates terrorism and then a state of terror, or in any case, of oppression. Each time I hear that a bomb has exploded in Israel or in the occupied territories, I feel that the attack was not so much directed against the occupation and domination of Israel as against the Palestinians who live in these territories. It is almost as if there was an attempt to prevent a new state of affairs from arising : that of a people no longer uprooted but comfortably settled, no longer armed with despair, bombs and terror, but armed with hope, democracy, civil disobedience, tolerance, non-violence and able with these arms - also usable by women and children, the old and the sick - to impose and assert their own rights. It is time today for this new state of affairs to establish itself on the West Bank and in Jordan where the 60% of Palestinians have made King Hussein's country a beautiful and rich nation.

I know that the nature of things dictates that one should take the opposite view. All the more reasons why one should oppose the nature of things, why one should trust common sense instead of commonplaces, why one should trust the morality of a policy based on choices instead of moral judgments or guilt complexes which are always a bad counsel (I am talking about the guilt complex of the Christians with respect to the Jews, that of the Jews with respect to the Palestinians, that of the ex-colonizers with respect to the ex-colonized). It is now that.hope for a different future should be built. It would be of no purpose to wait until it is the destiny of the people of Israel to once again be pushed into the sea and once again go through a genocide and the destiny of the people of Palestine and of the Arab countries to be subjected to an irreversible military and terrorist oppression.

Seen from this angle, Alex Langer's metaphor (the near-identification between Israel and the Radical Party) takes on another meaning, less rational, less schematic, less simplified.