Hannah Arendt – a Jewish Pariah and Daughter of the Diaspora

Arendt was the German-Jewish Refugee whose Universalism Overcame her Zionism

Hannah Arendt was an enigma. She rejected any materialist or class analysis in favour of a philosophical and metaphysical discourse. Originally a Zionist, Arendt escaped the shackles and straitjacket of authoritarian nationalism. Zionism demands obedience to the Jewish volk, above all from its intellectuals, which is one reason why it has produced so few. Nationalism and worship of the state are not conducive to freedom of thought or innovative ideas.

Arendt was the child of left-wing parents. In the 1930’s she became a Zionist as she saw in the rise of Nazism the defeat of universalism and assimilation. Arendt fled from Berlin in 1933 to Paris after having spent 8 days in the custody of the Gestapo. However, as with many other Jewish refugees, the Nazis caught up with her and in 1941 she escaped again from Gurs internment camp and made her way, with her husband Heinrich Blucher, to the United States. For the Zionists, this fact alone ‘only contributed to the dismissal of her work as having no real worth.’

Arendt’s most famous work, the The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951 in McCarthy’s America. It is as its title suggests an analysis of what she called ‘totalitarianism’, the kind of a state that Orwell described in 1984.  She summed it up in the Introduction:

‘Anti-Semitism (not merely hatred of the Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship) one after another, one more brutally than the other have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee.’

As a refugee she noted that when a person is driven away from one country, he is expelled from all countries “which means he is actually expelled from humanity”. Refugees are literally outlaws, beyond the protection of the law.

It is ironic that Israel alone of Western states refuses to accept any refugees on the grounds that they would undermine Israel’s (Jewish) national identity. Hostility to refugees in Israel is higher than in any other western state. Despite claiming it is a ‘Jewish’ state the injunction in Leviticus 19:33-34 is ignored:

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God”

refugees stranded at the Greek border 2016

Arendt is without doubt the greatest Jewish political philosopher of the 20^th century. It is little surprise that despite having being converted to Zionism under the influence of Kurt Blumenfeld of the German Zionist Federation and having worked for Youth Aliya in Paris in 1935 she became a bête noir for the Zionist movement after having published in 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of Evil, about the 1961 Eichmann trial in Israel.

BACKGROUND

Gabriel Piterberg in The Returns of Zionism describes how in 2001 Yad Vashem and Jerusalem’s Hebrew University organised a conference to mark the 40^th anniversary of the Eichmann Trial. The keynote address was by Anita Shapira, the ‘princess of Zionism’ To her all Jewish history began and continued in Israel. The intervening 2,000 years of diaspora Jewry were a void. Shapira evinces what Piterberg calls ‘the hegemonic depth of Zionist ideology.’

Elizabeth Varnhagen

We can see this ideological hegemony and totalitarian thought in the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ onslaught today on Corbyn’s Labour Party whereby any fundamental critique of Israeli ‘democracy’ is deemed anti-Semitic under the IHRA. The IHRA has been adopted by all major British political parties, local authorities and the Police and Judicial College, despite excoriating criticism by legal scholars such as  Geoffrey Robertson QC, Hugh Tomlinson QC and the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge Sir Stephen Sedley. No amount of reasoned argument or logic can withstand the unanimity of bourgeois support for Zionism.

In contrast the most outrageous anti-Palestinian racism is excused by police state journalists like the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland as a product of ‘Jewish identity’ which is therefore immune to criticism. ‘Jewish identity’ is used as a shield to protect Israel yet anyone who associates Jews with Israel’s crimes is under the IHRA ‘anti-Semitic’. A case of having your Zionist cake and eating it!

Arendt committed what for her Zionist detractors was a cardinal sin. She sought to draw universal lessons from the Holocaust that were neither nationalist nor racist. ‘Shapira charges Arendt with trying to ‘understand’ Nazism and the Judaeocide from a universalist position.’  [Piterberg, 149] That was why, until 1999, Eichmann in Jerusalem was not published in Israel. As Boaz Evron put it

‘this book came to me as a fresh wind of sobriety and sensibility amongst the hysterical storm blown all around by the propaganda agencies of the Ben Gurion regime.’

Arendt was

‘in Shapira’s absurd judgment, incapable of sensing the Jewish experience because she was from ‘there’ as if ‘there’ was not where the Holocaust had occurred.’

Not only did Shapira condemn Arendt’s universalism but her refusal to accept Zionist colonisation and ownership of the Holocaust. A Holocaust which the Jewish Agency had ignored whilst it was happening but which they utilised politically and ideologically.

Arendt’s essay ‘The Jew as a Pariah’ was savaged in a review in the magazine of the American Right, Commentary. Rather than praising Jewish nationalism, Arendt praises Jewish dissidents as she focuses on 4 particular pariahs – Heinrich Heine, Bernard Lazarre, Charlie Chaplin and Franz Kafka – each brilliant in their own way. But as Ron Feldman notes sniffily regarding Chaplin ‘strangely enough, one did not have to be Jewish to be a Jewish pariah.’

Rahel Varnhagen's Literary Salon in Berlin

But of course the quintessential pariah was Arendt herself. As Lyndsey Stonebridge notes in her essay The Shape of Totalitarianism and the Meaning of Exile: Three Lessons from Hannah Arendt Arendt was a self-proclaimed pariah, a term she borrowed from Bernard Lazare. She considered her closest soulmate Rahel Varnhagen, a pariah to parvenu of the late 17^th, early 18^th century who ran a famous literary salon in Berlin. An important figure in Germany’s Romantic movement she converted to Christianity in 1814 in order to escape the social restrictions that were placed on Jews. She was the outsider who sought acceptance which is one reason why Amos Elon [The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933] falsely accused her of hating her Jewish background.

Conversion was Varnhagen’s only escape. Arendt said of her that

‘Rahel had remained a Jew and a pariah. Only because she clung to both conditions did she find a place in the history of European humanity.’

For Zionism, what is and was more important was her rejection of racial exclusivism in favour of Jewish assimilation.

In 1938, Arendt completed her biography Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess although it wasn’t published until 1957. As Piterberg notes, it took 20 years to write. For Arendt ‘a decent human existence is possible only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risks of starving or being stoned to death.’  Arendt cherished Varnhagen as her "closest friend, though she had been dead for some hundred years".

Arendt followed a similar trajectory to Einstein. From Zionist to non-Zionist. She signed a famous letter on 2^nd December 1948 on the occasion of Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States.

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.

In October 1944 Arendt wrote an essay Zionism Reconsidered. Judith Butler observed

‘Paradoxically, and perhaps shrewdly, the terms in which Arendt criticised Fascism came to inform her criticisms of Zionism, though she did not and would not conflate the two.’

Although Zionism is not a fascist ideology (although it has a remarkable number of fascist adherents) it shares a number of common features with fascism such as the premium placed on loyalty to the state and the prioritisation of the needs of the state over those of the individual.

During the Holocaust this was expressed as the need to build the Jewish state taking priority over the saving of the Jews in Europe.  Shabtai Teveth, his official biographer, quotes Ben Gurion as saying that where there was

a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise, we shall say that the enterprise comes first.

In ‘Zionism Reconsidered’ Arendt noted that the American Zionist conference in 1944 had demanded a Jewish Commonwealth in the whole of Palestine without once mentioning the Palestinians, describing this as a victory for the Revisionist programme. Her conclusion was that this ‘obviously leaves them the choice between voluntary emigration or second class citizenship.’  In fact there was a third choice, which in 1948 came to pass – transfer or ethnic cleansing, which she notes was discussed in a wide variety of Zionist circles.

The critical problem for Arendt was both political and humanitarian:

the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.

As Butler noted

she calls ‘absurd’ the idea of setting up a Jewish state in a ‘sphere of interest’ of the superpowers. Such a state would suffer under the ‘delusion of nationhood’: ‘Only folly could dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbours.’

Zionism rested on‘an open acceptance of anti-Semitism as a “fact.” The Zionist labour movement had created, with the chalutz and kibbutz ‘a new type of Jew’ but this didn’t prevent the Zionist Organisation ‘against the natural impulses of the whole Jewish people’ doing business with Hitler in order to ‘trade German goods against the wealth of German Jewry.’

Arendt noted that the ‘socialist’ Zionists ‘failed to level a single critique of Jewish bourgeoisie outside of Palestine, or to attack the role of Jewish finance.’

Arendt had great difficulty in coming to terms with the nation state.  To her the only solution to national conflicts was either complete assimilation or emigration. The possibility of national autonomy, cultural pluralism and multi-culturalism were absent.

Arendt castigated the ‘Zionist doctrine of eternal anti-Semitism’. Quoting Herzl she noted that because Zionism ‘concluded that without anti-Semitism the Jewish people would not have survived’ it was opposed to any attempt to liquidate anti-Semitism.

Astutely Arendt observed that for all their strictures against assimilation the Zionists ‘were the only ones who sincerely wanted assimilation, namely, ‘normalization’ of the (Jewish) people.’ Theirs was a collective assimilation in a Jewish state. The irony is that because of the circumstances of its creation, under the protection of the British Empire, Zionism had created a ‘Jewish’ state which is anything but normal, not least because it is an ethno-nationalist state.

Arendt’s criticism of Zionism’s attitude to the Jewish diaspora are astute. Zionism ‘cuts off Jewish history from European history and even from the rest of mankind’.

Arendt is particularly cutting in her description of leftist Zionists ‘who simply added official Zionism to their socialism’ whilst fighting the employment of Arab labour ‘under the pretense of class-struggle against Arab labour.’

Arendt accused Zionism of being inspired by German nationalism which viewed people biologically not politically. In the process

‘Zionists ended by making the Jewish national emancipation dependent upon the material interests of another nation.’ ‘The erection of a Jewish State within an imperial sphere of interest may look like a very nice solution to some Zionists...’

The ‘relationship between the proposed new State and the Diaspora’ is one which disturbed her. Arendt put her finger on another problem of Zionism. Its claim that Jews form a separate nation, even whilst the majority continue to live outside Israel in other countries. Inevitably this posed ‘the old question of double loyalty’ which is precisely what has happened.  [see Hannah Arendt would agree with Ilhan Omar] In her essay ‘To Save the Jewish Homeland’ Arendt foresaw the time when Israel’s relations with world Jewry

would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large number of Jews lived.

Dual loyalty is inherent in Zionism.

Arendt argues that Herzl’s Zionism was ‘inspired from German sources – as opposed to the French variety.’ In other words a German nationalism which was exclusive and volkish, based on blood relations and kith and kin whereas French nationalism had been inclusive, based on all those residing within France.

Arendt noted the Zionist and Herzl view that the Jewish people were surrounded by a ‘world of enemies’ remarking that ‘if’ the whole world is ultimately against us, we are lost.’ She finishes her essay by warning of the parallels with Sabbatai Zevi, the false messiah of the 17^th century.

Arendt’s attitude to the onset of anti-Semitism was that

If one is attacked as a Jew one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.

Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of Evil

What aroused the ire of the Zionist movement to white fury was Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem. She famously coined the slogan ‘the banality of evil’ which Zionist historians like David Cesarani have written books about without once understanding what it meant! She portrayed Eichmann as a desk bound bureaucrat and some took this to mean that he was simply doing a job that he had no strong feelings about either way. Cesarani went out of his way to prove what none of us doubted – that Eichmann was an anti-Semite.

However his anti-Semitism was political not personal. He was not some political Lord Voldemort, breathing fire. Rather he was someone who could only talk in clichés, lacking all original thought. In fact a most unremarkable man who nonetheless had perpetrated monstrous crimes.

Lyndsey Stonebridge observed it wasn’t Eichmann who she got wrong, but a young black woman named Elizabeth Eckford who was depicted amidst screaming white women in a famous 1957 photograph from Little Rock, Arkansas as she entered an all-White schools.

Arendt argued that Eckford should not be carrying such a political burden at her age and that education was a social and largely private matter. Ralph Ellison replied that all black children in the south carried a political burden from the day they were born whether they or their parents liked it or not. Arendt shut up.

The Judgment of the Eichmann trial dovetailed with Zionism’s political requirements when it found that ‘it has not been proved before us that the accused knew that the Gypsies were being transported to destruction’. Thus no genocide charge except that against the Jews was upheld. Hannah Arendt remarked that

‘This was difficult to understand, for, apart from the fact that the extermination of Gypsies was common knowledge, Eichmann had admitted during the police examination that he knew of it.’ It had been an order from Himmler.

The trial verdict did not see the extermination of millions of people as a crime against humanity. Rather it was a crime against the Jewish people. The Holocaust was not seen as ‘a Fascist attack on human diversity’ but a specific and exclusive attack on the Jewish people.

Arendt pointed to the hypocrisy of the Prosecutor Gideon Hausner:

‘Israeli citizens, religious and non-religious seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law which prohibits intermarriage… there certainly was something breathtaking in the naiveté with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans.’

Kasztner was the leader of Hungarian Zionism during the war. He was accused after the war by Hungarian survivors of the deportations to Auschwitz of having collaborated with Eichmann in return for a train carrying 1,684 of the Jewish and Zionist elite out of Hungary. The verdict of the trial judge Benjamin Halevi was that Kasztner had sold his soul to the devil. Although the decision was overturned on legal and political technicalities by the Supreme Court the damage had been done.

The Eichmann trial was staged primarily to undo the damage caused by the Kasztner Affair. In the words of Israeli historian Tom Segev [The 7^th Million, p.328, see Noah Lucas, The Modern History of Israel, p. 414] it was meant to ‘expunge the historical guilt that had been attached to the Mapai leadership since the Kasztner trial.’  The Kasztner trial dominated the Israel of 1954-58 and caused the fall of the 1955 Sharrett government.

Witnesses who were likely to raise the issues that had surrounded the Kasztner trial were carefully excluded from giving evidence e.g. Kasztner’s friend Andre Biss.

What Arendt did was to write a book which threatened to undo this careful stage management. Her first sin was to attack the Jewish leadership in Nazi occupied Europe. She wrote:

‘Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and half and six million people.’

As Lucien Sternberg observed, ‘Arendt’s argument caused an outcry among Zionist holocaust historians but it could not be refuted.’ [Not as a Lamb - Jews Against Hitler, Gordon & Cremones, University Press, Glasgow p.109]

Arendt was accused of being incapable of understanding the complexity of the situation. Despite the participation of the Judenrat in rounding up Jews for deportation, Israel Gutman of Yad Vashem and Rozett opined that ‘‘The Judenrat reinforced the Jews’ power of endurance in their struggle for survival,’

Hausner was foremost among those who defended the Judenrat. He attacked Raul Hilberg, the preeminent Holocaust historian because Hannah Arendt ‘in her vicious and compassionless attitude to the Judenrat’ drew upon his work.’

The problem was that one could not explain how the Nazis had achieved their objectives so efficiently without taking the behaviour of the victims, including the Jewish Councils into account.

When Israeli Professor Jacob Talman criticised Hannah Arendt, for mentioning Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, Rudolph Vrba,  the Jewish escapee from Auschwitz, then residing in London asked:

‘Did the Judenrat (or the Judenverrat) in Hungary tell their Jews what was awaiting them? No, they remained silent and for this silence some of their leaders – for example Dr R Kasztner – bartered their own lives and the lives of 1684 other ‘prominent’ Jews directly from Eichmann.’

The Zionist movement exploded with fury when Arendt wrote ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of Evil.’ It threatened to undo all that had been achieved by the Eichmann Bill. Arendt’s crime was to highlight what the Eichmann Trial had been designed to avoid.  Their attacks bear a familiar ring:  Arendt wrote:

… the campaign, conducted with all the well-known means of image-making and opinion-manipulation, got much more attention than the controversy…. (it was) as though the pieces written against the book (and more frequently against its author) came “out of a mimeographing machine” (Mary McCarthy)… the clamor centered on the “image” of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had never occurred to me before.”

Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a German Zionist who had welcomed the rise of Hitler as vindicating Zionism, accused Arendt of having described Eichmann as a ‘sweet and misguided man.’ One French weekly went so far as to ask whether Arendt was a Nazi.

Amos Elon wrote, in an Introduction to her book, that

No book within living memory had elicited similar passions. A kind of excommunication seemed to have been imposed on the author by the Jewish establishment in America.

Arendt was stunned by the uproar. She spoke of the ‘smear campaign’ being conducted ‘on the lowest level’ based on the claim that she had said ‘the exact opposite of what I did in fact write.’ What Arendt had to say about the way her book was viciously caricatured has a familiar ring to those claims of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party. In a letter to her friend, Mary McCarthy, Arendt complained ‘what a risky business to tell the truth on a factual level without theoretical and scholarly embroidery.’ Shooting the messenger rather than responding to the message has always remained the quintessential Zionist modus operandi.  Apparently Arendt had claimed that ‘the Jews had murdered themselves’ and why had she told ‘such a monstrously implausible lie? Out of “self-hatred” of course.’

The Eichmann Trial was a political show trial. It focused solely on the Jewish dead and failed to place the Holocaust in any kind of historical context. Its purpose was not to understand but to rewrite history. People have concentrated on the Appeal Court’s decision to find Eichmann guilty and the imposition of the death sentence whilst ignoring its decision that ‘the Appellant had received no ‘superior orders’ at all. He was his own superior.’ Israel’s Supreme Court had exculpated Himmler and even Hitler.

A movie The Specialist was made. It reflected Arendt’s thesis on the banality of evil. Eichmann, whose enthusiasm for the annihilation of the Jews was never doubted, had nonetheless been a bureaucratic cog in the wheel.

‘The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else.’

Raul Hilberg reached the same conclusion.

‘The bureaucracy had taken over. It is the bureaucratic destruction process that in its step-by-step manner finally led to the annihilation of five million victims.’

Eichmann was an ardent Zionist. Baron von Mildenstein, the first head of the SS’s Jewish Department, had required Eichmann to read Herzl’s Der Judenstaat ‘which converted. Eichmann promptly and forever to Zionism... as late as 1939 he seems to have protested against desecrators of Herzl’s grave in Vienna.’

At the Eichmann trial, the most glaring omission from the picture painted was any witness to the co-operation between the Nazis and the Jewish authorities and the Zionists. This prevented the question being asked ‘Why did you cooperate in the destruction of your own people’. When Pinhas Freudiger, the Chief Rabbi of Hungary testified, this caused the only significant interruption as Hungarian survivors called him a collaborator and ‘accused him of abandoning his position as a leader of the Orthodox Community.’

Perhaps the best example of the ideological confrontation between Zionism, with its belief in the negation of the disapora and the voice of the Jewish diaspora, is the correspondence between Arendt and Gershom Scholem, the Professor of Mysticism. 

On June 23^rd 1963 Scholem wrote to Arendt, having read Eichmann in Jerusalem.

In the Jewish tradition there is a concept Ahabath Israel: ‘Love of the Jewish people…”  In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who came from the German Left, I find little trace of this….’

Arendt’s reply demonstrated that Scholem was at heart a Jewish chauvinist. 

‘I am not one of the “intellectuals who come from the German Left.’… It is a fact of which I am in no way particularly proud and which I am somewhat reluctant to emphasize – especially since the McCarthy era in this country.  I came late to an understanding of Marx’s importance… let me begin… with what you call “love of the Jewish people.”… (Incidentally, I would be very grateful if you could tell me since when this concept has played a role in Judaism)… You are quite right – I am not moved by any “love” of this sort, and for two reasons.  I have never in my life “loved” any people or collective… I indeed love “only” my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.  Secondly, this “love of the Jews” would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect…. I do not “love” the Jews, nor do I “believe” in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument…. But I can admit to you something beyond that, namely, that wrong done by my own people naturally grieves me more than wrong done by other peoples.’

It was in truth a devastating reply.

See      Hannah Arendt would agree with Ilhan Omar, Philip Weiss

Why Hannah Arendt is the Philosopher for Now, Lyndsey Stonebridge

Hannah Arendt: Human, Citizen, Jew

Tony Greenstein

On the day that Amos Oz died we should remember that it is Gideon Levy who is one of Israel’s few heroes

We should no more feel sympathy for dead Jewish settlers than we would have done for German settlers in the Warthegau

Today Amos Oz, novelist and doyen of the Zionist left died aged 79. Israeli newspapers, regardless of political affiliation, are full of sorrow and eulogies.

The President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin said that the news of Oz’s death “bring us sadness” calling him “a literary giant.” Culture Minster Miri Regev, who was accused of fascism by fellow Minister, Gila Gamliel, and who has apologised for likening African migrants in Israel to human beings and who called asylum seekers ‘cancer’ before apologising because of the offence it might cause to cancer patients, by comparing them to refugees, said of Oz that “your works, which you’ve left in our hearts, will resonate all over the world.”

Gideon Levy is Israel's true hero

All the world’s media agreed with the New York Times in describing Oz as a ‘peace advocate’. However it is untrue. Oz was a left-Zionist supporter of Apartheid.  His support for a 2 State Solution was based firmly on the idea that Arabs and Jews could not live together in one state. He was an advocate of segregation. It was because he knew that Netanyahu’s plans for a one state Greater Israel, in which the majority of Palestinians would have no rights, would result in Israel being labelled an apartheid state, that he supported two states. It was for this that he was seen as a peace advocate. Oz realised that tarnishing Israel with the Apartheid label would spell its  eventual demise.

Not once has David Friedman tweeted about the 'vile' shooting of Palestinian demonstrators or indeed any Palestinians - only settler lives concern this vile racist

It is not Oz, who never once queried or questioned what a Jewish state meant for those who were not Jewish who merits this praise. Oz never lifted a finger against Israeli racism or settler colonialism.  He preached segregation and separation. It is Gideon Levy and Amira Hass and the activists in groups like Youth Against the Settlements who deserve our support. Amos Oz was self-indulgent, hedonistic, sexist and racist, not least towards Mizrahi Israeli Jews. Oz’s light only shone because of the darkness into which Israel has sunk.

What is certain is that Oz could not have written a searing criticism such as Gideon Levy’s below in which he states outright that he does not have any sympathy with dead Jewish settlers in the West Bank.  Nor should we. 

When Nazi Germany captured Poland Himmler immediately set about a project of settling the Gau of Wartheland with German settlers and evicting the Polish peasants and Jews.  With Nazi Germany's defeat these settlers were evicted. I'm not aware that there is a great deal of sympathy for what became of them.

Site of shooting of settler near settlement of Ofra

Razan al-Najjar - 21 year old medic gunned down by Israeli snipers while tending the wounded - there is no backstory in Israel to this young girl - she has no siblings, parents and nor are there any tears

It is noticeable that when Palestinians die under Israeli bullets, there are no pen portraits of who they are, their children and life. as happens when an Israeli settler is killed.  When Razan al-Najar was struck down in a hail of bullets there were no eulogies to this 21 year old para medic living in Gaza, who had been murdered whilst tending injured demonstrators. Israeli Ministers and the President had nothing to say about a young life cruelly taken away.  She had no family as far as the Zionists were concerned.  Gaza is Hamas and therefore every barbarity is justified.

In the thousands of words of eulogy and in the many obituaries, it is doubtful whether there will many criticisms of Oz. Israeli academic Gabriel Piterberg captured Oz best when he called him a ‘mobilized propagandist’ [The Returns of Zionism, p.232 et. seq]. He became one of the chief editors of Siah lohamim (soldier’s talk) which was a recording of the recollections and experiences of 140 Kibbutz officers of the 1967 War of Expansion.  It was ‘one of the most effective propaganda tools in Israeli history.’  It created

Mourning a baby

‘the image of the handsome, dilemma-ridden and existentially soul-searching Israeli soldier, the horrific oxymoron of ‘the purity of arms’ and the unfounded notion of an exalted Jewish morality.’

The text’s editors, Oz and Avraham Shapira, of Kibbutz Jezreel, did two things: one was the omission of entire conversations as if they had not occurred at all; the other was the manipulation of and tampering with statements and conversations that were included.

Conversations with the Sarig family in Kibbutz Beit Hashita were omitted altogether. Beit Hashita belonged to the Kibbutz Hameuchad federation, which was an important part of the Greater Israel movement (Gush Emmunim) that was founded in 1969. Nahum Sarig was a commander of the Negev Brigade which fought in 1948. His son Ran fought in 1967. Ran Sarig explained that:

Amos Oz balanced his criticism of Netanyahu with criticism of those who blamed Israel - it was also the fault of the Palestinians

The greatest thing... was that we were going to make the country complete... This feeling I had was... of, as it were, the completion of father’s deeds 20 years ago. At that time there was constant talk about the injustice [sic] – what Ben Gurion called ‘a lasting regret’ [i.e. halting at what became the 1949 Armistice borders rather than conquering the whole of western Palestine]. I felt regarding this matter, that we were completing the assignment that actually should have been accomplished then [in 1948].’

Shapira admitted 30 years later that he had decided to omit the exchange because of his shock at ‘the manifestation of messianism’.  Since Shapira published it in his journal Shdemot it would seem that the real reason was to preserve the ‘shooting and crying’ image of the Israeli soldier and the propaganda value of the collection.  Piterberg notes that:

‘What is striking here is the extent to which the national religious settlement movement perceived itself as continuing the trail blazed by the labour settlement movement.

One editorial method was to distort direct descriptions of events. E.g.

‘What perhaps added to this terrible feeling was my impression of the enormous gaiety of the soldiers who [were lying in ambush and who] as it happened killed this fallah [peasant in Arabic]

The words in bold were omitted in the published version and the words in square brackets were inserted despite having not been spoken.

Another method was to tamper with testimonies of cleansing, in which outright falsehoods were inserted at the editorial stage and in which ‘expulsion’ was replaced with ‘evacuation’. Oz was well aware of the thorough cleansing of the villages in the Latrun area.

Conversations with soldiers of Merkaz Harav yeshivah were also omitted because their messianism was at odds with the philosophical, reflective Zionist soldier.  Describing how he felt ‘downcast and mourning’ after his encounter at Merkaz Harav, what ‘really hurt was the utter apathy towards our moral crisis.’  And this sums up ‘left’ Zionism. Its concerns are not what happened to the Palestinians but with their own feelings of discomfiture.  That was Oz.

Ariel Hirschfield described Oz’s Black Box as ‘seething with repressed, racist and domineering hatred for the Sephardi, together with admiration of his might and great fear for him.’ Piterberg asked ‘how anyone can see dissent in this literature, aesthetically and/or politically is puzzling.’ 

The original article

This is how  Siah Lohamim  was censored and cooked.  

Yediot Aharanot, 3 June 2005

Shortly after the war the writer Amoz Oz went with Avraham Shapira from Kibbutz Yizrael to talk to kibbutzniks who participated in the Six Day War. Altogether the two spoke to 140 officers over the course of hundreds of hours. The result was published in the book Siah Lohamim [Soldiers Speak] published in English as ‘The Seventh Day’. The book, which had not been intended for commercial distribution, became a best-seller. A hundred thousand copies were sold. The poet Haim Gouri wrote that the book could shape the soul and the consciousness of an entire generation. The book was supposed to present a portrait of humane and high-souled soldiers. Segev quotes in his book a study that was written by Dr. Alon Gan, himself a kibbutz member, who found that the book was censored and significant parts of it were deliberately distorted, in order to preserve the image that was portrayed in it.

For example, the authors of the book quoted one of the soldiers saying: ‘It was a kind of release [hitparqut] a really abnormal release.’ In reality the soldier said the following words: A release that bordered on cruelty. I know that one company commander  some old guy forty years old raised his hands  then he fired a burst into his belly  it was a kind of release grenades into the house just to burn houses some kind of release like that. Also the words ‘expulsion’ and ‘evacuation’ were omitted. One of the speakers who talked about the occupation of Gaza was quoted in the book thusly: ‘There was no law’; in reality he said: ‘We had to do the most drastic actions  blowing up houses and searching houses  it was a situation in which human life was of no account. You could kill. There was no law.’

Another speaker related that he and his friends had been given an order to kill everyone who came from the east bank of the Jordan. The authors of the book substituted the verb ‘to kill’ with the words ‘to prevent crossing.’ One of the members of Kibbutz Yifat related an argument that broke out among his friends over whether they should execute a wounded Syrian soldier whom they came across. Suddenly one of them broke off the argument, put a rifle to the wounded man’s head and killed him. In the book that moment was described thus: ‘One suggested executing him. Of course we didn’t allow it.’ Another soldier asked himself during the war how he would be able to kill people, and answered, ‘like I kill flies.’ Those words were censored. Some of the speakers described serious war crimes that were omitted from the book. One of the speakers described the treatment of civilians as follows: ‘I felt like a Gestapo man.’

It is astonishing how much this thing is edited, censored and inauthentic, opines Tom Segev. ‘A convergence of interests was created here between a society that needed an image like this and the kibbutz that needed an image like this. They invented this thing.’

Amos Oz

In June 2005, Yediot Ahronot reported (see this article) that Tom Segev was claiming that Oz, in this 1970 book, censored and faked testimonies of Israeli soldiers about war crimes in the 1967 war -- for example, a soldier told Oz that they got an order to kill every person trying to return to the West Bank from the East Bank of the Jordan but Oz just said that they were told to prevent people crossing the Jordan.

 Ralph Gideon-Yaakov Spiro is an Israeli journalist, left-wing activist and a survivor of the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom in Berlin. He is a campaigner for human rights, prominently involved in public acts against the distribution of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. He was sacked as a civil servant in the Education Ministry for opposing the Lebanon War.  By way of contrast Amos Oz supported all Israel’s wars yet, for some reason, he is known as a peace activist.

Letter sent to the Nobel Literature Prize Committee

Honorable Committee members

Since the writer Amos Oz is mentioned as a candidate for the 2009 Nobel Literature Prize, I find it important to inform you that Amos Oz supported the 2 latest wars initiated by Israel: The Gaza war (December 2008 January 2009) in which war crimes were committed (as reported just recently in the UN Goldstone report) and the Second Lebanon war (July August 2006 - see Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports).

Awarding the prize to Amos Oz, especially so close to those events, contradicts the spirit of Alfred Nobel, and is a slap on the face to Israeli human rights activists and war resisters, as well as being an insult to the Palestinian victims, including hundreds children.

Respectfully,

Gideon Spiro

Tel Aviv

I Feel No Sympathy for the Settlers

Beneath the veil of sanctimonious and hypocritical unity, and the media’s fake show of national grief to advance its own commercial goals, the truth must be told: Their tragedy isn’t ours

Gideon Levy Dec 16, 2018 2:32 AM

I do not sympathize with people who profiteer from tragedy. I have no sympathy for robbers. I have no sympathy for the settlers. I have no sympathy for the settlers not even when they are hit by tragedy. A pregnant woman was wounded and her newborn baby died of its wounds – what can be worse than that? Driving on their roads is frightening, the violent opposition to their presence is growing – and I feel no sympathy for their tragedy, nor do I feel any compassion or solidarity.

They are to blame, not I, for the fact that I cannot feel the most humane sense of solidarity and pain. It’s not just that they’re settlers, violators of international law and universal justice; it’s not just because of the violence of some of them and the settling of all of them – it’s also the blackmail with which they respond to every tragedy, which prevents me from grieving with them. But beneath the veil of sanctimonious and hypocritical unity, and the media’s fake show of national grief to advance its own commercial goals, the truth must be told: Their tragedy isn’t ours.

Their tragedy isn’t ours because they’ve brought the tragedy upon themselves and the entire country. It’s true that the main blame goes to the governments that gave into them, either eagerly or out of weakness, but the settlers cannot be absolved of blame, either. The extorter – and not just those who have given into extortion – is also to blame. But they are there, generations born on stolen land, children raised in an apartheid existence and trained to think it is biblical justice, and with government support. Perhaps we cannot blame those who are sitting on land usurped by their parents. But their tragedy is not ours because they exploit every tragedy to advance their aims in the most cynical of ways.

When a baby dies they install trailer homes, when soldiers are killed defending them – they do not seek forgiveness from the families of these soldiers, despite their blame for the lives that have been cut short – they only present demands so as to whitewash their crimes. And with these demands the appetite for revenge grows: to imprison even more of their neighbors, to destroy their homes, to kill, to arrest, block roads and exact more revenge. And if that, too, is not enough, their own wild militias raid the Palestinians, throw stones at their vehicles, set their fields on fire and wreak terror on their villages. They are not satisfied with the collective punishment imposed by the army and the Shin Bet security service, exercised with cruelty and sometimes criminality. The settlers’ lust for revenge is never satisfied. How is it possible to identify with the grief of people who behave like that?

It’s impossible to identify with their bereavement, because Israel has decided to avoid looking at all that is done there in the land of Judea. When you are capable of being indifferent to the execution of a psychologically impaired young man by soldiers, you can also be indifferent to the shooting of a pregnant woman by Palestinians. When you ignore the goings on at the Tulkarm refugee camp, you can also ignore what takes place at the Givat Assaf junction. It’s moral blindness to everything. Yesha isn’t here, that’s the price being paid for the lack of interest in what is going on in the territories and for ignoring the occupation, under whose sponsorship the settlements are based. Giant budgets are poured out there without any public opposition – so there is also indifference to the fate of the settlers and their tragedies. The piece of land they have taken over doesn’t interest most Israelis living in the land of denial, and that’s the price.

We have no reason to apologize for the lack of interest and identification. The settlers have brought it on themselves. Those who have never shown any interest in the suffering of their Palestinian neighbors, which they have caused, those who preach all the time that the iron fist must always be tightened, to torture them even more – don’t deserve to be identified with, not even in the hour of their grief. I take no joy in their suffering but I have no sympathy for their pain. The real pain is borne by their victims, those who moan submissively and those who take their fate in their hands and try to resist a violent reality violently and sometimes also murderously. The Palestinians are the victims deserving of pity and solidarity.

The Disabled Palestinian Slowly Walked Away. Then, Israeli Troops Shot Him in the Back of the Head

Mohammad Khabali started to retrace his steps. Security camera footage shows three soldiers moving ahead, to within 80 meters of him. Suddenly two shots are heard. The mentally disabled young man collapses, dead

Mohammed Khabali

Here’s the stick. The bereaved brother removes the black plastic that’s wrapped around it reverently, as if it’s a holy relic. It’s a broomstick, stained with his brother’s blood. It’s the stick he was carrying under his arm as he tried to move away from Israel Defense Forces soldiers approaching him on Jaffa Road in downtown Tul Karm, a street of restaurants and cafés. He was shot from a distance of about 80 meters; the bullet slammed into his head from behind.

How can it be claimed that he endangered anyone from that far away?

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The street was relatively quiet. A small number of young people winding up the night at the coffee houses – and about 30 soldiers opposite them. The security camera at one of the restaurants shows 2:24 A.M. From the video provided by that camera and three others along the street, whose footage was obtained by B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, we see no stone throwing, no large groups milling around. What is seen are three soldiers moving forward, ahead of the rest of their unit. One shot is heard from a distance, and another; two soldiers apparently fired simultaneously. The person seen carrying a stick and walking on the other side of the street, away from the approaching soldiers, falls to the ground, face down. For a second he tries to lift his head – before dying. Another young man is hit in the leg. The soldiers leave in a hurry.

The B'Tselem footage of the incident.

End of operation. End of the short life of Mohammad Khabali, whom everyone here called “Za’atar” affectionately (after the popular seasoning made of wild hyssop). Mentally challenged from birth, he never hurt a soul and helped local café owners clean up at night in return for a free smoke on the narghile; occasionally he would beg for a handout from a passerby. It’s doubtful that the soldier who shot him knew whom he was shooting; it’s even more doubtful that would have cared. He killed Za’atar for no apparent reason and inflicted another disaster on his already unfortunate family, which lives not far away from town in the Tul Karm refugee camp, one of the West Bank’s poorest.

An intimidating pile of garbage greets visitors at the gates of the refugee camp; workers wearing United Nations shirts are loading refuse onto a garbage truck. The Tul Karm camp is the larger of two refugee camps that abut the city on its eastern side. (The other is Nur a-Shams.) Graffiti of a prisoner in an Israel Prisons Service uniform is painted on a wall, a young man in a wheelchair sits in front of one of the houses, the narrow alleys are also littered with garbage.

Neglect is pervasive here. Garbage swirls even around the shattered monument commemorating the 157 inhabitants of the camp who were killed until between 1987 and 2003, during the two intifadas. The monument was erected at the site where at least 10 young people were killed in the second intifada by IDF snipers who positioned themselves on the roof of a high building nearby. A new, more up-to-date monument is planned, we’re told by the camp’s director of services, Faisal Salami. A cluttered store selling scraps, second-hand items and old trinkets is bursting at the seams. It seems like all of Israel’s schmattes have ended up here.

Entering one of the houses, we climb to the second floor: It is the home of the Khabali family and of the camp’s most recent martyr. Exposed electrical cables adorn the walls, on the sink is an old car mirror – the apartment’s only mirror. We will soon be joined by the bereaved father, Khossam Khabali, his legs incapacitated from a childhood disease; he ascends the stairs with great difficulty, leaning on a cane, both legs disfigured. He’s 54 years old and trying in every way possible to provide a living for his nine children, two of whom – the dead son and one of his brothers – have suffered from mental impairment. Khabali works as a guard in the Tul Karm Municipality, hauls fruits and vegetables to the market on a mule-drawn cart, and is an occasional undertaker in the local cemetery. No, he replies, he did not dig his son’s grave.

His face is a study in grief and suffering. Mona, his wife, a heavyset woman of 50, speaks about her dead son in a whisper. The shock is still palpable here.

Last Monday, they relate, Mohammad was at home and in good spirits. He helped his father fix the mule cart. For supper he had makluba, a chicken and rice dish that his mother prepared, and at about 7:30 he left for the cafes on Jaffa Road, as he did every evening. Before leaving, he asked his mother if she needed anything.

Mohammed Khabali's parents (center) at the Tul Karm refugee camp, December 11, 2018.Alex Levac

He would usually get home around 1 A.M., after straightening and cleaning up the cafes. This time he didn’t return. At about 3 A.M., distraught young men arrived at the house and woke up the eldest son, Ala, who roused his parents: Mohammad had been killed. Khossam asked one of his daughters to check on the camp’s Facebook page whether it was a mistake, and discovered, to his horror, that the victim was indeed his Mohammad. In a daze, he hurried to the Thabet Thabet Hospital in the city, where he saw his son’s body, a hole in the back of his neck. Death had claimed him at age 22.

Mohammad attended school until sixth grade, but didn’t understand a thing, his parents say. Already at the age of 3 they noticed he wasn’t developing like the other children and was mentally disabled. He was their second son. Their next child, Ibrahim, who’s now 18, suffers from the same affliction. Ten days before Mohammad was killed, he and Khossam returned from Amman, where they paid condolences on the death of Khossam’s brother. It was Mohammad’s first – and last – trip out of the country.

According to his Aunt Latifa, who came to Tul Karm for the funeral, he was thrilled to be in Amman. Video clips show him dancing and singing at the home of relatives in the Jordanian capital, a day before returning to the refugee camp. There’s also a selfie that Mohammad took. He helped his uncles harvest and sort olives – that too was captured on video and in other photos.

In the last picture taken of him, Mohammad can be seen holding a small Koran and seemingly reading from it, though he didn’t know how to read or write. That shot was taken in one of the Jaffa Road coffee houses, about an hour and a half before soldiers killed him. Some clips show him speaking, but his speech is slurred, unclear. Allah have mercy, his aunt sighs.

Mohammed Khabali's funeral, Tul Karm refugee camp, December 4, 2018.AFP

After father and son returned from Amman, discussions began about the wedding of the eldest, Ala. Mohammad told his parents that he’d like to be the next to get married. Mohammad was never stopped by soldiers, never got into a quarrel with anyone, and appears to have been much loved in the camp and in the city, partly because of his impairment. The narghile was his way of relaxing, his escape.

After leaving the family with a heavy heart, we drive to the scene of the killing. Tul Karm’s main street for entertainment begins at Kadoorie Technical University, at the city’s western edge, and ascends to the town center: stores, computer game arcades, restaurants, cafés – one of which is for women only, its windows blacked out. Some of the places are stylishly designed. There’s Café Bianco, Café Al-Shelal and opposite them a wall painting of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet.

On the night between Monday and Tuesday of this past week, some 200 soldiers invaded the city, according to residents’ estimates, and scattered to a number of sites. Routine. A group of about 30 soldiers raided two houses just off Jaffa Road and then proceeded to the main street. They didn’t detain anyone. The coffee houses were already mostly closed, the A-Sabah hummus restaurant was about to open to welcome workers who set out to their jobs in Israel in the middle of the night.

The soldiers gathered next to the Al-Fadilia boys school, the city’s veteran educational institution, at one end of the street. The young people who emerged from the cafés exchanged curses with the soldiers, some threw stones at them from a distance. According to Abd al-Karim Sa’adi, a field investigator for B’Tselem, who carefully collected evidence immediately after the killing as though he were from a police forensic unit, including footage from all the security cameras on the street, the stones landed halfway between the young people and the soldiers. No one was hit.

A memorial for those killed at the Tul Karm refugee camp. Alex Levac

In Sa’adi’s estimation, no more than 15 or 20 young Palestinians confronted the soldiers, from some distance. One of them told Mohammad, “Za’atar, you should get out of here.” As the video from one camera shows, Za’atar turns around and starts to walk away from the soldiers. Not running but slowly walking. Then he’s shot in the head, from behind.

In a statement to Haaretz this week, the IDF Spokespersons Unit said, “Last week a Military Police investigation was launched. At this stage it can be noted that during operational activity of Israeli soldiers in Tul Karm, a violent riot erupted and dozens of Palestinians hurled rocks towards the fighters. In response, the soldiers used riot-dispersal means and live fire. It was reported that one Palestinian was killed and another injured [in this incident]. When the army finishes its investigation, the conclusions of the probe will be examined by the military prosecutor. The incident is also being probed at the command level.” 

B’Tselem has released the following statement: “Video footage from four security cameras installed on three separate buildings along the street shows that the area was perfectly quiet and that there were no clashes there with soldiers… The video footage and the eyewitness accounts collected by B’Tselem from people who were near Khabali show no absolutely no of sign of any ‘disturbance,’ stone-throwing or use of crowd control measures. Quite the contrary: the soldiers are seen walking unhurriedly, the Palestinians are seen talking amongst themselves, and then the soldiers fatally shoot Khabali in the head from a considerable distance. The lethal shooting was not preceded by a warning, was not justified and constitutes a violation of the law.”

A few faded bloodstains are still visible on the asphalt where Khabali’s body was dragged away after the shooting. He died on the spot, his head bleeding profusely, Sa’adi says.

Fine Italian espresso is served in the café opposite, and two colorful photographs are hanging on the wall. One is of a large drone with the Israel Air Force symbol on its tail, the other of an IAF Fouga early fighter plane in the skies above Israel. The proprietor says he erased the squadron numbers before hanging them. He bought the two pictures in Tul Karm’s flea market.

Mohammad Khabali, aka “Za’atar,” is now buried not far from here, in the martyrs section of the cemetery.