[rael-science] Is Gideon Levy the most hated man in Israel or just the most heroic?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Raelian Movement
for those who are not afraid of the future : http://www.rael.org
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Is Gideon Levy the most hated man in Israel or just the most heroic?

For three decades, the writer and journalist Gideon Levy has been a
lone voice, telling his readers the truth about what goes on in the
Occupied Territories.
Interview by Johann Hari

Friday, 24 September 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/is-gideon-levy-the-most-hated-man-in-israel-or-just-the-most-heroic-2087909.html
Gideon Levy, Israeli journalist and author

Gideon Levy is the most hated man in Israel – and perhaps the most
heroic. This "good Tel Aviv boy" – a sober, serious child of the
Jewish state – has been shot at repeatedly by the Israeli Defence
Force, been threatened with being "beaten to a pulp" on the country's
streets, and faced demands from government ministers that he be
tightly monitored as "a security risk." This is because he has done
something very simple, and something that almost no other Israeli has
done. Nearly every week for three decades, he has travelled to the
Occupied Territories and described what he sees, plainly and without
propaganda. "My modest mission," he says, "is to prevent a situation
in which many Israelis will be able to say, 'We didn't know.'" And for
that, many people want him silenced.

The story of Gideon Levy – and the attempt to deride, suppress or deny
his words – is the story of Israel distilled. If he loses, Israel
itself is lost.

I meet him in a hotel bar in Scotland, as part of his European tour to
promote his new book, 'The Punishment of Gaza'. The 57 year-old looks
like an Eastern European intellectual on a day off – tall and broad
and dressed in black, speaking accented English in a lyrical baritone.
He seems so at home in the world of book festivals and black coffee
that it is hard, at first, to picture him on the last occasion he was
in Gaza – in November, 2006, before the Israeli government changed the
law to stop him going.

He reported that day on a killing, another of the hundreds he has
documented over the years. As twenty little children pulled up in
their school bus at the Indira Gandhi kindergarten, their 20 year-old
teacher, Najawa Khalif, waved to them – and an Israel shell hit her
and she was blasted to pieces in front of them. He arrived a day
later, to find the shaking children drawing pictures of the chunks of
her corpse. The children were "astonished to see a Jew without
weapons. All they had ever seen were soldiers and settlers."

"My biggest struggle," he says, "is to rehumanize the Palestinians.
There's a whole machinery of brainwashing in Israel which really
accompanies each of us from early childhood, and I'm a product of this
machinery as much as anyone else. [We are taught] a few narratives
that it's very hard to break. That we Israelis are the ultimate and
only victims. That the Palestinians are born to kill, and their hatred
is irrational. That the Palestinians are not human beings like us? So
you get a society without any moral doubts, without any questions
marks, with hardly public debate. To raise your voice against all this
is very hard."

So he describes the lives of ordinary Palestinians like Najawa and her
pupils in the pages of Ha'aretz, Israel's establishment newspaper. The
tales read like Chekovian short stories of trapped people, in which
nothing happens, and everything happens, and the only escape is death.
One article was entitled "The last meal of the Wahbas family." He
wrote: "They'd all sat down to have lunch at home: the mother Fatma,
three months pregnant; her daughter Farah, two; her son Khaled, one;
Fatma's brother, Dr Zakariya Ahmed; his daughter in law Shayma, nine
months pregnant; and the seventy-eight year old grandmother. A Wahba
family gathering in Khan Yunis in honour of Dr Ahmed, who'd arrived
home six days earlier from Saudi Arabia. A big boom is heard outside.
Fatma hurriedly scoops up the littlest one and tries to escape to an
inner room, but another boom follows immediately. This time is a
direct hit."

In small biographical details, he recovers their humanity from the
blankness of an ever-growing death toll. The Wahbas had tried for
years to have a child before she finally became pregnant at the age of
36. The grandmother tried to lift little Khaled off the floor: that's
when she realised her son and daughter were dead.

Levy uses a simple technique. He asks his fellow Israelis: how would
we feel, if this was done to us by a vastly superior military power?
Once, in Jenin, his car was stuck behind an ambulance at a checkpoint
for an hour. He saw there was a sick woman in the back and asked the
driver what was going on, and he was told the ambulances were always
made to wait this long. Furious, he asked the Israeli soldiers how
they would feel if it was their mother in the ambulance – and they
looked bemused at first, then angry, pointing their guns at him and
telling him to shut up.

"I am amazed again and again at how little Israelis know of what's
going on fifteen minutes away from their homes," he says. "The
brainwashing machinery is so efficient that trying [to undo it is]
almost like trying to turn an omelette back to an egg. It makes people
so full of ignorance and cruelty." He gives an example. During
Operation Cast Lead, the Israel bombing of blockaded Gaza in 2008-9,
"a dog – an Israeli dog – was killed by a Qassam rocket and it on the
front page of the most popular newspaper in Israel. On the very same
day, there were tens of Palestinians killed, they were on page 16, in
two lines."

At times, the occupation seems to him less tragic than absurd. In
2009, Spain's most famous clown, Ivan Prado, agreed to attend a
clowning festival on Ramallah in the West Bank. He was detained at the
airport in Israel, and then deported "for security reasons." Levy
leans forward and asks: "Was the clown considering transferring
Spain's vast stockpiles of laughter to hostile elements? Joke bombs to
the jihadists? A devastating punch line to Hamas?"

Yet the absurdity nearly killed him. In the summer of 2003, he was
travelling in a clearly marked Israeli taxi on the West Bank. He
explains: "At a certain stage the army stopped us and asked what we
were doing there. We showed them our papers, which were all in order.
They sent us up a road – and when we went onto this road, they shot
us. They directed their fire to the centre of the front window.
Straight at the head. No shooting in the air, no megaphone calling to
stop, no shooting at the wheels. Shoot to kill immediately. If it
hadn't been bullet-proof, I wouldn't be here now. I don't think they
knew who we were. They shot us like they would shoot anyone else. They
were trigger-happy, as they always are. It was like having a
cigarette. They didn't shoot just one bullet. The whole car was full
of bullets. Do they know who they are going to kill? No. They don't
know and don't care."

He shakes his head with a hardened bewilderment. "They shoot at the
Palestinians like this on a daily basis. You have only heard about
this because, for once, they shot at an Israeli."

I "Who lived in this house? Where is he now?"

How did Gideon Levy become so different to his countrymen? Why does he
offer empathy to the Palestinians while so many others offer only
bullets and bombs? At first, he was just like them: his argument with
other Israelis is an argument with his younger self. He was born in
1953 in Tel Aviv and as a young man "I was totally nationalistic, like
everyone else. I thought – we are the best, and the Arabs just want to
kill. I didn't question."

He was fourteen during the Six Day War, and soon after his parents
took him to see the newly conquered Occupied Territories. "We were so
proud going to see Rachel's Tomb [in Bethlehem] and we just didn't see
the Palestinians. We looked right through them, like they were
invisible," he says. "It had always been like that. We were passing as
children so many ruins [of Palestinian villages that had been
ethnically cleansed in 1948]. We never asked: 'Who lived in this
house? Where is he now? He must be alive. He must be somewhere.' It
was part of the landscape, like a tree, like a river." Long into his
twenties, "I would see settlers cutting down olive trees and soldiers
mistreating Palestinian women at the checkpoints, and I would think,
'These are exceptions, not part of government policy.'"

Levy says he became different due to "an accident." He carried out his
military service with Israeli Army Radio and then continued working as
a journalist, "so I started going to the Occupied Territories a lot,
which most Israelis don't do. And after a while, gradually, I came to
see them as they really are."

But can that be all? Plenty of Israelis go to the territories – not
least the occupying troops and settlers – without recoiling. "I think
it was also – you see, my parents were refugees. I saw what it had
done to them. So I suppose... I saw these people and thought of my
parents." Levy's father was a German Jewish lawyer from the
Sudetenland. At the age of 26 – in 1939, as it was becoming
inescapably clear the Nazis were determined to stage a genocide in
Europe – he went with his parents to the railway station in Prague,
and they waved him goodbye. "He never saw them or heard from them
again," Levy says. "He never found out what happened to them. If he
had not left, he would not have lived." For six months he lived on a
boat filled with refugees, being turned away from port after port,
until finally they made it to British Mandate Palestine, as it then
was.

"My father was traumatised for his whole life," he says. "He never
really settled in Israel. He never really learned to speak anything
but broken Hebrew. He came to Israel with his PhD and he had to make
his living, so he started to work in a bakery and to sell cakes from
door to door on his bicycle. It must have been a terrible humiliation
to be a PhD in law and be knocking on doors offering cakes. He refused
to learn to be a lawyer again. He became a minor clerk. I think this
is what smashed him, y'know? He lived here sixty years, he had his
family, had his happiness but he was really a stranger. A foreigner,
in his own country? He was always outraged by things, small things. He
couldn't understand how people would dare to phone between two and
four in the afternoon. It horrified him. He never understood what is
the concept of overdraft in the bank. Every Israeli has an overdraft,
but if he heard somebody was one pound overdrawn, he was horrified."

His father "never" talked about home. "Any time I tried to encourage
him to talk about it, he would close down. He never went back. There
was nothing [to go back to], the whole village was destroyed. He left
a whole life there. He left a fiancé, a career, everything. I am very
sorry I didn't push him harder to talk because I was young, so I
didn't have much interest. That's the problem. When we are curious
about our parents, they are gone."

Levy's father never saw any parallels between the fact he was turned
into a refugee, and the 800,000 Palestinians who were turned into
refugees by the creation of the state of Israel. "Never! People didn't
think like that. We never discussed it, ever." Yet in the territories,
Levy began to see flickers of his father everywhere – in the broken
men and women never able to settle, dreaming forever of going home.

Then, slowly, Levy began to realise their tragedy seeped deeper still
into his own life – into the ground beneath his feet and the very
bricks of the Israeli town where he lives, Sheikh Munis. It is built
on the wreckage of "one of the 416 Palestinian villages Israel wiped
off the face of the earth in 1948," he says. "The swimming pool where
I swim every morning was the irrigation grove they used to water the
village's groves. My house stands on one of the groves. The land was
'redeemed' by force, its 2,230 inhabitants were surrounded and
threatened. They fled, never to return. Somewhere, perhaps in a
refugee camp in terrible poverty, lives the family of the farmer who
plowed the land where my house now stands." He adds that it is "stupid
and wrong" to compare it to the Holocaust, but says that man is a
traumatized refugee just as surely as Levy's father – and even now, if
he ended up in the territories, he and his children and grandchildren
live under blockade, or violent military occupation.

The historian Isaac Deutscher once offered an analogy for the creation
of the state of Israel. A Jewish man jumps from a burning building,
and he lands on a Palestinian, horribly injuring him. Can the jumping
man be blamed? Levy's father really was running for his life: it was
Palestine, or a concentration camp. Yet Levy says that the analogy is
imperfect – because now the jumping man is still, sixty years later,
smashing the head of the man he landed on against the ground, and
beating up his children and grandchildren too. "1948 is still here.
1948 is still in the refugee camps. 1948 is still calling for a
solution," he says. "Israel is doing the very same thing now...
dehumanising the Palestinians where it can, and ethnic cleansing
wherever it's possible. 1948 is not over. Not by a long way."

II The scam of "peace talks"

Levy looks out across the hotel bar where we are sitting and across
the Middle East, as if the dry sands of the Negev desert were washing
towards us. Any conversation about the region is now dominated by a
string of propaganda myths, he says, and perhaps the most basic is the
belief that Israel is a democracy. "Today we have three kinds of
people living under Israeli rule," he explains. "We have Jewish
Israelis, who have full democracy and have full civil rights. We have
the Israeli Arabs, who have Israeli citizenship but are severely
discriminated against. And we have the Palestinians in the Occupied
Territories, who live without any civil rights, and without any human
rights. Is that a democracy?"

He sits back and asks in a low tone, as if talking about a terminally
ill friend: "How can you say it is a democracy when, in 62 years,
there was not one single Arab village established? I don't have to
tell you how many Jewish towns and villages were established. Not one
Arab village. How can you say it's a democracy when research has shown
repeatedly that Jews and Arabs get different punishments for the same
crime? How can you say it's a democracy when a Palestinian student can
hardly rent an apartment in Tel Aviv, because when they hear his
accent or his name almost nobody will rent to him? How can you say
Israel is a democracy when? Jerusalem invests 577 shekels a year in a
pupil in [Palestinian] East Jerusalem and 2372 shekels a year in a
pupil from [Jewish] West Jerusalem. Four times less, only because of
the child's ethnicity! Every part of our society is racist."

"I want to be proud of my country," he says. "I am an Israeli patriot.
I want us to do the right thing." So this requires him to point out
that Palestinian violence is – in truth – much more limited than
Israeli violence, and usually a reaction to it. "The first twenty
years of the occupation passed quietly, and we did not lift a finger
to end it. Instead, under cover of the quiet, we built the enormous,
criminal settlement enterprise," where Palestinian land is seized by
Jewish religious fundamentalists who claim it was given to them by
God. Only then – after a long period of theft, and after their
attempts at peaceful resistance were met with brutal violence - did
the Palestinians become violent themselves. "What would happen if the
Palestinians had not fired Qassams [the rockets shot at Southern
Israel, including civilian towns]? Would Israel have lifted the
economic siege? Nonsense. If the Gazans were sitting quietly, as
Israel expects them to do, their case would disappear from the agenda.
Nobody would give any thought to the fate of the people of Gaza if
they had not behaved violently."

He unequivocally condemns the firing of rockets at Israeli civilians,
but adds: "The Qassams have a context. They are almost always fired
after an IDF assassination operation, and there have been many of
these." Yet the Israeli attitude is that "we are allowed to bomb
anything we want but they are not allowed to launch Qassams." It is a
view summarised by Haim Ramon, the justice minister at time of Second
Lebanon War: "We are allowed to destroy everything."

Even the terms we use to discuss Operation Cast Lead are wrong, Levy
argues. "That wasn't a war. It was a brutal assault on a helpless,
imprisoned population. You can call a match between Mike Tyson and a 5
year old child boxing, but the proportions, oh, the proportions."
Israel "frequently targeted medical crews, [and] shelled a UN-run
school that served as a shelter for residents, who bled to death over
days as the IDF prevented their evacuation by shooting and shelling...
A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a
terror organisation. They say as a justification that Hamas hides
among the civilian population. As if the Defence Ministry in Tel Aviv
is not located in the heart of a civilian population! As if there are
places in Gaza that are not in the heart of a civilian population!"

He appeals to anybody who is sincerely concerned about Israel's safety
and security to join him in telling Israelis the truth in plain
language. "A real friend does not pick up the bill for an addict's
drugs: he packs the friend off to rehab instead. Today, only those who
speak up against Israel's policies – who denounce the occupation, the
blockade, and the war – are the nation's true friends." The people who
defend Israel's current course are "betraying the country" by
encouraging it on "the path to disaster. A child who has seen his
house destroyed, his brother killed, and his father humiliated will
not easily forgive."

These supposed 'friends of Israel' are in practice friends of Islamic
fundamentalism, he believes. "Why do they have to give the
fundamentalists more excuses, more fury, more opportunities, more
recruits? Look at Gaza. Gaza was totally secular not long ago. Now you
can hardly get alcohol today in Gaza, after all the brutality.
Religious fundamentalism is always the language people turn to in
despair, if everything else fails. If Gaza had been a free society it
would not have become like this. We gave them recruits."

Levy believes the greatest myth – the one hanging over the Middle East
like perfume sprayed onto a corpse – is the idea of the current 'peace
talks' led by the United States. There was a time when he too believed
in them. At the height of the Oslo talks in the 1990s, when Yitzhak
Rabin negotiated with Yassir Arafat, "at the end of a visit I turned
and, in a gesture straight out of the movies, waved Gaza farewell.
Goodbye occupied Gaza, farewell! We are never to meet again, at least
not in your occupied state. How foolish!"

Now, he says, he is convinced it was "a scam" from the start, doomed
to fail. How does he know? "There is a very simple litmus test for any
peace talks. A necessity for peace is for Israel to dismantle
settlements in the West Bank. So if you are going to dismantle
settlements soon, you'd stop building more now, right? They carried on
building them all through Oslo. And today, Netanyahu is refusing to
freeze construction, the barest of the bare minimum. It tells you all
you need."

He says Netanyahu has – like the supposedly more left-wing
alternatives, Ehud Barak and Tzipip Livni – always opposed real peace
talks, and even privately bragged about destroying the Oslo process.
In 1997, during his first term as Israeli leader, he insisted he would
only continue with the talks if a clause was added saying Israel would
not have to withdraw from undefined "military locations" – and he was
later caught on tape boasting: "Why is that important? Because from
that moment on I stopped the Oslo accords." If he bragged about
"stopping" the last peace process, why would he want this one to
succeed? Levy adds: "And how can you make peace with only half the
Palestinian population? How can you leave out Hamas and Gaza?"

These fake peace talks are worse than no talks at all, Levy believes.
"If there are negotiations, there won't be international pressure.
Quiet, we're in discussions, settlement can go on uninterrupted. That
is why futile negotiations are dangerous negotiations. Under the cover
of such talks, the chances for peace will grow even dimmer... The
clear subtext is Netanyahu's desire to get American support for
bombing Iran. To do that, he thinks he needs to at least pay
lip-service to Obama's requests for talks. That's why he's doing
this."

After saying this, he falls silent, and we stare at each other for a
while. Then he says, in a quieter voice: "The facts are clear. Israel
has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing the
Palestinian people to exercise their rights. No change will come to
pass in the complacent, belligerent, and condescending Israel of
today. This is the time to come up with a rehabilitation programme for
Israel."

III Waving Israeli flags made in China

According to the opinion polls, most Israelis support a two-state
solution – yet they elect governments that expand the settlements and
so make a two-state solution impossible. "You would need a
psychiatrist to explain this contradiction," Levy says. "Do they
expect two states to fall from the sky? Today, the Israelis have no
reason to make any changes," he continues. "Life in Israel is
wonderful. You can sit in Tel Aviv and have a great life. Nobody talks
about the occupation. So why would they bother [to change]? The
majority of Israelis think about the next vacation and the next jeep
and all the rest doesn't interest them any more." They are drenched in
history, and yet oblivious to it.

In Israel, the nation's "town square has been empty for years. If
there were no significant protests during Operation Cast Lead, then
there is no left to speak of. The only group campaigning for anything
other than their personal whims are the settlers, who are very
active." So how can change happen? He says he is "very pessimistic",
and the most likely future is a society turning to ever-more naked
"apartheid." With a shake of the head, he says: "We had now two wars,
the flotilla – it doesn't seem that Israel has learned any lesson, and
it doesn't seem that Israel is paying any price. The Israelis don't
pay any price for the injustice of the occupation, so the occupation
will never end. It will not end a moment before Israelis understand
the connection between the occupation and the price they will be
forced to pay. They will never shake it off on their own initiative."

It sounds like he is making the case for boycotting Israel, but his
position is more complex. "Firstly, the Israeli opposition to the
boycott is incredibly hypocritical. Israel itself is one of the
world's most prolific boycotters. Not only does it boycott, it
preaches to others, at times even forces others, to follow in tow.
Israel has imposed a cultural, academic, political, economic and
military boycott on the territories. The most brutal, naked boycott
is, of course, the siege on Gaza and the boycott of Hamas. At Israel's
behest, nearly all Western countries signed onto the boycott with
inexplicable alacrity. This is not just a siege that has left Gaza in
a state of shortage for three years. It's a series of cultural,
academic, humanitarian and economic boycotts. Israel is also urging
the world to boycott Iran. So Israelis cannot complain if this is used
against them."

He shifts in his seat. "But I do not boycott Israel. I could have done
it, I could have left Israel. But I don't intend to leave Israel.
Never. I can't call on others to do what I will not do... There is
also the question of whether it will work. I am not sure Israelis
would make the connection. Look at the terror that happened in 2002
and 2003: life in Israel was really horrifying, the exploding buses,
the suicide-bombers. But no Israeli made the connection between the
occupation and the terror. For them, the terror was just the 'proof'
that the Palestinians are monsters, that they were born to kill, that
they are not human beings and that's it. And if you just dare to make
the connection, people will tell you 'you justify terror ' and you are
a traitor. I suspect it would be the same with sanctions. The
condemnation after Cast Lead and the flotilla only made Israel more
nationalistic. If [a boycott was] seen as the judgement of the world
they would be effective. But Israelis are more likely to take them as
'proof' the world is anti-Semitic and will always hate us."

He believes only one kind of pressure would bring Israel back to
sanity and safety: "The day the president of the United States decides
to put an end to the occupation, it will cease. Because Israel was
never so dependent on the United States as it is now. Never. Not only
economically, not only militarily but above all politically. Israel is
totally isolated today, except for America." He was initially hopeful
that Barack Obama would do this – he recalls having tears in his eyes
as he delivered his victory speech in Grant Park – but he says he has
only promoted "tiny steps, almost nothing, when big steps are needed."
It isn't only bad for Israel – it is bad for America. "The occupation
is the best excuse for many worldwide terror organisations. It's not
always genuine but they use it. Why do you let them use it? Why give
them this fury? Why not you solve it once and for all when the, when
the solution is so simple?"

For progress, "the right-wing American Jews who become orgiastic
whenever Israel kills and destroys" would have to be exposed as
"Israel's enemies", condemning the country they supposedly love to
eternal war. "It is the right-wing American Jews who write the most
disgusting letters. They say I am Hitler's grandson, that they pray my
children get cancer? It is because I touch a nerve with them. There is
something there." These right-wingers claim to be opposed to Iran, but
Levy points out they vehemently oppose the two available steps that
would immediately isolate Iran and strip Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh of his
best propaganda-excuses: "peace with Syria and peace with the
Palestinians, both of which are on offer, and both of which are
rejected by Israel. They are the best way to undermine Iran."

He refuses to cede Israel to people "who wave their Israeli flags made
in China and dream of a Knesset cleansed of Arabs and an Israel with
no [human rights organisation] B'Tselem." He looks angry, indignant.
"I will never leave. It's my place on earth. It's my language, it's my
culture. Even the criticism that I carry and the shame that I carry
come from my deep belonging to the place. I will leave only if I be
forced to leave. They would have to tear me out."

IV A whistle in the dark

Does he think this is a real possibility – that his freedom could be
taken from him, in Israel itself? "Oh, very easily," he says. "It's
already taken from me by banning me from going to Gaza, and this is
just a start. I have great freedom to write and to appear on
television in Israel, and I have a very good life, but I don't take my
freedom for granted, not at all. If this current extreme nationalist
atmosphere continues in Israel in one, two, three years time?" He
sighs. "There may be new restrictions, Ha'aretz may close down – God
forbid – I don't take anything for granted. I will not be surprised if
Israeli Palestinian parties are criminalized at the next election, for
example. Already they are going after the NGOs [Non-Government
Organizations that campaign for Palestinian rights]. There is already
a majority in the opinion polls who want to punish people who expose
wrong-doing by the military and want to restrict the human rights
groups."

There is also the danger of a freelance attack. Last year, a man with
a large dog strutted up to Levy near his home and announced: "I have
wanted to beat you to a pulp for a long time." Levy only narrowly
escaped, and the man was never caught. He says now: "I am scared but I
don't live on the fear. But to tell you that my night sleep is as
yours... I'm not sure. Any noise, my first association is 'maybe now,
it's coming'. But there was never any concrete case in which I really
thought 'here it comes'. But I know it might come."

Has he ever considered not speaking the truth, and diluting his
statements? He laughs – and for the only time in our interview, his
eloquent torrents of words begin to sputter. "I wish I could! No way I
could. I mean, this is not an option at all. Really, I can't. How can
I? No way. I feel lonely but my private, er, surrounding is
supportive, part of it at least. And there are still Israelis who
appreciate what I do. If you walk with me in the streets of Tel Aviv
you will see all kinds of reactions but also very positive reactions.
It is hard but I mean it's?it's?what other choice do I have?"

He says his private life is supportive "in part". What's the part that
isn't? For the past few years, he says, he has dated non-Israeli women
– "I couldn't be with a nationalistic person who said those things
about the Palestinians" – but his two sons don't read anything he
writes, "and they have different politics from me. I think it was
difficult for them, quite difficult." Are they right-wingers? "No, no,
no, nothing like that. As they get older, they are coming to my views
more. But they don't read my work. No," he says, looking down, "they
don't read it."

The long history of the Jewish people has a recurring beat – every few
centuries, a brave Jewish figure stands up to warn his people they are
have ended up on an immoral or foolish path that can only end in
catastrophe, and implores them to change course. The first prophet,
Amos, warned that the Kingdom of Israel would be destroyed because the
Jewish people had forgotten the need for justice and generosity – and
he was shunned for it. Baruch Spinoza saw beyond the Jewish
fundamentalism of his day to a materialist universe that could be
explained scientifically – and he was excommunicated, even as he
cleared the path for the great Jewish geniuses to come. Could Levy, in
time, be seen as a Jewish prophet in the unlikely wilderness of a
Jewish state, calling his people back to a moral path?

He nods faintly, and smiles. "Noam Chomsky once wrote to me that I was
like the early Jewish prophets. It was the greatest compliment anyone
has ever paid me. But... well... My opponents would say it's a long
tradition of self-hating Jews. But I don't take that seriously. For
sure, I feel that I belong to a tradition of self-criticism. I deeply
believe in self-criticism." But it leaves him in bewildering
situations: "Many times I am standing among Palestinian demonstrators,
my back to the Palestinians, my face to the Israeli soldiers, and they
were shooting in our direction. They are my people, and they are my
army. The people I'm standing among are supposed to be the enemy. It
is..." He shakes his head. There must be times, I say, when you ask:
what's a nice Jewish boy doing in a state like this?

But then, as if it has been nagging at him, he returns abruptly to an
earlier question. "I am very pessimistic, sure. Outside pressure can
be effective if it's an American one but I don't see it happening.
Other pressure from other parts of the world might be not effective.
The Israeli society will not change on its own, and the Palestinians
are too weak to change it. But having said this, I must say, if we had
been sitting here in the late 1980s and you had told me that the
Berlin wall will fall within months, that the Soviet Union will fall
within months, that parts of the regime in South Africa will fall
within months, I would have laughed at you. Perhaps the only hope I
have is that this occupation regime hopefully is already so rotten
that maybe it will fall by itself one day. You have to be realistic
enough to believe in miracles."

In the meantime, Gideon Levy will carry on patiently documenting his
country's crimes, and trying to call his people back to a righteous
path. He frowns a little – as if he is picturing Najawa Khalif blown
to pieces in front of her school bus, or his own broken father – and
says to me: "A whistle in the dark is still a whistle."

Gideon Levy's book 'The Punishment of Gaza' is available from Verso
Books. You can buy it HERE.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
WARNING FROM RAEL: For those who don't use their intelligence at its full
capacity, the label "selected by RAEL" on some articles does not mean that I
agree with their content or support it. "Selected by RAEL" means that I believe
it is important for the people of this planet to know about what people think or
do, even when what they think or do is completely stupid and against our
philosophy. When I selected articles in the past about stupid Christian
fundamentalists in America praying for rain, I am sure no Rael-Science reader
was stupid enough to believe that I was supporting praying to change the
weather. So, when I select articles which are in favor of drugs, anti-semitic,
anti-Jewish, racist, revisionist, or inciting hatred against any group or
religion, or any other stupid article, it does not mean that I support them. It
just means that it is important for all human beings to know about them. Common
sense, which is usually very good among our readers, is good enough to
understand that. When, like in the recent articles on drug decriminalization, it
is necessary to make it clearer, I add a comment, which in this case was very
clear: I support decriminalizing all drugs, as it is stupid to throw depressed
and sad people (as only depressed and sad people use drugs) in prison and ruin
their life with a criminal record. That does not mean that there is any change
to the Message which says clearly that we must not use any drug except for
medical purposes. The same applies to the freedom of expression which must be
absolute. That does not mean again of course that I agree with anti-Jews,
antisemites, racists of any kind or anti-Raelians. But by knowing your enemies
or the enemies of your values, you are better equipped to fight them. With love
and respect of course, and with the wonderful sentence of the French philosopher
Voltaire in mind: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death
your right to say it".
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

------------------------------------

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Ethics" is simply a last-gasp attempt by deist conservatives and
orthodox dogmatics to keep humanity in ignorance and obscurantism,
through the well tried fermentation of fear, the fear of science and
new technologies.

There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history,
it is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.

On the contrary, let us embrace Science and the new technologies
unfettered, for it is these which will liberate mankind from the
myth of god, and free us from our age old fears, from disease,
death and the sweat of labour.

Rael
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Tell your friends who love scientific news that they can
subscribe to this list !!

They can do it by sending a blank email to:
rael-science-select-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

It's free !
-----------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, send an email to:
rael-science-select-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------
To change your e-mail address, unsubscribe from the old address and subscribe from the new address (see above).
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rael-science-select/

<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rael-science-select/join
(Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
rael-science-select-digest@yahoogroups.com
rael-science-select-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
rael-science-select-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/