Wow! An Israeli government minister speaks the truth!
The question the mainstream media refuses or can’t be bothered to ask and cause to be answered is this. Is it likely that any Israeli prime minister will ever be prepared to confront the settlers of the occupied West Bank?
Those familiar with my book and on-line articles will be aware that my answer is “No”, but why I believe that to be the case bears repeating in tight summary.
Way back in early 1980 when I was acting as the linkman in a secret, exploratory dialogue between PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres who was then the leader of Israel’s main opposition Labour Party and hoping to replace Menachem Begin as prime minister, Peres told me feared it was already “too late” for peace on terms the Palestinians could accept. I asked him why.
He replied: “Begin knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s stuffing the West Bank with settlements to create the conditions for a Jewish civil war. He knows that no Israeli prime minister is going down in history as the one who gave the order to the Jewish army to shoot large numbers of Jews… I’m not).
When Peres spoke those words to me there were 70,000 illegal settlers on the occupied West Bank. Today there are in excess of 520,000 with that number rising on an almost daily basis. If it was too late in 1980, how much more too late is it today?!
A few weeks after that conversation with Peres I had a private meeting with Ezer Weizman, then the defence minister in Begin’s first term coalition government. He was half an hour late for our appointment at the defence ministry in Tel Aviv and when he arrived he looked exhausted and very troubled. He told me he was late because he had been checking something out. He described the something as follows.
“This lunch time Sharon convened a secret meeting of some of our top generals and other security people. They signed a blood oath which commits them to fight to the death to prevent any government of Israel withdrawing from the West Bank.”
As I write I have on my desk a copy of Uri Avnery’s latest article. It is headlined THE PROSPECT OF A FASCIST COUP IN ISRAEL.
The first part of the article tells of what happened after an Israeli soldier in Hebron was filmed by a hidden Palestinian camera abusing and threatening Palestinians. The footage was broadcast on Israeli television along with a report that the offending soldier had been punished. Tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers then took to the social media to defend him.
Avnery then gets to his main point with the observation that for the first time in the history of Israel, and perhaps the world, the internet is providing the basis for rebellion. (He described the social media defence of the offending Israeli soldier in Hebron as “the first mass rebellion in the annals of the Israeli army.”) He went on:
“With the army rank and file composed of teenagers who are indoctrinated from the age of three in the spirit of Jewish victimhood and superiority, such a rebellion, if it occurs, is bound to be right-wing, perhaps even fascist… Now, in less than 24 hours, hundreds of thousands of soldiers can openly defy the army command… It (the social media) puts an end to the sacred assumption that the army obeys the civilian elected authority. It also puts an end to the assumption that a military coup can only be carried out by a junta of senior officers, the “colonels”. Now simple soldiers, incited by some rabble-rousers, can do it.”
Israel is not short of rabble-rousers and I assume that Avnery would not have written the article if he did not believe the prospect of a fascist coup was a real one.
But coup or no coup Israel in my view is on its way to becoming a state ruled by neo-fascists.
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