Holocaust remembrance is a boon for Israeli propaganda

By Gideon Levy

Israel's bigwigs attacked at dawn on a wide front. The president in Germany, the prime minister with a giant entourage in Poland, the foreign minister in Hungary, his deputy in Slovakia, the culture minister in France, the information minister at the United Nations, and even the Likud party's Druze Knesset member, Ayoob Kara, in Italy. They were all out there to make florid speeches about the Holocaust. Wednesday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and an Israeli public relations drive like this hasn't been seen for ages. The timing of the unusual effort - never have so many ministers deployed across the globe - is not coincidental: When the world is talking Goldstone, we talk Holocaust, as if out to blur the impression. When the world talks occupation, we'll talk Iran as if we wanted them to forget.

It won't help much. International Holocaust Remembrance Day has passed, the speeches will soon be forgotten, and the depressing everyday reality will remain. Israel will not come out looking good, even after the PR campaign.

On the eve of his departure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at Yad Vashem. "There is evil in the world," he said. "Evil must be stamped out at the beginning." Some people are "trying to deny the truth." Lofty words, said by the same person who only the day before, not quite in the same breath, uttered very different words, words of true evil, evil that should be extinguished at the start, evil that Israel is trying to hide.

Netanyahu spoke of a new "migration policy," one that is evil through and through. He malevolently lumped together migrant workers and wretched refugees - warning that they all endanger Israel, lower our wages, harm our security, make us into a third-world country and bring in drugs. He zealously supported our racist interior minister, Eli Yishai, who has spoken of the migrants as the spreaders of diseases such as hepatitis, tuberculosis, AIDS and God knows what else.

No Holocaust speech will erase these words of incitement and slander against migrants. No remembrance speech will obliterate the xenophobia that has reared its head in Israel, not only on the extreme right, as in Europe, but throughout government.

We have a prime minister who speaks about evil but is building a fence to prevent war refugees from knocking at Israel's door. A prime minister who speaks about evil but shares the crime of the Gaza blockade, now in its fourth year, leaving 1.5 million people in disgraceful conditions. A prime minister in whose country settlers perpetrate pogroms against innocent Palestinians under the slogan "price tag," which also has horrific historical connotations, but against whom the state does virtually nothing.

This is the prime minister of a state that arrests hundreds of left-wing protesters against the injustices of the occupation and the war in Gaza, while time grants mass pardons to the right-wingers who demonstrated against the disengagement. In his speech yesterday, Netanyahu's equating Nazi Germany with fundamentalist Iran was no more than cheap propaganda. Talk about "degrading the Holocaust." Iran isn't Germany, Ahmedinejad isn't Hitler and equating them is no less spurious than equating Israeli soldiers with Nazis.

The Holocaust must not be forgotten, and there is no need to compare it with anything. Israel must take part in the efforts to keep its memory alive, but in doing so it must show up with clean hands, clean of evil of their own doing. And it must not arouse suspicion that it is cynically using the memory of the Holocaust to obliterate and blur other things. Regrettably, this is not the case.

How beautiful it would have been if on this international day of remembrance Israel had taken the time to examine itself, look inward and ask, for example, how it is that anti-Semitism has reared its head in the world precisely in the past year, the year after we dropped white-phosphorous bombs on Gaza. How beautiful it would have been if on this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Netanyahu had declared a new policy for integrating refugees instead of expulsion, or lifted the Gaza blockade.

A thousand speeches against anti-Semitism will not extinguish the flames ignited by Operation Cast Lead, flames that threaten not only Israel but the entire Jewish world. As long as Gaza is under blockade and Israel sinks into its institutionalized xenophobia, Holocaust speeches will remain hollow. As long as evil is rampant here at home, neither the world nor we will be able to accept our preaching to others, even if they deserve it.

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Heads to the right

Gideon Levy

It is still unclear whether the terrorist who entered the
Mercaz Harav yeshiva on Thursday night and killed
eight of its students knew exactly what place he was
entering. But the thousands of people who walked
behind the coffins on Friday knew very well.
"The flagship of religious Zionism" was the common
expression used, the "holy of holies"; there was
even a hyperbolic comparison to the Al-Aqsa Mosque
in terms of sanctity. Some of the praise of the yeshiva
is certainly well deserved, and nothing, of course,
can justify the horrible killing of young boys in a
library. Still, it would be appropriate to recall,
even at this difficult hour, what this yeshiva has
brought forth.

Mercaz Harav is the flagship of the last group in
Israeli society still operating in the realm of ideas.
Religious Zionists are the only group, aside from
the ultra-Orthodox population, whose members
are willing to lay down their lives for the collective
and its worldview. It is a group that responds
faithfully to its leaders - a group that even has
leaders - and idolizes them. It is also a fairly homogenous
group in terms of its thinking:
Some 80 percent of its members define themselves
as right-wingers. None of this is true of Israel's
complacent, individualist secular public. And so
we end up with a minority, 12 to 15 percent of the
population, whose influence in certain areas is crucial
and far exceeds its own relative size.

No one can explain in depth the magical powers of
extortion this group has obtained. Nor can anyone
ignore the damage it has caused the country.
Without the settlement enterprise, peace might
have reigned here already; without the Gush Emunim
movement, supported by successive Israeli governments,
there would be no settlements; and without the
Mercaz Harav yeshiva, there would be no Gush Emunim.
This institution, then, was the cradle of the settlement
enterprise and its driving force. Most of the students killed
in the terrorist attack were second-generation settlers.
It should be said again, clearly and unequivocally:
Their killing was a criminal act.
(An unusual personal comment: On Friday I said in a radio
interview, among other things, that the Mercaz Harav
yeshiva was a fascist institution; right-wing circles spread
a rumor on the Internet that I had said the slain students
were fascists. This is not true. In any case, if my comment
about the yeshiva offended people in their grief, I wish to
express my sincere sorrow and apology).

From Mercaz Harav emerged the rabbis that led the vilest
move in Zionist history. Most of the delusional right-wing
perpetrators and the mongers of hate for Arabs came
from this flagship. Religious leaders such as Rabbis
Moshe Levinger, Haim Druckman, Avraham Shapira,
Yaakov Ariel, Zefania Drori, Shlomo Aviner and Dov Lior,
all idolized by their students, raised generations of
nationalist youths within those walls.


Rabbi Lior, for example, head of the Council of Rabbis
of Judea and Samaria, ruled in 2004 that the Israel
Defense Forces was allowed to kill innocent people.
How do these words sound now, after the attack in
Jerusalem? Is the permission ours alone? Back then,
Lior ruled that, "There should be no feeling of guilt at
the morality of foreigners." He decreed that the Knesset
could not decide to evacuate settlements, and that
soldiers were allowed to refuse the order to evacuate
settlers. Rabbi Druckman made a similar ruling.

In 2002, Rabbi Aviner, another graduate of the yeshiva,
called for the execution of Israelis who refused to serve in
the military. Back then the refusal came from left-wingers,
of course. Aviner also ruled that war casualties are no
cause for national grief, and he called for the abolition of
Yom Hazikaron, the annual day of remembrance for fallen
Israeli soldiers. He compared the road map peace plan to
the appeasement of Hitler and considers the evacuation
of settlements an "illegal crime."

The same yeshiva graduated Hanan Porat, one of the
founders of Gush Emunim and one of those who returned
to Gush Etzion. Another alumnus, Rabbi Levinger, beat
him to it with the Jewish settlement at the Park Hotel in
the heart of Hebron. These are the prominent figures that
have emerged from this radical seminary and that is their
legacy. From here they preached the application of different
laws of morality and justice than the universal ones; yes,
where the chosen people is concerned, there is such a thing.

With all the changes religious Zionism has undergone
- from the time the Mizrahi movement joined the Zionist
Congress, through its existence as a moderate stream that
deftly managed to combine religion and modernity, to its
transformation into the source of Israeli nationalism -
the movement has managed to retain an exalted,
inexplicable standing in Israel's largely secular society.
There are still very many secular Israelis who view the
religious Zionists, the students of the Mercaz Harav
yeshiva and the West Bank's so-called "hilltop youths"
as a group of pioneers committed to noble values, as the
pillar of fire advancing before the camp. Even those who
deeply detest the Haredi public reserve a warm spot in
their hearts for religious Zionism, the very group that
has inflicted more calamity on us than all the Haredim
put together.

The killing at the yeshiva is heartrending. No one
deserved it. The innocents in Gaza and the victims at
Mercaz Harav in Jerusalem were all an unnecessary
sacrifice. They have already paid the highest possible
price. Their families and those around them will
probably adopt even more radical positions now,
and so we will be led into another round of endless bloodshed.

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London`s burning for Dichter

By: Gideon Levy

Avi Dichter will not be going to London. The Israeli dream of taking in year-end sales, the new production of Othello or the sights of Oxford Street vanished before the public security minister`s very eyes. The Foreign Ministry advised Dichter not to participate in a conference there, because he could be arrested for involvement in the assassination of Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh, when he was Shin Bet security service head. The one-ton bomb used to target Shehadeh in 2002 left 15 people dead.

The day after the horrible assassination, in late July 2002, I visited the homes that were destroyed in the Al-Darj neighborhood in the Gaza Strip. The Israel Defense Forces tried at the time to claim they were `huts,` to explain why it was unaware that people lived there. But they were apartment buildings housing dozens of families. The person who dropped a one-ton bomb on them in the dark of night knew it would kill many innocent people.

Among the ruins, I met Mohammed Matar, a Palestinian laborer who had worked in Israel for 30 years, lying in the rubble of his home, his arm and eye bandaged. In the `targeted killing` planned by Dichter`s Shin Bet, Matar lost his daughter, his daughter-in-law and four toddler grandchildren. The pictures of the horror from the Gazan neighborhood have haunted me ever since. Someone, I thought, must pay for this. Could it be that no one is to blame or responsible for such an act?

Shehadeh`s assassination became a seminal event for Israel`s critics the world over. It was not different from many other liquidation operations the Shin Bet had planned for the IDF. In July 2006, for example, Israel assassinated nearly all of the Abu Salmiyeh family - Dr. Nabil Abu Salmiyeh, a lecturer in mathematics, his wife and seven of their children - because wanted man Mohammed Def was visiting their home at the time. In the past seven years, 368 Palestinians were killed in liquidation operations of which Dichter was the founding father.

However, the dimensions of the bomb dropped on Shehadeh and the scope of killing it sowed turned it into an icon of the struggle against Israel`s brutal methods of warfare. A damages lawsuit was submitted in a New York district court against Dichter on behalf of the families of those who were killed. Major General (Res.) Doron Almog was forced to remain on a plane when he arrived in Britain in September 2005 and Brigadier General Aviv Kokhavi, a former commander of the Gaza Division, canceled his plan to study in England.

These people and others were marked as war crimes suspects. Unfortunately, this occurred only overseas. Here, they remain ministers and aristocrats, their career and public status untainted, their foreheads unbranded by the mark of Cain. For years, the High Court of Justice deferred discussing petitions against the liquidations, until it finally gave its stamp of approval in December 2006. Another year passed before the state prosecution informed the High Court that it did not oppose forming an investigative committee to study the Shehadeh assassination, five years after the fact - a scandalous delay. In this state of affairs, those who were horrified by these operations could only hope legal authorities abroad would take action to fix what our authorities have chosen to ignore.

Yes, some in Israel believe that dropping a one-ton bomb on a residential neighborhood merits a criminal investigation. They are Israeli patriots no less than those who believe everything is permissible for us in the war against terror. They are not the ones who besmirch Israel`s name - Israel`s actions are responsible for this; these people seek to put an end to Israel`s actions. They would prefer judicial proceedings be held in Israel, but our legal system is blocked before them. Therefore, their eyes are directed abroad.

The Foreign Ministry already has begun to act against the complaints overseas in various channels. It is a shame that this is Israel`s only response. It would have been better to clarify here, among ourselves, the responsibility of these people for such grave actions as the bombing of Shehadeh`s neighborhood. Meanwhile those who believe that the liquidations have brought us to the verge of a moral abyss must look toward London. Thanks to legal authorities there, people like Dichter are finally feeling `a slight bump on the wing.`

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