Israel is making an all-out attack against Hamas in Gaza after Hamas made a shocking attack against Israeli citizens near the border. Where did all this start?
This week I read Josef Ben Eliezar’s book My Search. (Plough Publishing 2004.) I needed something to read over lunch and this book happened to be on the shelves of the small prison library. The title intrigued me. I knew nothing of the contents.
Josef was a child in Frankfurt when Hitler came to power. His family feared the worst and went to live in Poland. After the Nazis invaded Poland, the family were abused, starved, deprived of valuables, forced to march away from their home in a long line of others, under threat of being shot by soldiers. Eventually Josef was taken, on his own, through Tehran to Israel. Safe passage through a Moslem country.
Josef found it hard to fit into Israeli life, partly because his mother had died of starvation and exhaustion in Poland and he did not know where the rest of his family were. He was also firmly committed to the Jewish community in Palestine, as it was then, and to the State of Israel when it was founded in 1947 by the United Nations. In the war between Jews and Arabs that followed, Josef was an enthusiastic soldier, deserting from his regular army role to join the fiercer Palmach military.
I wanted to fight for the right to live in this land. I was more than ready to fight against the armies of Egypt, Jordan and other countries. I was prepared to give my life to secure the existence of the State of Israel. p67
He knew that fighting for the right to live in the land meant fighting against the people who were already living in the land. Room needed to be made for him to live in the land, room to live in. (The Nazis saw their invasion of Poland and displacement of the people living there as securing their, German, room to live in, ‘lebensraum.’)
Josef was fighting for the right not only to live in the land but to control the land. He refused to be a minority in the land, or have the land controlled by someone else.
My Jewish grandfather, though, thought it better for there to be no Jewish State. My grandmother spoke to a local US newspaper in 1947 saying that they thought the British should continue to control the land. Jewish people could live there if they could buy somewhere to live. My grandfather did not support Jews evicting others nor controlling the land. He had had experience of the aggression of Jewish fighters even against their own people. One of his sons had been targeted because he worked in administration for the British Port of Haifa.
Any illusions Josef had about being able to live in the land in peace were dispelled by Sammy, a man a little older than himself to whom he looked up. He convinced me that the Palestinians would always hate us as part of the Zionist enterprise…. It wasn’t our individual deeds or misdeeds that upset the Palestinians, it was the system, the very existence of the nation of Israel that displaced them. p78
Brutal aspects of the war in which he was fighting also troubled Josef, both at the time and later.
… we were in action trying to take the village of Tantura…. There were rumours that some men from the village were killed in revenge for the massacre at Kefar Sava. I never saw any killing, but even the rumour had an effect on me. p67
Our unit was heavily involved in the capture of Lod near Tel Aviv… After the town was conquered, there was some fighting in the streets, but then basically the entire Arab population was ordered to leave. I still remember those long lines of refugees – men, women and children – fleeing towards an uncertain future. At one point, my unit was searching those who left the town for weapons and valuables. The atmosphere was tense and some of my comrades treated the Arabs spitefully. In that moment, my mind flashed back to my own experiences as a ten-year-old boy fleeing our home in Poland. But here the roles were reversed. One of my comrades struck a Palestinian with his bayonet and I was stung by the memory of my father being struck in the same way by a German soldier…
I saw two of our soldiers – actually just boys – take some Arabs and ask them to dig a grave. They ordered them to go in and took aim at them with their rifles. Several of us shouted at them and they let the men go, but I was shocked that we seemed quite capable of the same things that we had heard from other nations. p68f
Josef’s mentor Sammy could not see peace between Palestinians and Israelis. The renowned Israeli General and Defence Minister, Moshe Dayan, expressed the same view.
Other Israelis have believed in peace with Palestinians and worked for it. Uri Avnery, who also fought in the Israeli War of Independence, called eloquently for peace and founded the Gush Shalom movement for peace. This, and other similar Israeli movements, now have less support in Israel than before. Yitzhak (Isaac) Rabin, Israeli Prime Minister, negotiated seriously with Palestinians. While still Prime Minister, in 1995, Rabin was assassinated. Most Israelis expressed no outrage. Instead, a cold, collective, unspoken ‘I was never comfortable with him. We’re better off without him.’
Since then, Israelis have voted not for peace but for dominance. Now they have a Government intent only on military dominance at any cost. It looks that the Israeli Government is systematically making the whole of Gaza uninhabitable so all the people have to move elsewhere. I hope this is an exaggerated interpretation.
I wonder how long Israel will be able to last like this. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.
In the Bible we read of the sons of Jacob, who’s name was changed by God to Israel, returning to Palestine. Their daughter is raped by a local Prince. They respond by massacring all the men of that tribe and taking the women, children, animals as their slaves. Then God summons Jacob, Israel, to a meeting. God says he will continue to look after the family, and says nothing about them living in the land of Palestine. ‘And God went up from Jacob.’ He was now on his own. Disaster upon disaster follows until Jacob and the whole family have to leave Palestine to live in Egypt where they become slaves for many years. Has Israeli bloodshed now also removed their right to live in the land? We will see what God does.
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