A Month by the Sea (18 page)

Tony Judt was one of the many Jewish supporters of BDS. Not
long before his death, in an interview with Kristina Božic in the
London Review of Books
(25 March 2010), he repeated his call for the EU to use its ‘enormous leverage’ and say to Israel, ‘So long as you break international laws, you can’t be part of the EU market.’ Why don’t we do this? Because of ‘ridiculous self-blackmail’. Tony Judt’s Dutch and German friends said to him:

I had occasion to quote Tony Judt in Jabalya as I talked with angry members of a football club which had just signed a letter to UEFA’s president, Michel Platini, condemning the suggestion that Israel might host the 2012 Under-21 tournament. Gaza has 42 football clubs and though their kicking spaces are so limited their enthusiasm is boundless. Each had signed this letter, denying Israel’s ‘right to be treated as a member of the community of nations’. One young man, Uthman, an English Literature graduate of al-Aqsa University, asked with tears of despair in his eyes, ‘
Why
does Europe treat Israel so kindly? In Europe there’s no AIPAC!’ Yet again I tried to elucidate the European bad conscience but those young men were impatient of Holocaust
talk. Although not Holocaust deniers (of whom I did meet a few among the younger Palestinians) they might be described as Holocaust sceptics – doubting the numbers and gruesome details. For this, Israeli
hasbara
and some fanatical imams share the blame. Zionists have consistently inflated the role of the Holocaust in the creation of the State of Israel.
Hasbara
presents their State-building as an understandable/forgivable consequence of the Holocaust. Who, after that attempted genocide, could blame the Jews for seeking to establish a ‘safe homeland’? The reality, as recognised by the historian and former Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, is that Zionism, since the 1890s, has been partly ‘a movement of conquest, colonisation and settlement … forced to use the tools of colonial penetration’. Moreover, the dominant Zionist attitude to Hitler’s Jewish victims was revealed by Ben-Gurion’s chilling calculation, made a few weeks after the
Kristallnacht
pogrom (9 November 1938). Israel’s future Prime Minster explained: ‘If I knew it was possible to save all the [Jewish] children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring to Eretz-Yisreal, I would choose the latter – because we are faced not only with the accounting of these children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish People.’ Exactly four years later, in December 1942, when Jews were being murdered by the million, Ben-Gurion reminded his followers, ‘The catastrophe of European Jewry is not, in a direct manner, my business.’ No doubt this sentiment partly explains why the Holocaust was little spoken of between 1948 and the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. After that came the founding of ‘the Holocaust industry’ and since then, as Norman Finkelstein puts it, ‘The Nazi holocaust has been fashioned into an ideological weapon to immunize Israel from legitimate criticism …
Whenever
Israel comes under renewed international pressure to
withdraw
from occupied territories, its apologists mount yet another meticulously orchestrated media extravaganza alleging that the
world is awash in anti-Semitism.’ No wonder some young Palestinians are Holocaust sceptics.

A classic Zionist fabrication was provided by Ruth Zakh, Israel’s deputy-ambassador to Ireland, in an
Irish Times
‘Opinion’ (1 June 2011). It was headed ‘Political Stunts not the way to end Gaza Conflict’.

From this we gather that Gazan weapons inflict widespread damage on Israel’s population, a message regularly reinforced by the international media. What percentage of the general public is aware that in ten years (2001–2011) Gazan rockets and mortars killed 23 people (22 Israelis and one Thai farm labourer)? Admittedly, 23 too many. But in 22 days Cast Lead killed more than 1,400 Gazans and since the end of that operation the IDF have killed another 200 plus – despite Ruth Zakh’s misleading statement about Israel having ‘withdrawn both its military and civilian presence from the Gaza Strip’.

The Gazans respect for John Ging led many to expect more support from the Irish government. Uthman asked me, ‘Why does your country not talk strong for us? Your Foreign Minister came visiting for a few hours but afterwards said nothing strong. Did you burn too many Jews?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘we didn’t burn any Jews but for economic and sentimental reasons Ireland has always been subservient to the US.’ Then I confessed that Shannon airport is permanently at the disposal of the US armed forces, however illegal their missions, and of the CIA as it flies its captives in unmarked planes to unnamed countries for courses of ‘enhanced interrogation’.

It took time to explain all this in simple English. Five of us were sitting in the shade of a half-collapsed wall, looking across this club’s pitch – a cleared bomb site, strewn with fragments of metal and splinters of glass. Soon it would be lost to the club; new shacks were planned.

On the far side rose a towering monument to Cast Lead’s savagery, the bisected remains of a ten-storey, Oslo-era block, designed to US corporate specifications and constructed of reinforced concrete. Its ground floor had been let to many stores, a car showroom, bakers, barbers, a restaurant, a few cafés, a dentist’s clinic, a gas cylinder store. On the next two floors were offices, above them, flats. Scores of women and children were among the 210 killed here, Uthman told me. Then immediately after the ceasefire many others died while trying to salvage something from within the unstable ruin. The bomb had left one half upright, in an extremely perilous condition. Tons of jagged slabs still hung by lengths of steel 100 feet or more above four children whose donkey-cart was being loaded with scraps of unidentifiable substances – for use in Gaza’s ‘building trade’, where a wealth of ingenuity makes up for a dearth of materials.

We crossed the ‘football field’ and within this macabre edifice Uthman insisted on leading me by the hand across a narrow causeway of rubble – shifting beneath the feet – to a point from where I cold look far down into the depths of the basement. There lay the bomb’s massive case, by far the biggest of the many ‘souvenirs’ displayed to me on the Strip. Two visiting ISMs had longed to auction it on eBay, to raise money for its maimed victims. A kind impulse, but no one could think how to haul it
up – and anyway, unless the top bidder lived in Gaza, there would be an insoluble transport problem. One wonders, why the
Goldstone
Enquiry? To drop such a bomb on a shopping centre-
cum-residential
block is in itself a war crime for which there could be no possible excuse or explanation.

On a very windy morning I walked the length of Gaza Port’s breakwater with Fahd and Yaser, two of Anwar’s bilingual
grandnephews
. They were first cousins, jobless graduates of Gaza’s al-Azhar University, politically on the same wavelength but in appearance almost comically dissimilar. Tubby Fahd took after his great-uncle, Yaser was unusually tall for a Palestinian with conspicuously long features: long nose, long chin, even long ear lobes. They felt none of Anwar’s reservations about BDS and worked hard on their computers as organisers for its National Committee. It cheered them that Dexia, a persistently targeted French-Belgian bank, was about to sell its Israeli subsidiary. And two French companies, Alstom and Derail Veolia, were loosening their ties with Israeli partners while numerous other companies had begun to register the effects of negative publicity. The University of Johannesburg was boycotting Ben-Gurion University. In Britain the University and College Union (the UK’s largest academic labour union) and the University of London Union (Europe’s largest student union) had voted to cut all links with Israeli institutions. Also, David Cameron had resigned, with minimum publicity, from his position as Honorary Chairman of the Jewish National Fund, a powerful Zionist agency. And Marc Almond and Andy McKee had cancelled visits to Israel. When I asked ‘Who are they?’ my companions looked worried and sympathetic; no doubt to them this lacuna suggested the onset of Alzheimer’s.

At the end of the long breakwater we perched on smooth boulders, the Mediterranean being boisterous on three sides,
cooling us with showers of spray. The only people visible were a few fishermen in the far distance, repairing their boats’ bullet holes, and Fahd noted that here we were beyond range of
eavesdroppers
– unless Israel’s latest pride and joy, a mini-drone known as ‘the Ghost’, incorporates some lip-reading device.

It heartened these keen campaigners to know that Israel was about to legislate against BDS, thus proving its effectiveness and gaining it much valuable global attention. The Law for Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel was passed a few weeks later, on 10 July (by 47 votes to 38), and a government spokesperson described BDS as ‘an existential threat’. Already this legislation had ignited controversy; thirty-six distinguished law professors considered it unconstitutional and leading civil rights groups were preparing to challenge it in the courts. On the West Bank, settler businessmen were also preparing lawsuits – against BDS organisations and individuals, who would be compelled to pay reparations at a fixed rate (30,000 shekels: US$8,700) without the injured party having to provide any evidence of actual injury. Companies complying with boycotts will be barred forever from doing business with any government office or agency.

Said Fahd, ‘All this helps towards what Zionists most dread – the delegitimising of Israel! Which prepares the way for
binationalism
…’

Yaser added, ‘The joke is, people backing the law say it’s to block delegitimisation efforts! On Facebook I saw “Peace Now!” car stickers saying “Sue me, I’m boycotting settlement products”. But only brave people will use those.’

‘Another new law bans Nakba Day,’ said Fahd. ‘Schools and institutions commemorating it will lose all funding – it denies the Jewish and democratic character of the State! An amendment to the Penalty Code protects that character – people denying its existence can be jailed. Even though with a normal IQ you can see it’s not possible to be Jewish and democratic with one-fifth Muslim citizens.
Tied in are the “acceptance committees” – naked apartheid! Every village and community built on public land can have a committee to reject Muslim newcomers. The bill calls them “candidates who fail to meet the fundamental views of the community”. So how can they get mad when we publicise their apartheid system?’

‘The positive bit,’ said Yaser, ‘is how all this unites some of us, Israelis and Palestinians protesting together. Next month Jerusalem will see a big joint demo. It’s being organised by Daniel Argo from the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity group and Murad Shafea from Silwan. We’ve had a video conference with them. Dan says we must have a unified state called Israeli-Palestine and all of us as equal citizens. He’s brave!’

Fahd was suddenly looking gloomy. ‘This government plans about twenty new laws, all meant to criminalise new ways of thinking, like binationalism. They feel they’re being pushed to the exit. When I first heard them saying BDS is an existentialist threat, I cheered. Now I’ve nightmares about another Cast Lead because they feel pushed. Or an all-out attack on Iran instead of just assassinating nuclear scientists. I wish they could see
Israeli-Palestine
as a model for the whole region – we’re demanding rights people don’t have in most Arab states. They could get a lot of respect if they shared with us what your friend Mazin calls the Land of Canaan.’

I asked, ‘At present, how do you see one-state support on both sides?’

Fahd shrugged. ‘What would you expect? Very little on the other side until BDS bites harder – far harder! But Desmond Tutu says for us it’s picking up speed faster than it did for the ANC – in reaction to Cast Lead.’

‘Among us,’ said Yaser, ‘attitudes changed, specially in our
age-group
, when al-Jazeera published the Palestine Papers. Then we saw the dung-heap in the PA’s backyard. And we realised honest people were trying to persuade them to go one-state as a credible
alternative. Hearing Erekat boasting about PA forces killing “terrorists” to “help” Israel – that was shock-therapy! We knew it went on, but boasting about it is different …’

Fahd was emphatic. ‘For certain we’d accept if Israel made the offer. If you asked people now most might say “No!” because they can’t imagine such a thing. That’s why it needs to be talked about loudly, in public. If the offer was genuine we’d say “Yes!” We’re tired – very tired – of conflict. We want justice before peace but we do want peace – badly.’