Key Zionist pioneer renounces Zionism
September 5th, 2009Tonight I received through one of my (numerous) mailing lists an article which I want to quote here in its entirety. I did not expect to read something like this, and I think that it should receive the biggest attention possible. People should send it to all their Israeli friends – just to make them read it, and hopefully think about it…
Key Zionist pioneer renounces Zionism
By Helena Cobban – August 5, 2009, 11:45AMI’ve never met Dov Yermiya, a Jewish Israeli peace activist who is now 94 years old. But I read of course the book he published in 1983 in which he wrote with anguish about the torture and other gross mistreatment of civilians he witnessed directly during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon the year before.
I have it in my hand now.
I just learned, in this open letter published today by Uri Avnery, that Yermiya recently renounced the ideology and practice of Zionism with these stirring words:
“I, a 95 year old Sabra (native born Israeli Jew), who has plowed its fields, planted trees, built a house and fathered sons, grandsons and great-grandsons, and also shed his blood in the battle for the founding of the State of Israel,
Declare herewith that I renounce my belief in the Zionism which has failed, that I shall not be loyal to the Jewish fascist state and its mad visions, that I shall not sing anymore its nationalist anthem, that I shall stand at attention only on the days of mourning for those fallen on both sides in the wars, and that I look with a broken heart at an Israel that is committing suicide and at the three generations of offspring that I have bred and raised in it.
… for 42 years, Israel turned what should have been Palestine into a giant detention camp, and is holding a whole people captive under an oppressive and cruel regime, with the sole aim of taking away their country, come what may!!!
The IDF eagerly suppresses their efforts at rebellion, with the active assistance of the settlement thugs, by the brutal means of a sophisticated Apartheid and a choking blockade, inhuman harassment of the sick and of women in labor, the destruction of their economy and the theft of their best land and water.
Over all this there is waving the black flag of the frightening contempt for the life and blood of the Palestinians. Israel will never be forgiven for the terrible toll of blood spilt, and especially the blood of children, in hair-raising quantities…”Avnery’s response is fascinating. He too is a veteran peace activist, and of about the same generation as Yermiya. But in the letter he is, I think, pleading with Yermiya not to renounce Zionism completely, but rather to reconnect with the “idealistic” Zionism that they both experienced during their youth.
He writes,
“When I think of our youth, yours and mine, one scene is never far from my mind: the 1947 Dalia festival.
Tens of thousands of young men and women were sitting on the slope of a hill in the natural amphitheater near Kibbutz Dalia on Mount Carmel. Ostensibly it was a festival of folk dancing, but in reality it was much more – a great celebration of the new Hebrew culture which we were then creating in the country, in which folk dancing played an important role. The dancing groups came mainly from the kibbutzim and the youth movements, and the dances were original Hebrew creations, interwoven with Russian, Polish, Yemenite and Hassidic ones. A group of Arabs danced the Debka in ecstasy, dancing and dancing and dancing on.
In the middle of the event, the loudspeakers announced that members of the UN Commission of Inquiry, which had been sent by the international organization to decide upon the future of the country, were joining us. When we saw them entering the amphitheater, the tens of thousands spontaneously rose to their feet and started to sing the “Hatikva”, the national anthem, with a holy fervor that reverberated from the surrounding mountains.
We did not know then that within half a year the great Hebrew-Arab war would break out – our War of Independence and their Naqba. I believe that most of the 6000 young people who fell in the war on our side, as well as the thousands that were wounded – like you and me – were present at that moment in Dalia, seeing each other and singing together.What state did we think of then? What state did we set out to create?
What has happened to the Hebrew society, the Hebrew culture, the Hebrew morality that we were so proud of then?”Then, he pleads this:
“You, Dov, have invested in this state much too much to turn your back on it in a gesture of anger and despair. The most hackneyed and worn-out slogan in Israel is also true: “We don’t have another state!”
Other states in the world have sunk to the depths of depravity and committed unspeakable crimes, far beyond our worst sins, and still brought themselves back to the family of nations and redeemed their souls.
We and all the members of our generation, who were among those who created this state, bear a heavy responsibility for it. A responsibility to our offspring, to those oppressed by this state, to the entire world. From this responsibility we cannot escape.Even at your respectable age, and precisely because of it and because of what you represent, you must be a compass for the young and tell them: This state belongs to you, you can change it, don’t allow the nationalist wreckers to steal it from you!
True, 61 years ago we had another state in mind. Now, after our state has tumbled to where it is today, we must remember that other state, and remind everybody, every day, what the state should have been like, what it can be like, and not allow our vision to disappear like a dream. Let’s lend our shoulders to every effort to repair and heal!”These are very weighty issues that these two longtime Zionists are debating.
I remember the evening I had back in early March with longtime Jewish-Israeli nonviolence activist Amos Gvirtz. Gvirtz is “only” in his late 60s or early 70s. But like Avnery and Yermiya he grew up in Israel.
He told me in March,
“I became an anti-Zionist after Oslo, when the government expelled the Arabs of Jahhaleenn to make room for the big new settlement area if Maale Adummim… Like the Zionists, I believe we Jews need a state of our own. But unlike the Zionists I don’t think this should be built on the ruins of someone else’s home. So our state need not necessarily be right here.”Gvirtz, too, like Avnery, identified a strong link between the events of 1947-48 and the situation today– though the nature of the link Gvirtz identified was very different from Avnery’s: “The Nakba wasn’t really a single event that happened in 1948, so much as a long-drawn-out process, that continues to this day.” In other words, he was quite unwilling to neatly divide Israeli history, as Avnery still does, between the idealized, pre-lapsarian days of the 1947 Dalia festival and the post-lapsarian era that was inaugurated– in Avnery’s view– only by Israel’s conquest of the West Bank.
Obviously, this is a very weighty issue for Zionists and their supporters to grapple with. Did 1967 mark a notable break between a laudable past and a troublesome present? Or were there indeed, as Gvirtz and many other current non- and anti-Zionists have argued many elements of continuity from the 1947 period right through to the present?
Anyway, I’d love to see the whole text of the latest Yermiya letter from which Avnery is quoting, if anyone can provide a link to it, preferably in English. The only recent English text that I could find by him online was this letter, published in the Communist weekly Zo Haderekh in June 2008.
In it, Yermiya was returning to Defense Minister Barak the invitation he had been sent to attend a ceremony to honor all veterans of Israel’s 1948 “War of Independence”.
He wrote,
“As a veteran of the 1948 war, who was already wounded in face to face combat two weeks before the Declaration of the State, I feel, obliged herewith to return the invitation to you, as Minister of Defense. I do so regretfully but see this as my duty.
I consider you, Ehud Barak, as one of the top military commanders and prominent political leaders who were responsible for converting the army from “the Israeli Defense Force” to an army of occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people and defender of the criminal settlements in their country.
40 years of occupation have utterly corrupted the Israeli army and all strata of Israeli society. They are both characterized by the nationalist ‘east wind’ [the east wind brings the chamsin and locusts - C.A.] which blows and kindles conflagrations of endless wars, which threaten our people and land with the third and final destruction. Your share in the responsibility for all this is enormous, and therefore I return your invitation to you, without thanks…”
What should I add to this?
Maybe because I’m rather of the generation of Gvirtz, maybe because my own way was much shorter – having arrived only 14 years ago to Israel with dreams that were (still) close to those described by Avnery, but having seen the “truth”, as Yermiya and Gvirtz describe it, 10 years later (already.. or “only” as one would like to see it) and have been fighting in my own little way to stop this development in the last 4 years, I rather agree with Yermiya and Gvirtz: “Like the Zionists, I believe we Jews need a state of our own. But unlike the Zionists I don’t think this should be built on the ruins of someone else’s home. So our state need not necessarily be right here.”
And of course – I don’t think that there are 2 separate stages in the history of Israel – before and after 1967 – but a continuous development, probably accelerated by the conquest of 1967 and the ensuing settlement movement. Obviously (for me) “The Nakba wasn’t really a single event that happened in 1948, so much as a long-drawn-out process, that continues to this day.” as Gvirtz says.
Whatever is “the truth” – Avnery’s view or Gvirtz, Israel NOW has become what Yermiya states, a “Jewish fascist state”, and me too, I feel that “Israel is committing suicide”.
“Over all this there is waving the black flag of the frightening contempt for the life and blood of the Palestinians. Israel will never be forgiven for the terrible toll of blood spilt, and especially the blood of children, in hair-raising quantities…”
Dov Yermiya speaks out the feelings that are in my heart… 
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Well, the Bni Menashe and the Lemba, the Beta Israel, Falasha, Sepharidi, even the Rastafarians, they all need housing, and since they are returning to the exact location that their ancestors were in before the exiles, they are kicking out the proverbial philistines. The problem is that these Palestinians are not giant Goliaths, neither are they foreigners, neither is their language so different from the yehudim (it is the same language, aleph, bey, pay tey…), hence this may be “an eye for an eye….”, the Palestinians are being punished for what their philistine ancestors did to the yehudim 3000 years ago, the strange part is that neither are most of the Jews blood descendants of the Yehudim (Ashkenazi are descended from Turkik Khazars), neither are the Palestinians of Israel descendants of the Philistines (they intermarried with arabs and yehudim as well as syrians, phonecians and egyptians). So we have 2 people who are pretending to be related to ancient people of 3000 years ago, neither do the Jews follow the exact Yehudim religions (they did not have Talmud), neither are the Palestenians worshiping the idol Baal, they are monotheist now and worship el, using the Hebrew language of Aleph, bey, pay. All in the name of religion, makes me think why Karl Marx, descendant of rabbis, made communism in the first place, maybe he was sick of the killing in the name of religion.
I say what Dr. Edward Said says:
“We, Palestinians, can never forget what happened to us, its part of our history, but we are always ready to forgive if there was a good will in the other side, to see us as humans.”
Look at what Germany did to the jews in WW2 and look to see how it is with jews now !!
Are the zionists ready to express their sorrow to what they did and still doing to us? Only then there will be peace.
Peace be on you.
Sami, the bedouin
Avnery !!!
You were dancing then on the devastation of demolished Karmel villages…. and you are still dancing and dancing and dancing on our blood and the corpses of our children !!! We can only dance together… but never ever one dance while the other is thrown away from his home mourning his demolished home and lynched children !!
I can understand and forgive, but only if I go back home to live normally like any human being but not a goi, a beast!!
Sami, the bedouin.
If Dov Yermiyha is a “Key Zionist pioneer” than I’m a sack of potatoes. Yes, he fought for the Palmach and was friends with Moshe Dayan, but that doesn’t make him important or influential. By the way, his anti-Zionist tendencies are a known fact for over a year, at least (Hebrew).
Elizabeth – I personally don’t even know him. Avnery obviously pays attention to what he does and says. That his change of views have been known for a while is obvious in the article. I don’t think that the expression “Key Zionist pioneer” is the most important message in this article. He’s probably known to the “old” establishment – but what’s important for ME is what he says – and most of all, HOW he says it!! What I found surprising and worth mentioning is his choice of words to describe the failure of Zionism and what it has brought… That was for me worth writing about…
The Khazar theory that modern Jews are not descended from a common Middle East population has been thoroughly disproved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars#Alleged_Khazar_ancestry_of_Ashkenazim
Modern DNA studies on the Y chromosome of Jews worldwide have largely disproven the Khazar origin theory for the vast majority of Ashkenazi DNA.
A 1999 study by Hammer et al., published in the Proceedings of the United States National Academy of Sciences compared the Y chromosomes of Ashkenazi, Roman, North African, Kurdish, Near Eastern, Yemenite, and Ethiopian Jews with 16 non-Jewish groups from similar geographic locations. It found that “Despite their long-term residence in different countries and isolation from one another, most Jewish populations were not significantly different from one another at the genetic level… The results support the hypothesis that the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population, and suggest that most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora.”[45] According to Nicholas Wade “The results accord with Jewish history and tradition and refute theories like those holding that Jewish communities consist mostly of converts from other faiths, or that they are descended from the Khazars, a medieval Turkish tribe that adopted Judaism.”[46]
Shalom Ahavshalom, Manish ma?
I do not agree, based on scientific reasoning. You quote a research paper from 1999, that is 10 years ago. I quote from research conducted in 2004, the article which was published in the eminent scientific journal “Genetics”.
See this link for the details of the paper
Also see same paper here
Show me the science.
I don’t have anything against writing about it. I just don’t see how this is a big deal. People get disillusioned with ideological and religious beliefs every day. I hope this comparison isn’t offensive, but to me it seems just like when people use Ayan Hirsi Ali or Walid Shoebat to discredit Islam. The fact that those people left Islam and are now blaming it for being a hateful and aggressive religion, doesn’t make it so.
He’s entitled to his own opinion, but it in no way means that others should think the same because he’s a “key Zionists” or whatever.
I am American reading this conversation.
I have watched with some disbelief at our media coverage of the conflict. I wonder why the concept of creating a Jewish state controlled by Jewish people for Jewish people is different in any ideological way in creating a white state, for white people, run by white people. This was our Klu Klux Klan, which was rightfully defeated in my country.
The defeat of the Klu Klux Klan has regulated it to a minority status fringe group. It made the United States a somewhat credible nation when it talked about basic human rights. The US has lost a great deal of credibility with it’s unqualified and absolute support of Israel.
Until Israel defeats it’s own Klu Klux Klan which runs the entire nation of Israel, it won’t be a credible nation to anybody that is well enough educated to see what Zionism is – it’s a racist ideology no different than the ideology of the KKK or the Nazis. Although different measures have been taken by these 3 groups to achieve their goals, at their core is the promotion of one demographic at the expense of another. Invariably, this leads to ill will and conflict that will continue to exist until one demographic or the other is absolutely defeated. The white minority governments of Zimbabwe and S. Africa were defeated. The Nazis were defeated, the Klu Klux Klan was defeated.
Zionism may still win however. There has been an ongoing guerilla war in what was the British Mandate of Palestine since it’s creation by the UN in 1948. Has any nation been able to win a guerilla war? Yes – but only though genocide. The United States beat the guerilla warriors of the Phillipines by murdering civilians and only stopping when the guerilla soldiers surrendered, unconditionally. The US only beat the natives of our country by killing nearly all of them, then finally granting them full citizenship rights and in some cases, rights above and beyond what normal citizens of the US enjoy.
Is this what Israel intends to do? This is why Israel will have to do if history is any guide – but it’s not 1850 anymore, it’s not 1950 anymore, and the world watches, and it records. Zionists make a claim to the land when it was Nero of Rome that removed those distant ancestors nearly 2000 years ago, that’s about 80 generations ago. There are about 4 million Palestinians in their diaspora now. Do Zionists expect them to forget after less than 70 years?