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CounterPunch
January
8, 2003
The Purge Begins
Crushing Dissent in Israel
By URI AVNERY
I have received a lot of curses in my lifetime,
and here and there some compliments, too. But I have never received
a compliment like this one: an important party, represented
in the Knesset, has mentioned my name in its official election
platform.
Under the heading "Legislation and
strict supervision of organizations and activists of the extreme
left", the National Union party's program says:
"We shall anchor in legislation
more severe measures, including the cancellation of citizenship,
against people like Uri Avnery, Leah Tsemel and refuseniks of
all kinds, who are defaming the country abroad."
I don't know whether to be proud, laugh
or be angry.
To be proud, because my name is used
to symbolize the whole peace camp. And also because I appear
side by side with Leah Tsemel, the valiant lawyer who defends
Palestinian prisoners, and the refuseniks, who represent the
conscience of Israel.
To laugh, considering the abysmal chutzpa
of this sentence. The leader  of the National Union party is Avigdor
(Ivette) Liberman, a person brought up in the Bolshevik education
system of Stalin and who has absorbed--as we can see--the racist
and power-hungry attitudes of the red tyrant. He has come here
when everything was ready, to a state that we have created (literally)
with our blood, and now demands, no more no less, to cancel
our citizenship.
To be angry, because Liberman, together
with National Religious leader Effi Eytam and some of the Likud
leaders, is in the vanguard of the dirty column that is besieging
Israeli democracy. Last week they succeeded in inducing the
majority of the politicians in the General Election Committee
to disqualify two Arab Knesset-members (Ahmed Tibi and Azmi
Bishara) and an Arab election list (Balad) from participating
in the elections, expelling in practice 20% of Israel's citizens
from the political arena.
If some people still entertain the illusion
that this attack is directed solely against the Arab citizens
(a totally unacceptable act by itself), they should be reminded
of one of the most important sayings of the 20th century, the
murderous century of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini.
The saying belongs to Martin Niemoeller,
a German U-Boat commander in WWI who later became a Protestant
pastor and pacifist. The Nazis threw him into a concentration
camp. After miraculously surviving, he coined the following
unforgettable sentences:
"When the Nazis took the communists
away, I was silent; after all, I was no communist.
"When they put the social-democrats
in prison, I was silent; after all, I was no social-democrat.
"When they took the trade-unionists
away, I did not protest; after all, I was no trade-unionist.
"When they took me away, there was
nobody left to protest."
Liberman's program shows clearly that
something similar is happening now in our country. They started
with the incitement against the Arab citizens and their expulsion
from the political system. Now they speak of eliminating the
"extreme left". Is there any doubt, that in the next
stage they will demand the elimination of all the left, "moderate"
and "patriotic" as they may be? And then, following
the historic precedents, it will be the turn of the "liberal"
Likud members.
An apocalyptic vision? Not really. The
President of the Supreme Court, Aharon Barak, this week compared
our situation with Nazi Germany. In the presence of the President
of Israel, the Chief Justice, himself a Holocaust survivor,
said that "if it has happened in the country of Kant and
Beethoven, it can happen everywhere. If we do not defend democracy,
democracy will not defend us!" (It will be interesting
to see how he will conduct himself next week, when he will have
to decide on the Tibi-Beshara expulsion case.)
In Israel, we don't like to make comparisons
with the dark regimes. The memories are too fresh, and nobody
in Israel advocates genocide. But undoubtedly, parties and leaders
who openly advocate "transfer", would have been called
anywhere else in the world Neo-Fascists (even if the term "Neo-Bolsheviks"
would be more appropriate, since it was Stalin who used to transfer
whole peoples in the Soviet Union.)
Joerg Haider does not propose to cancel
the Austrian citizenship of people who disagree with his obnoxious
views, nor does Jean-Marie Le-Pen propose to expel from the
National Assembly every deputy who is not of pure French blood.
For 54 years, the State of Israel has
prided itself of being "the only democracy in the Middle
East". All Israeli propaganda abroad, and especially in
the United States, is based on this slogan. Now Liberman and
the Libermen come and try to destroy Israeli democracy, our
creation, and to set up a kind of Fascistan, somewhere between
Pakistan and Afghanistan.
If somebody is "defaming our country
abroad", it is surely this person.
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