Mediapart Guests Mediapart Forums, views and opinions of the guests free of writing Mediapart. Editors Vincent Truffy Writing Mediapart Geraldine Delacroix Guests Mediapart Laurence Rizet ARTICLE EDITION Edition: Guests Mediapart Muses and death August 20, 2014 | BY GUESTS Médiapart While the truce was again broken between Israel and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand returns to the roots of the conflict and believes that in the absence of an equitable solution, the images of thousands of women, children, and old people, descendants of the 1948 refugees, wandering among the ruined houses in the summer of 2014 will continue to feed hatred for a long time. When thunder muses, the guns fall silent: the adage, usually reversed, is highly inaccurate. The muses of thunder communication especially when the guns, planes, and helicopters buzzing and spit their fire. Television channels in Israel and around the world, with their journalists, commentators, and their special envoys between two commercials, reports the bloodshed which few of them seemed to attach importance. A majority of viewers and listeners, starting with the leaders of the Western world did not react otherwise. The latter, after having expressed their support for the Israeli operation, waited for the beginning of the humanitarian catastrophe to emit a discrete critical. It is easier to deplore the past misfortunes (the duty of memory) as open, high, eyes on current tragedies. In Israel, people do not want to live with Gaza; she just wants to keep the Golan. Israel left Gaza; he asks only to quietly settle its Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), without being prevented by a cruel enemy. In Israel, the people pray for the extermination of Hamas and its supporters, and the hardest Added to those who grow,, become Hamas. Meanwhile, the Israeli-Jewish people aspire to develop and strengthen the Jewish identity of the state, which is not that of a quarter of the citizens, not defined as Jews. No normal state can not accept being the target of rockets, said at the beginning of the war, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He was absolutely right, but it would also be necessary to remind him that no normal state in the world, can not accept that in the capital, which is also the capital of the Jewish people, a third of the population is deprived of sovereignty and free democratic rights. There are also some states that stubbornly refuse, for years, to define their final borders, hoping, undisguised, to further expand. He is perhaps, after all, any connection between all these things abnormal? It is well known that in the wars in modern history, it is always the enemy who committed hostilities; so the Jew, peaceful state, says it only replicate the attacks he suffered. What is it really? Is this how history is written? No he has not, in the latest tragedy, the beginning of the long time and short time quite different and rather annoying? In the 1950s, when I was a child, my father took me to the cinema to see westerns. He loved the great outdoors, and I loved the pioneer cowboys, and I hated the Indians. It was almost always the same scene: a convoy of pioneer settlers advances slowly and quietly, and suddenly he is attacked by horsemen, half naked and daubed with grimacing faces. Howls means, arrows fuse, women and children are affected. Fortunately, the brave hero manages to repel the attackers; the convoy can resume stay the course to conquer and colonize new areas the desert. Finally, in the movies, we always went out winners: me and my white hero. In the late 1960s, Hollywood has made a malignant revision that destroyed the sacred images of my childhood. I then saw other scenarios: the wicked settlers steal land by slaughtering the natives, whose survivors are crammed into reserves. Later, studying history, my political and moral options deteriorated. Since then, I found myself on the side of the victims, who, even if they are ugly, are right to claim their land, and the right to live freely there. If I became a leftist One reason is that even if today I belong to the camp of the strong, I am a descendant of the victims of yesterday. Here, the story of the long time began there about 130 years ago, when anti-Semitic Eastern Europe began to vomit its Jews. Unlike the mass of refugees and immigrants that has passed to the new promised land in North America, the small Zionist minority has decided she preferred a self-sovereignty in ancient Canaan. This was the start of colonization in the Middle East, citing the Bible, like the Puritan colonists, but without religious motivation. It should also be remembered that, from the beginning, almost all of these settlers did not come here to live integrated with the local population, but to found his own Jewish state. For 130 years they have worked to displace the natives, and they managed to conquer the entire country. Each time, since 1929, the block settler was violently assaulted, but he always triumphed. He completed his journey, not San Francisco, but in Jericho, and instead of creating Las Vegas, he founded settlements in the Jordan Valley. Its cardinal mistake lay in the fact that, contrary to what happened in North America, it has not destroyed the majority of the natives. And, as pointed out by an eminent Israeli historian, he also made the mistake of not expelling all far from his new state. In his blindness, he did not foresee the future, leaving a portion of them live in the Jewish state expansion, and the rest pile up on its borders. When I see on television, the images from Gaza, I can not help but think that at least 70% of the people filmed are descendants of refugees who lived formerly in the places where I live and work , north of Tel Aviv (Shah Muwannis) in Jaffa or Majdal (now Ashkelon). Likewise come to mind Indian reservations of the nineteenth century, in desperation, rebelled violently, before finally going to force whites. A short narrative of the time is juxtaposed with that of long time. Suddenly, and without warning, Hamas started to shell us with rockets, cries in the face of the world, the Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. But, again, the story began substantially different. Three young settlers, unarmed, were abducted and murdered cruelly, the West Bank, near the home of the same foreign minister who lives outside the territory of the State, in the borders of the land God promised him. Unlike his past positions, Hamas has denied being at the initiative of the crime, or have authorized. (Israel has found evidence that it would be the sponsor of abduction after the beginning of the war). However, no matter the Israeli government the failure to identify the culprits simultaneously seeking murderers, he hired a showdown against widespread Hamas in the West Bank. In defiance of the rules of the game admitted he did not hesitate to arbitrarily arrest, again, a significant number of prisoners Hamas members in the West Bank, which were released during the exchange agreement with Gilaad Shalit. At the same time, and without arousing the slightest attention, five young unarmed Palestinians were killed during a protest, also in the West Bank, while a Palestinian teenager was burnt alive by a mob of israéliens- Jews. Israeli leaders they thought that Hamas would not be forced to react after such a declaration of war against him? Perhaps they were convinced that, given the balance of forces, the occupant can all afford. We can also assume that after the failure of talks fictitious peace and reconciliation between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government deliberately decided to break the process of intra-Palestinian compromise in other words, to humiliate Hamas, even at the price of a new war, encouraged by the advent of the military dictatorship in Egypt, hostile to Hamas. Saudi Arabia has also expressed its support secretly. At the same time, the Israeli government has likely ever imagined he could submit to silence the second reserve, close to the Jewish state. Binyamin Netanyahu, in his generosity, wants every Jew acquire a villa in Judea and Samaria exclaimed in shock: They built tunnels against us, instead of building schools, hospitals and hotels ; that was the reason for a new war against them. As if locked in a crowded store, blockaded for years, completely cut off from the world population, and that it is forbidden to rebuild an airport and a port would continue to invest in real estate, not in underground tunnels! I am convinced that if Gazans received United States aircraft, helicopters and tanks, they would not need to turn into moles for one day, out of the ground and break, by force, the seat imposed on them. In truth, I do not know what has been thought Netanyahu and his cabinet ministers; I leave it to future historians the task of finding out. I know, however, that Israel never left Gaza, and therefore will not leave Gaza Israel anytime soon. Meanwhile, the result, strange and terrible, this cruel war is that Hamas fired indiscriminately on civilians and has killed almost as military, while Israel, who said he wanted to strike fighters, killed massively civilians. At one point, despite the abundance of sophisticated American weaponry and high-tech and precise, the confrontation turned into a ruthless mass killing. The muses who mourn tomorrow on casualties on both sides certainly will discuss this imbalance. In the absence of an equitable solution to the conflict, the images of thousands of women, children, and old people, descendants of the 1948 refugees, wandering among the ruined houses in the summer of 2014 will continue to feed hatred for long . Shlomo Sand, professor of history at the University of Tel Aviv. His latest books in French: How the Land of Israel was invented (Flammarion, 2014) and How I stopped being Jewish (Flammarion, 2013)
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 22:17:45 +0000