Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: [MO]  WARNING! Sharon is now a wounded animal.

GUSH SHALOM press release May 4, 2004
pob 3322, Tel-Aviv 61033 - 
www.gush-shalom.org/
* Sharon - wounded animal 
* The Golem Turns on his Creator 
[The settlers took over Sharon's Likud powerbase; the PM
remains as a lame duck. With so many still prolonging
the "Sharon - Magician" / "Sharon - Israeli de Gaulle"
myths we decided already now to spread the following
assessment, which will appear as ad in our fixed corner
Friday Ha'aretz. You find here also the comment of Uri
Avnery...]
* Sharon - wounded animal
WARNING!
Sharon is now a wounded animal.
A wounded animal is a dangerous animal.
His Plan is dead. He is incapable of getting another
plan adopted. He is powerless to evacuate even one
single settlement.
His sole way out is to embark on spectacular military
operations. There is no limit to the bloody deeds he
may now launch in order to survive.
                                        ~~~
* The Golem Turns on his Creator 
by Uri Avnery
May 4, 2004 
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/WO0405/S00040.htm
 
In Jewish legend, the Golem was a man-made creature
endowed with enormous strength. Rabbi Judah Loew of
Prague, also know as the Maharal, created him of clay
and gave him life by putting a piece of paper with the
secret name of God under his tongue.
The Golem helped the Jews defend themselves against
anti-Semitic rioters, but one day he turned against his
creator. He sowed ruin and destruction, until, at the
last moment, the rabbi succeeded in extracting the
piece of paper from his mouth. The Golem turned back
into a heap of clay.
Ariel Sharon is not a rabbi and the Kabbalah is a
closed book to him. But he has created a Golem: the
settlement movement in the occupied territories.
He was sure that the Golem would serve him. After all,
the settlers owe him everything. It was he who nursed
them for decades, diverted funding to them on a massive
scale, put at their service all the political positions
he occupied one after the other: the ministries of
agriculture, defense, foreign affairs, housing,
industry and trade, infrastructure, and, finally, the
Prime Minister's office.
(I remember about 25 years ago, visiting Sharon at home
in the preparation of a biographical essay I was
writing about him. My wife and I were sitting in the
kitchen with Lilly Sharon, who served us her
delicacies, when I noticed that the chiefs of the
settlers were sitting in the adjoining room. Sharon
himself went back and forth between us, sharing his
time with us equally. Even at that early stage the
settlers clearly treated him as their patron.)
During all these years, ever since he served as the
Commanding General of the Southern Sector in the early
70s, he preached to everybody he met, Israelis and
foreigners alike, the gospel of the settlements,
spreading maps in front of them (he always has maps)
and demanding that they act. According to him, it was
vitally important to set up settlements in order to
turn all of Eretz Israel - from the Mediterranean Sea
to the Jordan River, at least - into a Jewish State, to
tear the Palestinian territories into ribbons and
prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, which
would be an obstacle to the achievements of the full
aims of Zionism.
Like a bulldozer without brakes, Sharon leveled all
opposition. He saw to it that tens of billions of
dollars were turned over to the settlements (the exact
amount cannot be ascertained, being hidden in various
corners of the budget), bent the laws to their benefit
and enlisted the officers of the army in their service.
In this way, a closely woven network of settlements and
special roads came into being, with perhaps 250,000
settlers (who is counting?)
When he coined the slogan "unilateral disengagement",
it never occurred to him that the settlers might oppose
him. Don't they owe him? Are they not his pampered
children? Aren't they eternally in his debt?
Sharon offered them a deal that seemed to him eminently
reasonable (as it had once looked to Yossi Beilin, who
invented it, and then to Ehud Barak, who tried to
implement it): Give up the isolated settlements, with a
few tens of thousands of settlers, in order to secure
the future of the big settlement blocks, with 80% of
the settlers, which will be incorporated into Israel.
Sacrifice some fingers in order to save the whole body.
This way not only do we save the settlement enterprise,
but we also gain the better part of the West Bank.
But the Golem, once the piece of paper is under his
tongue, demonstrates a logic of his own. He does not
intend to give up the dozens of small settlements,
especially as that is were the hard core of Messianic
fanatics lives. He also understood that the evacuation
of the first settlement would create a precedent that
would endanger all the others. The real settlers may
have nothing but contempt for the Gush Katif
"settlers", who are first and foremost calculating
businessmen, but they understand the crucial importance
of the battle for Gush Katif.
Like the Maharal, Sharon underrated his Golem. He
treated him as a servant. How could he respect a
creature that he had created with his own hands? Now he
is learning that it is much easier to create a Golem
than to reverse the process.
In the surfeit of interviews that Sharon gave last
weekend, he declared that the settlers are only a small
minority of the people. And indeed, even according to
the settlers themselves, they constitute less than 4%
of the citizens of Israel. But the numbers do not
reflect their actual power. In a democratic society, a
small, fanatical and highly motivated minority can
influence matters more than a big but apathetic and
flabby majority.
Sharon speculated on the unpopularity of the settlers
in Israel. They are violent and unruly; they speak,
dress and behave differently, even their body-language
is different. The ordinary Israeli sees them as a
bizarre sect. Also, at long last is has dawned on the
Israelis that the settlements are devouring the
billions that are needed for Israel's economic and
social recovery.
But in the course of the decades, the settlers have set
up an extensive apparatus of control and propaganda.
Patiently, they have infiltrated the army, where they
now occupy the key positions once held by Kibbutzniks.
Their independent media are expanding, while the Left
has in the course of the years given up literally all
their independent media. The settlers are in possession
of huge funds, not only the money that flows to them
through hundreds of channels from the state coffers,
and not only the lavish donations from American Jewish
multi- millionaires, but also from the plentiful
resources of the American Christian evangelists.
One may well ask: what foolishness possessed Sharon,
when he proposed that the Likud members, of all people,
should decide on his plan? Did he not realize that this
is the only arena where the settlers can command
superior forces?
Why? As usual with victory-drunk generals: out of sheer
arrogance and contempt for the opponent. At the
pinnacle of political power, he disparaged the
settlers. He did not dream of the mass home visits. He
underrated their emotional appeal and their well-oiled
logistic machine, that was created with the money of
the state.
Most of the settlers constitute a disciplined body.
Like any messianic sect, they unquestioningly obey
their commanders, the "Yesha rabbis" (Yesha is the
Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza.) This is a
totalitarian structure, in the true sense of the term:
total faith, total organization, total discipline.
"My head supports the Sharon plan, but my heart
supports the settlers," a Likud member confessed. That
is quite natural: when a settler pair with attached
baby (there is always a baby attached!) knocks at the
door and asks: "Do you want to evict us from our home?"
- how can he resist? After all, from the day he was
born he has heard that the national aim is to possess
the whole of Eretz Israel, that the settlers are the
salt of the earth, that one can ignore the rest of the
world - and suddenly this man, Sharon, comes and says
the opposite?
Yet it must be remembered that less than 2% of the
Israeli electorate voted against the Sharon plan in
this party referendum. (In the last elections, the
Likud received less than 30% of the votes. Less then a
quarter of these are Likud members, who were entitled
to take part in the referendum. Of these, less than
half did actually vote, and of these, less than 60%
voted against the plan. These, together with the
settlers who are not Likud members, compose the Golem.)
One good thing has come from this referendum: suddenly
the public has woken up and seen the Golem that has
come to life in their midst. >From the first moment,
the writing was on the wall: the settler movement is
sucking the marrow from the state, it is an obstacle to
peace, it is a danger to Israeli democracy and to the
future of the state itself. Now the general public,
too, sees the danger represented by this rampaging
Golem.
It is not too late to remove the piece of paper from
beneath the Golem's tongue. Not yet! ~~~

On Thu, 6 May 2004 09:46:14 +0200, AP wrote:
Per chi avesse interesse nella materia e difficolta' con l'inglese, saro'
ben felice di offrire una traduzione casalinga, anche in email.