Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: un po' di ripasso di storia non fa male

ABOUT THE SOFT AND THE DELICATE By Amos Oz
http://www.counterpunch.org/pipermail/counterpunch-list/2001-September/013054.html
(interview with Ariel Sharon published in the Israeli daily
Davar Dec. 17, 1982)
"You can call me anything you like. Call me a monster or a
murderer. Just note that I don't hate Arabs. On the
contrary. Personally, I am much more at east with them, and
especially with the Bedouin, than with Jews. Those Arabs we
haven't yet spoilt are proud people, they are irrational,
cruel and generous. It's the Yids that are all twisted. In
order to straighten them out you have to first bend them
sharply the other way. That, in brief, is my whole ideology.
"Call Israel by any name you like, call it a Judeo-Nazi
state as does Leibowitz. Why not? Better a live Judeo-Nazi
than a dead saint. I don't care whether I am like Ghadafi. I
am not after the admiration of the gentiles. I don't need
their love. I don't need to be loved by Jews like you
either. I have to live, and I intend to ensure that my
children will live as well. With or without the blessing of
the Pope and the other religious leaders from the New York
Times. I will destroy anyone who will raise a hand against
my children, I will destroy him and his children, with or
without our famous purity of arms. I don't care if he is
Christian, Muslim, Jewish or pagan. History teaches us that
he who won't kill will be killed by others. That is an iron
law.
"Even if you'll prove to me by mathematical means that the
present war in Lebanon is a dirty immoral war, I don't care.
Moreover, even if you will prove to me that we have not
achieved and will not achieve any of our aims in Lebanon,
that we will neither create a friendly regime in Lebanon nor
destroy the Syrians or even the PLO, even then I don't care.
It was still worth it. Even if Galilee is shelled again by
Katyushas in a year's time, I don't really care. We shall
start another war, kill and destroy more and more, until
they will have had enough. And do you know why it is all
worth it? Because it seems that this war has made us more
unpopular among the so-called civilised world.
"We'll hear no more of that nonsense about the unique Jewish
morality, the moral lessons of the holocaust or about the
Jews who were supposed to have emerged from the gas chambers
pure and virtuous. No more of that. The destruction of Eyn
Hilwe (and it's a pity we did not wipe out that hornet's
nest completely!), the healthy bombardment of Beirut and
that tiny massacre (can you call 500 Arabs a massacre?) in
their camps which we should have committed with our own
delicate hands rather than let the Phalangists do it, all
these good deeds finally killed the bullshit talk about a
unique people and of being a light upon the nations. No more
uniqueness and no more sweetness and light. Good riddance."
"I personally don't want to be any better than Khomeini or
Brezhnev or Ghadafi or Assad or Mrs. Thatcher, or even Harry
Truman who killed half a million Japanese with two fine
bombs. I only want to be smarter than they are, quicker and
more efficient, not better or more beautiful than they are.
Tell me, do the baddies of this world have a bad time? If
anyone tries to touch them, the evil men cut his hands and
legs off. They hunt and catch whatever they feel like
eating. They don't suffer from indigestion and are not
punished by Heaven. I want Israel to join that club. Maybe
the world will then at last begin to fear me instead of
feeling sorry for me. Maybe they will start to tremble, to
fear my madness instead of admiring my nobility. Thank god
for that. Let them tremble, let them call us a mad state.
Let them understand that we are a wild country, dangerous to
our surroundings, not normal, that we might go crazy if one
of our children is murdered - just one! That we might go
wild and burn all the oil fields in the Middle East! If
anything would happen to your child, god forbid, you would
talk like I do. Let them be aware in Washington, Moscow,
Damascus and China that if one of our ambassadors is shot,
or even a consul or the most junior embassy official, we
might start World War Three just like that !" ......We are
talking while sitting on the balcony of the pretty country
house belonging to C. which is situated in a prosperous
Moshav. To the west we see a burning sunset and there is a
scent of fruit trees in the air. We are being served iced
coffee in tall glasses. C. is about fifty years old. He is a
man well known for his (military) actions. He is a strong,
heavy figure wearing shorts but no shirt. His body is tanned
a metallic bronze shade, the colour of a blond man living in
the sun. He puts his hairy legs on the table and his hands
on the chair. There is a scar on his neck. His eyes wander
over his plantations. He spells out his ideology in a voice
made hoarse by too much smoking:
"Let me tell me [sic] what is the most important thing, the
sweetest fruit of the war in Lebanon: It is that now they
don't just hate Israel. Thanks to us, they now also hate all
those Feinschmecker Jews in Paris, London, New York,
Frankfurt and Montreal, in all their holes. At last they
hate all these nice Yids, who say they are different from
us, that they are not Israeli thugs, that they are different
Jews, clean and decent. Just like the assimilated Jew in
Vienna and Berlin begged the anti-Semite not to confuse him
with the screaming, stinking Ostjude, who had smuggled
himself into that cultural environment out of the dirty
ghettos of Ukraine and Poland. It won't help them, those
clean Yids, just as it did not help them in Vienna and
Berlin. Let them shout that they condemn Israel, that they
are all right, that they did not want and don't want to hurt
a fly, that they always prefer being slaughtered to
fighting, that they have taken it upon themselves to teach
the gentiles how to be good Christians by always turning the
other cheek. It won't do them any good. Now they are getting
it there because of us, and I am telling you, it is a
pleasure to watch.
"They are the same Yids who persuaded the gentiles to
capitulate to the bastards in Vietnam, to give it in to
Khomeini, to Brezhnev, to feel sorry for Sheikh Yamani
because of his tough childhood, to make love not war. Or
rather, to do neither, and instead write a thesis on love
and war. We are through with all that. The Yid has been
rejected, not only did he crucify Jesus, but he also
crucified Arafat in Sabra and Shatila. They are being
identified with us and that's a good thing! Their cemeteries
are being desecrated, their synagogues are set on fire, all
their old nicknames are being revived, they are being
expelled from the best clubs, people shoot into their ethnic
restaurants murdering small children, forcing them to remove
any sign showing them to be Jews, forcing them to move and
change their profession.
"Soon their palaces will be smeared with the slogan: Yids,
go to Palestine! And you know what? They will go to
Palestine because they will have no other choice! All this
is a bonus we received from the Lebanese war. Tell me,
wasn't it worth it?
"Soon we will hit on good times. The Jews will start
arriving, the Israelis will stop emigrating and those who
already emigrated will
return. Those who had chosen assimilation will finally
understand that it won't help them to try and be the
conscience of the world. The 'conscience of the world' will
have to understand through its arse what it could not get
into its head. The gentiles have always felt sick of the
Yids and their conscience, and now the Yids will have only
one option: to come home, all of them, fast, to install
thick steel doors, to build a strong fence, to have
submachine guns positioned at every corner of their fence
here and to fight like devils against anyone who dares to
make a sound in this region. And if anyone even raises his
hand against us we'll take away half his land and burn the
other half, including the oil. We might use nuclear arms.
We'll go on until he no longer feels like it...
"...You probably want to know whether I am not afraid of the
masses of Yids coming here to escape anti-semitism smearing
us with their olive oil until we go all soft like them.
Listen, history is funny in that way, there is a dialectic
here, irony. Who was it who expanded the state of Israel
almost up the boundaries of the kingdom of King David? Who
expanded the state until it covered the area from Mount
Hermon to Raz Muhammad? Levi Eshkol. Of all people, it was
that follower of Gordon, that softie, that old woman. Who,
on the other hand, is about to push us back into the walls
of the ghetto? Who gave up all of Sinai in order to retain a
civilised image? Beitar's governor in Poland, that proud man
Menahem Begin. So you can never tell. I only know one thing
for sure: as long as you are fighting for your life all is
permitted, even to drive out all the Arabs from the West
Bank, everything.
"Leibowitz is right, we are Judeo-Nazis, and why not?
Listen, a people that gave itself up to be slaughtered, a
people that let soap to be made of its children and lamp
shades from the skin of its women is a worse criminal than
its murderers. Worse than the Nazis...If your nice civilised
parents had come here in time instead of writing books about
the love for humanity and singing Hear O Israel on the way
to the gas chambers, now don't be shocked, if they instead
had killed six million Arabs here or even one million, what
would have happened? Sure, two or three nasty pages would
have been written in the history books, we would have been
called all sorts of names, but we could be here today as a
people of 25 million!
"Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work
for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport
them, to expel and burn them, to have everyone hate us, to
pull the rug from underneath the feet of the Diaspora Jews,
so that they will be forced to run to us crying. Even if it
means blowing up one or two synagogues here and there, I
don't care. And I don't mind if after the job is done you
put me in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for
life. Hang me if you want, as a war criminal. Then you can
spruce up your Jewish conscience and enter the respectable
club of civilised nations, nations that are large and
healthy. What you lot don't understand is that the dirty
work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it. True, it
could have been finished in 1948, but you interfered, you
stopped it. And all this because of the Jewishness in your
souls, because of your Diaspora mentality. For the Jews
don't grasp things quickly. If you open your eyes and look
around the world you will see that darkness is falling
again. And we know what happens to a Jew who stays out in
the dark. So I am glad that this small war in Lebanon
frightened the Yids. Let them be afraid, let them suffer.
They should hurry home before it gets really dark. So I am
an anti-Semite ? Fine. So don't quote me, quote Lilienblum
instead [an early Russian Zionist - ed.]. There is no need
to quote an anti-Semite. Quote Lilienblum, and he is
definitely not an anti-Semite, there is even a street in Tel
Aviv named after him. (C. quotes from a small notebook that
was lying on his table when I arrived:) 'Is all that is
happening not a clear sign that our forefathers and
ourselves...wanted and still want to be disgraced? That we
enjoy living like gypsies.' That's Lilienblum. Not me.
Believe me. I went through the Zionist literature, I can
prove what I say.
"And you can write that I am disgrace to humanity, I don't
mind, on the contrary. Let's make a deal: I will do all I
can to expel the Arabs from here, I will do all I can to
increase anti-semitism, and you will write poems and essays
about the misery of the Arabs and be prepared to absorb the
Yids I will force to flee to this country and teach them to
be a light unto the gentiles. How about it ?"
It was there that I stopped C.'s monologue for a moment and
expressed the thought passing through my mind, perhaps more
for myself than for my host. Was it possible that Hitler had
not only hurt the Jews but also poisoned their minds? Had
that poison sunk in and was still active? But not even that
idea could cause C. to protest or raise his voice. After
all, he said to have never shouted under stress, even during
the famous operations his name is associated with..."
--------------------------------------------------------
La libertà è libertà di dire che due più due fa quattro.
Concessa questa libertà, tutte le altre ne seguono.
George Orwell, 1984

 Davar Dec. 17, 1982)
varra' forse la pena di ricordare che nella ricostruzione che fa Benny
Morris in "Vittime" della guerra israeliana in Libano dell'82-85, la piu'
impopolare (Gush Shalom mi sembra nasca poprio come reazione a quella
guerra, cosi' come in quella guerra per la prima volta ufficiali dell'IDF
chiedono di essere esonerati dal comando) e la piu' inutile delle guerre
israeliane, tale guerra viene presentata come frutto quasi esclusivamente
della volonta' del premier Begin e del ministro della difesa Sharon, che,
se la ricostruzione di Morris e' esatta, mentirono ripetutamente (o
nascosero fatti essenziali) al gabinetto di governo e alla knesset per
potere portare avanti la loro operazione. Almeno Sharon ai tempi pago' le
sue colpe con l'allontanemento dall'incarico di ministro della difesa, in
seguito ai risultati della commisiione Kahan.
Giusto per dire che non e' che Sharon nell'82 rappresentasse pienamente il
pensiero del suo paese.
Ciao,
  Luca
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