Today, like every two weeks, I drove peace activists to the military check-points of the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories. I saw an officer put tight handcuffs on a taxi driver because he failed to obey the soldiers' order to park here and not there. "We told him a thousand times" the soldiers said.
The man was lying on the ground in the worst heat of the summer, thirsty, for hours on end. His friend was luckier: He had to stand on his feet, in a cell, without handcuffs. What pushes these young Israeli boys to play the rôle of supreme judges until they lose all judgment? In my opinion it is the Grand Zionist Narrative which serves as a collective conscience to the whole Israeli society, explicitly as well as implicitly. This grand narrative is the system of values that makes us belong to this particular collective.
This is the system that dictates the relationships between us and the Palestinians. How else can one explain young people who were educated to love their neighbour as they love themselves killing their neighbours, destroying their educational institutions, their libraries and their hospitals, for no apparent reason other than their being neighbours? The only explanation is that their minds are infected by parents, teachers and leaders, who convince them that the others are not as human as we are, and therefore killing them is not real killing; it has other legitimating names such as "cleansing" "purifying", "punishment", "operation","mission", "campaign" and "war".
Although I speak about Israeli boys this is not an Israeli affair because, as you know, the epidemic is worldwide. My nephew, Doroni, 7 years old, who lives in the US, came home on Halloween day and said he wanted to be a soldier, and then to go to Iraq and save America. How many American young men, ignorant as he is of the absurdity of this statement, actually went to Iraq and died there without knowing why, but with the words "save America" on their lips? The question is, how were these false values imprinted on their minds and how can they be erased?
The human psyche, says Dawkins, has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. We all suffer because of labels, but only those of us who died because of labels have realized that the way to fight labels is to refuse labels.
The way to defeat false value systems is to expose them. The viruses of the mind are only partially weakened by young people like Tal and other Israeli refusniks such as 'Combatants for Peace'. But most of our mind infected children would not be free of the grip of those viruses until they find their final rest in the evergrowing, underground kingdom of dead children . Only there will they realize that is doesn't matter whether their head was bare or not in a synagogue or a church or a mosque, whether they were circumcised or not, whether they pronounced forbidden words, ate pig or cow or whether they had a hot chocolate after their salami pizza just before they were blown up by someone who didn't. Israeli, American, English, Italian mothers raise their children with all the love and care in order to sacrifice them to the god of death, as if their uterus is a national or rather an international asset. and fathers urge their children to commit themselves to armies those interests have nothing to do with defense. And when these children die for the profits of somebody else their parents bear it with dignity and pride, as they were taught, put their dead children's photographs on the mantelpiece and sigh: He was so handsome in uniform. It is time to tell these parents that no-one is andsome in the uniform of brutality. It is time to tell them uniforms and ranks and medals have become ugly. Tell them their dignity and pride are misplaced.
It is time to tell Jewish people that the only way to discourage anti-Semitism is by condemning the only government in the world who deliberately sends young Jewish boys and girls to their certain death and who persecutes to the point of genocide a whole Semitic nation, explain to them that it is the Jewish government and the actions of its army, not some primordial hatred for the Jewish race, which are the reasons for the invention of the new sign we often see in pro-Palestinian demonstration, where the Star of David is equated with the swastika.
It is a terribly hard task for people who were educated in Israel or in the USA or in any other 'western' 'democratic' country, to admit we were raised on false racist values. On heterophobia. The only thing that can enhance such a change of spirit is the constant image of the mutilated small bodies of the victims of these values.
Tomorrow is Yom Kippur, the holiest day for the Jews. On this day people are required to ask forgiveness. Not to forgive but to try and be forgiven. I would like to quote one stanza from a poem written by the late Hanoh Levin, one of Israel's greatest playwrights, in the 1970s:
Dear Father, when you stand on my grave
Old and tired and very lonely,
And you see how they burry me in the ground -
Ask me to forgive you my father.
We must all ask our children's forgiveness for not being more alert, for not fighting hard enough to keep our promises for a better world, for not refusing the evil viruses before and for letting them be the victims of the horrible, mental infection we are all suffering from, to look at their innocent, astonished, disillusioned small faces and ask ourselves: why does that streak of blood rip the petal of their cheek???
The man was lying on the ground in the worst heat of the summer, thirsty, for hours on end. His friend was luckier: He had to stand on his feet, in a cell, without handcuffs. What pushes these young Israeli boys to play the rôle of supreme judges until they lose all judgment? In my opinion it is the Grand Zionist Narrative which serves as a collective conscience to the whole Israeli society, explicitly as well as implicitly. This grand narrative is the system of values that makes us belong to this particular collective.
This is the system that dictates the relationships between us and the Palestinians. How else can one explain young people who were educated to love their neighbour as they love themselves killing their neighbours, destroying their educational institutions, their libraries and their hospitals, for no apparent reason other than their being neighbours? The only explanation is that their minds are infected by parents, teachers and leaders, who convince them that the others are not as human as we are, and therefore killing them is not real killing; it has other legitimating names such as "cleansing" "purifying", "punishment", "operation","mission", "campaign" and "war".
Although I speak about Israeli boys this is not an Israeli affair because, as you know, the epidemic is worldwide. My nephew, Doroni, 7 years old, who lives in the US, came home on Halloween day and said he wanted to be a soldier, and then to go to Iraq and save America. How many American young men, ignorant as he is of the absurdity of this statement, actually went to Iraq and died there without knowing why, but with the words "save America" on their lips? The question is, how were these false values imprinted on their minds and how can they be erased?
The way to defeat false value systems is to expose them. The viruses of the mind are only partially weakened by young people like Tal and other Israeli refusniks such as 'Combatants for Peace'. But most of our mind infected children would not be free of the grip of those viruses until they find their final rest in the evergrowing, underground kingdom of dead children . Only there will they realize that is doesn't matter whether their head was bare or not in a synagogue or a church or a mosque, whether they were circumcised or not, whether they pronounced forbidden words, ate pig or cow or whether they had a hot chocolate after their salami pizza just before they were blown up by someone who didn't. Israeli, American, English, Italian mothers raise their children with all the love and care in order to sacrifice them to the god of death, as if their uterus is a national or rather an international asset. and fathers urge their children to commit themselves to armies those interests have nothing to do with defense. And when these children die for the profits of somebody else their parents bear it with dignity and pride, as they were taught, put their dead children's photographs on the mantelpiece and sigh: He was so handsome in uniform. It is time to tell these parents that no-one is andsome in the uniform of brutality. It is time to tell them uniforms and ranks and medals have become ugly. Tell them their dignity and pride are misplaced.
It is time to tell Jewish people that the only way to discourage anti-Semitism is by condemning the only government in the world who deliberately sends young Jewish boys and girls to their certain death and who persecutes to the point of genocide a whole Semitic nation, explain to them that it is the Jewish government and the actions of its army, not some primordial hatred for the Jewish race, which are the reasons for the invention of the new sign we often see in pro-Palestinian demonstration, where the Star of David is equated with the swastika.
It is a terribly hard task for people who were educated in Israel or in the USA or in any other 'western' 'democratic' country, to admit we were raised on false racist values. On heterophobia. The only thing that can enhance such a change of spirit is the constant image of the mutilated small bodies of the victims of these values.
Tomorrow is Yom Kippur, the holiest day for the Jews. On this day people are required to ask forgiveness. Not to forgive but to try and be forgiven. I would like to quote one stanza from a poem written by the late Hanoh Levin, one of Israel's greatest playwrights, in the 1970s:
Dear Father, when you stand on my grave
Old and tired and very lonely,
And you see how they burry me in the ground -
Ask me to forgive you my father.
We must all ask our children's forgiveness for not being more alert, for not fighting hard enough to keep our promises for a better world, for not refusing the evil viruses before and for letting them be the victims of the horrible, mental infection we are all suffering from, to look at their innocent, astonished, disillusioned small faces and ask ourselves: why does that streak of blood rip the petal of their cheek???
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