State of denial: Robert Fisk searches for peace in Israel

[Violet_Crumble]

Can peace in the Middle East be achieved while both Israelis and Palestinians refuse to give ground? Robert Fisk takes a road trip through a divided land, from Ben-Gurion's Tel Aviv villa to Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the besieged Gaza Strip.

There are no armed guards on the gate of Number 17 Ben-Gurion Boulevard in Tel Aviv, just a tired, two-storey villa set back from the street and an open door that leads to a dark kitchen and a little room with a cot on the floor.


There are bricks over the window above the neat little bed – to protect its owner and his wife Paula from Egyptian bombs during the 1956 Israeli invasion of Sinai, and the 1967 war – but upstairs is the bejewelled centre of this little home, David Ben- Gurion's library of 20,000 books. I pad through this den, scribbling in my notebook any clues to the mind of this most persuasive of Israeli leaders. Most of the books are in Hebrew – on religion, histories of the Zionist movement, research on Eretz Israel – but the creator of Israel and its first prime minister was also a linguist. There are Demosthenes and Homer in Greek, a three-volume history of the Hellenistic world, Julius Caesar in French, Duff Cooper's life of Tallyrand, George Bernard Shaw's complete works, a history of Vichy France, Henry Picker's Hitler's Table Talk (in English), Freud on psychology (in German), Guy Chapman's The Dreyfus Case, histories of Israel (including his own), a series on Jewish Influences on Christian Reform Movements. Ben-Gurion learned Spanish so that he could read a new biography of Cervantes. He loved Spinoza.

Then there are the photographs. Ben-Gurion with de Gaulle, with Kennedy and with a sad and debilitated Churchill, in 1961. Ben-Gurion wanted to read Churchill's almost forgotten essay on Moses; Churchill's letter to him, enclosing a copy of Thoughts and Adventures, is a little classic. "I have re-read it," Churchill wrote, "...and I would not particularly wish it to be remembered as one of my literary works."


But it was the set of Ben-Gurion's quotations that caught my eye: statements on the eternal morality of the State of Israel, messages from the great man – who physically was a very little man (I opened his bedroom cupboard and there were jackets and trousers of almost midget size) – in time of war. Here is Ben-Gurion, for example, during Israel's War of Independence – the Palestinian Arab 'Nakba' – when he feared that Jewish forces would destroy Muslim holy places in Jerusalem, cabling on 15 July 1948. "Further to my previous order relating to the Old City – you should see to it that the special force to be appointed for guarding the Old City uses mercilessly machine-guns against any Jew, and especially any Jewish soldier, who will try to pillage or to desecrate any Christian or Moslim holy place." In 1967, he was boasting of how, during the establishment of the state of Israel, "we did not damage any single mosque." Yet he was already creating myths. The undamaged mosques, he wrote in the same statement, were found in villages "without a single Moslem, as all of them had already fled during the Mandatory rule and before the declaration of the State..." Amid the detritus of Ben-Gurion's life, his thick-framed spectacles, his Quink fountain pen ink ("permanent black"), the willow-pattern plates, the original 1951 Marc Chagall sketch of a rabbi with a harp, the old transistor radio in the shelter – we shall forget the elephant tusk from the president of Gabon – there are musings on the morality and nobility and purity of arms of Israel's army. "The fate of Israel depends on two factors: her strength and her rectitude." And again. "The State of Israel will not be tried by its riches, army or techniques, but by its moral image and human values."

During the blood-soaked Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, an event which marked the decline of that rectitude and moral image, a wonderful Doonesbury cartoon depicted a press conference in which an anonymous voice asked an Israeli spokesman: "What has become of the Israel we knew and loved?" And the immediate rejoinder to the questioner? "Come off it, Yasser!" For in a sense, the lugubrious Arafat did adhere to Ben-Gurion's myth-making. In the end, he even signed up for peace with the state which had already taken 78 per cent of the land he called home. He was a super-terrorist who became a super-statesman and then – after refusing to submit at the final Camp David meeting – became a super-terrorist again.

The truth is that Israel has destroyed many mosques, that the original Palestinian Arab victims of the 1947-8 war did not all flee, as Ben-Gurion suggested; many, like the doomed men and women of the Deir Yassin massacre, were murdered in their villages. The Israeli army, to some of us who have watched it in action, is a rabble, little different from the Arab armies of the Middle East. The numbers of civilian dead in the Gaza war were as much an outrage as the Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1982 when Israeli soldiers watched – quite literally – as the Lebanese militia they had sent into the refugee camps eviscerated the Palestinian civilians inside. Foreign journalists continue to prattle on about the supposed purity of Israel's soldiers.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/state-of-denial-robert-fisk-searches-for-peace-in-israel-1895568.html

[Douglas Carpenter]

1. a long and depressing article - but still worth the read

[Tripmann]

2. Good article VC, cheers