der semitische antisemit ? teil 1

Avnery 1967, Donnerstag, 04. Dezember 2003, 21:53 (vor 7825 Tagen) @ Ishah

Review: Holy War

The New York Review of Books: Volume 9, Number 2

August 3, 1967

except:

The suggestion that Israel abandon its
supra-nationalist dream finds its only echo on the
other side of this collection of essays in
Israel´s No. 1 maverick and champion of Arab
rights, Uri Avnery. Avnery was born in Germany in
1923 and went to Palestine at the age of ten, the
year Hitler took power. He began his political
career on the far nationalist right, as a member
of the Irgun terrorist group in the struggle
against the British, but has since swung over to
the far left of Israeli opinion, to the point
where he is considered anti-nationalist. In the
wake of the first Suez war, he supported the
Egyptian demand for evacuation of the Canal Zone
and in 1959 he formed an Israeli committee to aid
the Algerian rebels. At one time he organized a
movement which asserted that the Israelis were no
longer Jews but "Canaanites" and therefore one
with the Arabs, forcibly converted remnants of the
same indigenous stock. When this far-out
conception attracted few Jews and even fewer
Canaanites, he formed a "Semitic Action" movement
which has now become "the Movement of New Forces."
This polled 1.2 percent of the vote in the 1965
elections and by virtue of proportional
representation put Avnery into Parliament. Avnery
has been more successful as a publisher. He has
made his weekly Haolam Hazeh ("This World") the
largest in Israel by combining non-conformist
politics with what the rather puritanical Israelis
call pornography, though that weekly´s girlie
pictures would seem as old-fashioned as the Police
Gazette in America.

Avnery writes in Les Temps Modernes (Paris, 991
pp., 20f. - juin 1967) that he would turn Israel
into a secular, pluralist, and multi-national
state. He would abolish the Law of Return which
gives every Jew the right to enter Israel and
automatically become a citizen. Avnery says this
pan-Judaism of Zionism feeds the anti-Zionism of
pan-Arabism by keeping alive "the myth of an
Israel submerged by millions of immigrants who,
finding no place to settle, would oblige the
government to expand the country by force of
arms."

Yet Avnery, who asks Israel to give up its Zionist
essence, turns out to be a Jewish nationalist,
too. After sketching out a plan for an Arab
Palestinian state west of the Jordan, Avnery
writes, "The Arabic reader will justly ask at this
point, ´And the return of Israel to the limits of
the UN plan of 1947?´ " Since Israel in the
1947-48 fighting seized about 23 percent more
territory than was allotted to it in the 1947
partition plan, this implies a modification of
frontiers in favor of the Arab state which was
supposed to be linked with it in an economically
united Palestine. But to this natural Arab
question Avnery replies,

Avnery was writing, of course, before the new
outbreak of warfare had again changed these
borders to Israel´s advantage.