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On Sunday 16 May, a day before the IDF launched its long-awaited, well-planned attack on the civilian population of Rafah, the Israeli chief of staff, Major-General Moshe (Boogey) Ya’alon said it was ‘almost the last chance’ for such an operation and that ‘special conditions were in place’ for an imminent attack. By ‘special conditions’, of course, he meant the public desire for revenge following the deaths of 13 soldiers in Gaza in the space of 48 hours. It was a convenient opportunity to start a war. But he also meant that sooner or later the Jewish settlements blocking Rafah’s access to its beach would be evacuated, so there was no choice but to destroy as much of Rafah as possible, and as soon as possible.

José Saramago, visiting Israel in March 2002, before the invasion in which Israel reoccupied the territories, said that Israel had two problems. The first, he said, is that the settlements need the army. Everyone agreed. The second is that the army needs the settlements. Nobody agreed. Nobody even listened. Yet Ya’alon knows that without the settlements he would have no excuse for patrolling the Gaza strip. Do Israelis understand the military’s motives? No. Many Israelis, probably the majority, would gladly turn their backs on the settlers. Not on the military, though. Therefore, the whole political campaign against the extreme right is futile. Behind the extreme right lurks the ‘moderate army’, and the army is the one player in Israeli society whose motives are never questioned.

Israeli militarism is about Israel’s faith in this huge benevolent apparatus. The army is always described in terms of ‘our boys out there’, sons, lads, children, a poor, beleaguered David. That’s us, the eternal victims. And the enemy is always Goliath, even the children who defied the IDF in Rafah three days ago and therefore had to die while demonstrating, empty-handed, in solidarity with the thousands whom the benevolent military had thrown out of their shacks and houses.

That same Sunday, 16 May, before the lethal convoy left on its way to Rafah, was almost a euphoric day among more moderate Israelis. On Saturday night, 150,000 people rallied in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv to call for peace, more or less. It was the largest rally Israel had seen for many years. The main speaker at the demonstration was Shimon Peres, foreign minister in Sharon’s former government, a man for all seasons and suits. His excellent speech was broadcast live on Israeli TV, even on the state-owned channel, which has become almost a Likud station. Yet we shouldn’t be surprised at the favourable TV coverage, just as we shouldn’t be surprised that all three Israeli newspapers were very excited about the rally the following day, even Ma’ariv. ‘We are not the Left, we are the majority of the people,’ Peres declared. But that wasn’t what the rally was about. And it wasn’t about the IDF policy of daily killings: the strategy that ensures our war will never end. It was about the Gaza settlers and everyone’s opposition to them.

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Letters

Vol. 26 No. 12 · 24 June 2004

Criticising the Israeli military, and Israel’s mystique about it, is one thing; attacking the entire peace camp, and falsely representing it, as Yitzhak Laor does, is something else (LRB, 3 June). It is nihilism to heap scorn on the 150,000 Israelis who attended the 15 May peace rally in Tel Aviv. Yossi Beilin, the head of Israel’s new Socialist International affiliate, the Yahad Party, addressed the rally; there was nothing pro-Sharon in his speech, or in the political thrust of the event.

Ralph Seliger
New York

Vol. 26 No. 13 · 8 July 2004

I guess Ralph Seliger attended the 15 May rally in Tel Aviv (Letters, 24 June). Otherwise he wouldn’t invoke Yossi Beilin’s speech to counter my claim that the Zionist left does not criticise the IDF. He must have noticed that Beilin did not condemn even General Yom Tov Samya, who on the same stage called for the liquidation of Arafat. Nor could Seliger have missed the brutal attack on the large group from Anarchists against the Wall who were holding signs protesting against the IDF. They were beaten up and their signs torn down, not by the police but by peace camp activists. My point is not the integrity of Beilin or his supporters, but their inability to become an opposition and to criticise the IDF. Without that, their efforts are nihil.

Yitzhak Laor
Tel Aviv

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