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The anniversary of the Gaza Carnage by Israel’s murderers is in one week! We shall not forget!
For those who were taken in by the Israeli attacks on the Swedish journalist who exposed organ harvesting in Israel, when Netanyahu demanded to put him on trial as an antisemite, you will be interested to read the evidence from the Horse’s Mouth – the ex-head of the Pasthological Service in Tel Aviv, which includes a full admission, and back up the accusations made…
Doctor admits Israeli pathologists harvested organs without consent: The Guardian
Israel has admitted pathologists harvested organs from dead Palestinians, and others, without the consent of their families – a practice it said ended in the 1990s – it emerged at the weekend.
The admission, by the former head of the country’s forensic institute, followed a furious row prompted by a Swedish newspaper reporting that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to use their organs – a charge that Israel denied and called “antisemitic”.
The revelation, in a television documentary, is likely to generate anger in the Arab and Muslim world and reinforce sinister stereotypes of Israel and its attitude to Palestinians. Iran’s state-run Press TV tonight reported the story, illustrated with photographs of dead or badly injured Palestinians.
Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab MP, said the report incriminated the Israeli army.
The story emerged in an interview with Dr Yehuda Hiss, former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic who released it because of the row between Israel and Sweden over a report in the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet.
Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.
The Israeli military confirmed to the programme that the practice took place, but added: “This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer.”
Hiss said: “We started to harvest corneas … whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.”
However, there was no evidence that Israel had killed Palestinians to take their organs, as the Swedish paper reported. Aftonbladet quoted Palestinians as saying young men from the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israeli forces and their bodies returned to their families with missing organs. The interview with Hiss was released by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley who had conducted a study of Abu Kabir.
She was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that while Palestinians were “by a long shot” not the only ones affected, she felt the interview must be made public, because “the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, [is] something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered.”
Israel demanded that Sweden condemn the Aftonbladet article, calling it an antisemitic “blood libel”. Stockholm refused, saying that to so would violate freedom of speech in the country. The foreign minister then cancelled a visit to Israel, just as Sweden was taking over the EU’s rotating presidency.
Hiss was removed from his post in 2004, when some details about organ harvesting were first reported, but he still works at the forensic institute.
Israel’s health ministry said all harvesting was now done with permission. “The guidelines at that time were not clear,” it said in a statement to Channel 2. “For the last 10 years, Abu Kabir has been working according to ethics and Jewish law.”
• This article was amended on 21 December 2009. The original misspelled a name as Nancy Sheppard-Hughes. This has been corrected.
Graphic novel on ‘Israeli massacres’ in Gaza to be released: Ha’aretz
Fans say graphic novelist Joe Sacco has set new standards for the use of the comic book as a documentary medium. Detractors say his portrayals of the Palestinian conflict are filled with distortion, bias and hyperbole.
One thing is certain – the award-winning author of “Palestine” leaves few readers indifferent.
Sacco’s work has more in common with gonzo journalism than your Sunday comic strip: He travels to the world’s hot spots from Iraq to Gaza to Sarajevo, immerses himself in the lives of ordinary people, and sets out to depict their harsh realities – in unflinching ink and paper.
One of his biggest supporters is award-winning Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman, who directed the 2008 Golden Globe winning cartoon ocumentary “Waltz for Bashir.”
“Whenever I’m asked about animation that influences me, I would say it’s more graphic novels. A tremendous influence on me has been Sacco’s ‘Palestine,’ his work on Bosnia and then Art peigelman’s ‘Maus,'” he said in a telephone interview.
“His work quite simply reflects reality.”
The American-Maltese artist’s latest book, “Footnotes in Gaza,” chronicles two episodes in 1956 in which a U.N. report filed Dec. 15, 1956 says a total of 386 civilians were shot dead by Israeli soldiers – events Sacco said have been “virtually airbrushed from history because they have been ignored by the mainstream media.”
Israeli historians dispute these figures.
“It’s a big exaggeration,” said Meir Pail, a leading Israeli military historian and leftist politician. “There was never a killing of such a degree. Nobody was murdered. I was there. I don’t know of any massacre.”
Sacco’s passion for the Palestinian cause has opened him up to accusations of bias.
Jose Alaniz, from the University of Washington’s Department of Comparative Literature, said Sacco uses “all sorts of subtle ways” to manipulate the reader.
“Very often he will pick angles in his art work that favor the perspective of the victim: He’ll draw Israeli soldiers or settlers from a low perspective to make them more menacing and towering.”
Alaniz also said Sacco draws children “in such a way to make them seem more victimized.”
Sacco himself admits he takes sides.
“I don’t believe in objectivity as it’s practiced in American journalism. I’m not anti-Israeli … It’s just I very much believe in getting across the Palestinian point of view,” he said.
In “Palestine,” which won the 1996 National Book Award, Sacco reported on the lives of West Bank and Gaza inhabitants in the early 1990s. “Safe Area Gorazde,” which won the 2001 Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel, describes his experiences in Bosnia in 1995-96.
Sacco has been lauded by Edward Said, the renowned literary scholar and Palestinian rights spokesman, who said in his foreword to “Palestine”: “With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco.”
“Footnotes” – to be released in the United States on Tuesday – sees Sacco’s cartoon self, with the now trademark nondescript owlishly bespectacled eyes, plunge into the squalid trash-strewn, raw concrete alleys of Rafah, and its neighboring town of Khan Younis.
Sacco draws crowded narrow streets, full of prying schoolchildren and unemployed men. His desperate characters – fugitives, widows and sheiks – mix long past fact with fiction.
“What I show in the book is that this massacre is just one element of Palestinian history … and that people are confused about which event, what year they are talking about,” he said.
“Palestinians never seem to have had the luxury of digesting one tragedy before the next is upon them.”
Sacco said in doing so he is trying to create a balance to what he calls the United States’ pro-Israeli bias.
A scene in “Palestine” shows an Israeli woman asking: “Shouldn’t you be seeing our side of the story?” Sacco’s cartoon self replies: “I’ve heard nothing but the Israeli side most of my life.”
Sacco says he puts himself into his comics because he wants his readers to see and feel what he does.
“I’m not pretending to be the all powerful, all knowing journalist god … I’m an individual who reacts to people who are sometimes afraid … On a human level, of course that colors the stories I’m telling.”
Folman, who both wrote and directed the 2008 animated documentary film about a 19-year-old Israeli soldier still troubled by nightmares about the Lebanon War, says Sacco has brought something rare to the cartoon genre.
“The way he illustrates says everything about the writing ? it’s so unique, there is nothing quite like him,” he explained.
“I really admire the guy … And I feel from his work that we share exactly the same opinions about what’s happening in the Middle East … The day will come when I will meet him and hopefully work with him.”
Few days ago we read about the Israeli police trying to execute a MacBook computer, so now they are trying to steal film awards from Palestinians… why not? It certainly a very quick and easy way of collecting film awards… if you think I invented this one, or that this is an especially bad film script, keep reading:
Arab filmmaker wins film award, Israel airline security nabs it: Ha’aretz
By Amira Hass
Thirty-five days after returning from Barcelona on a Sun D’Or flight, items belonging to documentary film director Sahera Dirbas, which Israeli security people had removed from her luggage and sent separately, were returned to her. Among them was a bronze figurine she had won at the International Euro-Arab Amal Film Festival in Spain for best documentary – awarded for her film “Stranger in My Home.”
The figurine was found and returned on Tuesday, six days after Haaretz requested a response from Sun D’Or regarding its whereabouts. Haaretz was informed that the prize had been found before the company alerted Dirbas.
The award-winning film directed by Dirbas, who was born in Haifa and lives in Jerusalem, has been screened at Israeli cinematheques and abroad. It was among eight films shown at the annual festival, which was held at the end of October. “Stranger in My Home” tells the story of five Jerusalemites, refugees from the 1948 war, who lost their homes in West Jerusalem, and a refugee from 1967 who was evacuated from his home in the Old City’s Mughrabi neighborhood.
On November 5, Dirbas made her way home from Spain via Barcelona. After answering questions from Israeli security employees regarding her work and the film festivals in which she had taken part, she was asked to enter a separate room for continued questioning, where a female security guard demanded she remove all her clothing. All of her belongings were taken out of her suitcase, and she was told that four items would be taken for additional examination and sent separately: two chargers for hard disks she had with her, a hair straightener and the bronze figurine. The examination took more than two hours.
When she arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport, she could not find the box with the separate items and filed the standard form for lost luggage. Four weeks later, on December 3, after her telephone inquiries went unanswered, Dirbas’ lawyer Reem Alhatib, submitted an official complaint to El Al (to which the security company was said to be connected) and a demand for compensation. In the letter of complaint, Alhatib linked the loss of the prize to a “discriminatory attitude and misuse of the security check to abuse, humiliate and hurt an Arab passenger.”
The two hard-disk chargers have yet to be returned to Dirbas.
Sun D’Or spokesman Ron Rahav released the following statement: “The security check was carried out by security personnel in Barcelona as it is carried out for all Israeli airlines, according to regular procedure as directed by the relevant state bodies. During the security check, items were indeed taken from Ms. Dirbas: two chargers, a hair straightener and a bronze figurine she won at a film festival. We apologize for the delay in returning the items to the passenger. The company made great efforts to locate them and indeed, after a careful search, the items were found in Israel and sent to the passenger by messenger. We regret the harsh feelings engendered as a result of the delay in locating the items, but at the same time, Sun D’Or is committed to the highest standard of security. We are in contact with the passenger and we will see to it that she is compensated.”
Dirbas told Haaretz that she had been offered a free ticket to Europe.
What next? Do not worry, they will come up with even better plots next week!
Are we like Sudan?: Ha’aretz
By Gideon Levy
No one in Israel wants to see Tzipi Livni in jail. It is also not pleasant to think that she and other senior Israeli officials can not travel to Europe. But the red warning lights from various parts of the world cautioning that eventually someone may be arrested should arouse a different response than our aggressive and blind one.
How did this happen to us? Livni is now unable to travel to Britain and a number of other countries, as if she were the president of Sudan. It is not (only) the world, it is (also) us. The arrest threat was issued by the most enlightened of nations. They did so when they became aware that Israel was not investigating itself. Is this not enough to rock Israeli society, to cause it to shine a light on itself instead of reprimanding half the globe?
The Foreign Ministry has turned into the Furor Ministry. But there is no reason to censure the British ambassador – his country has a separation of powers – just as there was no reason to censure some of his colleagues: We reproached the Turkish ambassador because of a TV series, we reprimanded the Swedish ambassador because of a newspaper article, and we rebuked Norway for marking the 150th birthday of its greatest writer.
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Israel does not see the ugly hump on its back. Instead of reproaching half the world, the time has come for us to take a look at ourselves: Maybe we’re making a mistake, too? How ridiculous a propagandist Israel’s ambassador to London Ron Prosor sounded when he said this week that Britain has a problem; he also mocked “the way Britain looks.” After all, despite these characteristically arrogant remarks, we’re the ones with the problem with the way Israel looks.
Not only is the whole world against us, we’re against the whole world – Israel is acting contrary to the standards of the new world. In his Nobel Prize speech this month in Oslo, U.S. President Barack Obama outlined three conditions for a just war: a last means of self-defense, the proportional use of force and refraining as far as possible from harming civilians. Even if there is disagreement over whether we met the first condition during Operation Cast Lead – which brought us arrest warrants and harsh reports – it’s hard to prove that the attack on Gaza met the other two criteria: our use of force was not proportional and we did not do enough to prevent harm to civilians.
Therefore the new world, justifiably, does not see Operation Cast Lead as a just war. Israel must internalize this. It cannot create separate standards for itself. There is no such thing as Israeli morals and international morals. There is only one morality of war, and it is represented in the international law that Israel is committed to. But time and again Israel breaks this law by establishing settlements and other acts of occupation, and by Operation Cast Lead.
The legal system in Britain is “distorted,” the Goldstone report “lies,” Amnesty International is “anti-Semitic” and Human Rights Watch is “hostile.” Even if we do accept these imaginary truths that we have automatically adopted, how is it that no suspicion creeps into our hearts that perhaps there is some truth to what our critics say? How is it that we accept the ruling of these international bodies about other countries – no one condemned Richard Goldstone in Yugoslavia or Rwanda, or Amnesty about Sudan – and only when the conclusions are about us do we refuse to accept them?
And how is it that Israel’s embarrassing excommunication does not give rise here to the thought that perhaps we, too, have some responsibility for the situation; that not only Goldstone is guilty but also Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Gabi Ashkenazi? Even if we assume that there were no war crimes, someone at least must bear responsibility for the refusal to investigate and the dangerous deterioration in Israel’s status.
The world treats Israel with strict standards. It has to act that way toward a country that sees itself as part of the family of nations. Israel very much enjoys its status as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” but this has a price. None of us wants them to treat us like Iran, North Korea or Hamas. For that we have to pay by meeting strict criteria. One year later, Israel has not even bothered to investigate the attack on Gaza as it should, as the world has demanded. There are no moral misgivings in Israel about the extent of the killing and destruction. Under these circumstances, it’s not possible to blame the world that is trying to arouse us from our moral stupor. We should have been the first to do so.
Livni does not deserve to sit in jail in Britain, but she has to be accountable here for her responsibility for the fatal blow to Israel’s status. Livni, who is enlightened, should also have been the first to call on us to take stock for the fact that our actinos have resembled Sudan’s. There is already one similarity between the two countries – both try to ignore the world’s attitude and show contempt for it.
Mustafa Barghouthi: When Will It Be Our Time?: New York Times
By Mustafa Barghouthi, The New York Times – 16 Dec 2009
RAMALLAH, WEST BANK — I have lived my entire adult life under occupation, with Israelis holding ultimate control over my movement and daily life.
When young Israeli police officers force me to sit on the cold ground and soldiers beat me during a peaceful protest, I smolder. No human being should be compelled to sit on the ground while exercising rights taken for granted throughout the West.
It is with deepening concern that I recognize the Obama administration is not yet capable of standing up to Israel and the pro-Israel lobby. Our dream of freedom is being crushed under the weight of immovable and constantly expanding Israeli settlements.
Days ago, the State Department spokesman, Ian Kelly, managed only to term such illegal building “dismaying.” The Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, stands up and walks out on the U.S. envoy, George Mitchell, every time the American envoy mentions East Jerusalem.
And Javier Solana, just prior to completing his stint as European Union foreign policy chief, claimed Palestinian moves toward statehood “have to be done with time, with calm, in an appropriate moment.” He adds: “I don’t think today is the moment to talk about that.”
When, precisely, is a good time for Palestinian freedom? I call on Mr. Solana’s replacement, Catherine Ashton, to take concrete actions to press for Palestinian freedom rather than postpone it.
If Israel insists on hewing to antiquated notions of determining the date of another people’s freedom then it is incumbent on Palestinians to organize ourselves and highlight the moral repugnance of such an outlook.
Through decades of occupation and dispossession, 90 percent of the Palestinian struggle has been nonviolent, with the vast majority of Palestinians supporting this method of struggle. Today, growing numbers of Palestinians are participating in organized nonviolent resistance.
In the face of European and American inaction, it is crucial that we continue to revive our culture of collective activism by vigorously and nonviolently resisting Israel’s domination over us.
These are actions that every man, woman and child can take. The nonviolent movement is being built in the villages of Jayyous, Bilin and Naalin where Israel’s segregation wall threatens to erase productive village life.
President Obama, perhaps unwittingly, encouraged this effort when he called for Palestinian nonviolence in his Cairo speech. “Palestinians,” he said, “must abandon violence. … For centuries, black people in America suffered…the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding.”
Yet without public American complaint, the Israeli military has killed and injured many nonviolent Palestinians during Obama’s 10 months in office, most notably Bassem Abu Rahme who was killed in April by an Israeli high-velocity teargas canister. American citizen Tristan Anderson was critically injured by the Israeli Army in March by a similar projectile and remains in a deep coma. Both men were protesting illegal Israeli land seizures and Israel’s wall. Hundreds more are unknown to the outside world.
A new generation of Palestinian leaders is attempting to speak to the world in the language of a nonviolent campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions, precisely as Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of African-Americans did with the Montgomery bus boycott in the mid-1950s.
We are equally right to use the tactic to advance our rights. The same world that rejects all use of Palestinian violence, even clear self-defense, surely ought not begrudge us the nonviolence employed by men such as King and Gandhi.
Western lethargy means the clock may run out on the two-state solution. If so, the fault will rest with the failure to halt Israeli settlement activity. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration that settlement construction will continue in East Jerusalem, with government buildings in the West Bank and on thousands of West Bank housing units already under development makes a mockery of the term “freeze.”
We Palestinians are completely accustomed to — and unwilling to accept — such caveats from Mr. Netanyahu.
The demise of the two-state solution will only lead to a new struggle for equal rights, within one state. Israel, which tragically favors supremacy rather than integration with its Palestinian neighbors, will have brought the new struggle on itself by relentlessly pushing the settlement enterprise. No one can say it was not warned.
Eventually, we will be free in our own country, either within the two-state solution or in a new integrated state.
There comes a time when people cannot take injustice any more, and this time has come to Palestine.
Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi is secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
Palestinian Christians urge boycott: Al Ahram Weekly
Palestinian Christian leaders, representing churches and church-related organisations, have launched a “landmark campaign” aimed at enlisting Christians worldwide in proactive efforts to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, reports Khaled Amayreh in Bethlehem. The unprecedented initiative, called “Kairos Palestine-2009: A moment of truth”, appeals to churches worldwide to treat Israel in the same way they had treated the erstwhile South African apartheid regime.
The authors of the 13-page document include such religious leaders as Patriarch Emeritus Michel Sabbah from the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Lutheran Bishop of Jerusalem Munib Younan, Archbishop of Sebastia Atallah Hanna from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, as well as the heads of various denominations in occupied Palestine.
“We, Palestinian Christians, declare in this historic document that the military occupation of our land is a sin against God and humanity and that any theology that legitimises the occupation is far from Christian teachings because true Christian theology is a theology of love and solidarity with the oppressed and a call to justice and equality among peoples,” reads the document.
The authors said they hoped that the document would raise the conscience of Christians worldwide on the enduring Palestinian plight. “We hope, as Palestinian Christians, that this document will be the leverage for the efforts of all peace-loving peoples in the world, especially our Christian sisters and brothers. We hope that it will be welcomed positively and will receive strong support, as was the case with the South Africa Kairos document launched.”
In Christian theological terminology, the word “kairos” means “moment of truth” or “time for action”.
The document elaborately describes the bleak conditions of life under the 42-year-old Israeli military occupation and the extreme oppression to which Palestinians, Muslims as well as Christians, are subjected, citing examples such as the annexation wall, continued Jewish settlement expansion and the daily humiliation Palestinians experience at military checkpoints as they make their way to jobs, schools and hospitals.
“Religious liberty is severely restricted, the freedom of access to holy places is denied under the pretext of security. Jerusalem and its holy places are out of bounds for many Christians and Muslims from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Israeli settlements ravage our land in the name of force, controlling our natural resources, including water and agricultural land, thus depriving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians…
“Jerusalem is the heart of our reality. It is, at the same time, a symbol of peace and sign of conflict. While the apartheid wall divides Palestinian neighbourhoods, Jerusalem continues to be emptied of its Palestinian citizens, Christians and Muslims. Their identity cards are confiscated, which means the loss of their right to reside in Jerusalem. Their homes are demolished or expropriated. Jerusalem, the city of reconciliation, has become a city of discrimination and exclusion, a source of struggle rather than peace.”
The document also illustrates how Israeli repression and systematic persecution of Palestinians is forcing many young Palestinians, Christians and Muslims, to emigrate.
“Emigration is another element in our reality. The absence of any vision or spark of hope for peace and freedom pushes young people to emigrate. Thus the land is deprived of its most important and riches resource- educated youth.”
One author of the landmark document, Orthodox Archbishop Atallah Hanna, told Al-Ahram Weekly that the main aim of the initiative was to alert Christians worldwide to the critical situation in occupied Palestine. “We are a peaceable people, we are not terrorists because we first and foremost are victims of Israeli terror. We love freedom, we love justice, we love our country, we love Jerusalem and we insist on living with human dignity.”
Hanna stressed that Christians everywhere had a paramount religious and human duty to stand on the Palestinians’ side. “This is a human and moral responsibility that churches and Christians in general must not flinch from shouldering.”
An active critic of Israeli occupation and oppression, Hanna said the situation on the ground in occupied Palestine was becoming unbearable in many respects, which he said made it imperative upon Christians and all men of conscience to help end “this nightmare”.
According to Rifat Kassis, a spokesman for “Kairos Palestine-2009,” Christian leaders in occupied Palestine have been deliberating the initiative for several months. “Ultimately we hope that Christian institutions, including churches around the world, will endorse this document and act on it in the same way churches related to the anti-apartheid regime in South Africa in 1985. In the final analysis, apartheid can’t be wrong in South Africa and right in occupied Palestine.”
Asked why the initiative is being launched now, Kassis said the situation in occupied Palestine had reached a crossroads. Quoting from the document, Kassis said: “… because today we have reached the dead-end in the tragedy of the Palestinian people. The decision-makers content themselves with managing the crisis rather than committing themselves to the serious task of finding a way to resolve it. What is the international community doing? What are the political leaders in Palestine, in Israel and the Arab world doing? What is the church doing? The problem is not just a political one. It is a policy in which human beings are destroyed, and this must be of concern to the church.”
Conscious of the fact that the document would be rejected by Christian allies of Israel, such evangelical Zionists, the authors of “Kairos Palestine-2009” urged churches to rediscover the fundamental values of justice in Christian theology. “Ours is a call to stand alongside the oppressed and preserve the word of God as good news for all rather than turn it into a weapon with which to slay the oppressed. The word of God is a word of love for all His creation. God is not the ally of one against the other, nor the opponent of one in the face of the other. God is the Lord of all and loves all, demanding justice from all and issuing to all of us the same commandments.
“We ask our sister churches not to offer theological cover for the injustice we suffer, for the sin of the occupation imposed upon us. Our question to our brothers and sisters in the churches today is: Are you able to help us get our freedom back? For this is the only way you can help the two peoples attain justice, peace, security and love.”
While making sure to condemn all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, the authors called on Christians worldwide “At the same time… to say a word of truth and to make a position of truth with regard to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. As we have already said, we see boycott and disinvestment as tools of non-violence for justice, peace and security for all.”
Uri Avnery’s weekly column – “Spot the Difference”: JFJFP
Uri Avneri; 12 December 2009
A SHORT historical quiz: Which state:
(1) Arose after a holocaust in which a third of its people were destroyed?
(2) Drew from that holocaust the conclusion that only superior military forces could ensure its survival?
(3) Accorded the army a central role in its life, making it “an army that had a state, rather than a state that had an army”?
(4) Began by buying the land it took, and continued to expand by conquest and annexation?
(5) Endeavored by all possible means to attract new immigrants?
(6) Conducted a systematic policy of settlement in the occupied territories?
(7) Strove to push out the national minority by creeping ethnic cleansing?
For anyone who has not yet found the answer: it’s the state of Prussia.
But if some readers were tempted to believe that it all applies to the State of Israel – well, they are right, too. This description fits our state. The similarity between the two states is remarkable. True, the countries are geographically very different, and so are the historical periods, but the points of similarity can hardly be denied.
THE STATE that was respected and feared for 350 years as Prussia started with another name: Mark Brandenburg. (Mark: march, border area). This territory in the North-East of Germany was wrested from its Slavic inhabitants and was initially outside the boundaries of the German Reich. To this day, many of its place names (including Berlin neighborhoods, like Pankow) are clearly Slavic. It can be said: Prussia arose on the ruins of another people (some of whose descendants are still living there).
A historical curiosity: the land was first paid for in cash. The house of Hohenzollern, a noble family from South Germany, bought the territory of Brandenburg from the German Emperor for 400,000 Hungarian Gulden. I don’t know how that compares with the money paid by the Jewish National Fund for parts of Palestine before 1948.
The event that largely determined the entire history of Prussia up to World War II was a holocaust: the 30-years war. Throughout these years – 1618-1648 – practically all the armies of Europe fought each other on German soil, destroying everything in the process. The soldiers, many of them mercenaries, the scum of the earth, murdered and raped, pillaged and robbed, burnt entire towns and drove the pitiful survivors from their lands. In this war, a third of the German population was killed and two thirds of their villages destroyed. (Bertolt Brecht immortalized this holocaust in his play, “Mother Courage”.)
North Germany is a wide open plain. Its borders are unprotected by any ocean, mountain range or desert. The Prussian answer to the ravages of the holocaust was to erect an iron wall: a powerful regular army that would make up for the lack of seas and mountains and be ready to defend the state against all possible combinations of potential enemies.
At the beginning, the army was an essential instrument for the defense of the state’s very existence. In the course of time, it became the center of national life. What started out as the Prussian defense forces became an aggressive army of conquest that terrified all its neighbors. For some of the Prussian kings, the army was the main interest in life. For a time, the soldiers and their families constituted about a quarter of the Berlin population. An old Prussian saying goes: “Der Soldate / ist der beste Mann im Staate” – the soldier is the best man in the state. Adulation of the army became a cult, almost a religion.
PRUSSIA WAS never a “normal” state of a homogenous population living together throughout the centuries. By a sophisticated combination of military conquest, diplomacy and judicious marriages, its masters succeeded in annexing more and more territories to their core domain. These territories were not even contiguous, and some of them were very far from each other.
One of those was the area that came to give the state its name: Prussia. The original Prussia was located on the shores of the Baltic Sea, in areas that now belong to Poland and Russia. At first they were conquered by the Order of Teutonic Knights, a German religious-military order founded during the Crusades in Acre – the ruins of its main castle, Montfort (Starkenberg), still stand in Galilee. The German crusaders decided that instead of fighting the heathens in a faraway country, it made more sense to fight the neighboring pagans and rob them of their lands. In the course of time, the princes of Brandenburg succeeded in acquiring this territory and adopted its name for all their dominions. They also succeeded in upgrading their status and crowned themselves as kings.
The lack of homogeneity of the Prussian lands, composed as they were of diverse and unconnected areas, gave birth to the main Prussian creation: the “State”. This was the factor that was to unite all the different populations, each of which stuck to its local patriotism and traditions. The “State” – Der Staat – became a sacred being, transcending all other loyalties. Prussian philosophers saw the “State” as the incarnation of all the social virtues, the final triumph of human reason.
The Prussian state became proverbial. Demonized by its enemies, it was, however, exemplary in many ways – a well organized, orderly and law-abiding structure, its bureaucracy untainted by corruption. The Prussian official received a paltry salary, lived modestly and was intensely proud of his status. He detested ostentation. A hundred years ago Prussia already had a system of social insurance – long before other major countries dreamed of it. It was also exemplary in its religious tolerance. Frederick “the Great” declared that everyone should “find happiness in his own way”. Once he said that if Turks were to come and settle in Prussia, he would build mosques for them. Last week, 250 years later, the Swiss passed a referendum forbidding the building of minarets in their country.
PRUSSIA WAS a very poor country, lacking natural resources, minerals and good agricultural soil. It used its army to procure richer territories.
Because of the poverty, the population was thinly spread. The Prussian kings expended much effort in recruiting new immigrants. In 1731, when tens of thousands of Protestants in the Salzburg area (now part of Austria) were persecuted by their Catholic ruler, the King of Prussia invited them to his land. They came with their families and possessions in a mass foot march to East Prussia, traversing the full length of Germany. When the French Huguenots (Protestants) were slaughtered by their Catholic kings, the survivors were invited to Prussia and settled in Berlin, where they contributed greatly to the development of the country. Jews, too, were allowed to settle in Prussia in order to contribute to its prosperity, and the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn became one of the leading lights of the Prussian intelligentsia.
When Poland was divided in 1771 between Russia, Austria and Prussia, the Prussian state acquired a national minority problem. In the new territory there lived a large Polish population that stuck to its national identity and language. The Prussian response was a massive settlement campaign in these areas. This was a highly organized effort, planned right down to the minutest detail. The German settlers got a plot of land and many financial benefits. The Polish minority was oppressed and discriminated against in every possible way. The Prussian kings wanted to “Germanize” their acquired areas, much as the Israeli government wants to “Judaize” their occupied territories.
This Prussian effort had a direct impact on the Jewish colonization of Palestine. It served as an example for the father of Zionist settlement, Arthur Ruppin, and not by accident – he was born and grew up in the Polish area of Prussia.
IT IS impossible to exaggerate the influence of the Prussian model on the Zionist movement in almost all spheres of life.
Theodor Herzl, the founder of the movement, was born in Budapest and lived most of his life in Vienna. He admired the new German Reich that was founded in 1871, when he was 11 years old. The King of Prussia – which constituted about half of the area of the Reich – was crowned as German emperor, and Prussia formed the new empire in its image. Herzl’s diaries are full of admiration for the German state. He courted Wilhelm II, King of Prussia and Emperor of Germany, who obliged by receiving him in a tent before the gate of Jerusalem. He wanted the Kaiser to become the patron of the Zionist enterprise, but Wilhelm remarked that, while Zionism itself was an excellent idea, it “could not be realized with Jews”.
Herzl was not the only one to imprint a Prussian-German pattern on the Zionist enterprise. In this he was overshadowed by Ruppin, who is known today to Israeli children mainly as a street name. But Ruppin had an immense impact on the Zionist enterprise, more than any other single person. He was the real leader of the Zionist immigrants in Palestine in their formative period, the years of the second and third Aliyah (immigration wave) in the first quarter of the 20th century. He was the spiritual father of Berl Katznelson, David Ben-Gurion and their generation, the founders of the Zionist Labor movement that became dominant in the Jewish society in Palestine, and later in Israel. It was he who practically invented the Kibbutz and the Moshav (cooperative settlement).
If so, why has he been almost eradicated from official memory? Because some sides of Ruppin are best forgotten. Before becoming a Zionist, he was an extreme Prussian-German nationalist. He was one of the fathers of the “scientific” racist creed and believed in the superiority of the Aryan race. Up to the end he occupied himself with measuring skulls and noses in order to provide support for assorted racist ideas. His partners and friends created the “science” that inspired Adolf Hitler and his disciples.
The Zionist movement would have been impossible were it not for the work of Heinrich Graetz, the historian who created the historical image of the Jews which we all learned at school. Graetz, who was also born in the Polish area of Prussia, was a pupil of the Prussian-German historians who “invented” the German nation, much as he “invented” the Jewish nation.
Perhaps the most important thing we inherited from Prussia was the sacred notion of the “State” (Medina in Hebrew) – an idea that dominates our entire life. Most countries are officially a “Republic” (France, for example), a “Kingdom” (Britain) or a “Federation” (Russia). The official name “State of Israel” is essentially Prussian.
WHEN I first brought up the similarity between Prussia and Israel (in a chapter dedicated to this theme in the Hebrew and German editions of my 1967 book, “Israel Without Zionists”) it might have looked like a baseless comparison. Today, the picture is clearer. Not only does the senior officers corps occupy a central place in all the spheres of our life, and not only is the huge military budget beyond any discussion, but our daily news is full of typically “Prussian” items. For example: it transpires that the salary of the Army Chief of Staff is double that of the Prime Minister. The Minister of Education has announced that henceforth schools will be assessed by the number of their pupils who volunteer for army combat units. That sounds familiar – in German.
After the fall of the Third Reich, the four occupying powers decided to break up Prussia and divide its territories between several German federal states, Poland and the USSR. That happened in February 1947 – only 15 months before the founding of the State of Israel.
Those who believe in the transmigration of souls can draw their own conclusions. It is certainly food for thought.