You are terrorists, we are virtuous
Yitzhak Laor, in the
London Review of Books:
Israelis have assimilated the logic and the language of the IDF -- and in the process, they have lost their memories. Is there a better way to understand why we have never learned from history?... The majority of Israelis identify with the army and the army reciprocates by consolidating our identity, especially when it is -- or we are -- waging war...
Meanwhile, it harasses Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, to very destructive effect... They shoot. They abduct. They use F-16s against refugee camps, tanks against shacks and huts. For years they have operated in this way against gangs and groups of armed youths and children, and they call it a war, a 'just war,' vital for our existence...
Military thinking has become our only thinking... The Arabs must be crippled, socially and economically, and smashed militarily, and of course they must then appear to us in the degraded state to which we've reduced them... Israelis long ago ceased to be distressed by images of sobbing women in white scarves, searching for the remains of their homes in the rubble left by our soldiers...
The truth behind this is that Israel must always be allowed to do as it likes even if this involved scorching its supremacy into Arab bodies... We have the right to abduct. You don't. We have the right to arrest. You don't. You are terrorists. We are virtuous. We have sovereignty. You don't. We can ruin you. You cannot ruin us, even when you retaliate, because we are tied to the most powerful nation on earth. We are angels of death...
The people we kill and maim and ruin cannot vote here. If we let our memories slacken now, the machine-memory will reassert control and write history for us... And suddenly we will not be able to explain what we know, even to our own children.
David Ben-Gurion, first and third Prime Minister of Israel: If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?
