abso
09-16-2010, 02:31 PM
The Punishment of Gaza by Gideon Levy
Nicholas Lezard welcomes a book that asks Israelis to be outraged
In his 1987 book The Yellow Wind, the Israeli novelist David Grossman said: "In Israel, the reality is that it is easier for a man to change religion, and maybe even his sex, than to change in any decisive way his political opinions." Nearly a quarter of a century on, the only modification that sentence needs is to replace the words "maybe even" with "certainly". And there is a possible further modification, if we are assuming that this sentence refers to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: insert the words "not only" at the beginning. I was quite amazed, for instance, when a link was posted on Facebook to some overheard mutterings, full of bravado, which purported to "prove" that the activists on the Mavi Marmara were actually looking for a fight. When I suggested, perhaps facetiously, that this accounted for the people who were shot in the back, I was very quickly unfriended.
Well, let us set to one side the legitimacy or otherwise of Operation Sea Breeze, as the IDF raid on the flotilla in May was named. (One should at least salute the officer who dreamed that codeword up: the spirit of George Orwell can turn up in the most unlikely places.) It might be, after all, that my gut instinct is wrong, and that the debacle was in fact a work of supreme cunning on the part of Hamas, deliberately engineered in order to discredit Israel in the eyes of the world.
Which is where Gideon Levy comes in. For nearly three decades he has been writing for the Israeli daily Haaretz, chronicling, in the face of outraged opposition, the depredations suffered by those targeted by the IDF. His particular interest is Gaza, and even though he has been banned from there since November 2006, he continues to plug away at the subject. "I am asking all Israelis to be outraged – or at least to understand what is being perpetrated in their name, so that they may never have the right to claim: we did not know."
This makes for painful reading, and it is with a heavy heart that you realise, while reading it, that someone who has decided that Israel's rights in this matter outweigh all other considerations will dismiss each of this book's 148 pages as emotive propaganda. And then there follows the even more depressing knowledge that anyone who raises any objections to Israel's behaviour and policies is going to be slandered as an antisemite. This was indeed the fate of Judge Richard Goldstone, whose massive and exhaustive report on the conflict, released under the auspices of the United Nations, was rejected out of hand.
You can find it on the net easily enough, but Levy's book acts as a passionate footnote to it. The details are harrowing. The most obscene development is the increasing number of children being killed. Almost 100 were killed in 2009 – "a pretty quiet year, relatively speaking", says Levy. (However, in the chronology at the end of the book it appears that Operation Cast Lead, a three-week operation from December 2008 to January 2009, resulted in the deaths of 1,330 Palestinians, 430 of whom were children.)
So is this propaganda? Doubtless there is much of the story he leaves out – but he is an Israeli dedicated to saving his country's honour, and if that means rubbing our noses in the details of Mahmoud al-Zakh, a 14-year-old boy whose father had to first identify him from looking at his belt and his socks, then a day later finding the rest of him, then so be it. (You wouldn't believe what the IDF called the manoeuvre which resulted in this death, along with 21 others: "Operation Locked Kindergarten". There really is someone with a genius for names over there.)
Well, I know what's going to happen now. I and the blameless Review section of this newspaper will be denounced as either Hamas stooges, antisemites, or both. It would appear that unimpeachably impartial reporting from this miserable part of the world is a categorical impossibility. (I've seen pro-Israel websites which maintain that the residents of Gaza actually have it pretty peachy.) But whichever way you lean, this is a very important book indeed.
Source (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/03/punishment-gaza-gideon-levy-lezard)
Nicholas Lezard welcomes a book that asks Israelis to be outraged
In his 1987 book The Yellow Wind, the Israeli novelist David Grossman said: "In Israel, the reality is that it is easier for a man to change religion, and maybe even his sex, than to change in any decisive way his political opinions." Nearly a quarter of a century on, the only modification that sentence needs is to replace the words "maybe even" with "certainly". And there is a possible further modification, if we are assuming that this sentence refers to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: insert the words "not only" at the beginning. I was quite amazed, for instance, when a link was posted on Facebook to some overheard mutterings, full of bravado, which purported to "prove" that the activists on the Mavi Marmara were actually looking for a fight. When I suggested, perhaps facetiously, that this accounted for the people who were shot in the back, I was very quickly unfriended.
Well, let us set to one side the legitimacy or otherwise of Operation Sea Breeze, as the IDF raid on the flotilla in May was named. (One should at least salute the officer who dreamed that codeword up: the spirit of George Orwell can turn up in the most unlikely places.) It might be, after all, that my gut instinct is wrong, and that the debacle was in fact a work of supreme cunning on the part of Hamas, deliberately engineered in order to discredit Israel in the eyes of the world.
Which is where Gideon Levy comes in. For nearly three decades he has been writing for the Israeli daily Haaretz, chronicling, in the face of outraged opposition, the depredations suffered by those targeted by the IDF. His particular interest is Gaza, and even though he has been banned from there since November 2006, he continues to plug away at the subject. "I am asking all Israelis to be outraged – or at least to understand what is being perpetrated in their name, so that they may never have the right to claim: we did not know."
This makes for painful reading, and it is with a heavy heart that you realise, while reading it, that someone who has decided that Israel's rights in this matter outweigh all other considerations will dismiss each of this book's 148 pages as emotive propaganda. And then there follows the even more depressing knowledge that anyone who raises any objections to Israel's behaviour and policies is going to be slandered as an antisemite. This was indeed the fate of Judge Richard Goldstone, whose massive and exhaustive report on the conflict, released under the auspices of the United Nations, was rejected out of hand.
You can find it on the net easily enough, but Levy's book acts as a passionate footnote to it. The details are harrowing. The most obscene development is the increasing number of children being killed. Almost 100 were killed in 2009 – "a pretty quiet year, relatively speaking", says Levy. (However, in the chronology at the end of the book it appears that Operation Cast Lead, a three-week operation from December 2008 to January 2009, resulted in the deaths of 1,330 Palestinians, 430 of whom were children.)
So is this propaganda? Doubtless there is much of the story he leaves out – but he is an Israeli dedicated to saving his country's honour, and if that means rubbing our noses in the details of Mahmoud al-Zakh, a 14-year-old boy whose father had to first identify him from looking at his belt and his socks, then a day later finding the rest of him, then so be it. (You wouldn't believe what the IDF called the manoeuvre which resulted in this death, along with 21 others: "Operation Locked Kindergarten". There really is someone with a genius for names over there.)
Well, I know what's going to happen now. I and the blameless Review section of this newspaper will be denounced as either Hamas stooges, antisemites, or both. It would appear that unimpeachably impartial reporting from this miserable part of the world is a categorical impossibility. (I've seen pro-Israel websites which maintain that the residents of Gaza actually have it pretty peachy.) But whichever way you lean, this is a very important book indeed.
Source (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/03/punishment-gaza-gideon-levy-lezard)