Discovering Israel — Part 3
What I learned from attending Al Jazeera’s Head to Head: Mehdi Hasan and Benny Morris
I knew a little bit about Benny Morris, heard him say some really horrible things in interviews, so I wasn’t expecting much. In my view, we were going to hear views of someone who teaches at Ben-Gurion University. University that honours mass murderer who was derogatory even to Auschwitz survivors. And it is fascinating when Israelis defend him saying things like ‘He’s the father of Israel’ — says so much about Israel, doesn’t it? However, books have been written about Ben-Gurion, so I won’t get into that.
I went to the event with a few ideas for questions, well 10 ideas for questions. I didn’t formulate the questions, I had topics I wanted to address, I was going to formulate the questions there. The topics were:
1. Honouring people like Ben-Gurion, and what does that tell us about Israel?
2. Lack of punishment for crimes among the soldiers of Israel? In fact, it seems Israel likes its soldiers to be pathetic and cruel.
3. What would make a professor say that Israeli soldiers are ‘macho’ — or something along those lines; manly, heroic, something like that. From what I have seen, Israeli soldiers are a bunch of cowards that our stupid government gifted with weapons. In fact, men need to defend their honour the moment Israel claims its soldiers are ‘manly’. Blooming heck!
4. October the 7th — being realistic about what happened that day. Once you take off all the Israeli lies about the babies, rapes, and such, and you take into consideration that much of the damage could not have been caused by Hamas since they didn’t have those kinds of weapons, the damage had to be caused by Israelis, and considering that Israeli soldiers are trigger happy, blood thirsty, no respect for life creatures, you realise that yeah a lot of it could have been done by them. Hence, you are left with an attack where some people got murdered, and some taken hostage. While this is horrible, it is not uncommon. In fact, if such events were a cause for genocide, we’d all be dead. Furthermore, Israeli army goes into Palestinian homes in the middle of the night, takes them hostage, and then calls them prisoners on regular basis, so this should not be even an event in Israel. In Israel, that sort of thing is kind-a common practice.
5. A lot of settlers seem to move to Israel out of greed not fear or need for refuge, so what is Israel really about?
6. Is it true that in Israel kids are taught that Auschwitz survivors are losers? Let me just make it clear that I think those people are heroes, human strength that is hard to match. I thought this would be a point that Israel and I would agree on, turns out, we might not.
7. Zionism benefited greatly from WWII and Islamic fanaticism; is Zionism really lucky or is there something we don’t know?
8. We were told that Zionists went to Palestine to ‘humanise’ local population. They seem to have done the very opposite. In fact, it seems everything Zionists say is a lie. Land without people — another example of a horrific, 100% lie. Zionists made it a land without people. However, despite constant lying, and the lies being so stupid it is ridiculous, how do Zionists manage to keep getting normal, educated people all over Europe and America to keep believing them, supporting them? Are drugs involved?
9. Many of the most important things in the world are looking like a lie, hologram, a Wizard of Oz show. Things like ICJ, ICC, Genocide Convention, Human Rights, democracy, and so on. It seems like these were created to hold some to account, but not all, certainly not the Zionists. If these things exist to keep the world safe, should the world choose Israel over itself?
10. Dayton Peace Agreement for Palestine-Israel territory. Now, I have called Dayton Peace Agreement (Dayton from now on) a psychotic document. However, one of the biggest reasons for that is because Serbia and Croatia exist as separate countries, hence, Dayton has enabled them to invade Bosnia through the political system. In Palestine-Israel territory, this is not the case. So, Dayton might work for a scenario where two countries occupy same land. But it would still need improvements — I don’t call the document psychotic just for one reason. So things like:
No need for 14 governments, 3 (maybe 4) is enough: national and two entities, and then maybe Jerusalem as its own district.
They do not need 3 presidents, 2 is enough, 1 Palestinian, and 1 Israeli. HOWEVER! And this is one of the most important improvements: both of these presidents MUST know they are presidents of the country NOT of one or another group of people! This is a MUST. In Bosnia, our politicians work on dividing the people so that they can stay in power. This MUST be removed.
OHR-like institution to be instated but MUCH more transparent, so something like PIC would need to be available to contact.
There must be a deadline!
Work with Civil Society better defined to avoid astroturfs and manufactured civil society organisations that prevent normal organisations from advancing and being seen.
This is just in short. There are few other things like passports, military, dealing with settlers (return of property, return of refugees and such), etc, but this shows the general idea. In 15, 20 or so years, people in the region should learn to live in peace and security, and then they can decide if they want to be this, that or the other. But, for now, improved version of Dayton might work for them.
I expected Benny would be against this. Bosnians were against Dayton, yet it still happened. So, this sort of stuff is possible. Let’s not forget that the only way to stop Serbia was to bomb it. Sure, Serbs still complain about being bombed, but they should have stopped killing innocent people. In short, I wanted to bring this up as an idea. I knew it was big, might need a separate event, but I thought about it.
So, there I was, standing in the queue, in the rain, going through these ideas. I managed to get in only because I came on my own. I got the ‘golden ticket’ — I was so happy. This kind of stuff doesn’t happen to me. Anyway…
We were seated. The ‘show’ started.
I’m not going to tell you what was said. The whole thing was recorded, so you’ll be able to see it for yourself. This article is about my thoughts and feelings during the filming, which you will not be able to see.
What Israel is doing is not a genocide, because there are many definitions of a genocide. There are NOT! There is one genocide convention, and it defines what is a genocide. Ethnic cleansing is a term conjured up so that genocidal governments have an escape. On the ground, to ordinary people being murdered, ethnic cleansing and genocide are exactly the same. As I said before, the difference is in articulation of intent. So if the government and the soldiers have telepathic connection, it’s called ethnic cleansing. If they don’t have telepathic connection, and therefore they have to articulate their intent, then it is genocide. Because, how is a government who’s soldiers murder just one group of people supposed to be responsible for what the soldiers did in a war? Hmm… Maybe they punish the soldiers? Maybe they state clearly that murder of civilians is against the law and will be punished? Maybe they do NOT starve the civilians? Maybe they do not practice collective punishment? I don’t know, just too many options. None of these options are good for a government that is trying to hide its genocidal intent, but a government that never had a genocidal intent should find all of these option and many more very easy.
Clearly, genocide convention needs improving. Mass murder of a specific group of people is NEVER an accident. EVER! Even if it’s done by 10 armed men, these 10 armed men have to organise. It is always organised. When it happens in large number of places, on a relatively large territory, it is government issued. And if there are no serious punishments afterwards, it is government supported.
In Benny’s view, the only ‘genocide’ worth mentioning is Turks murdering Christians in the 1900s. I know the world has been through a lot of sh*t. But let’s focus on sh*t after the laws were in place. With all due respect to all the victims, but if we do stuff like this, we will never end genocides. And we have so many going on right now, they’ll keep us busy for many years to come. We can’t afford to focus on genocides before the genocide convention. Bosnians were victims of a number of those too, so please do not think I’m saying this because it doesn’t concern my people. It does. But, to be realistic, we can’t pay much attention to genocides before the Genocide Convention because then we do not achieve what the Convention was set up to achieve — end of genocides.
I know that the ‘ethnic cleansing of Palestine’ was taking place while the genocide convention was being discussed. It took the world 4 years to get that convention going, and just look at the timing compared to what Zionists were doing — isn’t the timing a bit odd? Let’s put a pin in that for now.
When Milosevic was trying to inspire his psychos to attack us, he couldn’t find anything against us. We’ve never done them any harm. He ended up calling us Turks so that they can have a reason to kill us. I sat there, in the audience, with my Srebrenica flower (29th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica is coming up), looking at this genocide denier, and clearly someone willing to turn people against one another. At some point he said something about a war between Islam and West. In terms of values, Islam and the West are in agreement. Arabs and Islam seem to be at odds in terms of values. Anyway…
Not only was the guest defending Israel’s genocide in Gaza, he went as far as to say that what Hamas was doing or trying to do was genocide. On one side, Israel is not carrying a genocide because they didn’t kill enough people, on the other, Hamas is because… I think they might have said something that the Israelis translated into a genocidal sentence. Ordinary citizens in Israel proudly wave signs in support of genocide, signs like ‘kill them all’ — this sentence doesn’t need interpretation. Kill them all means kill them all. That is genocide. Even if they don’t kill them all, it is still genocide because they intend to kill them all. Do ordinary citizens matter? Yes! This isn’t one person, or a small group, this is significant number of people, speaking up in public.
Later on he said how Hamas is not a threat to Israel, it is when they join with Iran and other countries. Is Hamas a threat or not? Apparently it’s OK for Israel to murder everyone in Gaza so they can get rid of Hamas, who are not much of a threat to Israel?
Then there were so many lies about Palestinians back in the 1930s — you know, the land without people, had these people who wanted rights.
There were insults — I think the worst of them was that Palestinians want to die because they believe in Paradise. Just because Palestinians are not afraid to die, and they believe that God will forgive them, and give them a better place in the afterlife, it does NOT mean they want to die. For an Israeli to come out and make it sound like they are doing them a favour by killing them, was shocking.
Then they spoke about freedom of ‘Arabs’ in Israel, and how Israel is the only country in the region that gives ‘Arabs’ freedom — the walls are always a sign of freedom. Just like lack of water is sign of equality.
Then they took time to compare themselves to Arab dictators, being very proud that they are better then them. I’m not sure they are, but shame on the Arab world for giving Zionists such an excuse. However, this whole thing sounded like: Don’t judge us by those we’ve killed, judge us by those we have not killed. Like a murderer is someone who kills everyone they know. A murderer is not someone who knows 100s of people, but kills only one.
And while we are at Zionist excuses, I want to say that any attack on any Jews, anywhere in the world, is now equal to playing for the Zionist team. Like it or not, that’s the way it is. Zionists do NOT care about Jews. Far from it. They care about themselves. However, Zionists are very good at making any attack on Jews anywhere in the world their reason for being. Any attack on Jews is great for Zionists.
After that, they spoke about how Zionism is not about colonisation, and how that is ‘their land’, at the same time colonisaiton is wrong, but they should nuke Iran. In short, it was like listening to people who are on drugs. I couldn’t make a rational statement from anything they said.
At some point Benny mentioned how we never see a Hamas soldier murdered. Mahdi replied that as a foreign journalist he’s not allowed in Gaza. Which was a good response. But I was trying to figure out what the F did Benny mean. I have no doubt that in the mass murder of innocent Palestinians the pathetic Israeli soldiers kill a Hamas member every now and then. Did Benny expect us to say: Well done you? Shame on those Palestinian journalists who are reporting about 1000s of children being buried alive in the rubble of their home using our bombs, while ignoring the x number of Hamas people that Israel has also killed? It’ll snow in hell before I say something like this. WTF is wrong with these people?
He also mentioned something about how Israeli air force is precise! — so I guess they intended to murder all the people in Gaza? But they don’t, because if they wanted to kill all, they would have killed all. What? At this point, I’m not even sure which team was Benny supporting. I think his main point was that they have the weapons (provided by our government) to kill, they just don’t have the people who know how to use those weapons well enough to kill all. Having said that, no one has ever managed to kill all. Many have tried, but someone always survives. Hence, genocide is NOT about killing all, it’s about the intention to kill (or remove) all. How many the psychos manage to kill isn’t part of the ‘equation’.
As the event was going on I was making a list of new questions I wanted to ask, questions that included ‘Collective punishment’, ‘collective pain’, ‘collective land’ — Zionists are into all sorts of ‘collective’, one more confusing than another, especially since they also believe in individual.
I had questions about genocide vs ethnic cleansing, and ‘poor governments’ being free of the naughty soldiers who go out there on their own and murder only a specific group of people in areas that have completely mixed population.
Questions about revenge, and collateral damage — I’ve written about both, I don’t know which one is worse. You might have read that I think collateral damage is a pathetic man’s pathetic excuse for his pathetic deeds. Revenge is along the same lines.
Then I had question about double standards — as I said, it seems like we have genocide convention, democracy, rule of law, etc, only if Zionists need protecting not if they need to be held to account. I.e. double standards. And double standards is equal to having no standards.
I was going to question the idea of ‘their land’ — who is ‘they’, and who gave them the land, the Brits? And, now that I have mentioned the Brits, Zionists have forgotten how they got the land. They feel no gratitude for the fact that the Brits gave them the land, and then sent more troops to Palestine than to the Indian subcontinent. I wanted to ask about this as well. Why did the Brits do this huge thing for them? In fact, one of the panelists said something along the lines of ‘Palestine was a term invented by the Brits’, like Palestine didn’t exist, and the reason he state was that P doesn’t exist in Arabic. Has he ever heard of Germany? Germany doesn’t exist in a country called Deutschland. Let alone that most countries have a bit of a variation in the name from one language to another.
As the event went on, I realised these people had no brain. My questions were way too intellectual for them. Ordinary people could grasp the questions, but these were not ordinary people. It was like they didn’t know we live in the age of information technology. I was honestly shocked by how stupid they were.
So when it came to the audience to ask questions, I was trying to formulate one that the main guest could understand. I was using the skills I got from my picture book training. I love writing picture books, and one of the challenges is to make things simple.
I sat there for ages trying to come up with the simple yet meaningful question. Took me too long. By the time I raised my hand it was too late.
The question I was going to ask was:
I live in London, in a block of flats. I know my neighbours. Non of them are criminals. If someone bombed, demolished my building, while my family and neighbours were still inside, because they thought there might be a terrorist there, would we expect the world to say ‘yeah, that’s fine’? I know you like to compare yourself to brutal dictators so civilised London is way over your head, but keep in mind that a number of officials in London are being influence by you, so do try to answer this question with respect to both of these.
Maybe it’s good I didn’t get to ask the question. I don’t know. I left the event feeling like everything I learned about Israel during the event made my opinion of Israel a million times worse. However, my opinion of Israel is neither here nor there. What is worrying is the effect they’re having on our part of the world. How did anyone ever believe these ‘arguments’?