Uri Avnery is Very Wrong (Again)

Uri Avnery is Very Wrong (Again)

by John Spritzler [http://spritzlerj.blogspot.com/]

Uri Avnery has a new article, "The Day After the War," about the recent Israeli military action in Lebanon. I think Avnery is very wrong.

Avnery says Israeli leaders have suffered a major defeat in recent weeks. On the contrary, the Israeli ruling class (including both generals and politicians) has in the last month succeeded quite handsomely in its true objective. That objective was to increase the level of mutual fear and hatred between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. That is precisely the job for which the American ruling class pays the Israeli ruling class $3 Billion + /yr. Israeli rulers carry out ethnic cleansing of non-Jews (Palestinians) to keep their Jewish population under their control, to ensure that ordinary Jews in Israel will be so frightened of Arabs (made angry at Jews by the ethnic cleansing) that they will tolerate, as "protectors," their own Jewish ruling class which is driving them increasingly into poverty with privatization and cuts in pensions and so forth. [See "Israel No. 2 in West in Social Inequality" in Ha'aretz ] The American ruling class wants Israel to succeed in fomenting a Jewish/Arab war because such a war prevents people from waging the class war.

The idea that the Israeli ruling class is trying to achieve peace for Jews in Israel, or even to protect ordinary Jews from harm, is not supported by any of the facts. The Israeli rulers are just like the previous generation of Zionist leaders who fought AGAINST efforts to rescue European Jews during the holocaust, on the grounds that they needed dead Jews to have standing at the post-war negotiations that would create a Jewish state (this is in their own words, not mine! See details in SHOULD PEOPLE OPPOSED TO BIGOTRY AND ANTI-SEMITISM SUPPORT ISRAEL?)

So when Uri Avnery asserts that the Israeli ruling class has failed in the recent war, on the grounds that it has not defeated Hezbollah and therefore not protected the Israeli population from Hezbollah's rockets, he is wrong. That was never their objective in the first place. On the contrary, Israeli rulers NEED Arabs to fire rockets on Israeli citizens. When Arabs don't oblige, the Israeli military has to (secretly) arrange to make it seem as if they had.

Furthermore, if there is, after the war, a "Day of Long Knives," as Avnery predicts, with Israeli leaders blaming other Israeli leaders for having "lost the war," it will not mean that Israel's ruling class is weakened; on the contrary it will mean they have escalated their propaganda to cement the idea in the Israeli public that the public's number one concern should be to "win the war against the Arabs" (and not even to think about winning or even fighting the class war.)

Uri Avnery is a Zionist. (In fact, he and his colleagues in the Israeli Council for Israeli Palestinian Peace are, according to Uri Davis, the "only Jewish citizens of the State of Israel who can produce a court ruling attesting to their Zionist credentials" because in 1977 they won a libel case against people who accused them of being anti-Zionist.) Avnery supports the idea of a Jewish state, with all of the ethnic cleansing that such a state requires in order to exist. This is why he does not say that Israel should grant all Palestinians their right of return, but only some of them. His words are: " I believe that Israel can return to the state of Israel a sizable number - more than a symbolic number - of refugees, without really changing the basic character and composition of the state of Israel."

For this reason, Uri Avnery avoids talking about the root cause of the conflict--ethnic cleansing--and instead pretends that the only problem with the rulers of Israel is that they are incompetent (not as smart as Avnery) in their attempts to protect ordinary Israeli Jews from Arabs. In this way, Avnery provides a "left" cover for the Israeli ruling class. He is slick in
this regard. Beware!