Gideon Spiro
Oct9.07 Gideon Spiro’s response to One Voice translated
From Alef List Translated from Hebrew by Eldad [Eldad's clarifications in parantheses)
Greetings to all,
Below is my email response to ONE VOICE on September 18 this year regarding its invitation requesting me to participate in the event on this coming October 18.
Gideon
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Greetings,
I have read your manifesto, and I presume that your intentions are good, for after all, what could be better than ending the conflict between the two peoples. The problem is that your good intentions neutralize you—create what is known as trying to drive to a destination in neutral gear.
Your remarks regarding “the extremists on both sides” in the name of “the moderate majority” presumes symmetry between occupied and occupier, and is therefore a prescription for failure. For there is no symmetry between the settlers and settlements in the occupied territories (which are war crimes according to the Geneva and Rome conventions) and Palestinian opposition to the occupation. There is no symmetry between the “moderate majority” in Israel that refuses to return to the June 4, 1967 armistice line, and which supports at most a non-contiguous dispersed Palestinian state under Israeli control, and the Palestinian moderate majority that insists on Israel going back to the other side of the Green Line, the dismantling of all the settlements, and a just solution to the refugee problem. There is no symmetry between the Israeli occupation force that has been brutally persecuting Palestinians for 40 years, and those who struggle against it.
I read the list of names of Israelis who support you, and of the organizations that joined you as member organizations and find that there is no escape from concluding that you’ve fallen into the trap of being all-embracing.
For example, MK Gila Finkelstein from the Hamafdal ((moderate religious)) party who supports settlers, settlements, and the policies of occupation and apartheid that Israel carries out in the territories, can she be considered moderate? Or again, MK Ephraim Sneh, who until recently was Deputy Minister of Defense and responsible for the collective punishment of Palestinians, for orders to kill without trial (targeted killings, assassinations, as the occupation terms them), who was responsible for the killing of children and women--is he moderate?
Again, the Likud and Shas youth ((religous)) who joined you support the occupation, the apartheid wall, and collective punishment. Is there any common ground between them and Meretz Youth ((leftist))?
Your desire to embrace all, including contradictories, results in the fact that not once in your texts does the word ‘occupation’ appear, as if there were no Israeli occupation. Your texts likewise omit the words ‘human rights abuses,’ which are integral to the occupation.
I consider myself to be a very moderate person; I am a member of the Association for Human Rights ((an Israeli Org.)) and of Amnesty International, and make the Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN in December 1948 (one of the lessons derived from the Holocaust) the compass for my acts. But in today’s Israel of Olmert, Netanyahu, and Lieberman, my attitude is deemed radical.
In the Israel of the 21st century, even pacifist Albert Einstein is a radical. Therefore, my recommendation to you is to produce a manifesto in the spirit of what I have said here, even if it means that you have to reduce the number of people and organizations that create your umbrella |