Gideon Levy : Love and Darkness
ארי שביט אוהב את מדינת ישראל; אני אהבתי פעם את ישראל, מתקן התריסים בבית סבי...
www.haaretz.co.il
Gideon Levy
18 September 2015
Fellow Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, loves the State of Israel; I used to love an Israel too, the fellow by that name who used to fix the shutters at my grandfather’s place. It’s possible of course to also love a country or a people, even when it is automatically, blindly, and unconditionally. But it’s dangerous to turn it into an ideology. And worse still it’s dangerous to preach that kind of love - "So it should be in Israel, too”, commands Shavit. “The critics must stop being arrogant and acidic and dripping evil.”[1] (Only Love Can Win the Battle for Israel as We Know It, Haaretz 17 September).
I too was "was born here, became who I am here and it’s here that I will die”, as he puts it. I would too love to cosy up to the sweet and rosy fairy floss known as the "love of Israel". It’s a state with so many remarkable achievements, which I’d never know how to promote as well as Shavit does. But when something is rotten at the base, only an acid can sanitise it. All the innovations from drip irrigation to high tech, the gay friendliness and the talent, which no one is better in selling than him (mainly to American Jews, "lovers of Israel") - When something rotten at the base, it is impossible to counter it with love. When something is rotten at the base, then -- to paraphrase Proverbs 13, 24 – it’s actually those who love blindly who the real haters.
Loving Israel as it is today, also means loving racism and nationalism and violence and deprivation and evil. It’s impossible to love that. Loving Israel today also means loving the state that hosts the Myanmar dictatorship’s Chief of Staff of the and expels the refugees from the Eritrean dictatorship; it’s loving a state which looks for new ways to allow snipers to take pot shots at children throwing stones, and re-arrests a deathly ill person as he leaves hospital, having recovered from a courageous hunger strike. It’s loving a state which manufactures fear and furnishes evil, its two flagship products. Anyone who claims that they love Israel, has a hand in all this. A true lover of Israel cannot anoint it with the olive oil of "love". Even patriotic kitsch has its limits.
What is love? Why should we love all costs? Is it possible to love someone just because they sing beautifully? They’re well-spoken? Dance beautifully? And what about morality? And what should we called the love which doesn’t see darkness? I love the Israeli versions of marshmallow treats, soup niblets and toasted pasta, they are all so Israeli. And I love Meir Banai’s music. But I also love Said, the taxi driver from Gaza whose cab was bombed by Israel. And Maria, the wunderkind whose almost entire family was wiped out by an air force missile. She’s paralysed from the neck down for the rest of her life. Her father caring for her day and night. And Jamal, a noble man from the Jenin Refugee Camp, who lost considerable part of his family but never lost his in stature. I loved the beautiful Fatma who died from cancer because she couldn’t make it from Gaza to hospital for treatment. And above all I love Emad, the impressive intellectual, the administrative detainee who had been exiled to Europe. Those who love them, cannot love those who inflicted it on them.
And I also love many things in Israel, and I want to love them more, but for that you need to close your eyes and block your heart to lie, to suppress, to deceive and to enlist in the Israeli propaganda service, which preaches “the love of Israel ".
Reykjavik municipality isn’t "an erupting volcano of hate", as claimed by the Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson on the day after the Icelandic city’s council decided to boycott Israeli products in protest against the continued Occupation [Boycott has since been reversed-tr]. Reykjavik is not an “Israel hater". There used to be a time it liked Israel very much, and sent her best sons and daughters to volunteer in kibbutzim. Reykjavik, like most of the world, hates the Israeli occupation. It hates injustice and Apartheid and violations of international law and colonialism. Reykjavik used to be a lover of Israel, but now it cannot keep quiet anymore. It turns out that there are such strange bodies and people, devoid of love, who cannot remain silent. It turns out that there are those whose love is conditional, and is neither blind nor stupefying.
[1] Whenever possible I try to use established translation. But sticking with the Haaretz translation of “dripping pessimism” won’t make sense as both Shavit’s original and Levy’s numerous references are to evil.
Hebrew original: www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/
Ari Shavit’s article (in English): http://www.haaretz.com/
Translated by Sol Salbe of the Middle East News Service, Melbourne Australia.
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