'I used to be a terrorist' http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4312570,00.html Another atrocity, another brutal retaliation. Yesterday, Israel plunged deeper into a new spiral of violence. Uri Avnery, war hero and peace campaigner, tells Jonathan Freedland that the cycle cannot be broken until Israelis and Palestinians accept they have different versions of history; David Grossman describes life amid the terror Jonathan Freedland Guardian Tuesday December 4, 2001 He is a 78-year-old Israeli patriot, a veteran of the 1948 war of independence and the proud bearer of a scar given to him by three Egyptian bullets. He has served three terms in the Knesset and is a national legend in his home country. Yet don't look to Uri Avnery for a typical Israeli reaction to the latest calamities to befall his land. Nothing about Avnery is typical. He will not endorse yesterday's Israeli onslaught on the Gaza headquarters of Yasser Arafat, with whom he says he shares a special "bond". The two met as Israeli shells rained from the sky during the siege of Beirut in 1982, making Avnery the very first Israeli politician to shake hands with the Palestinian leader. He has no time for the current talk of removing Arafat and replacing him with a more pliable leader. "Arafat has the same standing among Palestinians as George Washington in America or David Ben-Gurion in Israel: he is the father of the nation," says Avnery. "He led them on a long march for 40 years from the brink of oblivion to the threshold of their own state." Israel should forget its fantasies of re placing him; Arafat is the only man with the moral authority to make peace. Nor will Avnery serve up the standard-issue condemnation of Palestinian violence, even after a weekend in which 25 Israelis, many of them teenagers, were killed by a string of suicide bombs. Instead, he says he understands the killers; he even identifies with them a little. "After all," he says, "I used to be a terrorist myself." To cap it all, Avnery delivered that remark yesterday - at a London ceremony to celebrate his receipt later this week of the alternative Nobel peace prize, awarded by an international jury in Stockholm. It all adds up to the unique mix of soldier and peace activist, ex-terrorist and radical dove that has made Avnery one of the most intriguing, controversial and divisive characters in Israeli history. Since the founding of the state, Avnery has been a self-styled conscience for Israel - whether as a serving politician or acid-penned editor for 40 years of Ha'olam Hazeh, a satirical, political magazine that served as a Hebrew Private Eye. A national hate-figure, regularly denounced as a traitor, he has spent a lifetime thinking the unthinkable. For five decades he has been the raging voice in the wilderness, complete with the ancient prophet's white beard, condemned by almost all who hear him. But never quite dismissed. For Avnery's life story reads like a history of the Jewish 20th century. He was the son of refugees from Hitler's Germany, fleeing to Palestine in 1933 (he still has the accent to prove it). Five years later, aged just 15, he joined the Jewish underground against "colonial British rule", fighting in the Irgun, the rightwing group headed by Menachem Begin. That CV should have made Avnery a Sharon-style Likud hardliner. But that's not how it worked out. Even before the Jewish state was created in 1948, he began to see the other side - to see how things looked from the Palestinian point of view. Asking Israelis and Palestinians to do the same, to understand each other's national "narratives", is now his life's work, carried out through his organisation Gush Shalom, or Peace Bloc. "You now have the fifth generation on both sides born into the conflict, which impacts on every sphere of their lives. They have two completely separate narratives, which can describe the same set of events, and yet which could have happened on two different planets." Take this weekend. "For the Israelis, these were terrorist outrages committed by criminals under the direction of the tired, corrupt Arafat. For the Palestinians, these same events were acts of liberation committed by heroes, led by the father of the nation, Yasser Arafat." The two sides are so far apart, they cannot even understand what the other side thinks or feels. He constantly tries to put himself into the shoes of the Palestinians and, he says, his background helps. When he ponders the current wave of terrorist violence, he remembers his own mentality as a young man in the Irgun. "My own memories from that period are a very good guide for me today. We joined those who fought, not those who didn't," he says, explaining why young Palestinians are flocking to the flag of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. If they didn't fight, those groups would become irrelevant. If Arafat was not associated with resistance to the Israeli occupation, Palestinians would leave him, too, says Avnery: "He would be a general without an army." This is not new, he says: this is the dynamic of any people fighting occupation. Equally, he remembers that the extremist Jewish groups melted away the moment the United Nations promised a Jewish state in 1947. If Israel and the United States made clear now that the Palestinians would get a Palestinian state on all of the West Bank and Gaza (with any small border changes mutually agreed) then, he believes, the likes of Hamas and Jihad would go the way of the Irgun and Stern Gang: they would become redundant overnight. The immediate priority is for an end to violence, which he believes has to be imposed by an external, international presence enforcing a ceasefire. Then there should be talks, aimed at creating a Palestinian state, compensation for refugees displaced in 1948 and a sharing of Jerusalem - the west as Israel's capital, the east as Palestine's. And Israel needs to make this move dramatically, not drawn out over several years. He quotes David Lloyd George: "You cannot leap over the abyss in two jumps." Later, there needs to be a truth and reconciliation process where both peoples can at last look at each other. He wants the Palestinians truly to realise and accept "the impact the Holocaust has on every Jew in the world today" and for Israelis to understand the naqba , the catastrophe that Palestinians believe befell them in 1948. "I saw what happened," he says. "I saw more than most people because I was in a mounted commando unit which went around, all along the front. So I saw the naqba as it happened: I've been in [emptied] Arab villages where the food was standing on the table and it was still hot... I came out of this war completely convinced that we must make peace with the Palestinian people." He started saying it right away, even in the early years of the state when such talk was heresy - when Golda Meir denied there was any such thing as a Palestinian people. The result was a string of arson attempts and bombings against his magazine offices, a serious beating which left two arms broken and, in 1975, an assassination attempt. Later, it emerged that Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, had officially branded Avnery and Ha'olam Hazeh as Public Enemy No1. Today, he keeps up the scathing rhetoric that earned him his radioactive reputation. In denouncing the loyalty of diaspora Jews to Israel, he says: "If Israel elected the House of Caligula, I'm sure American Jewry would follow it with total support." But, if they listened closely, many Jews and Israelis would find Avnery is not quite the treacherous monster of modern myth. For one thing, he insists he is not an anti-Zionist: he says he is a post-Zionist, one who recognises the movement for a Jewish state had many "beautiful" aspects as well as darker ones. He speaks with great passion for Israeli society and Hebrew culture, describing himself as a patriot. He disagrees strongly with Edward Said's previous advocacy of a single, binational state for both peoples: "Nationalism is still a very strong force," he says, and both sides should not be denied a state of their own. Most appealing of all, he retains his optimism even in this hour of darkness. He says the difference between a psychotic and a neurotic is that the former says two and two equals five, while the latter admits two and two is four but is angry about it: "Israel is moving from the psychotic to the neurotic phase," finally facing up to the reality of what happened in 1948 and after. And does he, at 78, believe he will see all his dreams and schemes realised? "Oh, yes. I've decided not to die until all this happens." |