Primo Levi's criticism of Israel's (the military state's) 1982 invasion of Lebanon made me go back to
Noam Chomsky's
Fateful Triangle to see about Primo Levi's statement
"We must choke off the impulses toward emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class. Help Israel find its European origins, or rather the equilibrium of its founding fathers, of Ben Gurion, of Golda Meir. Not that they all had clean hands, but who of us does? ^4"
The well-known Israeli military historian Meir Pail, formerly head of the Officers Training School of the IDF and an Israeli dove, might well have had the League in mind when he described the ways in which “Golda Meir and the Labor Party destroyed pluralism and debate within the old Zionist framework,” mimicking “Joseph Stalin’s tendency towards communist parties all over the world,” whose interests were to be “subjugated...to the power interests of the Soviet Union”; “And the Israeli regime’s tendency has been similar” as it has “destroyed the very process of dissent and inquiry,” beginning (he says) with the Golda Meir labor government.
Both political groupings, then, have been consistently rejectionist, willing to grant no national rights to the indigenous Arab population. Israel’s consistent rejectionism is founded on the attitudes expressed by the long-time leader of the Labor Party, David Ben-Gurion, when he stated that the Palestinian Arab shows no “emotional involvement” in this country:
Why should he? He is equally at ease whether in Jordan, Lebanon or a variety of places. They are as much his country as this is. And as little. ^24
Elsewhere, “Ben-Gurion followed Weizmann’s line when he stated that: ‘there is no conflict between Jewish and Palestinian nationalism because the Jewish Nation is not in Palestine and the Palestinians are not a nation’.” ^25 Essentially the same view was expressed by Moshe Dayan at a time when he was a principal spokesman for the Labor Party. The cause of the Palestinians (which he professed to understand and appreciate) is “hopeless,” he intimated, so they should establish themselves “in one of the Arab countries.” “I do not think,” he added, “that a Paleinian should have difficulties in regarding Jordan, Syria or Iraq as his homeland.” ^26 Like Ben-Gurion, Dayan was asserting that the Palestinians, including the peasantry, had no particular attachment to their homes, to the land where they had lived and worked for many generations, surely nothing like the attachment to the land of the Jews who had been exiled from it 2000 years ago.
Similar views were expressed by Prime Minister Golda Meir of the Labor Party, much admired here as a grandmotherly humanitarian figure, in her remark that:
.> .> It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist. ^27
Elsewhere, she describes the Palestinian problem as merely an “invention of some Jews with distorted minds.” ^28
^4 [The Complete Works of Primo Levi] Giampaolo Pansa, “Io Primo Levi, chiedo le dimissioni di Begin,” in Belpoliti, ed., Primo Levi: Conversazioni. In English, “Primo Levi: Begin Should Go,” in The Voice of Memory.
^24 David Ben-Gurion, Memoirs (World, New York, 1970, p. 118).
^25 Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians, p. 134, citing a speech of October 12, 1936. For the actual record of Palestinian nationalism, see the outstanding two-volume study by Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, The Palestinian Arab National Movement (Frank Cass, London, 1974, 1977)
^26 Kapeliouk, Israel, p. 32.
^27 London Sunday Times, June 15, 1969. For a longer excerpt, see John K. Cooley, Green March, Black September (Frank Cass, London, 1973, pp. 196-7). See Porath, op. cit., for a serious discussion of the facts concerning Palestinian nationalism.
^28 Kapeliouk, Israel, p. 32.
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