Israelis, mainly peaceniks, Pt. 4: Amos Gvirtz

On March 4, I had a delightful evening at the home of Amos
Gvirtz in Kibbutz Shefayim,
on the Mediterranean coast north of Tel Aviv.  Gvirtz is a longtime member of the kibbutz—maybe
he was born there? I’m not sure. 
Today, Gvirtz still lives in one of its simple, late-1950s-style homes. He
has a day job running one of the kibbutz factories but spends most of his
discretionary time doing peace work.  He’s a longtime pillar of the Israeli nonviolence movement,
and was a founder of Palestinians and Israelis
for Nonviolence.  He was also chairperson of the Israeli Committee
Against Home Demolitions, and every week since summer 2006 he has published
a short essay under the title “Don’t Say We Did Not Know.” You can find some
older samples of these essays here,
along with the email through which you can subscribe to them.

Gvritz had invited me to dinner at
the suggestion of our mutual friend Rabbi Moshe Yehudai,
an inspiring guy who sits on the board of Rabbis
for Human Rights. Yehudai describes himself as
both a pacifist and a Zionist, and makes about the best case I’ve ever heard
for how one can be both things.  Gvirtz, by contrast, says he’s no longer a
Zionist—see below. But the two men have worked together for a long time
and clearly get along very well despite that difference.

Yehudai picked me up from my hotel
for the evening on the kibbutz. I wish it had been lighter by the time we got
there, as I’d have loved to have a look round. But it had gotten pretty late
and it was dark, so we went straight to Gvirtz’s home,
where he served us an excellent vegetarian dinner. 

We had a good conversation with the meal, but it was only
later that I pulled out my notebook and I’m afraid I can’t reconstruct the
earlier portion of what we said.  So
join us as we sit on the low, Scandinavian-style seats in the sitting area of Gvirtz’s home, drinking herbal tea after the meal.  This is where I picked up my pen…

Gvirtz was talking about the continuity
of the practice of settling new areas with Jewish settlers and dispossessing
the native Palestinians, from the pre-state era right through to the
present.  (Later, he made the point
that “The Nakba wasn’t really a single event that
happened in 1948, so much as a long-drawn-out process, that continues to
this day.”)

He said,

The two sides here really understand war very differently. For Palestinians, settlement and dispossession are clearly understood as acts of war. Also, the stealing of
water.

When Israel undertakes acts like
these, they have nothing to do with our security. But every act like this gives
the Palestinians reasons to take revenge on us.  And indeed, more than 50 percent of what the Israeli
military does also has this effect.

He noted that there was a long tradition in Labour Zionism of focusing on the importance of deeds,
rather than words—with special reference to the Labour
Zionists’ lengthy project of adding “another dunum,
another mule” to the settlement project. (A dunum is
a local measure of land area equivalent to one-tenth of a hectare.)

Gvirtz added,

So at Oslo, for example, there were
really two processes going on. At the political level, it seemed that there was
a peace process. But on the ground, there was a war process, as the settlement
project was pushed forward even faster.

And it was the same after
Annapolis. And did you notice that this time around, after Annapolis, the
extreme right here didn’t complain about those negotiations  with the
Palestinians—neither about those nor about the negotiations with the
Syrians? Because they knew that at the same time the negotiations were going on
the government was doing a lot of important infrastructure preparation for the
new settlement area in ‘E-1’. And building inside the existing settlements
continued, as did the attacks on the Palestinian peasants…

I asked if, in light of the now-massive existence of
settlements, settlement infrastructure, and settlers in the west Bank, he
thought there was still time to salvage a two-state solution.

He said, “Yes. The one-state solution is a very beautiful
idea in theory but it will not work. The situation is still reversible.”

He said this about the most recent Israeli election:

In the last election, the big
debate among the three big leaders [Netanyahu, Livni,
and Barak] was over ‘Who can cheat the Americans the most effectively?’ My view
is that Ehud Barak has cheated not only the Americans, but also the moderate
peace movement in this country.

But anyway, don’t listen to the
declarations coming out of any of these people. Look at their acts.

He talked more about Israeli-US relations:

From the beginning of the Zionist
movement, they have always understood that they could only realize their aims
by winning the sponsorship of a superpower, and this concept is still very
present and very strong here.

Now, the country’s relationship
with the US is one of interests. For example, if you go back to the period
leading up to the 1967 war, you’ll recall that the Egyptian army was fighting
in the civil war in 
Yemen; and by raising the tensions here Israel was able to draw
the Egyptian army away from there, where they were operating pretty close to
some of the peninsula’s oil wells.

And before that, the government
here had a close relationship with France, the result of which was the
acquisition of nuclear weapons. But 1967 was the turning point, which took Israel
into the close relationship with the USA. That paid off for the Americans when
the Israeli government threatened to intervene to save King Hussein during
Black September [in 1970], and also during the first Gulf War.

So Israel is very strongly tied to
American interests.

However, there are two streams in
Zionism. There are ‘existential Zionists’, who seek simply to continue the
process of expropriation of the land and the expulsion of the Palestinians, and
there are others who are more focused on the survival of the state. When it
comes to a clash between those who favor more expropriation and the survival
interest of keeping our relationship with the US, they choose survival.

So Israeli governments have been pretending
to be attentive to US preferences, but not actually going along with them. And
the US interest in the occupied Palestinian territories has until now been only
a secondary interest for them.

I asked about his expectations from Pres. Obama. He said he had a small hope that Obama
could do something diplomatically with Syria. (“Maybe Americans hope they can
‘turn’ Syria’, in the same way they did with Egypt at Camp David,” he said.)

He did not say anything speciic
about his expectations from Obama on the Palestinian
track, though he did note that 76% of American Jews had voted for Obama—“against the advice of the leaders of their
organizations, nearly all of which were for McCain.”

He talked about what had driven him and some friends and
colleagues to found the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions back in
1997:

Back then, there were no young
people under 40 years old in the peace movement. Even people who had been
conscientious objectors were not in the peace movement but in the green
movement or in Ta’ayush [which is mainly a movement
for coexistence Jews and Palestinians who are citizens of Israel.] Then, after
Camp David 2 [in July 2000], peace Now effectively
disappeared, and at the time of the Israeli disengagement from Gaza, Ta’ayush became much weakened too. Since then, at the
political level, there has only really been the anarchists,
and they are very young.

But the Nakba
is here and now. It continues, so that’s what our committee trying to fight
against.

I became an anti-Zionist after
Oslo, when the government expelled the Arabs of Jahhaleenn
to make room for the big new settlement area if Maale
Adummim.

(As an aside, I’ll note that when I was in Palestine/Israel
with the Quaker fact-finding group in June 2002 we made a short visit to some
of the Arabs of Jahhaleen. This was a group of mainly
transhumant Palestinians who moved with their flocks around traditional grazing
grounds in the hills east of Jerusalem. After the occupation authorities moved
them off their traditional lands they ended up living in shipping containers in
a makeshift camp atop a long-used garbage dump. The Jews-only settlement of Maale Adummim now has around
35,000 settlers in its lovely, well-tended housing.)

Gvirtz continued:

Like the Zionists, I believe we
Jews need a state of our own. But unlike the Zionists I don’t think this should
be built on the ruins of someone else’s home. So our state need not necessarily
be right here.

He talked about what it has been like for him, living as a
convinced pacifist in Israel:

Until the First Lebanon War [1982],
people here opposed me a lot, and they were often angry with me. But since the
First Lebanon War, people simply haven’t cared so much. They are much less
idealistic than they used to be, and much more hedonistic.

You know, with all the great
achievements of the Zionist movement, this is still the mosyt
dangerous place in the world to be a Jew!

And now, here we are with the Arabs offering us peace, and our leaders aren’t
even dealing with this offer seriously at all! This is the most
irresponsible thing.

Finally, he talked about his theory of nonviolence and what
the responsibilities of the various parties to any conflict are in it.

You could say there are three
different ‘sides’ in our conflict. There are the Palestinians, the Israelis,
and others from outside; and nonviolent activists in each of these three groups
have different responsibilities. The Palestinians need to practice active
nonviolence, while the Israelis need to practice hat I call ‘preventive
nonviolence.’

The rule of the occupation over the
Palestinians can be maintained only through violence; and it provokes
the violence of others… So all steps that Israelis take to delegitimate
the occupation are acts of preventive nonviolence.

Then, in addition, Israelis and
others from elsewhere can interpose themselves between the soldiers running the
occupation and the Palestinians being occupied, or can act as witnesses to the
violence of the occupation. These are also valuable actions.

When Palestinians undertake
nonviolent acts, that really enables us to take part
more effectively; and our presence can help to de-escalate the violence from
the soldiers or settlers.

… A longish day was coming to an end. That was the point at
which I stopped taking notes.  Soon
thereafter, Gvirtz escorted me out to the bus-stop on
the nearby highway interchange, and we continued talking for the  five minutes it took till a
share-taxi swung to a halt to take me back to Tel Aviv.  Readers interested in learning more
about Gvirtz’s theory of nonviolence can go and read this 2003 article in which he
laid it out in more detail.