HOWARD EPSTEIN: YOM GIDEON LEVY – NEW DAY OF MOURNING
Allow me, before I get stuck into the deeply unpleasant subject of Gideon Levy, a little self-congratulation. Sometime about a year ago, I made a great investment. One Friday morning, I bought Haaretz. So unpleasant, carping and downright twisted was it about Israel, that I determined never to waste my money on that caricature of journalism again. If I should live another twenty-years, I could save some $30,000, all for an outlay of just $5 – and with the bonus of not having my well-being assailed by articles that range from defeatist to treasonable. Now beat that for a wise investment policy.
Then, last weekend, I went and spoilt everything. Staying in an Israeli hotel, and seeing a gratis copy of Haaretz, I made the mistake of picking it up (How should I be judged? Always the optimist, or every man has his price and mine is $5?), and delving into it. Within minutes, I was looking around to see if there was a doctor in the house. But what medical discipline would I need? Cardiologist or psychiatrist?
What was the source of my trauma? Haaretz star journalist, Mr Gideon Levy. One assumes, from having seen his name appear for some years, that it is Mister and not Master Levy, that he is an adult and not an adolescent. Yet his writing suggests the latter.
Here are some extracts from what Master Levy wrote, with my comments:-
One day Jerusalem Day will become a national day of mourning. …. The 28th of Iyar will enter Israel’s mourning-day calendar, sandwiched between the Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Tisha B’Av – a day to commemorate the destruction of the dream that falls before the day commemorating the destruction of the Temple…..
It is not unimportant to remember that the Six Day War, which gave birth to Jerusalem Day, was provoked by blood-curdling Arab screams to kill every last Jew living within what were believed to be indefensible borders, and the casus belli of Egypt’s closure to us of the Straits of Tiran.
Whom did Israel attack on Monday, June 5, 1967? Egypt and Syria. Whom did Israel implore not to join in? King Hussein of Jordan, who controlled East Jerusalem. Not understanding that his allies had already lost the war along with their air forces, Hussein pitched in. As a result of Arab action, and Israeli reaction, Jerusalem was reunited.
The restrictions, physical and otherwise, were removed from the Western Wall of (UNESCO please note) our Temple, as a symbolic first act, and there was an immediate upsurge of joy and the desire to improve life for all the city’s residents. Building and the renaissance of the city started almost immediately and it continues today. Have the Arab areas seen as much development as the Jewish areas? Ask if they pay their Arnona, seek a proper peace or (on the other hand) murder young and old Jews with everything from earth-movers to steak knives, by way of guns and bombs, given half a chance.
What does human nature feel inclined to reward: nihilism, or constructive goodwill? Nevertheless, Jerusalem Arabs benefit from many public works in the city, not least the ever-expanding light railway that serves all sectors of Jerusalem society and a broad cross-section of suburbs. It has seen perhaps one or two outrages in total from its thousands of Arab riders daily. Not much to mourn there – and there will be even less when our Arab neighbors join with us in building together, and abandon tearing down as a matter of policy. (They could make a real start by persuading their Palestinian cousins to abandon the policy of teaching their children that Jews are descended from apes and pigs, and live only to be killed by Arabs.)
This holiday [Jerusalem Day] was and remains the religious chauvinists’ holiday, celebrated by a bullying, screeching minority, who mark it in their characteristic manner. They celebrate Jerusalem’s only joy – gloating at others’ misfortunes….
This holiday is a matter of rejoicing for many beyond the religious neighborhoods of the city (and way beyond Israel, too). In any event, the assumption that the religious are also bigots is so grotesque that the very phrase religious chauvinists is as oxymoronic as the person who encapsulated it is moronic. (That word has many synonyms. I shall settle for weak-minded).
A poor city, filthy and neglected, which secular Jews leave as fast as they can, which the Palestinians cling to with all their meager strength and which religious, chauvinistic, extremist Jews have long taken over. It’s a city that sends its settler metastases into every Palestinian neighborhood, merely to bring misery, to dispossess, to oppress and to evict…..
I am not sure what it is that Master Levy considers makes Jerusalem look poor. Not to most normal people, those not eaten-up with left-wing poison and bile that is so indolently aimed at Israel, does the capital look poor. From the light railway, and its remarkably graceful cat’s-cradle of a bridge that lifts it over one of Jerusalem’s most complex intersections, to the astonishing ring road that sweeps through urban valley and hill, a triumph of engineering worthy of the city of the Temple, to the reborn Old City, and indeed the wider city, and to the universities with their many Arab students, we see achievement and enlightenment.
For over the past almost-half-century, Jews and Arabs have mixed in peace (the Intifadot aside), throughout central Jerusalem, without the muggings, sexual assaults, kidnappings and the other ugliness that mars city life in the UK and the USA. Are there no-go areas for some and others for others? Ask a Detroit or Paris policeman to define no-go areas for you. I think most of us would take our chances with taking a wrong turn in Jerusalem rather than those places. Do Arabs worry about these things? When did you last hear of an Arab from East Jerusalem or anywhere else being lynched Ramallah-style (See my earlier blogs)? (Answer: you never did.)
Its “settler metastases”! How mentally sick does one have to be for a phrase like that to form in the mind. “Metastases” implies cancer; but what is more cancerous: indulging in Intidafadot as an alternative to foreswearing a desire to kill all Jews, along with ditching the traditional Arab policy of nihilism?
As I have written before, all but one of the 23 institutions of tertiary education created in formerly Egyptian and Jordanian territory ceded as a result of the 1967 war were built under the Israeli administrations. (The odd one out was that created by Eli Kadoorie, an Iraqi Jew.) Where is the cancer Master Levy? Do you perceive it in the positive and constructive policies of the Jews? Or the destructiveness of the Arabs? Do grow up. The time for this childishness is surely over.
With the most racist soccer team. A poor city, filthy and neglected in the league and the most chauvinistic mayor in local government – neither by chance – Jerusalem has become the symbol of the occupation, the most convincing evidence of its apartheid…..
You are really scraping the bottom now, Master Levy, with the reference to a soccer team (see the intelligent response to this by Ms Liat Collins in this weekend’s Jerusalem Post) and the repeating of the word “chauvinist”. I infer that you are running out of ideas. Oh, and that tired, old apartheid canard again? You plainly have no conception of how it was in the RSA pre-Mandela and what is the reality of Israel today. (See my earlier blogs as to how unlike apartheid RSA Israel really is.) This is lazy, uninformed, uniform, left-wing claptrap, Master Levy.
It could have been different. Had Israel recognized the Palestinians as equals to the Jews and the Palestinian people as having equal rights in the city, today we’d have a different Jerusalem and a different Israel.
Master Levy is right about one thing, however. It could have been different, but that was up to the Arabs. They rebuffed the hand of friendship extended by successive Israeli leaders and the three Noes of Khartoum (see my earlier blogs) are merely one example of the consistently negative policy that has robbed the Palestinians of a half century of cooperation and wealth-creation. That is what happens when you want it all. Spoilt brats everywhere evidence that.
Forty-nine years ago today it conquered part of the city and since then has done everything to turn it into a moral ruins.
The moral ruin is that of the people with the bankrupt policies, who spurn progress and seek to turn back the clock, content to live in their discontent as long as they can kid themselves that one day the super-state that is Israel will somehow disappear. Fortunately for you Master Levy, it will not.
I kept the worst for the end: the title of Master Levy’s literary masterpiece. It was: A Day Of Mourning Called Jerusalem Day, although I am sure you got the idea. Well, Master Levy does not go away completely empty-handed. There is indeed the opportunity now for a new Israeli day of mourning. Not Yom Yerushalayim, 28th of Iyar, but 2nd Sivan – we could call it Yom Gideon Levy, since he was so keen on another day of mourning. This new Israeli day of mourning, named for him, would serve to remind us of last Wednesday, when three murderers put on, for them, the fancy dress of western businessmen, left their homes in Yatta, near Hebron, travelled to Tel Aviv and took the lives of four wonderful Israeli citizens. One severed digit of any of these martyrs to the idiocy under review was worth more than the whole of Master Levy and his warped, bitter, perverse and perverted being put together.
Please tell us Master Levy: you don’t really believe all that nonsense that you write, do you? You are in it for the money, surely. That we could understand. Not forgive but understand. In the interim, we despair of you, but pray that one day you will compare honestly the Israeli paradigm with those of our opponents.
You know what, Master Levy? I am willing to discuss it with you, debate it all with you. Fancy meeting for a coffee and a chat in Yatta?
© Howard Epstein June 2016
