ISRAEL = “A Slaughter of Innocents”: Henry Siegman, a Venerable Jewish Voice for Peace, on Gaza to Prevent a Palestinian State — Interview by Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh on Democracy Now!   July 29, 2014

Click for Source Article on Democracy Now and Truth-Out

Henry Siegman, Former executive director of the American Jewish Congress was ordained an Orthodox rabbi.  His father was a leader of European Zionist movement for creation of a Jewish state. Head of the Synagogue Council of America. Senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. + Now President of the U.S./Middle East Project.

Siegman = NOW a vocal critic of Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories and has urged Israel to engage with Hamas. Called the Palestinian struggle for a state “the mirror image of the Zionist movement.”

2014 July op-ed for Politico = “Israel Provoked This War.”

HENRY SIEGMAN: Israeli policies = Disastrous, both in political terms and humanitarian terms. Situation cannot lead to any positive results in the lives of either Israelis or Palestinians.  The Zionist dream is based on the slaughter of—repeated slaughter of innocents…profound, profound crisis…—in the thinking of all of us who were committed to the establishment of the state and to its success. It leads one virtually to a whole rethinking of this historical phenomenon.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: What do you believe the objectives of Israel are in this present assault on Gaza?

HENRY SIEGMAN: What seems on the surface a justifiable objective of ending rockets from Gaza—it’s hard to say they’re aimed at civilians, because they never seem to land anywhere that causes serious damage.  Obama says Israel has a right to defend themselves…But what he doesn’t add, and what perverts this principle, undermines the principle, is that no country and no people would live the way Gazans have been made to live.  Consequently, this moral equation which puts Israel as the victim with the Palestinians in Gaza the attackers.  Our media rarely points out that Palestinians have a right to live a decent, normal life and must think, “What can we do to put an end to this?”  This is why in Politico article, I pointed out the question of morality of Israel’s action depends on: Couldn’t Israel be doing something in preventing this disaster (and) destruction of human lives and cost? Answer: Sure, they could end the sustained occupation of Palestinian lands.

AMY GOODMAN: Israel says it does not occupy Gaza, that it left years ago. MSNBC clip of Joy Reid interviewing the Israeli spokesperson, Mark Regev.

REGEV: You said Israel is the occupying authority. You’re forgetting Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip. We took down all the settlements, and the settlers who didn’t want to leave, we forced them to leave. We pulled back to the 1967 international frontier. There is no Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip. We haven’t been there for some eight years.

HENRY SIEGMAN: That is utter nonsense for several reasons. Gaza is controlled completely, like the West Bank, because it is totally surrounded by Israel. = Chokehold on Gaza = Surrounded by military by land, air, and sea. = No one IN GAZA can make a move without coming into contact with the Israeli IDF.  GAZA is an imprisoned area. There’s no one I have encountered, who is involved with international law, who’s ever suggested to me that in international law Gaza is not considered occupied. So that’s sheer nonsense.

HENRY SIEGMAN: Another point is the Israeli propaganda machine = These (so-called) official spokespeople tell you, “Take a look at what kind of people these are. Here we turned over Gaza to them. And you’d think they would invest their energies in building up the area, making it a model government and model economy. Instead, they’re working on rockets.” The implication is that Palestinians didn’t take advantage of improving Gaza so deny them statehood.

HENRY SIEGMAN: I have always asked myself “What if we were in their place?” The policies pursued by Israeli governments, as a (SO-CALLED) model democracy in the Middle East assumes the (ENTIRE) public (ISRAELIS + PALESTINIANS) has some responsibility to put governments in their place = So, the question is: ‘What if the situation were reversed? A Talmudic saying is, “Don’t judge your neighbor until you can imagine yourself in his place.” — “What if we were in their place?’ What if the situation were reversed, and the Jewish population were locked into, were told, “Here, you have less than 2 percent of Palestine, so now behave. No more resistance. And let us deal with the rest”? Is there any Jew who would have said this is a reasonable proposition, that we cease our resistance, we cease our effort to establish a Jewish state, at least on one-half of Palestine, which is authorized by the U.N.? Nobody would agree to that. They would say this is absurd.

HENRY SIEGMAN: So the expectations that Palestinians would NOT try, in any way they can, to end this state of affair—and to expect of them to end their struggle and just focus on less than 2 percent to build a country is absurd. That is part of Israel’s propaganda that makes NO SENSE.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Palestinian unity government of Hamas and Fatah (PLO) is denied by Israel and United States — saying Hamas are “Terrorists.”  A short quote from a 2009 article you wrote in London Review of Books. You said, “Hamas is no more a ‘terror organization’ … than the Zionist movement was during its struggle for a Jewish homeland” in late 1930s and 1940s as “parties within the Zionist movement resorted to terrorist activities for strategic reasons.” Elaborate on the parallels between the two?

HENRY SIEGMAN:  I repeated it in a letter to NYT recently. Israel in its pre-state stage, had several terrorist groups that did exactly what Hamas does today — They killed innocent people in an even more targeted way than these rockets do. Benny Morris (Israeli Historian) published a book that is considered the Bible on that particular period in the book Righteous Victims, in which he said in his most recently updated book, based on new IDF information published, that Israeli generals received direct instructions from Ben-Gurion during the War of Independence to kill civilians, or line them up against the wall and shoot them, in order to help to encourage the exodus, that in fact resulted, of 700,000 Palestinians, who were driven out of their of their homes, and their towns and villages were destroyed (or taken over) by the Israeli military, that fought the War of Independence. These were oral orders, but Morris traces these orders given to Rabin, who executed these orders to execute civilians.

HENRY SIEGMAN: A recent book received so much public attention by Ari Shavit “My Promised Land,” describes several such incidents by Israeli Military = Shavit interviewed Benny Morris and said to him, “My God, you are saying that there was deliberate ethnic cleansing here?” And Morris said, “Yes, there was.” And he says, “And you justify it?” And he said, “Yes, because otherwise there would not have been a state.” And Shavit did not follow up. And that was one of my turning points myself, that he would not follow up and say, “Well, if that is a justification, the struggle for statehood, why can’t Palestinians do that? What’s wrong with Hamas? Why are they demonized if they do what we did?”

GOODMAN: Benjamin Netanyahu, vowed to punish those responsible for the killing of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, the Palestinian teen who was burned alive following the murders of three Israeli teens. Netanyahu drew a distinction between Israel and its neighbors in how it deals with, quote, “murderers.”

NETANYAHU: I know that in the society of Israel, there is no place for such murderers. And that’s the difference between us and our neighbors. They consider murderers to be heroes.

HENRY SIEGMAN:  The only difference is that Israel made the heads of the two major pre-state terrorist groups prime ministers (Irgun and Stern Gang = Begin and Shamir).  And contrary to Netanyahu, public highways and streets are named after them.  So this distinction he’s drawing is simply false; it’s not true. The heads of the two Israeli terrorist groups Benny Morris writes targeted civilians was started by the Jewish terrorist groups — And Arab groups followed that.

SHAIKH: Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, speaking to Charlie Rose said Hamas was willing to coexist with Jews but said it would not live, quote, “with a state of occupiers.” = MESHAAL: “I am ready to coexist with the Jews, with the Christians, and with the Arabs and non-Arabs, and with those who agree with my ideas and also disagree with them; however, I do not coexist with the occupiers, with the settlers and those who put a siege on us.”  ROSE: “Do you want to coexist with the state of Israel as a (SOLELY) Jewish state?  MESHAAL: “No. I said I do not want to live with a state of occupiers.”

SHAIKH: Could you respond to the claim made by Israelis repeatedly that they can’t negotiate with a political organization that refuses the state of Israel’s right to exist in its present form?

HENRY SIEGMAN: In both international custom and international law, political parties, like Hamas, are not required or even asked to recognize states (STATE OR NOT). The question is whether the government of which they are a part and that makes policy and executes policy, is prepared to recognize other states. I discussed this with Meshaal several times, face to face, and asked him whether he would be part of a government that recognizes the state of Israel, and he said, “Yes, provided  that the Palestinian public approves that policy….we will not serve in a government that has public support for that position…we will not serve in such a government.”  But a more important point is the state of Israel does not recognize a Palestinian state.  Important parties in Netanyahu’s government, including his Likud, to this day has an official platform that does not recognize the right of Palestinians to have a state anywhere in Palestine + Naftali Bennett’s party + HaBayit HaYehudi party.  Why hasn’t Israeli government said, “Like Hamas, if you have parties like that in your government, you are not a peace partner, and you are a terrorist group, if in fact you use violence to implement your policy…”? So the hypocrisy in the discussion that is taking place publicly is just mind-boggling.

GOODMAN: You are part or were part of major establishment Jewish organizations. You met Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas, several times. The U.S. government calls Hamas a terrorist organization, but communicate with them through other countries. Talk about your decision to meet with Khaled Meshaal, where you met with him, and the significance of your conversations.

HENRY SIEGMAN: FACT: U.S. has no such policy of not meeting with terrorist organizations (Taliban that cuts off hands and heads and kills girls who go to school). So that’s nonsense that we don’t talk to terrorist organizations.  USA has an Israeli (AIPAC imposed policy) of not meeting with Hamas. USA talks to enemies if we want to cease the slaughter, and we’re happy to do so and to try to reach an agreement that puts an end to it. And why Hamas should be the exception, again, I find dishonest. And the only reason that we do that is in response to the pressures from AIPAC and, of course, Israel’s position.

SHAIKH:  Israel and its supporters argue Israel’s disproportionate response to Palestine is because of the historical experience of the persecution of the Jews and, of course, the Holocaust. So how do you respond to those kinds of claims?

HENRY SIEGMAN:  I don’t accept that at all, because the lesson from the persecutions until the state of Israel came into being, is that you do not treat people in that kind of inhumane and cruel way. The hope always was that a state of Israel would be a model democracy practicing Jewish values of a humanitarian approach to these issues, and pursuit of justice.

HENRY SIEGMAN:  The Holocaust experience was important to me, since I lived two years under Nazi occupation, most of it running from place to place and in hiding—I always thought that the important lesson of the Holocaust is that there are evil people in this world who could do the most unimaginable, unimaginably cruel things. The great lesson of the Holocaust is that decent people would NOT allow such evil to prevail. The German public were not monsters, but it was OK with them that the Nazi machine did what it did. Now I draw no comparisons between the Nazi machine and Israeli policy. And what I resent most deeply is when people say, “How dare you invoke the Nazi experience?” The point is the evidence that they gave that decent people can watch evil and do nothing about it. That is the most important lesson of the Holocaust, not the Hitlers and not the SS, but the public that allowed this to happen. My deep disappointment is that the Israeli public, precisely because Israel claims to be democracy cannot say, “We’re not responsible what our leaders do,” that the public puts these people back into office again and again.

HENRY SIEGMAN:  I don’t consider myself a Holocaust survivor, in the sense that I was not in a concentration camp. But I lived under Nazi occupation in Frankfurt in 1930s.  My father decided to give up a very successful business to move to Belgium to escape the Nazis. But in 1940, the Germans invaded Belgium and France. We suffered until February 1942, when we arrived in USA. How my father pulled that off is a miracle; to this day, I don’t fully understand, because there were six children that he had to bring with him, and my mother, of course. We ran from place to place.  First we were at Dunkirk as the French and the British soldiers withdrew to across the channel. Then we were sent back when the Nazi troops finally caught up with us in Dunkirk, they sent us back to Antwerp. My father had connections with the police chief, because of his business interests in Antwerp  and was tipped off the Gestapo was supposed to come to our house to take all of us away THE NEXT MORNING. So we just picked up and some how got to Paris smuggled across the border into occupied Vichy France, for about a year, without proper papers and in hiding. Then we tried to cross into Spain, but they closed the border and sent us back into France.  We managed to get a boat to take us from Marseille to North Africa, where we were interned briefly in a camp in North Africa. And then the—what I believe was the last ship, a Portuguese, a neutral ship, taking refugees to the United States stopped in North Africa. We boarded that ship. And we were on the high seas for two months, because the Nazi subs were already busy sinking the ships that they encountered. So we had to go all the way around to avoid various Nazi submarine-infested areas.  After two months on the high seas, we arrived in New York, where we were sent to Ellis Island, which was full of Bundists, who had been German Bundists, who were arrested and were being sent back to Germany. But as we walked into Ellis Island into that hallway, something I will never forget, “We’re in America at last!” And those Bundists were greeting each other in the hallway, “Heil Hitler!” So the “Heil Hitlers” that we were trying to escape in Europe was the first thing we encountered as we landed on Ellis Island.

GOODMAN: How did you end up becoming head of one of the country’s two major Jewish organizations? And what was your position on Zionism after World War II?

HENRY SIEGMAN: My father was one of the leaders of European Zionism as head of the Mizrachi in the religious Zionist movement, not just in Belgium, but in Western Europe.  A leader and founder of the Mizrachi was Mayor of Berlin were guests in our house in Antwerp. And they used to take me on their knees and teach me Hebrew songs from Israel.  I was raised on mother’s milk — an ardent Zionist. I recall on the ship to America, I was writing poetry and songs at 10 or 11 about the blue sky of Palestina. In those days we referred to it as Palestina, Palestine.

I was an ardent Zionist until adulthood and well after the ’67 War, when I came across—and I got to know Rabin and other Israelis, who discussed an initiative from Sadat about peace and withdrawal.  And Rabin said, “But clearly, the Israeli public is not prepared for that now.” And that hit me like a hammer. I always had this notion drilled into me that if only the Arabs were to reach out and be willing to live in peace with Israel, that would be the time of the Messiah. But the Messiah came, and the Israeli leadership said, “No, public opinion is not ready for that.” And I wrote a piece then in Moment magazine—if you recall, it was published by Leonard Fein—and he made it a cover story, and the title was, “For the Sake of Zion, I Will Not Remain Silent.” And that triggered my re-examination of things I had been told and what was going on on the ground.

SHAIKH: Prior to that, your sense had always been that if the Arabs reached out, there would be two states: Palestine and Israel.

HENRY SIEGMAN: That was just a given fact we shared. The resolution said two states. The Israeli partition resolution, which Israel invoked in its Declaration of Independence, planted, rooted its legitimacy in that—it cited the Palestinian—the partition plan.  But now when someone says, “But there’s a partition plan that said that the rest of it, that was not assigned to Israel, is the legitimate patrimony of the Palestinian people,” the answer given is, “Ah, yeah, but they voted they would not accept it, and the partition plan was never officially adopted.” Well, why are you quoting it then in your Declaration of Independence, if you consider it to be null and void.

GOODMAN: The Israeli slogan is that idea in the founding of the state of Israel: Palestine is a land without people for a people without land?

HENRY SIEGMAN:  The common understanding repeatedly in Ari Shavit’s book and others, that the Zionist movement, at its very birth, was founded on an untruth, on a myth, that Palestine was a country without a people. And as he says, obviously—and he recognizes in his book that it was a lie. And therefore, from the very beginning, Zionism didn’t confront this profound moral dilemma that lay at its very heart. How do you deal with that reality? One of the ways Israelis dealt with it was the expulsion of (and murder of many) 700,000 Palestinians from their cities, from their towns and villages, which Ari Shavit writes about very painfully and honestly.

AMY GOODMAN:  Netanyahu claims that Israel is just responding to the thousands of rockets that Hamas and other groups are firing from Gaza.

HENRY SIEGMAN: Hamas wouldn’t be firing those rockets if you didn’t have an occupation in place. And you say you do not have a united Palestinian partner to make peace with, and yet Palestinians established that kind of government recently, bringing Hamas into the governmental structure headed by Abbas.  But Israel seeks to destroy that and won’t recognize it. The reason for recent Israeli actions is to prevent this new government from actually succeeding — It’s an attempt to break up the new unity government set up by the Palestinians.

SHAIKH: Why would they want to do that?

HENRY SIEGMAN: Because they are intent on preventing the development of a Palestinian state. To put it bluntly, they want all of it. They want all of Palestine. = Netanyahu said so openly without any reservations. He wrote it down in a published book his opposition to a Palestinian state, that Israel couldn’t allow that + He opposed peace agreements with Egypt + He opposed peace agreements with Jordan. + He opposed any positive step towards a stabilization and a more peaceful region = Netanyahu is on record.

HENRY SIEGMAN:  And when he took over as prime minister, he understood that it is not a smart thing to say that Israel’s policy is to maintain the occupation permanently. So, he pretends that he really would like to see a two-state solution, in his so-called Bar-Ilan speech several years ago. Naive people said, “Ah, you know, redemption is at hand,” when, to his own people, he winked and made clear, and as I just read recently it’s on record that his father said, “Of course he didn’t mean it. He will attach conditions that will make it impossible.” But that was his tactic. His tactic was to say, “We are all in favor of it, but if only we had a Palestinian partner.”

HENRY SIEGMAN:  Now they’ve had a UNITED Palestinian partner that’s been willing and able to set up institutions that the World Bank has said are more effective than most states that are members of the U.N. today. But Netanyahu continues to say we do not have a partner (NETANYAHU IS A LIAR – Sarkozy) pretending HAMAS is not united with Fatah under Abbas. FACT:  The Unity government of Palestine = A threat to Netanyahu’s tactic of pretending to be in support of a Palestinian state.

GOODMAN: In a response to the piece that you wrote for Politico that was headlined “Israel Provoked This War,” the Anti-Defamation League writes, quote, “Hamas has a charter which they live up to every day calling for Israel’s destruction. Hamas has used the last two years of relative quiet to build up an arsenal of rockets whose sole purpose is to attack Israel. Hamas has built a huge network of tunnels leading into Israel with the purpose of murdering large numbers of Israelis and seizing hostages.” Henry Siegman, can you respond?

HENRY SIEGMAN: What I would point out to my former friend Abe Foxman of the ADL is that, too, is Israel’s charter, or at least the policy of this government and of many previous governments, which is to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state. And they have built up their army and their armaments to implement that policy. And the difference between Hamas and the state of Israel is that the state of Israel is actually doing it. They’re actually implementing it, and they’re actually preventing a Palestinian state, which doesn’t exist. And millions of Palestinians live in this subservient position without rights and without security, without hope and without a future. The state of Israel is a very successful state, and happily Jews live there with a thriving economy and with an army whose main purpose is preventing that Palestinian state from coming into being. That’s their mandate.