Among the colorful revelers of Allenby street, in crowded
restaurants of merry-making Tel Aviv nights, a vision came to me, a vision
of an angel in battle-dress, chalking up on a wall three words, Mene,
Tekel ufarsin. My Angel-English on-line dictionary prompts a translation:
you were tested and you failed the test.
These are the darkest days for the people of Israel. They
are dark, as the lamentations and protests of us and our fathers turned
out to be as genuine as a three-dollar bill. In 1968, a young Jewish
Russian kid, I wrote on the walls of my native Russian city, ‘Hands off
Czechoslovakia’. The beautiful deep voice of a Jewish Russian poet
Alexander Galitch intoned: Citizens, our motherland is in danger, our
tanks are on foreign soil! Some Russian Jews demonstrated on the Red
Square against the invasion, and were beaten up by the police. We
protested against the presence of the Russian tanks in Budapest, Prague
and Kabul as Russian citizens who value honor above the ill-understood
loyalty, humankind above blood ties. In the same time, Jewish American
kids demonstrated against their country’s intervention in Vietnam, while
Jewish boys and girls in Europe fought against racism. Years passed by,
and now our Jewish tanks are on the foreign soil.
Our Jewish army murders civilians, demolishes houses,
starves millions and imposes the siege on the Palestinian villages. Our
crimes exceeded the Russian crimes committed in Chechnya and Afghanistan,
the American crimes in Vietnam and Serb crimes in Bosnia. Surely, the
Israeli intellectuals demonstrate en masse on our equivalent of
Pennsylvania Avenue or Trafalgar Square, American Jews raise their voice
against the America-armed killers of Palestinians, Russian Jews speak up
for the human rights of the enslaved Gentiles of the Holy Land? No fear,
our literati exalt the courage of our Jewish soldiers, venerate the steady
hand of our Jewish snipers and glorify the immense humanity of the Jewish
folk, who could pulverize all the Gentiles of Palestine, but kindly limit
ourselves to a few hundred wounded and maimed a day.
My grandfather in the Pale of Settlement complained
against the restrictions of the free movement of Jews in the Russian
Empire, while in our generation Anatoli Sharansky became a symbol of
struggle for human rights. In our own country, the Gentiles are fenced
into reservations and concentration camps that the Pale pales in
comparison with. A Palestinian cannot go to the next village without the
Jewish ausweis, he is forever checked by our Checkists. He can only dream
of the sea, washing the shores of his ancestral home ? we do not let
Palestinians to pollute the Jewish purity of our beaches.
Ostrovsky reported that Mossad gents bugged the
home of a Middle Eastern diplomat during the administration of Jimmy
Carter in order to embarrass the United States Ambassador to the United
Nations, Andrew Young, after Young sought to establish informal talks with
PLO representatives. When Young met with the unofficial United Nations PLO
representative Zehdi Labib Terzi "accidentally" in the home of a
friendly diplomat, Kuwaiti Ambassador Abdalla Yaccoub Bishara, listening
devices planted surreptitiously and without Terzi's knowledge by Mossad
field officers recorded every word of the diplomats conversation. The
incident soon became front-page news in the Zionists' most prominent U.S.
propaganda organ, The New York Times, and President Carter caved in to
public pressure and asked for Young's resignation. Thus, that early effort
to establish relations between the U.S. government and the PLO became a
footnote in history when, on September 23, 1979, Young resigned from his
position. Young, an African American, has never since served in the upper
levels of government.
For years, the Jews protested the discrimination in
employment and education. In our own state we created the system of total
national discrimination. In our state-owned Electric company, out of 13000
employees there are six Gentiles. 0,0004%. Gentiles form forty percent of
the population between the Jordan River and the sea, but only one out of
four has the right to vote. There are no Gentiles in the Supreme court, in
the government, in Air Force, in the secret services. There is not even
one Gentile on the board of the main Israeli Liberal newspaper, Haaretz.
That is why all complaints of Jews in the Diaspora deserve
to be re-written in the light of the events. We did not fought for the
human rights, but for the rights of Jews. We were for the freedom of
movement and freedom of choice ? for Jews only. We spoke of the universal
suffrage, but we meant the right of vote for Jews only. We do not mind
occupation and invasion, as long as we invade and occupy. The sight of a
child raising hands in front of the machine gun toting thug grieves us
only if it is a Jewish child. The Gentile child can be shot at freely.
When Bialik wrote “Devil did not invent a fit punishment
for the murder of a child”, he actually meant ‘a Jewish child’. When
he was horrified by the scenes of pogrom, he was horrified that the
violence is directed against Jews. Otherwise, there is nothing wrong with
pogrom per se. The Jews of Upper Nazareth committed a pogrom of Gentiles
in Nazareth, but no pogromchik was tried. Police helped them by murdering
few of pogrom victims. Still worse were the pogroms of Ramallah and Beth
Jallah, committed with the helicopter gun ships and tanks.
Tsarist Russia, ‘the land of pogroms’, was much hated
by our grandfathers, and eventually destroyed by them. Still, hundred
years of Jewish pogroms caused fewer casualties than we murder in a week.
The most horrible pogrom of Kishinev claimed 45 dead and 600 wounded. Last
weeks in Israel, 300 were killed and many thousands wounded. After the
pogrom in Tsarist Russia, all writers and intelligentsia condemned the
perpetrators. In the Jewish state, hardly few dozens gathered on the
demonstration in Tel Aviv, while the Hebrew Writers Union supported the
pogrom of Gentiles.
In 1991, the majority of the Russian Jews took the stand
against communism and for the private ownership. They actually had in mind
Jewish private property, as we confiscate the Gentile property with
greatest ease. Go through the best areas of Jerusalem, Talbieh, Old
Katamon, Greek and German Colonies, and see the marvellous palaces. They
belonged to Gentiles, - Germans, Armenians, Greeks, British, Russians,
Palestinians ? Christian and Moslem. All of them were confiscated and
given to Jews. During last weeks, hundreds of acres of Gentile property
were confiscated, and hundreds of Gentile houses seized or demolished.
Just before his arrest, the richest Russian Jewish
media-lord Gusinsky came to Israel and expressed his unlimited support. At
the same time he asked the world to help him in his fight with the Russian
authorities who try to save the TV from his clutches. His support of
Israel proves that Mr Gusinsky approves confiscations on the ethnic base.
He is just against the confiscations of the Jewish property. He is against
Jews being arrested ? the Gentiles may rot in prisons forever, as it
happens in the Jewish state.
In no time at all we succeeded to undermine the long-term
achievements of Jews in the struggle for democracy, human rights and
equality. What we did not like about the German Nazis? Their racism? Our
racism is not less wide-spread and poisonous. The Russian language
newspaper Direct Speech published in Jerusalem asked hundreds of Russian
Jews about their feelings towards the Palestinians. Typical answers were:
“I would kill all Arabs”, “All Arabs must be eliminated”, “Arabs
must be expelled”, “An Arab is an Arab. They have to be eliminated”.
I am not sure you would get better results in Germany in 1938. Even Nazis
did not intend to kill their Jewish enemies until 1941.
Let us put it straight, we were against racism as long as
it was somebody else’s racism. We were against death squads and
Sonderkommando as long as they acted against us. Our own killers, our
Jewish Sonderkommando is the object of our tender admiration. The Jewish
state is the only place in the world possessing legitimate killer squads,
embracing the policy of assassinations, practicing torture on the medieval
scale. Do not worry, dear Jewish readers, we torture and assassinate
Gentiles only.
We were against ghetto while we were pushed into a ghetto.
Now the most liberal Jewish plan calls for creation of a few Gentile
ghetto fenced by barbed wire, surrounded by Jewish tanks and Jewish-owned
factories at the fence, where the Arbeit will macht the Gentiles
frei. We
shall give the ghetto full independence previously removing all sources of
income and sustenance.
Israelis are brainwashed from kindergarten, they are
taught they belong to the Chosen People, who are Uber Alles. They were
indoctrinated in belief that the Gentiles are not fully human, and
therefore they can be killed and expropriated at will. After all, Israel
fulfilled one UN resolution, the one that called Zionism a form of racism.
What is upsetting that the internationalist upbringing in the Soviet Union
could not withstand the poison of Zionist propaganda of Jewish
superiority. I do regret the moral collapse of my own Russian community in
the Holy Land.
Now, as the angel wrote his fiery words, as prophets
called the people to repent, we have the choice. We can choose the way of
Nineveh, to repent, to return the stolen property, to give full equality
to Gentiles, to stop discrimination and murder, and hope to be forgiven by
God, if not for our sake, then for the sake of our cats and dogs. We can
persist in our evil ways as the people of Sodom and wait for the flood of
fire and burning sulfur from the angry heavens of Palestine.