Untitled Document
Comment on Chapter 2
Humiliation and anger
July 7, 2010
Amos Oz comments on a visit he made in 1982 to the town of Beth Shemesh. He had found dilapidated buildings twenty years earlier. He now finds the place transformed, with affluent, bourgeois homes, and a sign reading "Build your house." But in the old part of Beth Shemesh, the paint is peeling off the old collective housing, run-down and the resentments of the forgotten ones of growth, the Jews from North Africa, the Sephardim, are expressed violently.
Some complain: this place will remain a hole! People work, watch TV and go to bed. The discussion, at a café terrace, is about the opposition between Likud and the Labor Party. It quickly becomes heated.
*- Do you think this politician would hold up against the Arabs, against the whole world? *
The opposition between Begin (right wing) and Peres (Labor) is at the center of the debate.
Oz is the target of an outpouring of anger for what he wrote "against Begin and against Israel."
*- Why does Peres go to Israel to plant ideas against Israel in Reagan's head? *
- The Lebanon war is a just war... Sharon defeated the Egyptians at the moment when Dayan was cracking... My parents came from North Africa. They arrived in Haifa and were sprayed with disinfectant. Why? Ben-Gurion himself called us "dust of men"... But now that Begin is in power, things have changed. I'm not religious, I drive on the Sabbath, but my parents are traditionalists. And Begin, he knows the value of belief and respects it...
Labor Party... opposition... political struggles, friction between Israeli communities....
- At the army, second class soldiers are Moroccans. Officers come from the kibbutzim. All my life, I've been below, and you are above. You brought us here. You gave us a roof and work. You even brought our parents. But do you know why? You didn't have the Arabs yet. So you brought our parents to do the dirty jobs, to be sweepers, servants, cops. You brought our parents here to be your Arabs! For now, I'm a foreman, and I have a parent who owns a small construction company. But be careful, if you give the territories back to the Arabs, they won't work, and we'll be the ones doing the dirty jobs! My daughter works in a bank, and every evening an Arab comes to clean the offices. What you want is to fire her, to make her work on the assembly line, or to mop the floors instead of the Arab!
- You brought Begin to power. Everything he promised, he kept. There's abundance; the standard of living. Even the Arabs are doing well with him.
- They say that Peres' son was in charge of a plane during the bombing of the reactor in Iraq (Osirak, built by the French for Saddam Hussein, destroyed in 1980).* Bravo for the son. But the father would sell the country to the Arabs. Even his own mother, he would have sold... Begin made peace with Egypt. Maybe he will manage to make peace with other Arab countries, by making a small concession on the territories. But what, we're bargaining! We set the bar very high. Not like Peres, who would give them everything. Begin bargains, he has time.*
- Violence? Who invented violence? Believe me, if the Jews from the East hadn't come here, you, the Ashkenazim, would have continued to kill each other... How? Didn't you hand over people from the Irgun to the British? Didn't you fight between communists and religious people? Who invented violence, us?... Half the country belongs to you, and the other half, you want to give it back to the Arabs.
- And what does it matter if we take the territories and annex them? Do the Arabs lack territory? The Sinai, they got it without any compensation, for peace. Honestly, Golda (Meir) would never have given the Sinai like that. Now you want to give them Jerusalem, and then Beth Shemesh?... Are the Arabs unhappy here? Do we not allow them to earn a living? Do we not build schools for them at the state's expense? Do we not give them everything they need? If only you hadn't come and planted ideas in their heads, they would have been quiet and wouldn't have thrown stones at us.
- Do you know what "Peace now" means? It's Begin. He destroyed the PLO. He gave the Syrians a beating to keep them quiet. Before, he destroyed the Iraqi reactor. When he installs a few more settlements, you'll see that peace will be on the West Bank (...). ... that the Arabs go and live in the houses we left in Morocco. Believe me, they are nicer than their huts! And those who want to stay can work quietly.
The whole chapter is along these lines. While reading, I thought I was hearing the pieds noirs of the 1950s. I have only taken excerpts here and there. Get this book, on the secondhand market, and read it. The previous chapter dealt with the ultra-orthodox Jews, the Haredim. Here, it's the section on "conflictual relations between those who are on top, the Jews from Central Europe, the Ashkenazim, the "whites," and those from North Africa, the Sephardim, the unloved, the "blacks," who are treated "like Arabs."
What about the issue of relations between Israelis and Arabs? Let's wait for the following chapters.
The Osirak reactor was destroyed in 1980 by a raid of sixteen Israeli F-16s carrying one-ton bombs. These bombs were dropped in a parabolic trajectory, guided by a radio beacon placed by a French technician working on the reactor. He placed this transmitter, accompanied by an agent of the Mossad, who attached it to an element of the installation. He died during the bombing. Below is the flight plan of the planes, which were refueled above Saudi Arabia.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5fumq_mossad-operation-osirak_news
Menachem Begin was the seventh Prime Minister of Israel, from 1977 to 1983. He negotiated the Camp David peace agreements with President Carter and Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat, negotiating peace in exchange for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Sinai. These agreements earned Sadat and Begin the Nobel Peace Prize. Sadat was assassinated on October 6, 1981 by a member of his guard, obeying a fatwa, during a military parade.
Before receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, on July 22, 1946, Menachem Begin had coordinated the Irgun attack on the King David Hotel, where he and his companions, disguised as Arabs, planted explosives that killed 91 people and injured 47, mostly employees of the hotel's secretariat, where British residents lived.
Also read The Land of Suffering and Hatred