![]() Nothing can stop it.”Ī few days ago, Avnery wrote a column that ended with a sequence from some future movie: “One scene: Israeli soldiers discover a tunnel and enter it in order to clear it of enemies. Someday, there will be a Palestinian state. Unfortunately, we are at war with the Palestinians. That way we could sit down with the Dutch they are such nicer people. Uri Avnery, a leader in the peace movement, once told me facetiously: “You know, I wish we were at war with the Dutch. And they believed the only solution was for an Israeli state to live side by side with a Palestinian state. There was an active peace movement made up of Israelis who felt endless war was not what they wanted for their children. If you have nothing to die for, you have nothing to live for.” “Our life in this country is a continuous war. “I tell my children, ‘I live with possibility that you might die,’” Horowitz had told me. He believed many Americans could not understand Israelis, because many Americans had never sacrificed anything for their country. He was a colonel in the army reserve but now worked in the government press office, guiding foreign journalists around. Horowitz, whose mother’s family had lived in Jerusalem for eight generations, had fought in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence when he was 17. But Gaza was still Gaza, densely populated, poor, restive. Israel had other borders it was more worried about. Israel had been occupying Gaza since the 1967 Six-Day War. Israelis flooded into Gaza to buy cheap produce and to get their cars fixed at endless stretches of auto repair shops. In those days, you just drove into Gaza from Israel. A group of Palestinian teenagers, not threatening, just bored-looking, had gathered some yards away. “We should stop,” he said, pointing with his chin to an Israeli couple and a small child standing next to their broken-down car in Gaza.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |