Oct9.07 Gideon Spiro’s response to One Voice translated
Greetings to all,
Below is my email response to ONE VOICE on September 18 this year regarding
its invitation requesting me to participate in the event on this coming
October 18.
Gideon
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Greetings,
I have read your manifesto, and I presume that your intentions are good, for
after all, what could be better than ending the conflict between the two
peoples. The problem is that your good intentions neutralize you—create
what
is known as trying to drive to a destination in neutral gear.
Your remarks regarding “the extremists on both sides” in the name of “the
moderate majority” presumes symmetry between occupied and occupier, and is
therefore a prescription for failure. For there is no symmetry between the
settlers and settlements in the occupied territories (which are war crimes
according to the Geneva and Rome conventions) and Palestinian opposition to the
occupation. There is no symmetry between the “moderate majority” in Israel
that refuses to return to the June 4, 1967 armistice line, and which supports
at
most a non-contiguous dispersed Palestinian state under Israeli control, and
the Palestinian moderate majority that insists on Israel going back to the
other side of the Green Line, the dismantling of all the settlements, and a
just solution to the refugee problem. There is no symmetry between the
Israeli occupation force that has been brutally persecuting Palestinians for 40
years, and those who struggle against it.
I read the list of names of Israelis who support you, and of the
organizations that joined you as member organizations and find that there is no
escape
from concluding that you’ve fallen into the trap of being all-embracing.
For example, MK Gila Finkelstein from the Hamafdal party who supports
settlers, settlements, and the policies of occupation and apartheid that Israel
carries out in the territories, can she be considered moderate? Or again, MK
Ephraim Sneh, who until recently was Deputy Minister of Defense and responsible
for the collective punishment of Palestinians, for orders to kill without
trial (targeted killings, assassinations, as the occupation terms them), who
was responsible for the killing of children and women--is he moderate?
Again, the Likud and Shas youth who joined you support the occupation, the
apartheid wall, and collective punishment. Is there any common ground between
them and Meretz Youth?
Your desire to embrace all, including contradictories, results in the fact
that not once in your texts does the word ‘occupation’ appear, as if there
were no Israeli occupation. Your texts likewise omit the words ‘human rights
abuses,’ which are integral to the occupation.
I consider myself to be a very moderate person; I am a member of the
Association for Human Rights [an Israeli Org.] and of Amnesty International,
and
make the Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN in December 1948 (one of
the lessons derived from the Holocaust) the compass for my acts. But in today
’s Israel of Olmert, Netanyahu, and Lieberman, my attitude is deemed
radical.
In the Israel of the 21st century, even pacifist Albert Einstein is a
radical. Therefore, my recommendation to you is to produce a manifesto in the
spirit of what I have said here, even if it means that you have to reduce the
number of people and organizations that create your umbrella.








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