Sleaze thrives; Israel faces existential threat! ‘PALESTINIAN IMBROGLIO’ & BRIBERY EPIDEMIC CO-EXIST . . . December 6, 2014, 12:00 pm by Selvam Canagaratna Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned. Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned. – Willaim Congreve, The Mourning Bride (1697) In the first week of November Israeli society as a whole seemed transfixed by a courtroom drama in Jerusalem to such an extent that Uri Avneri, an Israeli writer and peace activist ventured to suggest, tongue-in-cheek, that even if ISIS jihadists had, in fact, approached Israel’s borders, nobody in the country would have even noticed. Avnery wrote: There, in the Jerusalem District Court, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert faced his erstwhile secretary, Shula Zaken. No one could take his or her eyes off them. It was the stuff soap operas are made of. We’ll let Avnery, the experienced story-teller, set the stage for us as only he can: Shula was a 17-year old Jerusalem girl when she first met Ehud. He was a fledgling advocate, she was a new secretary in the same office. Since then, for more than 40 years, Shula was the shadow of Ehud, a fiercely loyal secretary who followed her ambitious boss from station to station – mayor of Jerusalem, then Minister of Trade, and finally Prime Minister. She was his closest associate, his confidante, everything. [That last, seemingly innocuous word, certainly assumes a degree of significance so as to be almost ‘pregnant’ with meaning!] Wrote Avnery: And then it all blew up. Olmert was accused of several big corruption affairs and was forced to resign. For years now he has been a fixture in the court-rooms and TV court reports. Shula Zaken, now a 57-year old rather stout matron, is his co-defendant. She supported him through thick and thin, until in his testimony he put all the blame on her. Shula was sent to prison for 11 months. And Ehud was (again) acquitted. It wouldn’t be too far off the mark to speculate that, for Shukla, it was the moment her whole world crashed around her. Because, up until then, and for over 47 years, her ‘world’ began and ended with Ehud; nothing else existed, or even mattered. She reportedly claimed that Ehud meant so much to her that she couldn’t live without actually listening to his voice whenever he wasn’t physically in her presence. That seemed to be Shula’s peculiar ‘madness’. So she thought of a novel way of catering to her craving: for all those years, the devoted secretary had quietly recorded all of Ehud’s private conversations with her – so as to be able [as she tells it now] merely to keep ‘listening to his voice’ at leisure for her own pleasure. There are those in Israel today who, in retrospect, lean to the belief that there certainly was ‘method’ in Shula’s ‘madness’. With Ehud no longer being the sole orbiter of her private universe, she soon realized that Ehud’s recorded voice could come to her aid in more senses than one. A couple of weeks ago, wrote Avnery, after Shula made a deal with the prosecution, the court listened to a whole stack of recordings, which may well send Olmert to prison for many years. The drama between the two was irresistible. It headed the news, pushing almost everything else off the table. Few dealt with the real importance of the affair. The recordings showed an all-pervading atmosphere of corruption at the highest level of government. Large bribes moved around as a matter of course. The relationship between the tycoons and the Prime Minister was so intimate, that the leader could request any tycoon by phone to transfer tens of thousands of dollars to his secretary to pay for his personal life in luxury and then for her silence. The recordings do not show what the ultra-rich got in return. One can only guess, wrote Avnery. It seems that the same symbiosis between top politicians and the ‘wealthy’ (the American synonym for stinking rich) prevails in the US. In this respect, too, the similarity between the two countries is growing. We have indeed common values – the values of the tiny group of plutocrats who employ the top politicians in both countries. While everybody stares at the court scenes, who is there to watch what is happening beyond our borders? asks Avnery, and promptly slips into history to make the crucially important point he wanted to make all along, merely using the Ehud & Shula (love) story that went awry as a convenient, and arresting starting point: Some 2400 years ago, the Gauls were about to mount a night time surprise attack on Rome. The city was saved by the geese of a temple on Capitol Hill, which raised such a ruckus that the inhabitants woke up in time. We have no temple and no geese to warn us, only some intelligence agencies with a consistent record of failure. ISIS is far away. We have enemies galore, who are much nearer: Hamas, Mahmoud Abbas, ‘the Palestinians’, ‘the Arabs’, Hizbollah, and – somewhere beyond – ‘the Bomb’ (a.k.a. Iran). To my mind, none of these are an existential danger for us, says Avnery. ISIS is. As I have said before, ISIS poses no military danger. In military terms. Israelis, like Americans, are practical people. They don’t appreciate the power of ideas. They think like Stalin who, when warned of the Pope, asked: ‘How many divisions does he have?’ It is ideas that change the world. Like those of Moses. Of Jesus of Nazareth. Of Muhammad. Of Karl Marx. How many divisions did Lenin have, when he crossed Germany in the sealed train? ISIS has an idea that can sweep the region: to do what Muhammad did, to restore the Caliphate which ruled from Spain to India, to wipe away the artificial borders that divide the Islamic world, to drive away the pitiful and corrupt Arab rulers, to destroy the infidels (including us). For millions upon millions of young Muslims in their impotent and impoverished failed states, this is an idea that straightens their back and swells their breast. Ideas cannot be detected by spy drones. They cannot be blown out of existence by heavy bombers. The American conviction that you can solve historical problems by bombing from the air is a primitive illusion. The recent Gaza war has stirred sentiments throughout the Arab world. The human and material losses suffered by the Palestinian population remain immense. Who gains? ISIS. A constant stream of deeds and misdeeds designed to upset the Palestinians, all Arabs and the entire Muslim world. Food for ISIS propaganda. Why, for God’s sake, are our politicians doing this? Because they are just politicians. Their sole interest is in winning the next elections, which may come sooner than the law requires. Keeping the Arabs down is popular. And the traditional contempt for all things Arab is blinding them to the serious dangers ahead. It is an old Israeli complaint that whenever something goes wrong in our region, Israel is always blamed. Take Sabra and Shatila. As our then Chief of Staff exclaimed: Goyim kill goyim and the Jews are blamed. Once more. ISIS has nothing to do with us. It is a purely Islamic affair. Yet many people blame Israel. However, this time the blame is not without reason. Israel considers itself an island in the region, the famous ‘villa in the jungle’. But that is wishful thinking. Israel is located in the middle of the region, and whether we accept it or not, everything that we do or do not do has a huge impact on all the countries around us.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 14:06:07 +0000
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