What lineage
by Uri Avnery
Not yet published!
 
Two Jews meet during the first year of the Third Reich. One of
them is reading "Der. Stuermer."
 
"Are you crazy?" asks the astounded second man, "reading that
pornographic antisemitic rag?" "I will tell you why," says the
first. "In all the other papers I read that Jews are persecuted and
pathetic. Only in this paper do I get to read that Jews run the world!"
 
For the same reason I like to hear and read the musings of our own right
wingers. The left wingers whine. All is lost. We have lost power; we
have lost our state. We are helpless and have no influence. It is only
when I read the words of the right wingers that I realize how omnipotent
the Left really is, that it is the elite, controlling the media, the
economy and the rest of our infrastructures.
 
One such Balaam is Amnon Lord, who writes in a Tel-Aviv local
paper. Every once in a while Lord showers me with compliments
which work miracles on my ego. A few months ago he wrote: "After all, Uri
Avnery... had a tremendous impact on the entire spiritual life as it
exists today in Israel." I have never heard such words coming from a left
winger.
 
Two weeks ago, this Lord Balaam scaled new heights. In a debate with a
competing local paper, he defined the following historical truths: "Maybe
this is the time to inform the snot-nosed and dull-witted in the decadent
camp that "the children of the Sebastia settlement" and "the children of
the Hebron settlers" are the ones with the real lineage, in contrast to
those who have sprung from the impoverished seeds of S. Yis'har, Uri
Avnery and Joseph Stalin."
 
I look to the right and I see the giant of the spirit, Yis'har, the
Israeli Thomas Mann, a man who should been awarded the Nobel Prize
for literature long ago. I look to the left, and I see the
giant of power, Stalin, one of the dominant figures of the
twentieth century. How can my ego not get inflated?
 
In truth, Joseph Visarionovich Dzhugashvilli, known as Stalin, has
never been among my favorites (with the exception, perhaps, of a
short period when his army marched west, vanquished the Nazi monster and
saved the remaining Jewry from the ovens of Auschwitz).
 
I have never been a Communist, and, woe is me, not even a Marxist. I
could never comprehend how so many honest and bright individuals could
worship this monstrous man and see him as "a sun to the nations" until his
death. As a murderer of peoples, he was no slouch compared to Hitler.
His innocent victims numbered in the tens of millions.
 
It is not clear to me what a true humanist such as S. Yis'har and
an inhuman despot such as Stalin could have in common, and even less so,
what could I have in common with either one. It is unclear how the seed
of the three of us compares with that of Meir Kahane, Amnon Lord and
Benito Mussolini, for instance. But perhaps the learned Amnon Lord meant
the spiritual seed.
 
If this is the case, then there is plenty to discuss. Are those youths
of Beit Hagi, who murder a poor Arab farmer as a prank, spiritually
superior to those children of peace movements, who stand up for the
rights of every human being in God's image? Is Margalit Har-Shefi a
nobler individual than, say, Hanah Senesh? Does Yigal Amir's courage
exceed the courage of the combat soldiers described by Yis'har in "The
Days of Tsiklag"? Is Baruch Goldstein's conscience better than that of
the heroes of Yis'har's "Hirbat Hiz'ah"? If I had but a fraction of the
influence that the writer ascribes to me on the hundreds of thousands of
those demonstrating against Sabra and Shatillah, should I, then, hang my
head in shame vis a vis Moshe Levinger?
 
A few weeks ago, at the Yigal Allon award ceremony, Yitzhak
Ben-Aharon spoke to an audience of Leftists, opening his
speech with the following words: "Greetings, all you homeless people. You
are all homeless. Some of you have lost a kibbutz, some have lost a
country, some have lost their friends. All of you have lost your home."
 
No, no, a thousand times no! I am not homeless. We have a home, we have
a country, and for those we will fight with all our might. We have the
power, and it is not only the moral and spiritual power. We have the
capability to make a difference in actions, with our personal example,
with logic and with spiritual fervor.
 
It is only the low spirits and the lack of will which are our undoing. It
is not the warmongers and the hatemongers who are the greatest enemies of
the Left, nor is it the Orthodox and the settlers, nor the Bibi Netanyahus
-- it is our own despair and whining, the rampant fear among the Left
itself.
 
Such an outburst of frustration and self-pity is natural in times of
hardship, but a mentally strong individual pulls himself out of it and,
come morning, goes into action.
 
For those who want a demonstration of our true might, let them pay heed to
the words coming out of the House of Lords of the Right.