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| By Israel Insider staff June 10, 2007 |
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Avraham Burg, who once was taken seriously as a rising young Israeli leader until he was rejected in politics and investigated by the police, was ridiculed from left and right after coming out with a series of provocative statements against his what he now considers his third-string national identity. in an interview with Haaretz's Ari Shavit.
Burg, who once served as Speaker of the Knesset and head of the Jewish Agency, compared Israeli with Germany before the rise of the Nazis, said Zionism was dead, called for revocation of the Law of Return and said that the idea of a Jewish State was "dynamite." He said every Israeli who could get a foreign passport should do so, as he did.
The kippa-wearing son of Josef Burg, an immigrant from Germany who was a signatory on the Declaration of Independence and rose to become leader of the National Religious Party, "Avrum" was clearly out to make waves to sell his new book comparing Israel to pre-Nazi Germany and to settle scores with the Israeli establishment to which he once belonged as a prodigal son.
He was evidently embittered by the fact that his successor at the Jewish Agency, Sallai Meridor, considered it ridiculous that Agency Chairmen should have a car and driver for life, and discontinued this benefit. He was also miffed at having been probed for questionnable business dealings. It all made him leave the country in a huff and set up shop in Brussels by virtue of his French Passport.
Perhaps he thought that his series of provocations would earn him sympathy as an angry prophet, but from left and right the inclinaton was to make fun of his hypocrisy and pomposity.
Shavit, a long-time colleague of Burg, did not give him the easy interview he may have wanted.
Shavit: Does this mean that you no longer find the notion of a Jewish state acceptable?
Burg" "It can't work anymore. To define the State of Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end. A Jewish state is explosive. It's dynamite.... 'Jewish-democratic' is nitroglycerine."
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Shavit: Do we have to amend the Law of Return?
Burg: "We have to open the discussion. The Law of Return is an apologetic law. It is the mirror image of Hitler. I don't want Hitler to define my identity."
...
Shavit: Well, I will counter by saying that your description is distorted. It's not as though we are living in Iceland and imagining that we are surrounded by Nazis who actually disappeared 60 years ago. We are surrounded by genuine threats. We are one of the most threatened countries in the world.
Burg: "The true Israeli rift today is between those who believe and those who are afraid. The great victory of the Israeli right in the struggle for the Israeli political soul lies in the way it has imbued it almost totally with absolute paranoia. I accept that there are difficulties. But are they absolute? Is every enemy Auschwitz? Is Hamas a scourge?"
Shavit: You are patronizing and supercilious, Avrum. You have no empathy for Israelis. You treat the Israeli Jew as a paranoid. But as the cliche goes, some paranoids really are persecuted. On the day we are speaking, Ahmadinejad is saying that our days are numbered. He promises to eradicate us. No, he is not Hitler. But he is also not a mirage. He is a true threat. He is the real world - a world you ignore.
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Shavit: The truth is that you are a salient Europist. You live in Nataf [in Israel] but you are all Brussels. The prophet of Brussels.
"Completely. Completely. I see the European Union as a biblical utopia. I don't know how long it will hold together, but it is amazing. It is completely Jewish."
...
Burg's ecstatic love for Europe includes Germany and extends to America. About the latter, he writes: "They created a situation in which the goy can be my father and my mother and my son and my partner. The goy there is not hostile but embracing. And as a result, what emerges is a Jewish experience of integration, not separation. Not segregation. I find those things lacking here. Here the goy is what he was in the ghetto: confrontational and hostile."
Shavit hammers away at the hypocrisy of Burg the proud pacifist trying to buy an Israeli company that makes tanks, a shady deal that earned him an inquiry by the state comptroller and the police. Even more petty is Burg's belief of entitlement to the benefits of the Jewish Agency, even though he served only for a few years.
Shavit: Salai Meridor [former Jewish Agency chairman] decides that there is no justification for him and you to enjoy the baseless privilege of a service car with a chauffeur for life, and you go to court to fight for that privilege with all your might.
Burg: "As a former chairman of the Jewish Agency, I have pension rights just as you have pension rights. One day they are suddenly gone.
Shavit: We're talking about NIS 200,000. And about your behavior, which the judge found disgraceful. And about the fact that even though you talk high and mighty about morals, you don't see the moral flaw in the fact that 10 years after leaving the Jewish Agency you are driving on your business trips throughout the country with a Jewish Agency chauffeur driving you everywhere. On top of which, today you are so alienated from everything the Jewish Agency stands for.
Burg: "I have something to say about what the judge said. But I will not counterattack. I will not correct violence with violence. We are talking about a person's basic right. About a pension right."
Shavit: Was it worth it? What will remain engraved in people's memory is that Salai Meridor was fair and modest, and Avrum Burg was a hedonist who coveted benefits.
Shavit tells Burg that there is an internal contradiction that accounts for the perception of hypocrisy and double standards.
Shavit: But there is a question mark here which has accompanied you all along. You speak so impressively. Not only articulately but morally. And now you have written a book that is all morality. But your activity in the world is different. In political life you were sophisticated, cagy and snakelike, and in the business world, too, you are far from being a saint. The disparity between your language and your deeds is disturbing.
Burg: "The disparity is in the eye of the beholder. I do not ask myself how Ari Shavit sees me. I am finished with the world in which I care what you think of me. I live in a world in which I care what I think about me.
Israeli columnists had a field day with Burg's self-righteous pontifications. Alexander Jakobson, a columnist in Haaretz, gleefully mocked the claim that Israel was already dead but didn't know it, referring to an occasion in which the former Knesset speaker mistakenly announced the death of a colleague.
In a piece entitled, "Don't worry, we're just National Socialists," Jakobson quotes Burg: "We are already dead. WE haven't received the news yet, but we are dead. It doesn't work anymore." This is the message to the nation and the world from the daring revolutionary, former Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization Chairman Avraham Burg. There is no need to get excited about what he says. Experience proves that when Burg solemnly announces someone's death, there is no need to hurry to believe him. Professor Amnon Rubinstein, who had the privilege of hearing Burg's moving eulogy for him, can attest to this. But if, as Burg sees it, "we are already dead" and if "whoever can" should obtain a foreign passport, what point is there in suggesting the cancellation of Israel's definition as a Jewish state? Why take the trouble to correct the name of the deceased?"
There was one part of the world which celebrated Burg's remarks. The Gulf Times out of Qatar had this headline: Ex-speaker of Knesset sees Zionist Nazi parallel. The Palestine Chronicle headlined its piece: "Now in France: Burg Suggests that Israelis Leave the Country". And PressTV out of Iran headlined its piece: "Israel [is] Ghetto, not State."
Perhaps Avrum can extract a kiss from Ahmadinejad. |
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