In comments here Parviz pointed to this piece written in German and Sabine
kindly translated it to English. It is by Rolf Verleger, a German
psychology professor and Jewish activist. The original was published on
January 5 in the German magazine Hintergrund.
—

Update note: Rolf Verleger asked me to post his revised version of the piece. The old version in English is available here. His revisions in the German version were adopted to the English one by me and posted below on January 22, 9:00am EST. – b.

Update II: A revised translation was posted  below on January 30, 7:00am EST. -b.
—

GAZA: THE BAD, BAD NEIGHBOUR

What would you do – the Israeli
historian Professor Fania Oz-Salzberger
wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung – if your neighbour constantly
threw stones and Molotov cocktails at
your apartment? Wouldn’t you
eventually pick up a gun and put an end
to such activity? And if this neighbour
surrounded himself with his children so
you couldn’t attack him, wouldn’t you
then use a gun with telescopic sights?
Didn’t Hamas behave in Gaza just like
this neighbour when it fired rockets at
Israeli cities? Therefore, wrote Professor
Oz-Salzberger, Israel’s current war
against Gaza was a just war.

With such an example, one can indeed
get across plenty of things with
considerable clarity. For simplicity, let
us call you and the family terrorized by
the bad neighbour the landlord, and let
us now look at the curious
circumstances in the apartment house.
The neighbouring apartment is Gaza.

1) Three years ago you took away your
neighbour’s key.

Without your approval as landlord, your
neighbour’s family is not allowed to
leave the apartment, either for work or
for study, or for travel or for shopping.
Without your approval as landlord, your
neighbour receives no mail, nothing to
eat, no electricity, no gas and no visitors:
the apartment is locked, you as the
landlord have the key, and your bad, bad
neighbour is locked in. All this since
2006, almost three years ago.

Thereupon your bad, bad neighbour
became furious.

What was the mistake made by the bad,
bad neighbour and his friends in the
other apartment house? They had voted
for the wrong party!

And this, despite the fact that you were
so nice to the neighbour four years ago
in 2005, when you voluntarily moved off
his balcony with the seaview which
you’d taken away from him earlier. Of
course, you didn’t deign to give your
neighbour a word or a look when you
moved out. And you also demolished the
balcony furniture. Whatever would
become of us if we actually talked with
our neighbours? And now you tell the
whole world that you have vacated the
balcony. But you don’t mention that you
still have the key to the apartment.

2) Two years ago you sent a gang of
thugs to your neighbour.

In 2007, you and your North American
friends from the Homeowners’
Association quartered a bunch of thugs
in the neighbour’s apartment, the
Mohammed Dahlan gang. This gang was
supposed to deprive your bad neighbour
of his apartment. However, nasty as he
is, the bad neighbour defended himself
successfully. And you were pretty bitter
about it. Afterwards you tried to make
everybody believe that the bad
neighbour had violently and illegally
taken control of his apartment without
any reason. You yourself were surprised
at how many journalists spread this lie.

Thereupon your bad, bad neighbour
became furious.

3) You have not invoiced the running
costs correctly.

For years you, as landlord, have
collected duties and taxes due to your
neighbour, but have not paid them to the
neighbour completely and on time.

Thereupon your bad, bad neighbour
became furious.

4) You have already killed many people
from the neighbour’s apartment.

That was in 2006. There were hundreds
of dead in the neighbour’s apartment.
Fortunately the wind did not come from
the south, otherwise the stench would
have reached your apartment.

Thereupon, your bad, bad neighbour
became furious.

5) You took your neighbour’s work and
car away.

Once the neighbour used to go fishing.
You stopped that. He once had factories.
Those you bombed in 2006. He practised
agriculture. You ruined that by
forbidding exports. He once had an
airport – built with funds from the
European Union. You broke that up: bad
neighbours don’t need airports. The bad
neighbour who only wants to shoot
should not fish, should not work, should
not till the fields, should not travel. Your
bad neighbor should shoot at you so you
can shoot back.

And that is what he did.

6) Courts confirmed the neighbour’s
case.

Ignorant non-locals, alleged experts in
Neighborhood Law, like Amnesty
International, UN experts, Nobel peace
prize winners unanimously say that
your action as landlord towards your
neighbour violates law and justice.
Fortunately these people have no police
to enforce their so-called law and
justice. As Stalin already asked, ‘How
many divisions has the Pope?’

Thereupon your bad, bad neighbour
became furious.

7) For years you have driven your bad
neighbour’s friends out of their
apartments.

Unfortunately the bad neighbour still
has telephones and mobiles. Thus he
learns every day how his friends and
relatives who live in the West Bank
apartment houses are being driven out
of their apartments. One of the ways you
have of doing this is building a big wall,
meant basically for your protection – at
least that is what you claimed in your
building application. But actually you
built this wall not around your
apartments, but right through the
apartments of your bad neighbour’s
friends. What do they need two living
rooms for? One is quite sufficient. In the
other one your friends could live –
demented Americans who are so
forgetful that already after only one day
of living in somebody else’s apartment
claim this to be their true home. And if
the relatives of your bad, bad neighbour,
in their own little apartment, have to go
through a security check on their way
from the living room to the bathroom,
what is the problem? In the end, all of
life is a waiting-room! And who ever
demonstrates peacefully against it may
get the Ossietzky Peace Prize in
Germany, but at home will get tear gas
again, and with bad luck may get shot
for security reasons while
demonstrating. Naturally, some friends
of your bad neighbour went to court on
account of the partition through their
apartment. The then Foreign Minister of
Germany, a complacent man named
Fischer, called that ‘not helpful’.
Naturally, your bad, bad neighbour won
the case, but again, naturally, there are
no police to enforce the law.

Thereupon your bad, bad neighbour
became furious.

8) You took possession of the
neighbour’s house sixty years ago.

A long, long time ago your neighbour’s
grandfather was the owner of the whole
house. At that time your grandparents
came into the house, in despair,
persecuted; it was a good shelter against
the storm. Soon they built a house in the
courtyard; after all, the courtyard did
not belong to anybody, did it? The fact
that the others were no longer getting
from one house to another – did that
matter so much? After all, they were
only Arabs. Occasionally a few
humanistic weirdos came by, named
Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber, Hannah
Arendt, and a few more, who said one
should live with those house owners in
peace, but, in the name of Marx and
Bakunin, these Arabs were certainly too
primitive for living together in
communal flats, and one cannot be
friends with such yokels. And later when
Marx was no longer in fashion, one said:
for God’s sake, these Arabs have the
wrong religion, what do they actually
want here in this Holy House? There are
enough other houses; they can go
elsewhere.

And then, from 1947 on, your parents
took away most of the apartments from
the parents of your bad, bad neighbour,
when these fled in fear, panicking in the
face of the armed terror of your parents.
And now many descendants of these
people live in this one apartment, in the
most densely populated spot on earth, in
Gaza. Well, just why is it so densely
populated?

Thereupon your bad, bad neighbour
became furious.

And therefore the German Chancellor
and Professor Oz-Salzberger said: The
exclusive responsibility for this war
rests on your bad, bad neighbour.

9) Concluding remarks

In 1890 when the first Zionists came to
what is today Israel, they were fleeing
discrimination, pillage and murderous
pogroms in the Russian czarist empire,
and searching for a free, self-determined
life they were not allowed to live in their
old homeland. This was not a conflict of
good against evil, but rather the struggle
for a piece of land that was home to the
Palestinian Arabs and at the same time
appeared as the only possible homeland
to the immigrants.

The struggle was won by the Jewish
side, at the price of a constant state of
war. However, a peace plan has been on
the table for a long time. It consists of
the Two-State Solution, with Israel’s
borders those of 1967, and a mutually
acceptable regulation of the problem of
the Palestinian refugees, and a mutually
acceptable agreement on Jerusalem.
This was proposed to Israel in 2002 by
the member states of the Arab League
and recently reconfirmed. Israel does
not agree, because it cannot decide
whether it would rather keep the
illegally occupied land on the West Bank
and extend it. As long as Israel does not
say ‘yes, we’d rather have peace, and
end the occupation,’ there will be no
peace.

The position of Germany in this conflict
is ambivalent. But can the fact that we
European Jews were victims of a great
injustice that was perpetrated by
Germany give the Jewish state the right
to commit injustice to others now? Do
German politicians really believe that it
is a compensation for the murder of my
Jewish relatives that Israel now can do
anything it wants, without limits and
without restraint?

On the contrary, it would do Israel
infinite good if it could be shown the
way out of its fantasy position of eternal
victim and become, like every other
state, part of a network within an
international system of law. This means
that the occupation of the West Bank,
the years-long siege of Gaza and the
mass murder of the inhabitants of Gaza
since the 27 December 2008 should give
rise to sanctions and boycotts. The
European Union should assess Israel on
its progress in observing international
law and human rights, just as it does –
justifiably or not – Serbia and Turkey.
And a legal assessment in the cases of
Olmert, Barak and Livni should take
place in the same way as those of
Milosevic, Mladic and Karadzic – in The
Hague.

—

This text, in its German original, will soon appear in the new edition of the book by Rolf
Verleger “Israels Irrweg. Eine jüdische Sicht” (“Israel’s wrong way. A Jewish view”,
PapyRossa-Verlag, Cologne). It was first published in a slightly changed version on January
5, 2009 at www.hintergrund.de.