Yesterday, Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010, IDF Chief of the General Staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, sent to every commander in the IDF a letter in which he expressed his personal thoughts on ethics with regards to several recent incidents that had occurred. This letter was to be read to each and every soldier by the commanders of the IDF, as ordered by Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi.
Below, please find a translation of the letter, whereas the letter itself is originally Hebrew form:
This story is at least a week old, but it doesn’t seem to have had much of an airing, so here goes. At this month’s World Masters Weightlifting Championship in Poland, an Israeli competitor, Sergio Britva, took first place. Britva lifted an astonishing 300kg of weight, beating the second-placed competitor, the Iranian Hossein Khodadadi, by 4 kilos.
The two athletes mounted the podium to receive their medals, together with the third-placed competitor from Germany. Britva and the German shook hands. But when Britva offered his to Khodadadi, the Iranian refused it.
That unsporting gesture didn’t prevent Khodadadi from being rebuked by the Iranian authorities for standing alongside an Israeli. According to Radio Zamaneh, “the Head of Iran’s National Athletic Organization had earlier written a letter to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, to receive instructions on how to handle situations where Iranian athletes have to confront Israeli athletes.” You don’t need a wild imagination to figure out what those would have been.
And so to the video embedded above. At 1′30″, you can see Britva mount the podium draped in an Israeli flag. He shakes hands with the German to his left. He turns to his right, but the Iranian declines. That doesn’t seem to bother Britva, who is deservedly delighted with his victory. Then, at 2′21″, with Khodadadi and Britva still together on the podium, a stirring rendition of Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, strikes up. Britva stands erect and solemn, choking back tears of pride and joy. His image then dissolves into another of the Israeli flag atop the Iranian and the German.
I don’t know whether the Polish producers of the broadcast understood the enormous historical resonance here, but it really has to be seen.
Landing at Beirut’s international airport, Ahmadinejad’s motorcade passed near the site where Hizbullah murdered 241 American marines and 58 French soldiers in dual suicide truck bombings in September 1982. These peacekeeping forces had been dispatched to monitor the exit of Yasser Arafat and the PLO, following the Israel-Lebanon war, and to assist in restoring peace to this small, battered country.
But the void left by the PLO departure, and subsequent withdrawal of American and French forces, was quickly filled by Hizbullah, born during that war. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, emboldened by the shah’s overthrow and eager to export their ideology across the Middle East, seized an opportunity to plant revolutionary seeds. Lebanon, a nation torn by civil war, was particularly vulnerable to outsider machinations, especially any seeking allies intent on Israel’s eradication as part of the larger crusade to spread radical Islam across the region.
From my op-ed in today’s Jerusalem Post, examining the ramifications of Ahmadinejad’s recent visit to Lebanon.
A brief coda to this post. If the opinion polls are anything to go by then Dilma Rousseff will today be elected President of Brazil. Her father was born in the Bulgarian city of Gabrovo. Gabi Ashkenazi is the 19th Chief of Staff of the IDF. His father was also born in Bulgaria, just 90 kilometers south of Gabrovo in the city of Plovdiv.
1. In response to my post about Ireland’s law of return, a reader who signs himself “lapsedmethodist” asks,
Who would the potential Irish citizen be displacing upon his/her return to Ireland should he/she avail of that option?
I think that this question reflects a view of history that plagues much commentary on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Those who hold it see the Zionist enterprise as unjust from the outset because it sought and seeks to persuade a great number of people to move somewhere else, to a place where people who are not part of that enterprise already live.
Turkish-Israeli relations have fallen to their lowest point in the months following the flotilla dispatched to Gaza by the pro-Hamas Islamist charity IHH. Joint military exercises have been canceled, Israeli tourism to Turkey has dropped by 90 per cent and Turkish officials have threatened “irreparable consequences” to relations between the two countries. Into this breach has stepped Greece.
1. In a discussion over at Engage in which he offers arguments in support of a boycott of Israel and only Israel, Ran Greenstein says,
Third, any diminishing of the capacity of the Israeli state to continue with its exclusionary and abusive practices is a blow against anti-semitism, because it relieves Jews of the burden of having to pay a price for Israeli policies they do not support and have nothing to do with them.
Just a line to recommend this conversation between Haim Watzman and his friend Frank (a disciple of Professor Dwight Geist?) in which they compare the state of democracy in Israel and the United States.
1. The city of Buenos Aires, the nation’s capital and not the vast conurbation that surrounds it, has long had its everyday law enforcement carried out by the Policía Federal Argentina. If you live in the United States imagine ordinary policing in Washington D.C. being carried out by the FBI.
1. If and when Iran acquires nuclear weapons the avoidance of nuclear war between it and Israel, the country it seeks to destroy, will depend on Israel having a second strike capability. That means that it must have the capacity to suffer a nuclear attack and still be able to inflict a terrible retaliatory blow. If it has this capacity then it has less motivation either to mount a conventional attack on Iran designed to prevent or delay its acquisition of nuclear weapons or, once these weapons have been acquired, launch a preemptive nuclear attack designed to prevent them being used and permanently end Iran’s capacity to threaten its security.
I don’t think many will contradict me if I say that the verb “resist” is usually transitive. That means, for example, that it doesn’t make sense for me to praise “Mike’s resistance” unless I am sure that my interlocutor knows about Mike’s attempts to stop his landlord from evicting him.
There’s a school of thought, if I may so dignify it, that holds that there’s nothing racist or fundamentally objectionable about anti-Zionism because opposing Zionism just means being opposed to a political system. The collapse of the Soviet Union is often proferred in this context as an example of one political system being replaced by another. “So what’s the problem?” they say, “After Zionism is defeated all the people currently resident in what is now Israel and the Palestinian Territories will be able to live together in peace and equality”.
The purpose of this post is to introduce readers to Dwight Geist, Esteemed O’Donnell Professor of the Creative Arts at the University of Eastern Colorado. Norman Geras reports on a recent conversation with him here. The following extract from their discussion will help readers grasp something of the subtlety and intelligence that are basic characteristics of this increasingly influential thinker’s work:
Watching the direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians fizzle out over the last week, I was reminded of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s observation that “conflicts don’t have solutions - they have outcomes.” For nearly two decades, the contours of a final compromise on territory that would enable the State of Israel to live alongside a new State of Palestine have been known, yet an actual agreement has remained elusive.
