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Mein Kampf in Hebrew
The
following is a reprint of an interview with Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon by Amos Oz as originally published in the Israeli daily
Davar
on 17 December 1982. The man referred to as C. is Sharon.
Please
note: The article is kept for archive purposes, but that the
identity of the interviewee has since come into doubt (see errata at
the end).
"You
can call me anything you like. Call me a monster or a murderer. Just
note that I don't hate Arabs. On the contrary. Personally, I am much
more at ease with them, and especially with the Bedouin, than with
Jews. Those Arabs we haven't yet spoilt are proud people, they are
irrational, cruel and generous. It's the Yids that are all twisted.
In order to straighten them out you have to first bend them sharply
the other way. That, in brief, is my whole ideology.
"Call
Israel by any name you like, call it a Judeo-Nazi state as does
Leibowitz. Why not? Better a live Judeo-Nazi than a dead saint. I
don't care whether I am like Ghadafi. I am not after the admiration
of the gentiles. I don't need their love. I don't need to be loved
by Jews like you either. I have to live, and I intend to ensure that
my children will live as well. With or without the blessing of the
Pope and the other religious leaders from the New York Times. I will
destroy anyone who will raise a hand against my children, I will
destroy him and his children, with or without our famous purity of
arms. I don't care if he is Christian, Muslim, Jewish or pagan.
History teaches us that he who won't kill will be killed by others.
That is an iron law.
"Even
if you'll prove to me by mathematical means that the present war in
Lebanon is a dirty immoral war, I don't care. Moreover, even if you
will prove to me that we have not achieved and will not achieve any
of our aims in Lebanon, that we will neither create a friendly
regime in Lebanon nor destroy the Syrians or even the PLO, even then
I don't care. It was still worth it. Even if Galilee is shelled
again by Katyushas in a year's time, I don't really care. We shall
start another war, kill and destroy more and more, until they will
have had enough. And do you know why it is all worth it? Because it
seems that this war has made us more unpopular among the so-called
civilised world.
"We'll
hear no more of that nonsense about the unique Jewish morality, the
moral lessons of the holocaust or about the Jews who were supposed
to have emerged from the gas chambers pure and virtuous. No more of
that. The destruction of Eyn Hilwe (and it's a pity we did not wipe
out that hornet's nest completely!), the healthy bombardment of
Beirut and that tiny massacre (can you call 500 Arabs a massacre?)
in their camps which we should have committed with our own delicate
hands rather than let the Phalangists do it, all these good deeds
finally killed the bullshit talk about a unique people and of being
a light upon the nations. No more uniqueness and no more sweetness
and light. Good riddance."
"I
personally don't want to be any better than Khomeini or Brezhnev or
Ghadafi or Assad or Mrs. Thatcher, or even Harry Truman who killed
half a million Japanese with two fine bombs. I only want to be
smarter than they are, quicker and more efficient, not better or
more beautiful than they are. Tell me, do the baddies of this world
have a bad time? If anyone tries to touch them, the evil men cut his
hands and legs off. They hunt and catch whatever they feel like
eating. They don't suffer from indigestion and are not punished by
Heaven. I want Israel to join that club. Maybe the world will then
at last begin to fear me instead of feeling sorry for me. Maybe they
will start to tremble, to fear my madness instead of admiring my
nobility. Thank god for that. Let them tremble, let them call us a
mad state. Let them understand that we are a wild country,
dangerous
to our surroundings, not normal, that we might go crazy if one of
our children is murdered - just one! That we might go wild and burn
all the oil fields in the Middle East! If anything would happen to
your child, god forbid, you would talk like I do. Let them be aware
in Washington, Moscow, Damascus and China that if one of our
ambassadors is shot, or even a consul or the most junior embassy
official, we might start World War Three just like that !"
......We
are talking while sitting on the balcony of the pretty country house
belonging to C. which is situated in a prosperous Moshav. To the
west we see a burning sunset and there is a scent of fruit trees in
the air. We are being served iced coffee in tall glasses. C. is
about fifty years old. He is a man well known for his (military)
actions. He is a strong, heavy figure wearing shorts but no shirt.
His body is tanned a metallic bronze shade, the colour of a blond
man living in the sun. He puts his hairy legs on the table and his
hands on the chair. There is a scar on his neck. His eyes wander
over his plantations. He spells out his ideology in a voice made
hoarse by too much smoking:
"Let
me tell me [sic] what is the most important thing, the sweetest
fruit of the war in Lebanon: It is that now they don't just hate
Israel. Thanks to us, they now also hate all those Feinschmecker
Jews in Paris, London, New York, Frankfurt and Montreal, in all
their holes. At last they hate all these nice Yids, who say they are
different from us, that they are not Israeli thugs, that they are
different Jews, clean and decent. Just like the assimilated Jew in
Vienna and Berlin begged the anti-Semite not to confuse him with the
screaming, stinking Ostjude, who had smuggled himself into that
cultural environment out of the dirty ghettos of Ukraine and Poland.
It won't help them, those clean Yids, just as it did not help them
in Vienna and Berlin. Let them shout that they condemn Israel, that
they are all right, that they did not want and don't want to hurt a
fly, that they always prefer being slaughtered to fighting, that
they have taken it upon themselves to teach the gentiles how to be
good Christians
by
always turning the other cheek. It won't do them any good. Now they
are getting it there because of us, and I am telling you, it is a
pleasure to watch.
"They
are the same Yids who persuaded the gentiles to capitulate to the
bastards in Vietnam, to give it in to Khomeini, to Brezhnev, to feel
sorry for Sheikh Yamani because of his tough childhood, to make love
not war. Or rather, to do neither, and instead write a thesis on
love and war. We are through with all that. The Yid has been
rejected, not only did he crucify Jesus, but he also crucified
Arafat in Sabra and Shatila. They are being identified with us and
that's a good thing! Their cemeteries are being desecrated, their
synagogues are set on fire, all their old nicknames are being
revived, they are being expelled from the best clubs, people shoot
into their ethnic restaurants murdering small children, forcing them
to remove any sign showing them to be Jews, forcing them to move and
change their profession.
"Soon
their palaces will be smeared with the slogan: Yids, go to
Palestine! And you know what? They will go to Palestine because they
will have no other choice! All this is a bonus we received from the
Lebanese war. Tell me, wasn't it worth it? "Soon we will hit on
good times. The Jews will start arriving, the Israelis will stop
emigrating and those who already emigrated will return. Those who
had chosen assimilation will finally understand that it won't help
them to try and be the conscience of the world. The 'conscience of
the world' will have to understand through its arse what it could
not get into its head. The gentiles have always felt sick of the
Yids and their conscience, and now the Yids will have only one
option: to come home, all of them, fast, to install thick steel
doors, to build a strong fence, to have submachine guns positioned
at every corner of their fence here and to fight like devils against
anyone who dares to make a sound in this region. And if anyone even
raises his hand against us we'll take away half his land and burn
the other half, including the oil. We might use
nuclear
arms. We'll go on until he no longer feels like it...
"...You
probably want to know whether I am not afraid of the masses of Yids
coming here to escape anti-semitism smearing us with their olive oil
until we go all soft like them. Listen, history is funny in that
way, there is a dialectic here, irony. Who was it who expanded the
state of Israel almost up the boundaries of the kingdom of King
David? Who expanded the state until it covered the area from Mount
Hermon to Raz Muhammad? Levi Eshkol. Of all people, it was that
follower of Gordon, that softie, that old woman. Who, on the other
hand, is about to push us back into the walls of the ghetto? Who
gave up all of Sinai in order to retain a civilised image? Beitar's
governor in Poland, that proud man Menahem Begin. So you can never
tell. I only know one thing for sure: as long as
you
are fighting for your life all is permitted, even to drive out all
the Arabs from the West Bank, everything.
"Leibowitz
is right, we are Judeo-Nazis, and why not? Listen, a people that
gave itself up to be slaughtered, a people that let soap to be made
of its children and lamp shades from the skin of its women is a
worse criminal than its murderers. Worse than the Nazis...If your
nice civilised parents had come here in time instead of writing
books about the love for humanity and singing Hear O Israel on the
way to the gas chambers, now don't be shocked, if they instead had
killed six million Arabs here or even one million, what would have
happened? Sure, two or three nasty pages would have been written in
the history books, we would have been called all sorts of names, but
we could be here today as a people of 25 million!
"Even
today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to
kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn
them, to have everyone hate us, to pull the rug from underneath the
feet of the Diaspora Jews, so that they will be forced to run to us
crying. Even if it means blowing up one or two synagogues here and
there, I don't care. And I don't mind if after the job is done you
put me in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life. Hang
me if you want, as a war criminal. Then you can spruce up your
Jewish conscience and enter the respectable club of civilised
nations, nations that are large and healthy. What you lot don't
understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet,
far from it. True, it could have been finished in 1948, but you
interfered, you stopped it. And all this because of the Jewishness
in your souls, because of your Diaspora mentality. For the Jews
don't grasp things quickly. If you open your eyes and look around
the world you will see that darkness is falling again. And we know
what happens to a Jew who stays out
in
the dark. So I am glad that this small war in Lebanon frightened the
Yids. Let them be afraid, let them suffer. They should hurry home
before it gets really dark. So I am an anti-Semite ? Fine. So don't
quote me, quote Lilienblum instead [an early Russian Zionist - ed.].
There is no need to quote an anti-Semite. Quote Lilienblum, and he
is definitely not an anti-Semite, there is even a street in Tel Aviv
named after him. (C. quotes from a small notebook that was lying on
his table when I arrived:)
'Is
all that is happening not a clear sign that our forefathers and
ourselves...wanted and still want to be disgraced? That we enjoy
living like gypsies.' That's Lilienblum. Not me. Believe me. I went
through the Zionist literature, I can prove what I say.
"And
you can write that I am disgrace to humanity, I don't mind, on the
contrary. Let's make a deal: I will do all I can to expel the Arabs
from here, I will do all I can to increase anti-semitism, and you
will write poems and essays about the misery of the Arabs and be
prepared to absorb the Yids I will force to flee to this country and
teach them to be a light unto the gentiles. How about it ?"
It
was there that I stopped C.'s monologue for a moment and expressed
the thought passing through my mind, perhaps more for myself than
for my host. Was it possible that Hitler had not only hurt the Jews
but also poisoned their minds? Had that poison sunk in and was still
active? But not even that idea could cause C. to protest or raise
his voice. After all, he said to have never shouted under stress,
even during the famous operations his name is associated with.
Errata
18th April 2002
We picked up the interview and
checked as far as possible that it was authentic; the interview was
published in the Davar paper as stated, and we took the assurances
of people who know Amos Oz, the journalist who conducted the
interview, that the person identified as "C" was Ariel
Sharon. There has since been a lively discussion that some of the
descriptions of the interviewee do not fit with Sharon, even though
the opinions mentioned match his thinking. Many journalists took the
claim that it was Sharon at face value, as did for example the
editor of Rocky Mountain News who just issued the following
statement:
CORRECTION:
A MEA CULPA
By
Holger Jensen, Scripps Howard News Service, 4/15/02
This
is a mea culpa. I made a grievous error in not verifying the
authenticity of 20-year-old quotes attributed to Ariel Sharon that
I used in my April 12 column on the Israeli leader. As it
turns out, they were made not by Sharon but another unnamed Israeli
soldier who died 11years ago. The interview in question was
conducted by Amos Oz, one of Israel's leading authors and prominent
in the Peace Now movement. He had access to many Israeli generals
and politicians of that era but identified some of his interview
subjects only by letters of the alphabet, leaving it up to his
readers to decide who they were...
(Holger
Jensen is international editor of the Rocky Mountain News. E-mail:
hjens@aol.com)
Comment
19th April 2002
The
following comment was sent in from one of our readers:
Dear
IPB,
I
think it looks like: From the North and From The West by Mordechai
(Motta) Gur, Israel Ministry of Defense Press, 272 pages. (Ma'arachot).
Hebrew title is Mitzafon u-MiYam. The late Motta Gur was Chief of
the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces from 1974-1978. He
is famed for announcing "The Temple Mount is Ours," (Har
HaBayit BeYaDaynu) in the 1967 War, while commanding the brigade
that took back Jerusalem. He is also famous for humiliating
General Ariel Sharon. Born in Jerusalem in 1930, he entered the
Gadna/Palmach at age 13, and served in the IDF until his death.
These books which will one day be translated into English
hopefully, illuminate Israel's history from the POV of this mythic
top echelon officer. See also his books 'Fouth Battalion' and 'The
Temple Mount is Ours'.
International
Campaign For Justice For The Victims of Sabra & Shatila
(www.indictsharon.net)
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