Palestinians worldwide condemn Ziad Asali

"When I was general of the Central Command, and among other things we were planning the conquest of the East Bank, we had to build a military administration for that region. I called the area "Magor" and Moshe Dayan, who was then defense minister, asked me what Magor was. I said the acronym for Menashe, Gad and Reuven. He said, `That's a political issue. How in the world did the general staff approve it?' I told him they didn't know what it meant." Thus, in 1993, Rehavam Ze'evi described to a writer for Svivot, a Sde Boker publication, his "historical" views.

In that anecdote there is much more than the mythical nonsense about the Promised Land ("everywhere [in the Middle East] where there are remains of Jewish culture that can be dug up and revealed, that is Eretz Yisrael," Ze'evi went on to tell the writer). History, according to Ze'evi, was anachronistic biblical archaeology combined with preaching about ethnic cleansing - "transfer." His military perspective refused to recognize that above the army was a state, and the state is not only a law-abiding state but a member of the family of nations and must obey international law.

The MK who just signed a bill for a "Ze'evi Center" out of "friendship" proved once again that such "friendship" - just like Ze'evi's friendship with the likes of convicted murderers Tuvia Oshri, Rahamim Aharoni and the rest of the "friends" from the cafe at the corner of Weizmann and Yehuda Maccabi in Tel Aviv - is nothing other than a failure to understand the difference between "me" and the state, and holds true for some of the legislators as well.

Ze'evi's entire transfer concept, whether he attached the word "willing" or "agreement" to it, proved how the man was not capable of understanding the difference between a nighttime militia raid on Balad al-Sheikh near Haifa (his first "battle" at the end of 1947) and a state with citizens, an army, a law and commitments to the international community. The admiration of Ze'evi, like the admiration of others "who say what others only think," is mostly derived from perceiving the state as a kind of democratic obstacle in front of the nation, an obstacle that must be circumvented though trickery, or "secret" retaliations. The outpost farce in the West Bank certainly was not born yesterday.

There's no sex appeal in generals who die slowly. If Ze'evi had died by fading away as an aging general, perhaps a little senile, presumably he would have also faded from public awareness like other far more brilliant and charismatic figures - Moshe Dayan, for example. The fact is that in the wake of the army's assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa, the secretary general of the Popular Front, members of that organization assassinated Ze'evi and brought down a pack of troubles for us: first the "national hero" and now a well-financed center that will operate day in and day out in all aspects of our life, but particularly with our children, to nurture his "heritage."

When MK Aryeh Eldad defends the attempt to settle in the heart of national symbols, it is clear why he is doing so. That's what he was elected to do, and that is his job: to represent the racist dimension inherent in part of the Israeli Right.

When MKs from the Labor Party or its ministers sign the bill almost in secret and then roll their eyes and say "it's only love of the land, not the entire heritage," do they really think we are complete idiots? It was precisely that "love of the land" of Ze'evi's that was his transfer evangelism. What Ze'evi called "love of the land" was first of all the demand to throw the Arabs out of their land, and at the same time remove them from the historiography of the country, as he tried to do as the scandalous director of the museum from which Tel Aviv City Hall tried to remove him, but about which his "friends from the army" (from left and right) made a scandal and prevented it.

With a dilettante's knowledge and a personal library, he blinded his friends in the general staff and in politics, who indeed were less educated than him at least regarding a selective history of the country. Anyone who calls those values "love of the land" obviously thinks that everything that comes from love is permissible. Ze'evi's love of the land was perverse, and perversion does not get memorial institutes.

A lot of injustices were done to Yitzhak Rabin before and after he was assassinated. One was the way the circumstances of his murder have been blurred. But the greatest injustice is the way he has been turned into the excuse for the establishment of a hatred center.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/552571.html