Interview with an Israeli Soldier

(believed by many in Palestine to have been Ariel Sharon,
therefore in continuation: remarks by Paul J.Balles about the possible identify of the interviewed "soldier")

by Amos Oz, an Israeli writer,
published by the Israeli daily Davar in December 17, 1982.



[Z]: “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. [Hat Tip: MPACUK]



They Swarm Like Killer Bees

By Paul J. Balles

Al-Jazeerah, March 18, 2004




In a recent article, I referred to an interview of Ariel Sharon that was reportedly conducted by Amos Oz saying that Sharon wanted to foment global anti-Semitism to con Jews into leaving the Diaspora and moving to Israel. See:

Why is Senator John Kerry kowtowing to Israel? By Paul J. Balles (Al-Jazeerah, March 6, 2004).


Following publication of the article I received a friendly email query from New Zealand asking whether I could comment on the authenticity of the quotation attributed to Oz. Though the inquirer didn’t say so, I surmised that he might have seen the one source on the Internet debunking the interview and attacking Holger Jensen, the writer/editor who quoted it in the Denver Rocky Mountain News.


In my response, I noted that judging from what's available on the Internet, Jensen had been cheated out of a career at which he excelled.


The Interview of Oz with Ariel Sharon was reportedly published in the Israeli daily Davar, Dec.17, 1982 and reported by the Independent Media Centre at http://jerusalem.indymedia.org/news/2002/05/26661.php , the Islamic Association for Palestine at http://www.iap.org/sharonisvile.htm , The Voices of Palestine at http://www.voicesofpalestine.org/ArielSharon.asp and several other sites.


The only denial of the article's authenticity came from Ricki Hollander in Camera long after Davar stopped publication.

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=372&x_article=372


Hollander claimed that the interview came from Oz's book In the Land of Israel. Hollander wrote, "Amos Oz never met nor interviewed Sharon. In fact, the so-called “interview” was a literary device taken from Oz's book In the Land of Israel. In the English version, the interviewee's identity is not revealed, and is referred to as Z (Flamingo/Fontana 1983)."


Notice how Hollander tried to deny it was an "interview" and called it a "literary device"; yet she referred to "the interviewee's identity" in the next sentence. Hollander attempted to claim that Z did not fit Sharon, adding "at one point Z refers to Sharon, Begin and General Eitan" without pointing out that Sharon (Z) could easily refer to himself in the context of the other two.


Holger Jensen, who Camera faulted, had actually got the quote from Palestinian sources, and when Camera called him on it, he immediately retracted (according to Camera) his use of the quote rather than sticking by his belief in the authenticity of the story as he received it until Camera provided definite proof of its falsity.


Camera went on a campaign to vilify Jensen, writing "Holger Jensen’s distortions and misrepresentations require swift and forthright correction! Act now!" To accommodate that, they added:


"Contact John Temple, the Editor and Vice President of the Rocky Mountain News. Politely urge that Holger Jensen be held to the usual journalistic standards that require accuracy, balance and accountability. Politely demand that the paper ensure Jensen’s false charges and malicious distortions are corrected and that they do not recur. Write John Temple at:..."


The result: Jensen resigned as editor of the Rocky Mountain News under great pressure from these thugs who use Mafioso tactics to break the bones of anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their extortionist services.


As it turned out, Camera attributed the statements to "another unnamed Israeli soldier who died 11 years ago...” How convenient! "Another unnamed Israel soldier"! Camera had the audacity to challenge sources of information and statements made, while they relied on "unnamed" soldiers to fit their biased preconceptions.


In other words Hollander didn't deny the statements were made to Oz, but simply denied Sharon made them! There are few organizations in America as rabid in their protection of Sharon or as vicious in their vengeance of Israeli critics as Camera. The only reason that several reliable Palestinian news sources seem to have lost out in this instance to a Zionist news mafia in America is because of the power that the Zionists wield there.


In another version of the story, the interviewee is identified not as Z but as C, but the story is the same. What Camera doesn't say is that the interview from the book appeared in the daily Davar. It's inconceivable that the Palestinians reporting the interview would have read the book. However, there was never any question that the passage appeared in the book.


Z (or C) says, "I don't care if I am like Ghadafi." Is that something that an ordinary soldier would say (as Camera asserts)? Oz refers to his interviewee as about 50 years old. At the time of the interview, Sharon was 54 years old. Later he says "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." Is this just any soldier speaking or the leader of the pack comparing himself with other leaders?


And further on, Z (or C) says "Maybe the world will then at last begin to fear me instead of feeling sorry for me." Why would "the world" feel anything for an insignificant soldier as Camera attempts to portray the character? Could Z (or C) be anyone else when Oz writes "he was said to have never shouted under stress, even during the famous operations his name is associated with"?


Another Palestinian source reports that "Amos Oz reproduced this interview, with others, in his book in Hebrew, 1982: Amos Oz: Poh va-sham be-Erets-Yisra'el bi-setav, 1982, republished by Am Oved, Tel-Aviv, 1986. The interview is on pages 70-82. Amos Oz does not mention the name of Sharon, but uses the abbreviation Z. The facts given by Amos Oz indicate that the person interviewed is Ariel Sharon."

http://www.voicesofpalestine.org/ArielSharon.asp


The fact that the story was translated into several languages accounts for the different references to Z and C (and even T in another translation).


There's an unfortunate "mea culpa" presumably written by Holger Jensen at http://www.broeckers.com/jensen.htm indicating that he talked with Amos Oz after the flare up by Camera and that Oz said he had never interviewed Sharon. Holger also said some had believed that Oz could well have been saying that "now covering his ass."


Jensen also noted that he "received a sympathetic e-mail from Israel Shamir, another prominent Russian-Israeli journalist and author, saying dozens of Israeli journalists had attributed those quotes to Sharon in the past." As Jensen has said elsewhere, "American journalists who cover the Middle East are accustomed to attacks by hate web sites such as CAMERA and Honest Reporting, which bombard their editors with demands they be fired for 'pro-Arab' or 'anti-Israel' views."


Camera and other similar groups hate writers like Jensen because they represent a voice for even-handedness in the Middle East; and the Zionist controlled media will not allow any news organization, editor or writer the right to balanced judgment. For the kind of fair reporting Jensen was doing, see a March 2002 article at http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/cra0212.htm


I must say that I was disappointed that Jensen caved in so easily. The sadistic Zionists at Camera couldn't resist rubbing his face in the mud once they got him down.


Websites like Camera (or ADL, etc.) are worse than contemptible for their derision of any critic of Israel or Zionism. Their despicable use of pressure and lobbying to ruin the career of any non-compliant follower of Zionism is nothing but cheap, self-serving sleaze and fake bravado. They swarm like killer bees to destroy any opposition.


The question of authenticity of the Oz report depends on who you believe. I tend to believe the underdog trying to report what he sees as fairly and accurately as he perceives it rather than reprehensible thugs who not only engage in character assassination but who would destroy anyone who doesn't yield to their pressure and intimidation. The intimidators also make a mockery of "freedom of speech."



*Paul Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for 35 years. For more information, see http://www.writerfreelance.com and http://www.pballes.com