AAARGH
How does Israel defend its interests abroad? In the first of
an occasional series, Peter Snowdon in Paris calls round
for a cup of coffee and a chat with the young Zionists of the
Betar-Tagar
It wasn't difficult to get in touch with the Betar. I'd imagined
that any organisation which went round Paris shouting racistslogans
and issuing communiques claiming responsibility for beating up
Arabs must be relatively low profile, if not completely underground.
Of course, the Front National do that kind of thing, and they're
in the phone book. But they do it on behalf of the French people.
The Betar do it on behalf of Eretz Israel. On 27 February, the
Betar brought the Middle East "peace process" to the
Ile de la Cité in central Paris. As supporters of Roger
Garaudy left the court
room opposite Notre Dame where sentence had just been handed down
on the revisionist philosopher, a crowd of Betarim were waiting
for them. Insults were traded, and amid cries of "Dirty Jews"
and "Kill the Palestinians", a fight broke out. Several
people were injured. Among the victims were two Egyptian journalists,
who were attacked a little later as they were making their way
to a nearby Metro station. According to Le Monde, it was
the Betar who started it.
Hardly the kind of people who are likely to advertise their services
in the yellow pages. Yet, as it turned out, nothing could have
been easier than to contact them and arrange a meeting. I rang
the Consistory -- the governing body of French Judaism -- and
explained my problem to Yitzhak in the Press Department. Of course,
he cried, but of course he could put me in touch with the Betar.
I wondered aloud if they were a marginal group. "Mais non,
mais non!" he replied, as if shocked by the idea that a Jewishgroup
could be marginal. "They have an office. I will give you
their telephone number. You can go and see them. They will make
you at home. You will see that they are very fine young people.
It is an excellent idea for you to write something about them
to correct all the misleading information in the press."
I promised I would do my best. "You have heard of the Jewish
Defense League?" asked Yitzhak. "Sometimes, my dear
sir, it is necessary for Jews to organise and defend themselves,
because nobody else will help them."
My Jewish friend, N, had told me something about the Betar approach
to self-defence. In his youth, the Betar were famous because they
travelled everywhere dressed as if for a golf match. "That
way," he explained, "they could always have a few golf
clubs with them, without anyone asking any questions." In
the 1980s, they specialised in breaking up private parties among
Front National supporters. Their actions rarely made it into the
press, since their adversaries preferred direct reprisal to legal
proceedings. Until I spoke to Yitzhak, I hadn't met a single French
Jew who had a good word to say for the Betar. But N told me he
remembered his younger brother saying, at the time when the FN
was just beginning its rise to power, "At least, if things
get really bad, there'll always be the guys from the Betar."
Today, the FN has more than 15 per cent of the national vote and
controls the balance of power in a number of French regions.
The Betar-Tagar have their Paris office on one of the city's less
glamorous boulevards, lodged in between a cafe serving spécialités
d'Alsace and an Afro-Caribbean hairdresser's. On the main door
is a plaque advertising courses in Kinomichi. The Betar really
like to be in the thick of it -- as if one diaspora wasn't enough
for them, and they have to muscle in on everyone else's as well.
The walls of the staircase leading to the first floor were daubed
with violently anti-semitic slogans. I knocked on the heavily-armoured
door and a young man showed me into a corridor festooned with
wiring where the ceiling was in the process of being disembowelled.
I had come to meet Moti. I didn't know what Moti did exactly,
and I never discovered his second name. He had been "delegated"
by the Jewish Agency, he told me. His office was small, cramped,
papers piled high on every available surface, walls covered with
maps, postcards, pictures. When it had Moti in it, it was even
more cramped. Moti wasn't fat, so much as he was bulky. He seemed
constrained by all the papers, the tracts, the furniture, and
yet at the same time, he wasn't in revolt against those constraints:
he had accepted them. They were part of his bulk, his mass: part
of what had to be dealt with.
"Coffee?" said Moti. While he went to fetch it himself
from the vending machine in the hall, I looked round at the posters
and slogans that filled the room: "Tremble anti-semites",
one intoned, "the Tagar is watching you." A small postcard
showed a group of Ancient Egyptians in Pharaonic dress whipping
a group of slaves on a building site. Underneath were the words:
"Ever since then, the Jew has only been free in Israel."
A photograph of Netanyahu shaking hands with Arafat was completed
by the legend: "Let's get him a portable phone -- just like
Yehia Ayache!". I was beginning to feel at home already.
Moti came back with my drink. "I'm sorry," he said,
"I just have to send a fax." He leaned back in his chair,
and his girth loomed proudly towards the edge of the table, as
if daring it to try and push him back within his negotiated limits.
I was just wondering what this urgent message might be --instructions
to an active unit to mount a raid or spring a trap? -- when Moti
turned to me and asked: "Do you know the Musée André
Jacquemart?" I had to admit I'd never been. "You really
ought to go," said Moti, reproachfully. Running a bomb-detector
deftly over an envelope, he ripped it open, removed a handful
of brochures, and handed me one. "They've just reopened after
restoration," he explained. "One of the finest collections
of decorative art in Europe. I'm trying to fix up a guided tour
for next Tuesday."
I wasn't sure if this was an invitation or not. But as our interview
wore on, and Moti repeatedly broke off explaining his movement's
ideology or his view of the peace process to haggle over the price
of an air ticket or discuss the arrangements for a dance class,
it slowly dawned on me that that's the funny thing about the Betar-Tagar.
It isn't a front, an elaborate cover -- a gang of thugs masquerading
as an art appreciation association. It's an organisation run by
and for people who genuinely believe that a passion for Empire-style
furniture and the willingness to give those whom they perceive
to be their enemies a good beating are not merely morally compatible,
but are, in some sense, equally important social functions.
Doubtless that's how they come to be an official association,
part of the Jewish Agency's Education Department and affiliated
in France to the Ministry for Youth and Sports. Betar is an acronym
which stands for brith Joseph Trumpeldor -- the Joseph Trumpeldor
alliance. They were founded in 1923 as the youth wing of the Revisionist
movement within the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) by Trumpeldor's
friend Vladimir Jabotinsky, with whom he had organised the Zion
Mule Corp to fight alongside the British at Gallipoli. Trumpeldor
and Jabotinsky have quasi-mythic status in Revisionist circles:
Trumpeldor, as the First Jew to die for the homeland (he was killed
defending the colony of Tel Hai in 1920), Jabotinsky as the man
who created the first Jewish army sincethe fall of Massada in
135 -- the Jewish Legion, formed in 1916 to fight with the British
against the Turks in Palestine.
The Revisionists sought to "revise" the policies of
the WZO, in the sense that they were more clear-sighted than their
mainstream rivals about the need for force if the Zionist project
was to succeed. They could see that the conventional strategies
-- secret diplomacy and large-scale financial facilitation (bribery)
-- were unlikely to achieve their ends, since none of the great
powers had at that time any real interest in seeing a Jewish state
established in Palestine. The Zionists would only get their state
if they fought for it. Jabotinsky said as much in 1923: "Zionism
is a colonising adventure, and therefore it stands or falls by
the question of armed force. It is important to speak Hebrew,
but unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot."
Whether Jabotinsky really felt the need for guns was unfortunate
is unclear. Some time later he told an American journalist: "Revisionism
is naive, brutal and primitive. It is savage. You go out into
the street and pick any man -- a Chinaman -- and ask him what
he wants and he will say one hundred per cent of everything. That's
us. We want a Jewish Empire. Just like there is the Italian or
French on the Mediterranean, we want a Jewish Empire."
I guess Moti knew all this, but he wasn't volunteering any of
it when we met. He was very strong on all the mythic stuff, though.
He quoted Jabotinsky to me at some length on the importance of
keeping Zionism 'pure'. I'm not sure quite what 'pure' means in
this context, though for Moti it seemed to imply the nobility
of what he was doing. Speaking of Jabotinsky (or of Trumpeldor
-- it wasn't always clear who exactly he had in mind), he told
me: "He was a new kind of Jew -- not a ghetto Jew, a Jew
attachd to his immediate community, but a proud Jew, who learned
how to use a gun, and once he had learned, put this skill at the
service of his country. He was a descendent of King David -- a
poet and a fighter, an officer and a gentleman". But in fact
this aristocractic vision of his mission was Jabotinsky's problem,
as much as his solution. He saw himself as a Jewish Garibaldi,
but he collaborated with Petliura, Mussolini and the Polish Colonels.
About the only good thing one can say about him is that he drew
the line at Hitler -- which is more than can be said for many
of his lieutenants. It was Mussolini's naval academy at Civitavecchia
which turned the Betar from just one more impetuous brownshirt
gang into the disciplined organisation which would become, in
turn, the Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Gang. As one Jewish
historian has put it: "He was the liberal-imperialist head
on a totalitarian body."
If revisionism is pure, it is in the sense that it is more or
less entirely empty of any specifically "Jewish" content
-- indeed, of any content at all. It is a complete break with
tradition, as Jabotinsky's one-time disciple Arthur Koestler saw.
It replaces the Torah and the Midrash with the Kalashnikov and
the Smith and Wesson. Once you have your state you can fill it
with whatever you like: old French armchairs, Habad rabbis, illegal
settlements. It is against the diaspora, not because it is all
overthe place, but because it saps the moral character of "the
Jew". Indeed, listening to Moti was like being transported
back in time: in his conversation, nations are not inherently
complex and self-divided collectivities, but types, to be summed
up in a single capitalised figure: "the Jew", "the
Arab", "the German". Moti told me: "We say:
It isn't normal that an Israeli Jewish mother should send her
children to protect a kibbutz in the north, and that a French
Jewish mother shouldn't do the same. The Jew of the diaspora isn't
and never has been capable of defending a Jewish child who calls
out for help." He added, dismissively, as if it was just
another example of this kind of generalised incompetence: "We
saw that with the six million".
Once I'd got over my initial trepidation, I'd been quite genuinely
prepared to like Moti, even if I wasn't prepared to believe everything
he said or approve of everything he did. Can a man who devotes
his life to introducing adolescents to the pleasures of ormolu
and Meissen be all bad? But by the end of the interview, I wanted
to pick him up and shake him -- metaphorically, at least. (Literally
might have been quite risky.) In his hands, the Holocaust is no
longer a human tragedy, just a statistic whic shows both how seriously
Israel ought to be taken, and how careless, how "negative",
Jews who deny Israel can become. Just as Zionism has always agreed
with other racialist ideologies that there really is a "Jewish
problem", so Moti seemed all too happy to blame the diaspora
for the Final Solution. But that's always been the Revisionists'
problem: they can't wait to eliminate the Jews of the diaspora
and replace them with that organic, self-assertive monad, "the
Jew". As Jabotinsky himself put it: "Liquidate the diaspora,
or the diaspora will liquidate you".
So Moti and his friends are doing their best to create a new race
of "proud" Jews in France, and prepare them for emigration
to Eretz Israel. They do this through providing low-cost informal
education for the children of Jewish families who can't afford
the private Jewish schools. Their aim is to develop in their charges
"good behaviour, good citizenship and good 'Jewishness'".
This education, Moti explained, covers a variety of different
activities: current affairs and media analysis ("Often, the
young person, he is stupid"), games, debates, dancing and
singing (in Hebrew), help with homework, and sporting actitivies.
I was tempted to ask at what age they began practising their golf.
"All our monitors have a monitor's certificate from the French
state. That's the great thing about informal education,"
said Moti, "you can use it to convey any kind of message
you want".
I was intrigued by the games. What kind of games do you play,
Moti? "We have board games where you have to progress around
the map of Israel. Or we take a silhouette of a man, and we say:
Write down five things about this man which make him Jewish."
That sounded a little racist: wasn't he worried about that? This,
it turned out, was Moti's favourite subject:
"What makes someone a Jew? Not wearing the kippa, not respecting
kosher and the sabbath. There are many different ways of feeling
Jewish. It's not up to me to tell people which is the right way.
But to realise one's Judaism, there must be a national value.
Here we have nothing to protect us against mixed marriages or
anti-semitism, so the Jew has a problem of responsibility."
He paused. "Have you heard of Entebbe?"
Yitzhak had asked me the same question the day before. In 1976
a cell of Bader-Meinhoff terrorists with support from a Palestinian
splinter group hijacked an Air France flight from Ben Gurion to
Paris and diverted it to Entebbe in Uganda. While the rest of
the world hesitated, Israel sent a crack special services unit
to storm the plane. The only Israeli soldier killed during the
operation was Yoni Netanyahu -- the brother of Binyamin.
As Moti told me the story of Entebbe all over again, I began to
realise how much for the Revisionists, Netanyahu's election isn't
an aberration, but a homecoming -- how for them, even more perhaps
than under Menachem Begin (himself a former Betar leader), Israel
now finally has the government it deserves. Binyamin Netanyahu's
father was Jabotinsky's first political secretary, and Yoni is
a hero to the Betarim on a par with their founders -- a modern
Jabotinsky, a second Trumpeldor. They've even named the programme
they run in Israel to prepare new immigrants for military service
after him. "The French Jews," said Moti, employing a
rare (derogatory) plural, "have never really said thank you
to Yoni Netanyahu. He was the first to volunteer [for Entebbe].
As soon as he heard what had happened, he said: 'I don't care
what anyone thinks, I have to go and help them.'" Moti looked
me straight in the eyes and laughed: "I was almost going
to say: That is a real Jew!"
Moti may have laughed, but I don't think he was joking. The real
Jew, for the Betar, isn't the most pious or the most ethnically
pure: he's the one who is most inhabited by the 'will to Jewishness',
and most ready to translate that will into an act of physical
force. You can tell a real Jew, not by his skullcap, his features
or his diet, but by the notches on the butt of his rifle.
Yet for all their talk about making the aliyah, about emigrating
to Israel and defending the kibbutzim of the north, most of the
hard-core Betarim end up staying on in France, where at least
they can pick on someone smaller than themselves. And when they
do go to Israel, they don't like it: they can't stand being in
a country that's "overrun" with Arabs (not to mention
a large number of "ungrateful" Jews, who would like
to make peace with them).
Yoni would have come in handy at the Garaudy trial, that's for
sure. But was beating people up and shouting "Death to the
Palestinians" really a demonstration of good behaviour, good
citizenship, good Jewishness? "I don't have to answer false
accusations," said Moti, feigning an Olympian indifference.
"There are some young Jews who came. That's all." That's
all? "I can't reply to and refute everything that has been
said. There were so many people there. But I can tell you that
I'm not worried about the eople who got beaten up." Really?
"I can condemn violence in general." Of course. "But
those people were not pure and innocent. They were there to defend
Garaudy. They are anti-Semites. If we shouldn't defend ourselves,
then the Warsaw uprising was wrong too! I don't like the fact
that antiSemitism dares come out and appear in public. It should
be ashamed, and if it is to be shamed, there has to be a Jewish
youth that is proud of what it is, and which condemns all this
verbal, intellectual and racist violence."
I began to get the feeling that Moti wasn't very concerned with
conceptual nuance. Just as he seemed unwilling to differentiate
between people of different races who hate each other and people
of different races who fall in love with one another (mixed marriages/anti-Semitism),
so he didn't seem to distinguish, other than at the pragmatic
level of what might be an appropriate and effective response,
between the might of the German army massed on the banks of the
Oder and a couple of unarmed Arab journalists trying to catch
the Metro back to their hotel.
I tried to steer the conversation back onto firmer ground. Didn't
you issue a communique? "When we issue a communique, we say
what happened there," Moti huffed: "No one says that
it was a guy from the Betar, that it was a Jew who did this or
that! All we say is that the negationists were 'corrected'. I
suppose it was a Jew -- responding to a racist provocation,"
he added disingenuously.
So there you have it: the Betar weren't taking responsibility,
they were just acting as a kind of volunteer news agency, keeping
the world informed. Maybe all those classes in media analysis
aren't so good for the Jewish character after all. Surely, if
it wasn't the Betar who did this, you should issue a denial? Moti
affected a certain world-weariness: "I don't have to react
to defamatory statements and false information." He laughed
again. "If I had to reply every time that people said the
Betar smashed up such and such a place, I'd never leave the office!"
I told him I quite understood how irritating that could become.
But what about Palestine and the Palestinians? Have they no place
in the Betar's vision for Israel? This, in my opinion, is were
things got really nasty. "If I had to answer as one human
being to another human being who is called the Palestinian or
the Arab," said Moti, weighing each word, "if the person
opposite me has a humanist vision, then we can find a solution.
But if," and here his voice rose, "if he doesn't have
a humanist vision, if he isn't a human being, if he is an anti-Semite
-- then I have to find another kind of solution."
Moti didn't tell me what that solution would be; but then, he
didn't need to. You can see it unfolding every day, as "the
Jewish revolution that is Israel" tightens its grip on Judea
and Samaria, and the people who live there are driven out of their
homes, stripped of their rights and herded into ghettos, just
as surely as the Jews of Warsaw ever were. But that's what happens
whenever a people becomes a 'problem' to be 'solved'. And that's
the Palestinians' tragedy: to live in a country where a bunch
of self-appointed 'humanists' get to decide who is and who isn't
fully human.
I thanked Moti for his time, and left. I could have kept on asking
questions, but what was the point? Walking slowly back along the
boulevard, past the snack bars selling merguez frites, the Indian
haberdashers and the Turkish newsstands, I tried to imagine what
an Israel run by Moti and his friends would look like: walls of
bronze against a hostile world, very cheap flights, very extensive
golf courses, flashy European furniture to impress the visitors,
the Arab 'servants' discreetly out of sight -- and the wiring
hanging out everywhere.
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly
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ARTICLE 19
<Tout individu a droit à la liberté d'opinion
et d'expression, ce qui implique le droit de ne pas être
inquiété pour ses opinions et celui de chercher,
de recevoir et de répandre, sans considération de
frontière, les informations et les idées par quelque
moyen d'expression que ce soit>
Déclaration internationale des droits de l'homme,
adoptée par l'Assemblée générale de
l'ONU à Paris, le 10 décembre 1948.