Attacked for His Views (Extract)

After being injured by a bomb left outside his home, outspoken Prof. Zeev Sternhell warns of the danger of the extreme right

By EETTA PRINCE-GIBSON
14sternh88 (photo credit: )
14sternh88
(photo credit: )
Extract from an article in Issue 14, October 27, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. To some, Zeev Sternhell, 73, is the embodiment of what is good and right about Israel. His biography reflects the historical justice of the Zionist endeavor; his personal achievements record the success of an enlightened society. A Holocaust survivor, orphaned by the age of 7, Sternhell immigrated to Israel alone at the age of 15, to be part of the Jewish national homeland. A charismatic commander in the Israel Defense Forces who served in four wars, he is a professor of political science at Hebrew University. An Israel Prize laureate and an internationally renowned authority on the roots of fascism, he was a founding member of Peace Now. But Sternhell - articulately soft-spoken yet forceful and determined, elegantly erudite yet kind and compassionate - is a scathing critic of the Israeli occupation of the territories conquered in the 1967 Six-Day War. He regularly publishes widely read articles criticizing the nationalist right and the settlement movement. Some would consider him a traitor. On September 25, Sternhell was the target of the highest-profile political act of political violence Israel has seen since Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995. The attackers, presumably right-wing Jewish extremists, put a pipe bomb outside the door of his apartment. At about 1 a.m., as Sternhell was locking the outer gate to his home, the bomb exploded. Sternhell sustained minor injuries to his legs and was hospitalized for several days. Flyers were found near his home, signed by the "Liberating National Army," a previously unknown group, offering 1.1 million shekels (approximately $314,000) reward for anyone who killed a member of Peace Now. The police investigation is pending. Sternhell initially insisted that he did not want to give this interview. On October 2, as religious Jews observed the Fast of Gedalia, which commemorates the first political assassination in Jewish history, several hundred gathered near the Sternhell home to protest the violence. Sternhell addressed the crowd, warning that political violence was undermining Israeli democracy. "I felt that I had nothing left to say," he said. But then he reconsidered. "It is important that the Jews who live abroad and especially in America realize what is happening here, so that they support us in our struggle to preserve Zionism and democracy in Israel," he explained. Sternhell's middle-class neighborhood, Rassco, in western Jerusalem, is serenely quiet. The stairs leading to his home, tucked away in a modest complex of townhouses, pass through well-tended courtyards with hanging geraniums and flowering jasmine bushes. But the wooden door to his apartment is jaggedly scarred from the explosion and the broken glass has not yet been replaced. Sitting in a black leather armchair in his airy, simply furnished apartment, facing French doors that lead to a small garden, Sternhell is clearly still in pain and shifts positions uncomfortably. His face seems a bit more lined than before the attack and his voice is hoarse. He chooses his words carefully but no less emphatically, his right index finger pointing into the air to emphasize his arguments. "This was an act of terror," he says flatly. "It was aimed against me because I am a man who expresses his opinions, even though I have no public or political position. And it was an act of terror because it was blind violence. They couldn't have known who would open the door. My wife? My youngest daughter, who left the house only a few hours earlier? My little granddaughters? And the shrapnel could have hurt our neighbors, and they have children, too. Like all terror, it was meant to punish, to frighten and to deter anyone who agrees with what I say." It won't, he promises. "The public response has been extraordinary. People realize that this isn't a personal thing. This attack has public, social and political meaning. I have received support from friends, from soldiers who were under my command many years ago, from the political elite." But not, I point out, from the fringes of the political right, including extremist activist Baruch Marzel from the Jewish settlement in the West Bank city of Hebron, who, when interviewed on Israeli television, blatantly refused to condemn the attack. "This just shows that this was a symbolic act. It shows that we have crossed another red line. There have been other attacks against the left - the murder of [Peace Now activist] Emile Grunzweig in 1983 and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. But there have not been any attacks on Jews since then, so people deluded themselves into believing that we had learned something." He raises his voice, only slightly. "As a society, we haven't learned anything! Nothing! In the territories, the settlers are running rampant, attacking Palestinians, and no one is doing anything. Not the police, not the army. So it is not surprising that the violence has spilled over into Israel proper." He is quiet for a moment, then says he wants to "to make something absolutely clear. We cannot place the blame on the entire right wing. Most of the people who live in the territories live there for economic, not ideological, reasons. But a generation is growing up there that thinks that violence against Palestinians is normal, necessary, legitimate and part of everyday life. They carry out reprisals against Palestinians whenever they wish, because they view them as second-class residents, who have no rights." The responsibility, he insists, is the government's. "The government makes proclamations about what should be done to stop the violence, as though they were university professors," he says, without any self-irony. "It's not their job to tell us what should be done, it's their job to do it. By ignoring the violence, the government is becoming complicit with it, as are the settler leaders." No country, he says, can allow itself to be undermined by such lawlessness. "The government is bankrupt and it is bankrupting the state. The settlers seem to think that the role of the state is to provide them with services - security, cultural activities, roads built especially for them - but they won't allow the state to tell them what to do. And when they are hurt - and yes, the Palestinians have hurt them, there is no doubt - they respond disproportionately and violently." Extract from an article in Issue 14, October 27, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.