The Example of the Crazies : An interview with Neta Golan

Monday July 22, 2002 04:48

by Neta Golan and Justin Podur

Israeli society is going through a collective turn to fascism. It is supporting assassinations, extra-judicial executions, openly. These things are really scary. I feel it, I feel like we're in the middle of an unfolding catastrophe and I think, quite often, of those 'crazies' in Germany who resisted. I feel closer to them all the time.

Neta Golan has been described as "a legendary figure" and is one of very few Israelis who has been arrested, beaten, and harassed repeatedly for working against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. She lives in the West Bank where she works with the International Solidarity Movement.

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Every Arab civilian in the world knows that their blood is cheap.

Iraqis, Afghanis, Palestinians. They are paying a high price for the West's racism, being killed, humiliated. Those things create terrorism. Israeli and US state terror and the reaction in 'retail' terrorism are two sides of the same coin and they can't exist without each other. We're creating that, feeding it, in the Arab world. And one source that feeds it, that tells Arabs their blood is cheap, is what is happening in Palestine.

For Westerners to say we refuse to do this, we refuse to believe that our lives are worth any more than Arab lives, is an important message for all of us. It makes everyone safer.

Bush, Sharon, they're leading us down a road very dangerous for our future. For our present! The West has already paid a little bit, with the attacks in New York, for the hatred they are creating. There will only be more backlash. So for those of us who want a sane world, for those of us who don't want to live in a world that is at war, resisting this conflict in a just way is in our own interest.

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Interesting that you mentioned 'a sane world'. Here in Israel, and I guess elsewhere, we're the ones who are thought of as 'insane'. I'm sure you've been called 'crazy', no?

One problem is the disinformation. Hardly anybody who would call us 'crazy' knows what's going on here and if they did, if they came here, they would be motivated in the same ways that we are. But they would have to get up from behind their televisions.

In the Israeli media, the only image of Arabs is violence. The human side, the suffering, is hidden from us. I believe that if they saw people, just like them, suffering the way they are, they would be motivated the same way.

I'm a Jewish Israeli. As a Jew, I carry a wound. I know my people suffered a genocide. They tried to tell the world; people didn't come, believe, know, want to know, do anything.

Some did. A few did, and they were called 'crazy' at the time. I want to do for the Palestinians what those 'crazies' did for the Jews, I want to take their example, and the truth is that it's easier for us to do what we do now than it was then. There are Israelis who support our work here.

Israeli society is going through a collective turn to fascism. It is supporting assassinations, extra-judicial executions, openly. These things are really scary. I feel it, I feel like we're in the middle of an unfolding catastrophe and I think, quite often, of those 'crazies' in Germany who resisted. I feel closer to them all the time.

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Many of the activists who have been coming here are also working on an ongoing basis with the 'anti-globalization' movement. If it's all part of a movement for justice, what do you think the next steps should be?

I would love to see the tens of thousands of people who go to a G-8 meeting or a World Bank meeting come here, where the terrible decisions they make are actually being implemented. With several thousand activists we could dismantle checkpoints, break sieges of all kinds, we could make a real difference on the ground where the policies are actually being implemented. I think it would be great to disrupt the implementation of the policies rather than only the planning of them.

Politically speaking, a kind of anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal force could reach out to moderate Muslims. Muslims' choices seem to be imperialism or resistance that takes a fundamentalist form. What about resistance that is anti-imperialist and not fundamentalist? If our ideas could reach, and interest, the Muslim community it would add strength and depth to both movements, and give new avenues and political options to people.