The Israel born historian Omar Bartov, writing in the Guardian, recounts a funeral Eulogy Given by Moshe Dayan in 1956. (As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel)
“On 30 April 1956, Moshe Dayan, then IDF chief of staff, gave a short speech that would become one of the most famous in Israel’s history. He was addressing mourners at the funeral of Ro’i Rothberg, a young security officer of the newly founded Nahal Oz kibbutz, which was established by the IDF in 1951 and became a civilian community two years later. The kibbutz was located just a few hundred metres from the border with the Gaza Strip, facing the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuja’iyya.
Rothberg had been killed the day before, and his body was dragged across the border and mutilated, before being returned to Israeli hands with the help of the United Nations. Dayan’s speech has become an iconic statement, used both by the political right and left to this day:
Yesterday morning Ro’i was murdered. Dazzled by the calm of the morning, he did not see those waiting in ambush for him at the edge of the furrow. Let us not cast accusations at the murderers today. Why should we blame them for their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been dwelling in Gaza’s refugee camps, as before their eyes we have transformed the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property.
We should not seek Roi’s blood from the Arabs in Gaza but from ourselves. How have we shut our eyes and not faced up forthrightly to our fate, not faced up to our generation’s mission in all its cruelty? Have we forgotten that this group of lads, who dwell in Nahal Oz, is carrying on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, on whose other side crowd hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands praying for our moment of weakness, so that they can tear us apart – have we forgotten that?…
We are the generation of settlement; without a steel helmet and the muzzle of the cannon we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Our children will not have a life if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads and dig water wells. Millions of Jews who were exterminated because they had no land are looking at us from the ashes of Israeli history and ordering us to settle and resurrect a land for our people. But beyond the border’s furrow an ocean of hatred and an urge for vengeance rises, waiting for the moment that calm will blunt our readiness, for the day that we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call upon us to put down our arms …
Let us not flinch from seeing the loathing that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who dwell around us and await the moment they can reach for our blood. Let us not avert our eyes lest our hands grow weak. This is the destiny of our generation. This is the choice of our lives – to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down.“
Pondering Dayan’s remarkable candor, on reflection it would be foolish not to recognise that the Zionists’ murderous brutality is responsible for the murderous hatred rising in the hearts of the people whose property they “made their own”. Especially when the eyes of those they have brutalised and stolen from are watching, just a few hundred metres away in the refugee camps the Zionists have put them in after forcing them from their beautiful homes in Palestine. In his funeral eulogy, therefore, Dayan must use the Holocaust to justify what he clearly recognises as unjust, realising it would be foolish to deny it. First, because the crimes of the Zionists are difficult to deny; and second and more importantly for the Zionists, if they forget that they are both purveyors and benefactors of injustice and brutality they will fail to see the necessity of continuing to be brutal and unjust until all the land is securely taken. That is why Dayan speaks of his generation of being the ones having to commit the necessary crimes, so that their children will not need to.
But Dayan made an important error. He neither pushed for nor thought it necessary to exterminate entirely the people they had massacred and from whom they had stolen. He did not reckon with the fact that their existence, particularly so close by, would ensure that the unjust barbarity necessary for his generation to take another peoples’ land would be transferred to their children and generations to come. The Palestinians exist, and therefore evidence of the crime exists.
This is why Israelis not only must continue to be brutal and unjust, but are becoming more so by the day. The evidence of the crime is still around them, and for all their efforts they have not been able to wipe and cleanse it way. In fact, they are both adding to the crime and the evidence. The choice they face is either to admit; or double down. So far they have chosen the latter path, becoming more unjust, crueler and losing more of their humanity in order to hang on to the stolen property. Unless they exterminate the Palestinians, as they should have done from the beginning, they cannot possibly hope to keep the land.
[1] “Millions of Jews who were exterminated because they had no land are looking at us from the ashes of Israeli history and ordering us to settle and resurrect a land for our people. ” Evocation of the Holocaust by Dayan as justification of dispossession of the Palestinians
[2] “But beyond the border’s furrow an ocean of hatred…” Evocation of antisemitism