by URI AVNERY
Something happens to retired chiefs of the Israeli internal Security Service, Shin Bet. Once they leave their jobs, they become spokesmen for peace. How come? Shin Bet agents are the only members of the establishment who come into real, direct, daily contact with Palestinians. They interrogate Palestinian suspects, torture them, try to turn them into informers. They collect information, penetrate the most remote parts of Palestinian society. They know more about the Palestinians than anybody else in Israel (and perhaps in Palestine, too).
The intelligent among them (intelligence officers can be intelligent) also come to conclusions that evade many politicians: that there is a Palestinian nation, that this nation will not disappear, that the Palestinians want a state of their own, that the only solution to the conflict is a Palestinian state next to Israel. And so, on leaving the service, Shin Bet chiefs become outspoken advocates of the two-state solution.
The identity of all secret service personnel is, well, secret, except the chiefs. (When I was a member of the Knesset, I submitted a bill which stipulated that the name of the service chiefs be made public. The bill was rejected, like all my proposals, but soon afterwards the prime minister decreed that the names of the chiefs be made public.) Some time ago, Israeli TV showed a documentary called The Doorkeepers, in which all the living ex-chiefs of the Shin Bet and the Mossad advocated peace based on the two-state solution. They expressed their opinion that there will be no peace unless the Palestinians achieve a national state of their own.
At the time, Tamir Pardo was the chief of the Mossad and could not give his opinion. But he retired earlier this year, and last week opened his mouth in public for the first time. He is a Sephardic Jew whose family came from Turkey, where many Jews found refuge after the expulsion from Spain 525 years ago. So he does not belong to the Ashkenazi ‘elite’.
The recent chief of the Mossad sees no military threat to Israel – not from Iran or Daesh or anybody else. This is a direct challenge to the main plank of Netanyahu’s policy: that Israel is surrounded by dangerous enemies and deadly threats. But Pardo sees a menace that is far more dangerous: the split inside Israel’s Jewish society. We don’t have a civil war yet. But ‘we are rapidly approaching it.’
Civil war between whom? The usual answer is between ‘right’ and ‘left’. Right and left in Israel do not mean the same as in the rest of the world. In Israel, the division between left and right in Israel almost solely concerns peace and the occupation. But I suspect that Pardo means a much deeper rift, without saying so explicitly: the rift between Ashkenazim (‘European’) and Mizrahim (‘Oriental’ or ‘Arab’) Jews. The Sephardic (‘Spanish’) community, to which Pardo belongs, is seen as part of the Orientals. The overwhelming majority of the Orientals are rightist, nationalist and at least mildly religious, while the majority of the Ashkenazim are leftist, more peace-oriented and secular. Since the Ashkenazim also tend to be socially and economically better off than the Orientals, the rift is profound.
London Review of Books for more