El periódico El País reproduce hoy - ¡en español, gracias a Dios !- un texto del profesor Timothy Garton Ash publicado originalmente en The Guardian, el 27 de julio: We Europeans must never forget that we created the Middle East conflict - anexo- (Oriente Próximo, problema europeo. Están en juego intereses vitales y la posible reacción de las minorías étnicas marginadas).
(Garton Ash es historiador británico, profesor de Estudios Europeos en la Universidad de Oxford y uno de los intelectuales más lúcidos del siglo XXI).
¿Cuándo y dónde comenzó esta guerra? ¿Poco después de las nueve de la mañana, hora local, del miércoles 12 de julio, cuando unos militantes de Hezbolá capturaron a Ehud Goldwasser y Eldad Regev -nos reservistas israelíes en el último día de su turno de servicio- en una incursión en el norte de Israel desde el otro lado de la frontera? ¿El viernes 9 de junio, cuando unos proyectiles israelíes mataron al menos a siete civiles palestinos en una playa de la franja de Gaza? ¿En enero de este año, cuando Hamás venció en las elecciones legislativas palestinas, un triunfo ambiguo para la política estadounidense de apoyo a la democratización? ¿En 1982, cuando Israel invadió Líbano? ¿En 1979, con la revolución islámica en Irán? ¿En 1948, con la creación del Estado de Israel? ¿O quizá en Rusia, en la primavera de 1881?
Las preguntas simples exigen respuestas muy complicadas. Incluso aunque nos pongamos de acuerdo sobre los datos esenciales, todos y cada uno de los términos están en discusión: ¿militantes, soldados o terroristas?, ¿detenidos, capturados o secuestrados? Cada forma de escoger los hechos implica una interpretación. Y en historias tan atormentadas como ésta, cada horror se explica o se justifica mediante la referencia a otro horror anterior.
"De tiranía en tiranía hasta la guerra. / De dinastía en dinastía hasta el odio. / De villanía en villanía hasta la muerte. / De política en política hasta la tumba... La canción es tuya. Ordénala como quieras", dice el poeta James Fenton en su Balada del imán y el sha.
Sin embargo, al observar las reacciones europeas ante el conflicto actual, quiero insistir en que existen muchas razones para que Europa esté entre las primeras causas. Los pogromos rusos de 1881; la turba francesa que gritaba "¡abajo los judíos!" mientras al capitán Dreyfus le arrancaban los galones en la École Militaire; el antisemitismo enconado en Austria alrededor de 1900, encarnado en la figura del joven Adolf Hitler; hasta desembocar en el Holocausto de los judíos europeos y las oleadas de antisemitismo que sacudieron Europa inmediatamente después. Esa historia de un rechazo europeo cada vez más radical, desde la década de 1880 hasta la de 1940, es la que impulsó el sionismo político, la emigración judía a Palestina y la creación del Estado de Israel.
"Lo que me hizo sionista fue el caso Dreyfus", decía Theodor Herzl, el padre del sionismo moderno. Europa había decidido que cada nación debía poseer su propio Estado, no aceptaba ni a los judíos emancipados como miembros de pleno derecho de la nación francesa o la alemana, y acabó convirtiéndose en escenario del intento de exterminio de todos los judíos, de modo que éstos necesitaban tener su hogar nacional en algún otro lugar. El hogar -según una definición que le gustaba mucho a Isaiah Berlin- es el lugar en el que, cuando llegas, tienen que acogerte.
Nunca más volverían a ir los judíos como ovejas al matadero. Como israelíes, lucharían por la vida de cada uno de ellos. Los estereotipos decimonónicos del Helden alemán y el Händler judío se han invertido. Los alemanes, y con ellos la mayoría de los europeos aburguesados de hoy, se han convertido en los eternos comerciantes; los judíos, en Israel, son los eternos guerreros.
Un hilo importante
Por supuesto, éste no es más que un hilo en el que tal vez es el tejido político más complicado del mundo, pero es un hilo muy importante. Creo que ningún europeo debería hablar o escribir sobre el conflicto actual en Oriente Próximo sin ser consciente de nuestra responsabilidad histórica. Me temo que algunos europeos lo hacen, y no me refiero a los ultraderechistas alemanes que se manifestaron el sábado de la semana pasada en la ciudad de Verden, en la Baja Sajonia, ondeando banderas iraníes y gritando "¡Israel, centro internacional del genocidio!" Me refiero asimismo a gente de izquierdas, personas que participan en los foros de discusión de The Guardian y otros similares. Al tiempo que criticamos al ejército israelí por matar a civiles libaneses y observadores de la ONU con la excusa de querer recobrar a Ehud Goldwasser (y destruir la infraestructura militar de Hezbolá), debemos recordar que todo esto, seguramente, no ocurriría si algunos europeos no hubieran intentado, hace varios decenios, borrar a todos los que se llamaban Goldwasser de la faz de Europa... o incluso de la Tierra.
Que quede claro lo que quiero decir. Esta terrible historia europea no significa que los europeos deban mostrar una solidaridad ciega con cualquier cosa que se le ocurra hacer al Gobierno de Israel, por violenta o equivocada que sea. Al contrario, el amigo de verdad es el que no se calla cuando estás cometiendo un error. No significa que debamos apuntarnos a las más recientes y peligrosas simplificaciones de una "guerra tercermundista" contra "una alianza terrorista de Irán, Siria, Hezbolá y Hamás" (según el republicano estadounidense Newt Gingrich) o un "movimiento totalitario unificado" del islamismo político (según el parlamentario y periodista conservador británico Michael Gove).
No significa que cualquier europeo que critique a Israel es un antisemita encubierto, como parecen insinuar algunos comentaristas en EE UU. Y desde luego, no significa que debamos prestar menos atención al sufrimiento de los árabes, entre ellos los árabes palestinos que huyeron o fueron expulsados de sus casas al crearse el Estado de Israel o sus descendientes que crecieron en campos de refugiados. La vida de cada libanés muerto o herido por los bombardeos israelíes vale exactamente lo mismo que la de cada israelí muerto o herido por los cohetes de Hezbolá.
La huella de los europeos
¿Significa que los europeos tienen una obligación especial de involucrarse para tratar de lograr un acuerdo de paz con el que el Estado de Israel pueda vivir dentro de unas fronteras seguras y al lado de un Estado palestino viable? En mi opinión, sí. Por supuesto, dado que los europeos han dejado su huella, de uno u otro modo, casi en cualquier rincón de la Tierra, este argumento histórico podría llevarnos, en teoría, a todas partes: el legado del imperialismo europeo ofrecería una excusa moral universal para el neoimperialismo europeo. Pero la historia de los judíos expulsados de sus hogares europeos y que, a su vez, expulsaron de su hogar a los árabes palestinos, es un caso extraordinario. Y aunque uno no acepte el argumento de la responsabilidad histórica y moral, están en juego intereses vitales para Europa: petróleo, proliferación nuclear y la posible reacción de nuestras propias minorías musulmanas marginadas, por no citar más que tres factores.
No está tan claro en qué debería consistir esa intervención. Se ha propuesto que los europeos participen en una fuerza de paz multinacional en el sur de Líbano, pero eso sólo tiene sentido si se establecen unos parámetros realistas que permitan llevar a cabo una misión clara, factible y concreta. Unos parámetros que no se ven todavía cerca. Ni siquiera se ve cerca un alto el fuego. La cumbre de Roma terminó el miércoles por la tarde disimulando a duras penas las claras discrepancias entre Estados Unidos e Israel, por un lado, y la mayor parte del resto del mundo -incluidas la UE y la ONU-, por otro, sobre cómo lograr el alto el fuego. La verdad es que, más que nunca, la clave diplomática está en que EE UU se comprometa a fondo, utilice su influencia sobre Israel y negocie de la forma más directa posible con todas las partes en el conflicto, por desagradable que resulte. Mientras eso no ocurra, Europa puede hacer poco por sí sola.
Pero lo importante aquí no es sólo cambiar las cosas en Oriente Próximo. Lo que los europeos dicen y escriben sobre la situación de los judíos en la región a la que los europeos les empujamos está relacionado con nuestra forma de definirnos a nosotros mismos. Tenemos que medir cada palabra.
En Ingles:We Europeans must never forget that we created the Middle East conflict/ By Timothy Garton Ash (THE GUARDIAN, 27/07/06):
When and where did this war begin? Shortly after 9am local time on Wednesday July 12, when Hizbullah militants seized Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev - Israeli reservists on the last day of their tour of duty - in a cross-border raid into northern Israel? Friday June 9, when Israeli shells killed at least seven Palestinian civilians on a beach in the Gaza strip? January this year, when Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, in a backhanded triumph for an American policy of supporting democratisation? 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon? 1979, with the Islamic revolution in Iran? 1948, with the creation of the state of Israel? Or how about Russia in the spring of 1881?
Simple questions require such complicated answers. Even if the basic facts are agreed, every term is disputed: militants, soldiers or terrorists? Seized, captured or kidnapped? Every selection of facts implies an interpretation. And in tortured histories like this, every horror will be explained or justified by reference back to some antecedent horror:
From tyranny to tyranny to war
From dynasty to dynasty to hate
From villainy to villainy to death
From policy to policy to grave…
“The song is yours. Arrange it as you will,” writes the poet James Fenton, in his Ballad of the Imam and the Shah.
Yet observing European responses to the current conflict, I want to insist on Europe’s own strong claim to be among the earliest causes. The Russian pogroms of 1881; the French mob chanting “à bas les juifs” as Captain Dreyfus was stripped of his epaulettes at the École Militaire; the festering anti-semitism of Austria around 1900, shaping the young Adolf Hitler; all the way to the Holocaust of European Jewry and the waves of anti-semitism that convulsed parts of Europe in its immediate aftermath. It was that history of increasingly radical European rejection, from the 1880s to the 1940s, that produced the driving force for political Zionism, Jewish emigration to Palestine and eventually the creation of the state of Israel.
“What made me a Zionist was the Dreyfus trial,” said Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism. If Europe decided that each nation should have its own state, would not accept even emancipated Jews as fully members of the French or German nation, and eventually became the scene of the attempted extermination of all Jewry, then the Jews must have their own national home somewhere else. Home - in a definition beloved of Isaiah Berlin - is the place where, if you have to go there, they have to take you in. And never again would Jews go as lambs to the slaughter. As Israelis, they would fight for the life of every single fellow Jew. The 19th-century stereotypes of German Helden and Jewish Händler have been reversed. The Germans, and with them most of today’s bourgeois Europeans, have become the eternal traders; the Jews, in Israel, the eternal warriors.
Of course, this is only one thread in perhaps the world’s most complicated political tapestry; but it’s a very important one. I don’t think any European should speak or write about today’s conflict in the Middle East without displaying some consciousness of our own historical responsibility. I’m afraid that some Europeans today do so speak and write; and I don’t just mean the German rightwing extremists who marched through the town of Verden in Lower Saxony last Saturday, waving Iranian flags and chanting “Israel - international genocide centre”. I also mean thinking people on the left, contributors to discussion threads on Guardian blogs and the like. Even as we criticise the way the Israeli military are killing Lebanese civilians and UN monitors in the name of recovering Ehud Goldwasser (and destroying the military infrastructure of Hizbullah), we must remember that all of this would almost certainly not be happening if some Europeans had not attempted, a few decades back, to remove everyone called Goldwasser from the face of Europe - if not the earth.
Let me be very clear what I mean. It does not follow from this terrible European history that Europeans must display uncritical solidarity with whatever the current government of Israel chooses to do, however violent or ill-advised. On the contrary, the true friend is the one who speaks up when you’re making a mistake. It does not follow that we should sign up to the latest dangerous simplifications about a “third world war” against “an Iran-Syrian-Hizbullah-Hamas terrorist alliance” (according to the US Republican Newt Gingrich) or a “seamless totalitarian movement” of political Islamism (according to the Conservative MP and journalist Michael Gove).
It does not follow that every European who criticises Israel is a covert anti-semite, as some commentators in the United States tend to imply. And it certainly does not follow that we should be any less alert to the suffering of the Arabs, including the Palestinian Arabs who fled or were driven out of their homes at the founding of the state of Israel, and their descendants who grew up in refugee camps. The life of every single Lebanese killed or wounded by Israeli bombing is worth exactly as much as that of every Israeli killed or wounded by Hizbullah rocket attacks.
Does it follow that Europeans have a special obligation to get involved in trying to secure a peace settlement in which the state of Israel can live in secure frontiers next to a viable Palestinian state? I think it does. To be sure, since Europeans have one way or another affected almost every corner of the earth, such an argument from history could in theory take us everywhere - the legacy of European imperialism providing a universal moral excuse for European neo-imperialism. But the story of the Jews driven from their European homelands, and in their turn driving Palestinian Arabs from their homeland, is unique. Even if you don’t accept this argument from historical and moral responsibility, Europe’s vital interests are plainly at stake: oil, nuclear proliferation and the potential reaction among our alienated Muslim minorities, to name but three.
It’s less clear what that involvement should be. One proposal is for European forces to participate in a multinational peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, but that only makes sense if realistic parameters are established for a clear, feasible and finite mission. Those are not yet in sight. Even a ceasefire is not yet in sight. The Rome summit concluded yesterday afternoon barely papering over a clear difference between the United States and Israel, on the one side, and most of the rest of the world, including the EU and the UN, on the other, about how a ceasefire should be achieved. The truth is that now, more than ever, the diplomatic key lies in the full engagement of the United States, using its unique influence with Israel and negotiating as directly as possible with all partners to the conflict, however unsavoury. Until that happens, Europe alone can do little.
Yet the issue here is not just changing the realities on the ground in the Middle East. How Europeans speak and write about the position of the Jews in the region to which Europeans drove them is also a matter of our own self-definition. We should weigh every word.
Simple questions require such complicated answers. Even if the basic facts are agreed, every term is disputed: militants, soldiers or terrorists? Seized, captured or kidnapped? Every selection of facts implies an interpretation. And in tortured histories like this, every horror will be explained or justified by reference back to some antecedent horror:
From tyranny to tyranny to war
From dynasty to dynasty to hate
From villainy to villainy to death
From policy to policy to grave…
“The song is yours. Arrange it as you will,” writes the poet James Fenton, in his Ballad of the Imam and the Shah.
Yet observing European responses to the current conflict, I want to insist on Europe’s own strong claim to be among the earliest causes. The Russian pogroms of 1881; the French mob chanting “à bas les juifs” as Captain Dreyfus was stripped of his epaulettes at the École Militaire; the festering anti-semitism of Austria around 1900, shaping the young Adolf Hitler; all the way to the Holocaust of European Jewry and the waves of anti-semitism that convulsed parts of Europe in its immediate aftermath. It was that history of increasingly radical European rejection, from the 1880s to the 1940s, that produced the driving force for political Zionism, Jewish emigration to Palestine and eventually the creation of the state of Israel.
“What made me a Zionist was the Dreyfus trial,” said Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism. If Europe decided that each nation should have its own state, would not accept even emancipated Jews as fully members of the French or German nation, and eventually became the scene of the attempted extermination of all Jewry, then the Jews must have their own national home somewhere else. Home - in a definition beloved of Isaiah Berlin - is the place where, if you have to go there, they have to take you in. And never again would Jews go as lambs to the slaughter. As Israelis, they would fight for the life of every single fellow Jew. The 19th-century stereotypes of German Helden and Jewish Händler have been reversed. The Germans, and with them most of today’s bourgeois Europeans, have become the eternal traders; the Jews, in Israel, the eternal warriors.
Of course, this is only one thread in perhaps the world’s most complicated political tapestry; but it’s a very important one. I don’t think any European should speak or write about today’s conflict in the Middle East without displaying some consciousness of our own historical responsibility. I’m afraid that some Europeans today do so speak and write; and I don’t just mean the German rightwing extremists who marched through the town of Verden in Lower Saxony last Saturday, waving Iranian flags and chanting “Israel - international genocide centre”. I also mean thinking people on the left, contributors to discussion threads on Guardian blogs and the like. Even as we criticise the way the Israeli military are killing Lebanese civilians and UN monitors in the name of recovering Ehud Goldwasser (and destroying the military infrastructure of Hizbullah), we must remember that all of this would almost certainly not be happening if some Europeans had not attempted, a few decades back, to remove everyone called Goldwasser from the face of Europe - if not the earth.
Let me be very clear what I mean. It does not follow from this terrible European history that Europeans must display uncritical solidarity with whatever the current government of Israel chooses to do, however violent or ill-advised. On the contrary, the true friend is the one who speaks up when you’re making a mistake. It does not follow that we should sign up to the latest dangerous simplifications about a “third world war” against “an Iran-Syrian-Hizbullah-Hamas terrorist alliance” (according to the US Republican Newt Gingrich) or a “seamless totalitarian movement” of political Islamism (according to the Conservative MP and journalist Michael Gove).
It does not follow that every European who criticises Israel is a covert anti-semite, as some commentators in the United States tend to imply. And it certainly does not follow that we should be any less alert to the suffering of the Arabs, including the Palestinian Arabs who fled or were driven out of their homes at the founding of the state of Israel, and their descendants who grew up in refugee camps. The life of every single Lebanese killed or wounded by Israeli bombing is worth exactly as much as that of every Israeli killed or wounded by Hizbullah rocket attacks.
Does it follow that Europeans have a special obligation to get involved in trying to secure a peace settlement in which the state of Israel can live in secure frontiers next to a viable Palestinian state? I think it does. To be sure, since Europeans have one way or another affected almost every corner of the earth, such an argument from history could in theory take us everywhere - the legacy of European imperialism providing a universal moral excuse for European neo-imperialism. But the story of the Jews driven from their European homelands, and in their turn driving Palestinian Arabs from their homeland, is unique. Even if you don’t accept this argument from historical and moral responsibility, Europe’s vital interests are plainly at stake: oil, nuclear proliferation and the potential reaction among our alienated Muslim minorities, to name but three.
It’s less clear what that involvement should be. One proposal is for European forces to participate in a multinational peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, but that only makes sense if realistic parameters are established for a clear, feasible and finite mission. Those are not yet in sight. Even a ceasefire is not yet in sight. The Rome summit concluded yesterday afternoon barely papering over a clear difference between the United States and Israel, on the one side, and most of the rest of the world, including the EU and the UN, on the other, about how a ceasefire should be achieved. The truth is that now, more than ever, the diplomatic key lies in the full engagement of the United States, using its unique influence with Israel and negotiating as directly as possible with all partners to the conflict, however unsavoury. Until that happens, Europe alone can do little.
Yet the issue here is not just changing the realities on the ground in the Middle East. How Europeans speak and write about the position of the Jews in the region to which Europeans drove them is also a matter of our own self-definition. We should weigh every word.
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