By Stanley
Rogouski, 8/25/06
“The people have said their piece and no demonstration or
rally will bring down the government”.
-Moshe Dayan to Motti
Askhenazi in 1974
Outside of the United States, where protest movements
usually confine themselves to single issue demands, there is a long tradition
of mass, non-violent protest going so far as to drive sitting governments from
power.
One example took place in Israel during the general
atmosphere of malaise and anxiety that followed the disastrous Yom Kippur War.
While there are very few stirring images of the protest movement that brought
down the government of Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan in April of 1974, no Lech
Welesa jumping the wall at the Lenin shipyards and no anonymous Chinese
protester facing off with a Soviet made tank in Tiennemann Square, it is
significant for two reasons. First of all, it is a good example of a small,
grassroots movement managing to bring down a sitting government without the
benefit of professional organizers, support from established politicians or
massive crowds of people. But even more important, the protest movement led by
the disgruntled army officer Motti Askhenazi burst onto the scene only three
months after the elections of December of 1973 had seemingly confirmed the
ruling party in power.
On October 6th of 1973, on Yom Kippur, a
coalition of Arab armies led by Anwar Sadat of Egypt
launched a surprise attack on Israel.
Even though the Israelis eventually managed to secure help from the United States and win the war of maneuver,
trapping the Egyptian Third Army behind the Suez Canal as they rushed into the
Sinai and driving the Syrians out of the Golan Heights,
the country was badly shaken. Over 3000 Israeli soldiers had been killed along
with 8,000 Arab coalition soldiers and the ease with which Sadat’s forces
neutralized Israeli air power and breached the Bar Lev Line early in the war
led to a crisis of confidence in Gold Meir’s government, which was widely seen
as not having responded quickly enough to the signs that Sadat was planning for
an invasion. What’s more, the war, financed by pay deductions from Israeli
salaries, dealt crippling blows to the country’s economy and shook its entire
social structure.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944771-1,00.html
One reason for the present Israeli malaise is financial.
The cost of the war – an estimated $10 billion – has staggered the country’s
economy. The involuntary war “loan” deducted from Israeli salaries
has been raised to 14% of income – on top of steep ordinary income tax rates –
even as government subsidies of food staples have been slashed. As a result,
the cost of such items as bread, butter and milk has risen anywhere from 30% to
70%, while the average bus fare has gone up 50% and the price of a telephone
call 33%. (Time Magazine, Mar. 4, 1974)
But the general election
of the Eighth Knesset that was held in December of 1973 glossed over what the
public considered to be the most important issue of the day, the slow response
of Gold Meir, Moshe Dayan and the IDF’s general staff to the Egyptian attack
that previous. In this sense, the Israeli election of 1973 was quite similar to
the elections held in the United States
in 2004, where both parties declined to address the most important issue of the
day, the occupation of Iraq,
and where the debate centered, bizarrely enough, on Mary Cheney’s sexual
orientation and the record of both candidates during the Vietnam War. Even
though Dayan and Meir managed to cobble together a shaky coalition between
Labor and several smaller political parties, it was clear that, in spite of the
vote that December, the government that was about to be formed was not a
legitimate expression of the will of the people and that it was vulnerable to
any grassroots protest movement that asked one simple question. Was Moshe Dayan
still fit to run the IDF?
Motti Ashkenazi was a
33-year-old reserve captain in the IDF who commanded the only unit on the Bar
Lev line to hold out in the face of the Egyptian onslaught. As he was to
describe 30 years later in the Jerusalem Post, his thoughts alternated between
the terror of being caught in a surprise attack by overwhelming numbers and his
rage at Meir and Moshe Dayan (the hero of the 1967 War) for missing the obvious
signals that an attack was imminent and for wasting the lives of thousands of
his fellow soldiers.
http://info.jpost.com/C003/Supplements/30YK/new.03.html
Egypt
was not interested in a military adventure and offered negotiations for a
political settlement. There was, in fact, a fundamental conflict of interest
between Syria and Egypt from the outset, which was clearly
illustrated later in Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem
and eventual peace settlement. Israel
did not have the foresight to exploit this basic conflict of interest. If it
had, the lives of at least 2,000 soldiers could have been saved.
Ashkenazi and his troops were finally rescued 5 days later
after the tide of the war started to turn but he had already decided that if he
had gotten out of the trap alive, he would lead a protest movement against the
government. In other words, Ashkenazi was not a disgruntled student or even a
member of the intellectual elite but a bone fide war hero. Like Cindy Sheehan
over 30 years later, Ashkenazi had personally experienced the worst effects of
the war he was about to protest, and, as a result, had immediate legitimacy in
the eyes of most of the country.
But that did not guarantee success. On February 4th,
shortly after his release from the army, and two months after the elections, he
showed up outside Dayan’s office and stayed, a lone protester with a sign that
conveyed a simple message. Dayan had to step down. And there he stood, alone,
for the next few weeks. In contrast to
George Bush’s refusal to meet with Cindy Sheehan, Dayan did actually arrange a
meeting Ashkenazi but only to issue his famous that the people had spoken and
no protest movement would bring down the government. At that moment the tide
seemed to turn. The people had indeed voted but so obviously had not spoken.
Bit by bit, Ashkenazi was joined by students, intellectuals, and, finally,
large numbers of disgruntled reservists who had finally found a voice
articulating their own discontent with the way the war had been conducted that
fall. By that April, it was clear that Ashkenazi’s protest had spread so deeply
into every section of Israeli society and had such a widespread geographic
reach and legitimacy in the eyes of the public that the Labor government that
had won the election in December would not be able to govern, and Dayan and
Golda Meir stepped down to allow Yitzhak Rabin to form a government in their
place. In other words, the results of the election had been overturned by a
small, elite group of protesters without firing a shot and without riots.
As Ehud Sprinzak argues in his article “Extreme Politics in Israel”, it was
not numbers of violence that allowed Ashkenazi’s protest movement to drive
Golda Meir out of power, but the combination of a war hero as its public face,
penetration into every sector of the country’s elite, and the political
situation in which they made their demands
http://www.geocities.com/alabasters_archive/extreme_politics.html
“But even at their high point the protest movements did not
attract large numbers of people to their ranks. Their major operation, the
demonstration on March 24, 1974, at the Prime Minister’s Office, drew no more
than 5,000-6,000 participants. The effectiveness of the protest movements was
due mainly to the quality of their members, their wide geographical spread and
their peculiar ability to penetrate the political center. A study of the
quality of the members indicates that this was an elite group. Ashkenazi’s
supporters were not deprived citizens, alienated intellectuals or enraged students.
They represented the “positive Israelis” members of well-established
kibbutzim and moshavim, reserve army officers of all ranks, senior managers
from an branches of the economy, scientists, intellectuals and white-collar
professionals, from the nation’s first families. These distinguished members of
the Israeli periphery were later joined by integral units of the army reserves
which immediately following their release from active duty came to Jerusalem to
express their frustration before the symbol of the Israeli political center-the
Knesset. If the number of actual participants in the demonstrations was not
large, their geographical spread was. They flocked to Jerusalem from an over the country and seemed
to represent a greater number of their compatriots.” (The Jerusalem Quarterly)
In the end, Motti
Ashkenazi’s protest movement did not have a positive affect on Israeli society.
Quite the contrary, it did not address the apartheid system under which the
Palestinians live or the country’s dependency on the United States. It provided a model
for the religious extremists who would form the basis of the settler movement
and it eventually led to the disintegration of the Labor coalition and the rise
of the Likud Party in 1978. Motti Ashkenazi himself was no real dissident and
did not address or even want to address the fundamental contradictions at the
heart of Israeli society. He was much closer in spirit to Jack Murtha than to
Martin Luther King, a nationalist who wanted his government to kill more efficiently,
not a humanist who wanted it to stop killing altogether. Nevertheless he was
able to grasp the fundamentally undemocratic character of the election that
winter and to radically break the framework into which the existing political
elite had tried to force the debate. He was able to call up large reserves of
discontent from grassroots of the (Jewish obviously) part of Israel and
eventually to burst out of the killing confines of electoral politics.
While most of us here in
the United States in the anti-war movement and even in the progressive wing of
the Democratic Party would probably disagree with Ashkenazi’s grassroots
militaristic nationalism, the movement he led, nevertheless, can provide some
insight into why the protest movement against the war in Iraq, so full
of promise and energy in 2002 and 2003, had failed to accomplish its
objectives. It can also point to why in fact it succeeds where it does.
It’s a familiar ritual
here in the United States.
Professional peace bureaucrats organize a protest, often months in advance.
Permits are granted. Buses are rented. The press is contacted and the day goes
off, usually, pretty much as planned. After it’s all over, everybody sits
around and counts the spoils, the numbers of people who showed up. The
organizers estimate high. The press estimates low. And the truth lies somewhere
in between. But, in contrast to our American obsession with numbers, the size
of a political demonstration is only one measure of its effectiveness.
Cindy Sheehan’s vigil outside
of Crawford rarely numbered more than a few hundred people. Yet it reverberated
throughout the press and the rest of the country and shook the bipartisan
consensus on supporting the continued occupation of Iraq. Even though no major figure
in the Democratic Party outside of the Congressional Black Caucus would allow
himself to share a stage with Sheehan, only a few months later, powerful
conservative Democrat Jack Murtha came out as a serious critic of the war.
The gigantic UFPJ led mass
rallies during the RNC in 2004, on the other hand, wound up duping most of
their participants into becoming actors in an elaborate production of post 9/11
“Security Theater”. It allowed the NYPD a national stage on which to show off
their ability to control large numbers of people, and demonstrated to the
government and the major media that the leaders of the anti-war movement would
make no serious moves outside of the consensus framed by the Democrats and
Republicans. Secure in the knowledge that there would be no major social
disruptions in the event of an escalation of the war, the Bush regime and the
cable news outlets rolled out the Swift Boat campaign and the return of the
“stab in the back” narrative. They easily brushed aside the Democratic Party’s
attempts to make George W. Bush’s record during the Vietnam War a campaign
issue, and, predictably, after his narrow victory over John Kerry in November,
Bush proclaimed, with no small justification, that he now had “political
capital” and he was going to spend it. Shortly after the election, Fallujah was
wrapped in barbed wire. Military males trying to escape was sent back inside,
and the full power of the United
States military was unleashed against the
city as revenge for the murder of four Blackwater, Inc. mercenaries the
previous spring.
It’s probably no
exaggeration to argue that Leslie Cagan and the professional peace bureaucrats
at UFPJ bartered the lives of thousands of people in Iraq for a few more votes for John
Kerry.
On the other hand, as
Motti Ashkenazi’s protest movement demonstrated in 1974, numbers, while
important, are often less important than the clarity of the movement’s
objective and the force with which it’s articulated. This fall, on October 5th,
a group does in fact have a clearly articulated message and a political
strategy that addresses the fundamental inability of the electoral process to
confront the ongoing issue of the occupation of Iraq, the emerging Christian
fascist movement, the criminal neglect of the Bush administration during Hurricane
Katrina, and the consolidation of the Bush regime’s power into the executive
branch of government. Since the elections this November will not address the
fundamental question facing the American people today, the ongoing project of
the Bush regime t radically remake society in a fascist direction and for years
to come, since the Lamont campaign will talk about the ongoing war in Iraq but
not the coming war against Iran, we have to take to the streets with a very
simple, direct, and powerful message. George Bush must step down and take his
whole program with him.
http://worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2655&Itemid=223
On October 5, 2006, on the
basis of the Call, The World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime!, people
throughout the country will be stepping forward in a day of mass resistance. The breadth, the depth, the
impact and the power of that day depends not only on those in The World Can’t
Wait organization, and others, who are already organizing for this day — it
depends on you, on us, on all those who have been hoping and searching for a
means to do something that will really make a difference.If we fail to act to make
this a reality, then it will definitely make a difference — in a decidedly
negative way. But if we do take up the challenge to build for this, and then do
take history into our hands on that day, through political action on the
massive scale that is called for — it can make all the difference in the
world, in a very positive sense and for the possibility of a better future for
humanity.AS THE CALL, THE WORLD
CAN’T WAIT – DRIVE OUT THE BUSH REGIME!, CONCLUDES:“The point is this:
history is full of examples where people who had right on their side fought
against tremendous odds and were victorious. And it is also full of examples of
people passively hoping to wait it out, only to get swallowed up by a horror
beyond what they ever imagined. The future is unwritten. WHICH ONE WE GET IS UP
TO US.”