Israeli Writer-Activist Tikva Honig-Parnass, Who Fought for Israel’s Founding in 1948, on 60 Years o

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Israeli Writer-Activist Tikva Honig-Parnass, Who Fought for Israel’s Founding in 1948, on 60 Years of Palestinian Dispossession and Occupation

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/16/israeli_writer_activist_tikva_honig_parnass

Raised in an ultra-Zionist family, Tikva Honig-Parnass was barely twenty years old in 1948. She was a member of the Haganah paramilitary and the Palmach. Today, Tikva Honig-Parnass is an anti-Zionist leftist writer and activist. She has been involved with anti-occupation, women’s, and Mizrahi movements in Israel since the 1960s. She was editor of News From Within, the publication of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, for close to a decade. More recently, she founded and edited the periodical Between the Lines with Palestinian activist Toufic Haddad.

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AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about your experience in 1948? Could you go back in time, Tikva, and talk about how it is you joined the Haganah and the Palmach? And explain what they are, for viewers and listeners who are not familiar.

TIKVA HONIG-PARNASS: Yes. But before saying how I enlisted Haganah and the Palmach in—and what happened in ’48, the listeners have to understand that we were the generation that were programmed to commit the mass expulsion. It was inserted to us with the—as you say, with the milk of our mothers. In school, the Bible, in a secular school, was taught five days a week as if it is an historical document. And we were already ready when ’48 war broke out. We were already indifferent to the Palestinians—not even hating, just indifferent. They became for us a kind of an environmental nuisance. It is the kind of objectification which prepared us not to care about the expulsion, which we saw in front of our eyes.

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AMY GOODMAN: For those who say the Palestinians left of their own accord in 19-–

TIKVA HONIG-PARNASS: No, no. What do you mean, “of their own accord”? No, of course not. It was actually—already we know now. Already, the—not only the new historians, but even Benny Morris, who justifies the ethnic cleansing, already we know that it was a pre-planned , which was to evacuate the land—the land, so that it will be with a Jewish majority, because according to the UN decision, there was half and half Jews and Palestinians.

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