A New Moon over the Flowers of Galilee
by Leyla Chavez, 3 November 2005
On the 2nd November M Cherifi was
condemned to pay €13,500, an exorbitant sum, in addition to the
humiliation of a suspended prison sentence. He had the courage
to publish, for francophone readers, a book which pays homage to
the ‘Flowers of Galilee’: its children, its martyrs, and the
author’s persistent goal: the achievement of equality amongst
all its inhabitants. The author
is hard, in the way Israelis in general are hard; for example,
he was not afraid to write: ‘In a constantly expanding America,
the Jews did not need to kill or supplant the indigenous elites;
instead, they became a significant component of them,
controlling discourse and acquiring a considerable degree of
financial power. They still don’t identify with gentile America:
each year, they force the US Congress and government to send
five billion dollars to their Israeli offspring, and they
endeavour today to push America to make war in Iraq on their
behalf.’ (‘The Other Face of Israel’, ‘Flowers of Galilee’ ed.
Al-Qalam, Paris 2004, p 294). That was four years ago. All that
the author foretold has been borne out, and our media now want
to push us into war in Iran, so that Israel’s nuclear weapons
can freely terrorise the region. The judge in Nanterre who
condemns the spirit of resistance by ruling against the
publisher of the ‘Flowers of Galilee’, has gone a step ahead of
Israel and the United States, neither of which has yet to take
legal action against this book, a book which has already been
translated and published in ten languages. Once more, one bears
witness to a diminution of the standards of justice in France,
for the wording of the judge’s conclusions reveals the taboo: he
refused to answer the defence counsel on the right to criticise
the Jewish religion; it’s a topic that is not open to
discussion, from his point of view.
Membership in this religion, being transmitted almost
exclusively by descent through one’s mother, it is explicitly a
religion which reinforces a feeling of biological membership in
a race; and only one religion would thus have this right,
recognised by the French State, to make such a claim. And it is
precisely in implementing this racist paradigm that the State of
Israel declares itself a ‘Jewish State’, and thus denies
non-Jews equal rights.
However, Dieudonné won his case precisely by
invoking our right to criticise all religions; and
www.Islamiya.info has also just put an end to the legal fury
against its great Muslim site, by winning its case in the
supreme court of appeal and without remand, arguing for the
right to criticise the ‘Jewish State’, a case that resulted from
a complaint by the usual Jewish defence organisations: LICRA,
J’accuse, UEJF. The exceptional severity against Israel Shamir’s
publisher clearly proves, were it necessary to do so, the
importance of the book in question: it is not another lampoon,
in the manner of some anti-Zionist publication, or another sad
description of injustice: it is a book that can knock one off
balance no matter the perspective one is coming from, starting
with the solidly philo-Semitic position, i.e. those people who
admire the Jewish genius, community spirit, and the Jews’
attachment to their own traditions, and who do not understand
how these qualities can end up with the construction of numerous
walls to enclose and starve the Palestinians.
‘The Other Face of Israel’ is a book that
sets you free because it restores the flow of truth between a
number of fields: local politics, international history,
ecology, and spirituality. Readers are respected, they will find
answers to perplexing questions, legitimate and yet dramatically
shameful, the untangling of the Gordian knots which have been
stifling them, from their subconscious thoughts to the
stammering of their indignation. The author, Israel Adam Shamir,
makes a point of proclaiming his identity as both Israeli and
Christian. It is with the usual bluntness of the Israelis that
he tackles the lies of those who are dominant, and it is with
the softness of the Galilean that he restores sight to the
blind. Mr Alaoui Cherifi, his publisher in France, is assuming
the spiritual role of France’s Muslims: he’s making an appeal
against the judgement of the court in Nanterre. He is setting
the example, he uphelds his faith: dignity, like beauty, does
not have a price.
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