Moshe "Bogie" Ya'alon and
Minister of Strategic AffairsThe Strategic Affairs Minister of Israel is the political head of the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and a member of the cabinet. The portfolio and ministry was created in 2006 for Avigdor Lieberman, whose Yisrael Beiteinu party had just joined the governing coalition...
.
Palestinian threat as 'cancer'
On 27 August 2002, he told the
HaaretzHaaretz is Israel's oldest daily newspaper. It was founded in 1918 and is now published in both Hebrew and English in Berliner format. The English edition is published and sold together with the International Herald Tribune. Both Hebrew and English editions can be read on the Internet...
newspaper: "The
PalestinianThe Palestinian people, also referred to as Palestinians or Palestinian Arabs , are an Arabic-speaking people with origins in Palestine. Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one third of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in the area encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza...
threat harbours cancer-like attributes that have to be severed. There are all kinds of solutions to cancer. Some say it's necessary to amputate organs but at the moment I am applying
chemotherapyChemotherapy is the treatment of cancer with an antineoplastic drug or with a combination of such drugs into a standardized treatment regimen....
." In January 2004, he publicly stated that the thirteen
Sayeret MatkalSayeret Matkal is a special forces unit of the Israel Defence Forces , which is subordinated to the intelligence directorate Aman. First and foremost a field intelligence-gathering unit, conducting deep reconnaissance behind enemy lines to obtain strategic intelligence, Sayeret Matkal is also...
soldiers who refused to serve in the
Israeli-occupied territoriesThe Israeli-occupied territories are the territories which have been designated as occupied territory by the United Nations and other international organizations, governments and others to refer to the territory seized by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967 from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria...
were taking the unit's name in vain.
The alleged statement
In 2002 through 2009 a statement on the Palestinian people, in general, was attributed to Moshe Ya'alon. The quote was "The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people," and it was first attributed to Ya'alon in 2002. According to a Craig Silverman article in the
Columbia Journalism ReviewThe Columbia Journalism Review is an American magazine for professional journalists published bimonthly by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 1961....
, "It’s the kind of quote that makes readers sit up and pay attention," but "Yaalon never uttered those words."
The quotation, with minor variations, has appeared in broadcast news, on blogs, and in articles in publications including the
Chicago TribuneThe Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
,
Boston Globe,
Toronto StarThe Toronto Star is Canada's highest-circulation newspaper, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Its print edition is distributed almost entirely within the province of Ontario...
,
Time Magazine, the
London Review of BooksThe London Review of Books is a fortnightly British magazine of literary and intellectual essays.-History:The LRB was founded in 1979, during the year-long lock-out at The Times, by publisher A...
. It has been cited by academic experts on the Middle East, including Professor
Rashid KhalidiRashid Ismail Khalidi , born 1948, a Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East, is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.-Family, education and...
, who used it in his 2005 book
Resurrecting Empire, and also Siegman who, in 2007, placed the entire phrase in quotation marks, explicitly attributing it to General Ya'alon.
The
Toronto Star published the quote in a 2004 article by columnist
Haroon SiddiquiHaroon Siddiqui, CM, O.Ont is an Indo-Canadian newspaper journalist, columnist and a former editor.-Early life and career:...
. According to Siddiqui, "The statement attributed to [Yaalon] was not just in the blogosphere but was widely quoted in mainstream, respected publications". Furthermore, "there had been no correction or clarification sought or given that I was aware of. So, I had no reason to think it was not a valid quote."
Time Magazine published a version of Siegman's phrase ("It will be seared deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people") in February 2009, attributing it to Ya'alon.
Proof of falsehood; retractions
In a
Toronto Star article, it was pointed out that "Ya'alon did not say what he is supposed to have said." The Canadian newspaper article concluded that Ya'alon "certainly" did not utter these words during the 2002 interview with Ari Shavit, a
HaaretzHaaretz is Israel's oldest daily newspaper. It was founded in 1918 and is now published in both Hebrew and English in Berliner format. The English edition is published and sold together with the International Herald Tribune. Both Hebrew and English editions can be read on the Internet...
reporter, although that interview was widely cited as the original source of the remark. The
Star cited the incident as "a case study in a seldom-examined aspect of popular culture in the electronic age – the self-replicating propagation of erroneous information."
In the original interview of Ya'alon, as translated in the English edition of
Haaretz, Ya'alon describes the "Palestinian threat" as an "existential threat" and a "cancerous manifestation". When asked by Shavit how he would define "victory" against the Palestinians, Ya'alon replies "I defined it from the beginning of the confrontation: the very deep internalization by the Palestinians that terrorism and violence will not defeat us, will not make us fold. If that deep internalization does not exist at the end of the confrontation, we will have a strategic problem with an existential threat to Israel. If that [lesson] is not burned into the Palestinian and Arab consciousness, there will be no end to their demands of us."
The media watchdog group
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in AmericaThe Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America is an American non-profit pro-Israel media watchdog group. The group says it was founded in 1982 "to respond to the Washington Post's coverage of Israel's Lebanon incursion", and to respond to what it considers the media's "general...
(CAMERA) began an investigation of the quotation after
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
professor
Rashid KhalidiRashid Ismail Khalidi , born 1948, a Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East, is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.-Family, education and...
published the quotation in an op-ed piece for The New York Times, and was obliged to print a correction.
Gilead Ini, a researcher with
CAMERAA camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...
, believes that the error began with
Henry SiegmanHenry Siegman is a German-born Jewish American nonfiction writer and a journalist specializing in the Middle East policy towards Israel, and a visiting professor at the University of London.-Early life and education:...
, an academic and Middle East pundit once associated with the
Council on Foreign RelationsThe Council on Foreign Relations is an American nonprofit nonpartisan membership organization, publisher, and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs...
, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. In an article published in December 2003 in
The New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
, Siegman wrote of Ya'alon as "the official who had formerly talked of how war would `sear deep' into Palestinian consciousness that they are a defeated people." In that article, only the words "sear deep" appeared in quotation marks.
The Columbia Journalism Review criticized
Time for publishing a correction that implied that the quotation might be real, despite admitting that no source could be found for it.
On the need to confront Iran
In January 2008, during a discussion on the
Interdisciplinary CenterThe Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya is a private Israeli college located in Herzliya, Israel.The languages of instruction in the Interdisciplinary Center are Hebrew and English.-History:...
, Ya'alon said "There is no way to stabilize the situation all over the world and especially in the Middle East without confronting
IranIran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
."
According to
The Sydney Morning HeraldThe Sydney Morning Herald is a daily broadsheet newspaper published by Fairfax Media in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1831 as the Sydney Herald, the SMH is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Australia. The newspaper is published six days a week. The newspaper's Sunday counterpart, The...
Ya'alon said: "We have to confront the Iranian revolution immediately. There is no way to stabilize the Middle East today without defeating the Iranian regime. The Iranian nuclear program must be stopped."
When asked whether "all options" included a military deposition of Ahmadinejad and the rest of Iran's current leadership, Ya'alon told The Herald: "We have to consider killing him. All options must be considered."
The Peace Now/'virus' incident
On August 2009, Ya'alon visited the ruins of
HomeshHomesh was an Israeli settlement in the northern Samarian Hills of the West Bank along Tulkarm and Route 60. The village fell under the administrative jurisdiction of the Shomron Regional Council...
that was evacuated in
Israel's unilateral disengagement planIsrael's unilateral disengagement plan , also known as the "Disengagement plan", "Gaza expulsion plan", and "Hitnatkut", was a proposal by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, adopted by the government on June 6, 2004 and enacted in August 2005, to evict all Israelis from the Gaza Strip and from...
in 2005 and toured Shomron communities, considered as un-authorized outposts. He said that these communities are all legitimate and should not be called "illegal." In addition, he participated in a convention of
Manhigut YehuditManhigut Yehudit is a movement started by Moshe Feiglin and Shmuel Sackett to lead the State of Israel with, in their words, "authentic Jewish values." This has been widely interpreted, both by Manhigut supporters and outside observers, as closer to Orthodox Judaism but without a Galut or Exile...
("Jewish Leadership"), the more right-wing Settlers' segment within the
LikudLikud is the major center-right political party in Israel. It was founded in 1973 by Menachem Begin in an alliance with several right-wing and liberal parties. Likud's victory in the 1977 elections was a major turning point in the country's political history, marking the first time the left had...
right-wing Party, in which he condemned the disengagement plan. He said that in everyone of the Israelis, including him, there is a "virus" called "peace now."
Subsequently, Ya'alon explained that, indeed, all Israelis want
peace, now. He stressed, however, the need to accept the fact that peace won't come immediately, otherwise it "hurts Israel." Ya'alon stated that, in his view, the way of thinking that Israel just needs to give one more piece of land and
then it will have peace is a kind of "virus." However, his original statement in the convention and the term "virus" he used were intepreted as directed against the pro-peace, leftist movement of
Peace Now.
Also, he said that "We have become accustomed to Arabs being permitted to live everywhere, in the
NegevThe Negev is a desert and semidesert region of southern Israel. The Arabs, including the native Bedouin population of the region, refer to the desert as al-Naqab. The origin of the word Neghebh is from the Hebrew root denoting 'dry'...
,
GalileeGalilee , is a large region in northern Israel which overlaps with much of the administrative North District of the country. Traditionally divided into Upper Galilee , Lower Galilee , and Western Galilee , extending from Dan to the north, at the base of Mount Hermon, along Mount Lebanon to the...
,
ShechemShechem was a Canaanite city mentioned in the Amarna letters, and is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as an Israelite city of the tribe of Manasseh and the first capital of the Kingdom of Israel...
(
NablusNablus is a Palestinian city in the northern West Bank, approximately north of Jerusalem, with a population of 126,132. Located in a strategic position between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, it is the capital of the Nablus Governorate and a Palestinian commercial and cultural center.Founded by the...
),
JeninJenin is the largest town in the Northern West Bank, and the third largest city overall. It serves as the administrative center of the Jenin Governorate and is a major agricultural center for the surrounding towns. In 2007, the city had a population of 120,004 not including the adjacent refugee...
, and [on the other hand] there are areas where Jews are not allowed to live. We caused this." He concluded that, "regarding the issue of the settlements, Jews can and should be [living] everywhere in the
Land of IsraelThe Land of Israel is the Biblical name for the territory roughly corresponding to the area encompassed by the Southern Levant, also known as Canaan and Palestine, Promised Land and Holy Land. The belief that the area is a God-given homeland of the Jewish people is based on the narrative of the...
. Every settlement needs to get the authorities' approval, and what emerges in contradiction to these decisions is not eligible. That is what is against the law".{{verify source|type=English|date=August 2009}}
Later, after meeting with PM Netanyahu, Ya'alon retracted parts of his statements and said that he "recognized the importance of democratic discourse and respecting other opinions."
External links
- Personal website
- Moshe Ya'alon, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
- "Taking stock", Moshe Ya'alon profile and interview by Yaakov Katz, Jerusalem Post, published 30 April 2009 & updated 7 May 2009 (Accessed 26 October 2011)
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Kiryat HaimKiryat Haim is one of the five Krayot suburbs located north of Haifa, Israel. In 2003, Kiryat Haim had a population of 40,000. Kiryat Haim is within the municipal borders of the city of Haifa, and lies on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.-History:...
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