Dear Dov Yermiya,

I have received the distressing letter that you recently sent to a limited number of friends. You paint the Israeli reality in dark – but true – colors, and end by cutting your ties with it.

“Therefore I, a 95 year old Sabra (native born Israeli Jew), who has plowed its fields, planted trees, built a house and fathered sons, grandsons and great-grandsons, and also shed his blood in the battle for the founding of the State of Israel,

“Declare herewith that I renounce my belief in the Zionism which has failed, that I shall not be loyal to the Jewish fascist state and its mad visions, that I shall not sing anymore its nationalist anthem, that I shall stand at attention only on the days of mourning for those fallen on both sides in the wars, and that I look with a broken heart at an Israel that is committing suicide and at the three generations of offspring that I have bred and raised in it.”

Since I first met you, Dov, some fifty years ago, I have always considered you the salt of the earth. You were born in a village, the son of a farmer, were a fighter in the 1948 war and later a Colonel in the army, a modest man, a moral person in every fiber.

In the first Lebanon War, you exposed the atrocities committed against the Palestinian refugees in the Tyre-Sidon area, and your courageous report shocked me no less than those of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. You did not hesitate to break the silence, as the “Breaking the Silence” youngsters are doing now, knowing full well that your peers in the officers’ corps would excommunicate you.

You are a man of my heart, Dov. That is why your words distress me so much. I think it important to share the statement of a man of your caliber with those in our camp who spend sleepless nights worrying about the situation of our state.

You start your letter by mentioning the founders of the Zionist movement.

“If Herzl could come to life again and see what those who claim to carry the flag of Zionism are doing, he would flee at once, miserable and shocked, back to his grave. So would Chaim Weizmann and most of the pioneers, the fathers and mothers of my generation. They were people of conscience and morality, who held to the axiom that human beings are decent and honest.”

Most of your fierce accusations concern Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. “And thus, for 42 years, Israel turned what should have been Palestine into a giant detention camp, and is holding a whole people captive under an oppressive and cruel regime, with the sole aim of taking away their country, come what may!!!

“The IDF eagerly suppresses their efforts at rebellion, with the active assistance of the settlement thugs, by the brutal means of a sophisticated Apartheid and a choking blockade, inhuman harassment of the sick and of women in labor, the destruction of their economy and the theft of their best land and water.

“Over all this there is waving the black flag of the frightening contempt for the life and blood of the Palestinians. Israel will never be forgiven for the terrible toll of blood spilt, and especially the blood of children, in hair-raising quantities.”

But I believe that the abysmal despair echoed in your words has other roots, too. It is a feeling that troubles the heart of many of your and my generation, the feeling that “they have stolen our state”, that there is no resemblance between the state which we dreamed of and fought for and the thing that has taken its place.

When I think of our youth, yours and mine, one scene is never far from my mind: the 1947 Dalia festival.

Tens of thousands of young men and women were sitting on the slope of a hill in the natural amphitheater near Kibbutz Dalia on Mount Carmel. Ostensibly it was a festival of folk dancing, but in reality it was much more – a great celebration of the new Hebrew culture which we were then creating in the country, in which folk dancing played an important role. The dancing groups came mainly from the kibbutzim and the youth movements, and the dances were original Hebrew creations, interwoven with Russian, Polish, Yemenite and Hassidic ones. A group of Arabs danced the Debka in ecstasy, dancing and dancing and dancing on.

In the middle of the event, the loudspeakers announced that members of the UN Commission of Inquiry, which had been sent by the international organization to decide upon the future of the country, were joining us. When we saw them entering the amphitheater, the tens of thousands spontaneously rose to their feet and started to sing the “Hatikva”, the national anthem, with a holy fervor that reverberated from the surrounding mountains.

We did not know then that within half a year the great Hebrew-Arab war would break out – our War of Independence and their Naqba. I believe that most of the 6000 young people who fell in the war on our side, as well as the thousands that were wounded – like you and me – were present at that moment in Dalia, seeing each other and singing together.

What state did we think of then? What state did we set out to create?

What has happened to the Hebrew society, the Hebrew culture, the Hebrew morality that we were so proud of then?

Yes, we did create a state. As the old song goes: “On the battlefield, a town is now standing”. We have brought millions of people to this country. From a Hebrew community of 650 thousand we have grown into a population of 7.5 million. A fourth and fifth generation speaks Hebrew as their mother tongue. Our economy is large and solid, even in these times of crisis. In several fields we are in the first rank of human endeavor.

But is this the society, is this the state, which we saw in our mind’s eye on the day it was set up? Is this the army that you and I swore allegiance to on the day it was founded?

Did we dream of this corrupt society, a society without compassion, where a handful of the very rich live off the fat of the land, with a large band of politicians and media people and other lackeys groveling in the dust at their feet?

Did we dream of a state that is an isolated and shunned ghetto in the region, lording it over an oppressed Palestinian ghetto-within-a-ghetto? There were days when we could stand up anywhere in the world and proudly declare “I am an Israeli.” No one can do that now. The name of Israel has become mud. Since the Gaza War, in which our army poured molten lead onto men, women and children, many Israelis avoid speaking Hebrew in the streets of foreign cities and the IDF has ordered the faces of some of its officers – those whose rank equals yours – be obscured in pictures published in the media.

Why did this happen? When did this happen?

My aim is not to start a discussion with you about the fundamentals of Zionism, both positive and negative. We might not agree. Nor shall I enter into the question of whether everything really started in 1967, with the intoxicating and corruptive victory, or whether the seeds of disaster were sown earlier. On one thing I agree with you entirely: that the fatal step was taken then, on the morrow of that war, when we had the choice between the shining gold of peace and the base metal of annexation, and stretched our hands out towards the latter.

My personal conscience is clean. I am proud that I was one of the few in the country, and the sole voice in the Knesset, who proposed even during the war to turn over the occupied territories to the Palestinian people, so as to enable them to set up their state. This unique opportunity was missed, as you point out in your letter, because of the greed of the founders of the settlement movement, the champions of a Greater Israel.

From there things rolled on, as in a Greek tragedy, to where we are now, with an assorted crew of settlers, racists, nationalists, messianic zealots and ordinary fascists in charge of the state, turning the Knesset into a circus, undermining the Supreme Court, perverting the army, imposing obscurantist religious laws, handing the public treasury to unbridled tycoons, polluting the education system with a primitive nationalist indoctrination, persecuting poor asylum seekers, oppressing the national minority and planning military attacks that will wreak death and destruction on civilian populations.

This is the state that you detest. I have no quarrel with you about that.

This is the state that you despair of. About that I do have a dispute with you.

You bear the name of the prophet who is nearest to my heart, Yirmiyahu, the prophet of anger who called out: “Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole world … every one doth curse me!” (Jer. 15:10)

But Jeremiah was not only an accuser, he was also a healer: “to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down – to build and to plant.” (Jer. 1:10)

You, Dov, have invested in this state much too much to turn your back on it in a gesture of anger and despair. The most hackneyed and worn-out slogan in Israel is also true: “We don’t have another state!”

Other states in the world have sunk to the depths of depravity and committed unspeakable crimes, far beyond our worst sins, and still brought themselves back to the family of nations and redeemed their souls.

We and all the members of our generation, who were among those who created this state, bear a heavy responsibility for it. A responsibility to our offspring, to those oppressed by this state, to the entire world. From this responsibility we cannot escape.

Even at your respectable age, and precisely because of it and because of what you represent, you must be a compass for the young and tell them: This state belongs to you, you can change it, don’t allow the nationalist wreckers to steal it from you!

True, 61 years ago we had another state in mind. Now, after our state has tumbled to where it is today, we must remember that other state, and remind everybody, every day, what the state should have been like, what it can be like, and not allow our vision to disappear like a dream. Let’s lend our shoulders to every effort to repair and heal!

You have voiced the message of Jeremiah, the prophet of anger. I beg you, give voice also to Jeremiah, the prophet of hope!

Uri Avnery

In a recent landmark case, the Supreme Court of Canada tackled the thorny issue of whether “government entities, in managing their property, [could] disregard the right of individuals to political expression in public places.” The court responded with a resounding “no.” In one fell swoop, Canada’s top court effectively knocked the wind out of Canada’s media empires, resolving that Canadians now have an expanded right to express themselves in public places. This important decision ultimately means greater participation for the average Canadian in hotly debated and controversial issues, which have been previously excluded from the realm of mainstream media discourse.

The court unanimously denounced the advertising policies of both Vancouver’s BC Transit and TransLink public transportation corporations as unconstitutional for denying two public interest groups the right to purchase advertising space on the sides of their buses. After a careful and comprehensive review of the case law concerning the freedom of expression provision of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Supreme Court decided that both BC Transit and TransLink were “government” for the purposes of the application of the Charter (meaning that the public transportation entities were subject to the constitutional requirements of the Charter), and concluded that “the side of a bus is a location where expressive activity is protected by s. 2(b) of the Charter.”

The court further stated that “rather than undermining the purposes of s. 2(b), expression on the sides of buses could enhance them by furthering democratic discourse, and perhaps even truth finding and self-fulfillment” – note that democracy, truth, and autonomy are the core principles underlying the right to free speech under s. 2(b) of the Charter. Therefore, by finding that the advertising space on the side of buses is “a public place where expressive activity is already occurring [and] is a location where constitutional protection for free expression would be expected,” the court has awarded a major victory to free speech advocates here in Canada.

As a corollary, this case has served as a successful testing ground for the media-access litigation that Adbusters Media Foundation has trumpeted for the better part of 15 years. Throughout its media democracy litigation, Adbusters has sought to test the constitutional waters surrounding the question of the extent to which Charter s. 2(b), the freedom of expression provision, applies in the context of access to broadcast media. In a series of litigation cases surrounding this very question, Adbusters has argued that the Charter should be interpreted to include the right for individuals to access broadcast media in Canada – broadcast media which operates on radio frequencies that are expressly acknowledged to be public property, pursuant to the federal Broadcasting Act.

And so, if the Supreme Court of Canada has accepted that the constitutional protection of freedom of expression on the sides of buses – which are publicly owned – is warranted, then why not also on the publicly-owned broadcasting airwaves to which private media corporations owe their livelihood? In the case noted above, the court held that “[t]he very fact that the general public has access to the advertising space on buses is an indication that members of the public would expect constitutional protection of their expression in that government-owned space. Moreover, an important aspect of a bus is that it is by nature a public, not a private, space.” In that context, then, would it not be analogous for the court to accept that television advertising using radio frequencies – which also constitutes advertising space to which the general public has access and which is by its nature a public and not a private space – would also merit the constitutional protection of freedom of expression? On this point, Adbusters’ “public space” arguments must succeed.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the great civil libertarian John Stuart Mill published On Liberty, perhaps his most well-known work. In that text, Mill expressed a profound truth about the diminishing value of human life in those societies where the diversity of opinion is silenced: “There have been, and may again be, great individual thinkers in a general atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that atmosphere an intellectually active people.” Mill was acutely correct in suggesting that societies, which encumber their people with the chains of mental slavery will not flourish intellectually. Bearing in mind that Mill wrote his treatise in 1859, there seems to be no better time than now (a full century-and-a-half later) to break free from this general atmosphere of imperial media rule, consumption memes and corporate advertising’s imprisonment of our mental environments. Support Adbusters’ efforts to bring the media back to the people.

Craig Brannagan is a third year law student at the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Law, and is CJAM 91.5 Windsor/Detroit Campus Community Radio’s Legal Advisor. He is also an advocate of community access to media broadcasting.

The Supreme Court decision discussed above is “Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority v. Canadian Federation of Students – British Columbia Component.”

Adbusters is locked in a struggle that began 20 years ago with a citizen-produced television spot warning of the hazards of clear-cutting in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Although the networks were happy to sell airtime to the logging industry, they flatly rejected our ad. That’s when we began to perceive the scope of the disparity between public and corporate interest and the woeful lack of democracy on the public airwaves … and from the flames of our outrage, Adbusters Media Foundation was born. We’ve since gone on to produce messages about food, fashion, automobiles, overconsumption, Buy Nothing Day, neoclassical economics and other critical areas of our culture – but every single one of our messages has been rejected by broadcasters in Canada, the US, Australia and Europe. Networks, including CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, MTV and the food Network, have all refused to extend us the same right that corporate advertisers enjoy: the ability to call up a local TV station and purchase a 30-second time slot. So we decided to fight back and take the battle for media democracy to the courts.

It has been a long road. Over the course of 15 long years, we have suffered a string of debilitating defeats and have incurred legal costs that almost bankrupted us. But finally, last April, we won a stunning victory: the bc Court of Appeal overturned previous rulings and declared that television airtime may indeed constitute “a public space,” one which all citizens have the right to access. This hard-won victory has inspired media activists around the world and paved our way forward.

But Leonard Asper – Canada’s most powerful media mogul – and his CanWest corporation have decided to play dirty. They’re appealing our victory – but not with the expectation of overturning it. Asper’s strategy is to deplete our coffers, hoping that we’ll run out of money before we can finish the fight. He’s not trying to beat us; he’s trying to outlast us.

We’re happy to take Asper on. But as we prepare for the next leg of our legal battle, we need an injection of funds. We are asking for donations from you and other people in our network who believe that open airwaves is one of the keys to a flourishing democracy, one of the few promising ways left for us to navigate our way through the dangerous times that lie ahead.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says every human being has the right to seek, to receive and impart information without hindrance. Please help us win the battle for our inalienable right to communicate.

There are many ways you can help. You can make a donation online, call us at 604-736-9401 or 1-800-663-1243 (toll-free in North America) or send a check along with the form provided.

We are also trying to get in touch with media lawyers in the US, Australia and the UK who are interested in launching Right To Communicate legal actions in their own countries. If you have ideas, want more information or wish to help in plotting strategy, email me at kalle@adbusters.org.

This is a freedom of speech battle of tremendous importance … please help us fight it.

We don’t sell airtime for issue ads because that would allow the people with the financial resources to control public policy. – CBS Boston, public affairs manager, Donald Lowery

[Airing your spots would] create some real angst with our key advertisers and clients and agencies. – Channel 7 Australia, sales manager, Eddie Reginato

[Your TV spots] are counterproductive to what we do. We sell advertising. – CHUM Television Canada, national sales representative, Susan Orr.

I’m sure we’re not the only venue who has blocked you. I know. I’ve been kicking around this business for a long time. – Fox Broadcasting Company, executive director of broadcast standards, Darlene Lieblich

You know what I feel like saying? Suck it up, it’s the real world. – ABC, vice president of advertising, Julie Hoover

In the midst of the Roman Saturnalia – a public festival of drunkenness and debauchery lasting several days in December – the stoic philosopher Seneca wondered how a person dedicated to living a life of voluntary simplicity ought to act. Should he publicly rebuke society for its excess by refusing to partake in the revelry; or should he take off his toga, throw a dinner party for friends and share the gaiety of society at large? For Seneca, the answer was not an easy one – while one path represented an affront to one’s friends, the other was an insult to one’s ideals.

In typical stoic fashion, Seneca resolved his dilemma by balancing two extremes. The solution was to neither fully reject nor fully accept society. In letter XVIII of his Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium, he writes, “Remaining dry and sober takes a good deal more strength of will when everyone about one is puking drunk; it takes a more developed sense of fitness, on the other hand, not to make oneself a person apart, to be neither indistinguishable from those about one nor conspicuous by one’s difference, to do the same things but not in quite the same manner.” The goal was not to embrace the cynic’s rejection of society nor the hedonist’s acceptance, but instead to live on the edge of the two opposing viewpoints – to live committed to one’s ideals and to strengthen oneself against the temptations of excess consumption through exposure, not avoidance.

Although Seneca was a stoic philosopher who preached voluntary simplicity, he was also an extravagantly wealthy adviser to the infamous Nero, the tyrannical and decadent emperor of Rome whose lifestyle was antithetical to Seneca’s philosophy. It was clear to Seneca that he lived a life of contradiction, but unlike other ancient philosophers – such as Diogenes the Cynic who chose to live on the street in open renunciation of society – Seneca chose another path.

Seneca believed that living a moral life did not consist of rejecting the world, but of doing away with the fear that motivates our frenetic consumption: the fear of poverty. In a letter every culture jammer should read On Festivals and Fasting, Seneca counsels a friend that the path to inner peace is to adopt a ritual of practiced poverty: “appoint certain days on which to give up everything and make yourself at home with next to nothing. Start cultivating a relationship with poverty. For no one is worthy of god unless he has paid no heed to riches. I am not, mind you, against your possessing them, but I want to ensure that you possess them without tremors; and this you will only achieve in one way, by convincing yourself that you can live a happy life even without them, and by always regarding them as being on the point of vanishing”. In this way, Seneca hoped that the fear of becoming poor in the future would be banished and that the self would be liberated in the present to live a more genuine life.

Micah White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters and an independent activist. He is writing a book on the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org