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    18 FEBRUARY 2013


    Silence over Zygier echoes attitudes of Stalinism


    JEFF SPARROW

    Israel today is not the Soviet Union of the '30s. But that attitude of turning a blind eye to obvious injustices is all too familiar from the history of Stalinism, writes Jeff Sparrow.

    In the 1920s, Harry Pollitt, a key leader of British Communism, fell in love with a young activist called Rose Cohen. By his own reckoning, he proposed to her (unsuccessfully) 14 times.

    Cohen later moved to the Soviet Union, where, in 1937, she was arrested as a spy. The Russians never reported her fate but we now know that in November that year, guards dragged Cohen to the basement of Moscow's Lubyanka prison and shot her in the back of the head.

    Coincidentally, Pollitt was in Moscow when the secret police came for Cohen. Behind the scenes, he lobbied on her behalf with high profile officials, including, it seems, Stalin himself. Yet when Pollitt returned to London, he and his Communist Party colleagues refused to call publicly for Cohen's release, going so far as to denounce others who did. 'Any charge that may be brought against [Cohen],' wrote the Daily Worker, 'will be tried according to the forms of Soviet justice. The British government has not right whatever to interfere in the internal affairs of another country and its citizens. It is not surprising that the reactionary press is in full cry in support of the British protest …'

    The Cohen affair comes to mind in the reaction to the extraordinary tale of Israel's 'Prisoner X'.

    Back in 2010, the Israeli news site Ynet reported that an anonymous prisoner was being kept in solitary confinement, in conditions of secrecy so great that even his guards didn't know his name. That report was taken offline within hours, after pressure from the Israeli government.

    Last week, ABC television identified Prisoner X as the Australian-Israeli man Ben Zygier - and Israel once more sought to gag the media. Nonetheless, we now know that Zygier was detained in early 2010 and then died later that year, supposedly by hanging - despite 24 hour surveillance in a 'suicide proof' cell.

    Even from this sketchy information, an obvious question arises: why has there been such little public outrage about Zygier's treatment?

    In 2010, more than a dozen condolence notices for Ben Zygier appeared in the Australian Jewish News, including from major organisations such as Jewish Community Council of Victoria, the Jewish Holocaust Centre, and the National Council of Jewish Women. Yet, according to The Age, last week none of these groups were willing to comment on what had been done to him.

    As Bill van Esveld from Human Rights Watch points out, secret detention without trial and without access to lawyers is a flagrant breach of international law. Whatever the crime, whatever the circumstances, disappearing someone like that represents an egregious affront to civilised judicial norms. There's all sorts of reasons why states should not be allowed to keep anonymous inmates in hidden jails, not least because of the potential for prisoners to mysteriously die in custody.

    This should not be controversial. It's as basic a moral point as opposing murder or torture.

    Yet, as the AJN notes, both the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry declined to make a statement after the ABC's report. When the Jerusalem Post contacted the Zionist Federation of Australia, it was told: 'we won't surprise you... but no comment.'

    Bear in mind that Zygier was not an obscure figure. As Elissa Goldstein writes:

    The Zygier name is well-known in the community: Geoffrey Zygier, Ben's father, was once the head of the JCCV, the most important Jewish organisation in the state of Victoria, of which Melbourne is the capital. He's currently the executive director of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission, the Australian equivalent of the ADL. The JCCV and the ADC, like almost every Jewish institution in Australia, are politically conservative and ardently pro-Israel.

    It's that political identification with Israel that seems the problem.

    Again, you can hear the ghost of Rose Cohen.

    Francis Beckett, the historian of British Communism, documents how the independent socialist Maurice Reckitt tried to save Cohen.

    'When we turned to the left wing for help we were met with a blank refusal to give or suggest any assistance whatever,' Reckitt wrote later.

    'A few offered the lame pretext that it would be better for Rose if everyone kept silence; others added the barefaced assertion that Soviet justice could be relied on … Others, again, still more scandalously asserted that no individual's fate was of consequence if they came into the conflict with the interests of the Soviet Union.'

    These were, as Reckitt noted bitterly, people who 'had been for years the very closest friends and admirers of the woman in this appalling predicament.'
    Is there not an obvious parallel with those organisations who knew Zygier and his family yet still refuse to publicly condemn the flagrant breach of human rights that his treatment represents?

    After the ABC story broke, the Sydney Morning Herald spoke to Zygier family friend Henry Greener. Greener, quite admirably, declared he would no longer let sleeping dogs lie.

    'We all knew there was something suspicious and underhanded about Ben's death,' he told the paper.

    Nobody wanted to go there because of the suppression order in Israel. But now that the cat's been let out of the bag, we are going to find out a lot more, and in that process I think there should be justice for Ben, to find out what happened, because nobody really knows.

    Compare Greener's courageous response to the shameful reaction from the Zionist Council. Its spokesman declared that the Zygier affair was 'a family tragedy and there is nothing more to say.'

    Nothing more to say? What about the allegations that, after the supposed suicide, Israeli intelligence cordoned off the cell, refusing access to emergency services, the coroner or prison staff? What about the response of the Australian Government, which has now walked back Foreign Minister Carr's initial denial knowledge, even as a senior Israeli official now claims the Gillard Government had detailed knowledge of everything that took place?

    If Zygier had died in custody in a different country, does anyone believe that the Zionist Council would be as publicly indifferent?

    Harry Pollitt did, within certain limits, campaign for Rose Cohen, trying for years to find out her fate. But, shamefully, he didn't draw any broader conclusions. In particular, he never asked, if someone like Cohen could simply disappear, what was happening to those without her connections? What did her arrest say about the society as a whole?

    We might pose the same questions about the Zygier case. How many other Prisoner X, Y and Zs are languishing anonymously in tiny cells? If a well-educated middle-class Australian-Israeli boy can simply be disappeared, how do you suppose an impoverished Muslim might fare? As Gideon Levy asks in Haaretz:

    What about Arabs and Palestinians, who don't have an investigative reporting TV program on Channel 2? How many of them have been made to disappear and have disappeared, 'committed suicide' and died?'

    Indeed, Amnesty International says that Palestinians in the Occupied Palestian Territories (OPT) continued to be tried before military courts and routinely denied access to lawyers during pre-trial interrogation, that allegations of torture and other mistreatment continue to be made and that, in 2011, the Israeli authorities held at least 307 Palestinians from the OPT in custody without charge or trial.

    That's the context in which Haaretz quotes (paywall) an unnamed family friend explaining the local reaction to Zygier's death:

    The silence is because people don't know. I don't know anything. I don't want to know anything.

    Israel today is not the Soviet Union of the '30s. But that attitude - that not wanting to know about obvious injustices - is all too familiar from the history of Stalinism.

    It's worth pointing out that Harry Pollitt wasn't a monster. He was an idealistic working class activist who saw the Soviet Union as an alternative to the grinding poverty his mother had been forced to endure.

    'Defending the Soviet Union gives you a headache?' he once snapped at a heckler at a meeting in 1956.

    'You think I don't know that? All right - if it gives you a headache, take an aspirin.'

    His willingness to dose himself against the reality of Stalinism turned Pollitt from an honest militant into a propagandist who whitewashed horrific atrocities - including the murder of the great love of his life.

    Writing about Cohen's case, Reckitt noted 'the corrosive influence of Communist ideology upon rudimentary morals and natural affection.' The response - or rather the lack of one - to the Zygier revelations suggests that a blind loyalty to Israel produces a similar moral corrosion.

    Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland literary journal and the author of Killing: Misadventures in Violence. On Twitter, he is @Jeff_Sparrow. View his full profile here.

    http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4524478.html?WT.svl=theDrum

 
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