Adam Keller, lighting his beacon:

The day before yesterday I received a nice gift from Bank HaPoalim, the Workers' Bank which long since has nothing to do with workers: a nylon bag full of small Israeli national flags, "Made in China" . The accompanying letter asked me to raise the flags so as "to help paint the country Blue and White". I sent the gift back to the Central Directorate of Bank HaPoalim (50 Rotschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv). I thanked them but remarked that as long as the state of Israel continues to use brutal force in order to paint in Blue and White territories which do not belong to it, I would not be able to participate in raising this flag.

In a month from now, we are going to mark an unhappy birthday: forty years to the occupation. Already for forty years, two thirds of Israel's total history, the occupation continues - a malignant cancerous growth, which is becoming bigger and even more dangerous with every passing year. Until now, this country is unwilling or unable to undertake the necessary operation. I hope and pray that it is not yet too late, that it is still possible to get rid of the occupation and recover from its effects.

For many years we have talked of the phenomenon known as "shooting and crying": those people who perpetrated horrifying deeds in the Occupied Territories or in Lebanon and elsewhere, and afterwards cried and said how sorry they were and how much it pained them to do these things - which did not stop them from afterwards doing new horrible things and then again cry and be sorry. We have condemned them and laughed at them for their hypocrisy - and rightly so.

But in recent years there is hardly any "shooting and crying" left. Instead, there is a new phenomenon which I call "shooting and laughing". Sincere people, quite lacking in hypocrisy. People who perpetrate horrible acts and are quite happy with what they had done and utter not one word of regret. And there are such not only in the territories of occupation. The public life of the state of Israel is nowadays full of those who steal and laugh, or rape and laugh, or spit in our faces and laugh.

A typical example is Dan Halutz, the famed pilot who slept well at night after a one-ton bomb was thrown on Gaza and killed fifteen civilians, nine of them children. A slight bump in the wing is all he felt. In fact, one thing did disturb him - when the Gush Shalom movement sent letters to army officers, warning them that their acts might constitute war crimes. Then, he called for Gush Shalom to be outlawed. I personally got at the time some thirty anonymous phone calls, threatening me with murder. Well, now he is no longer the Army Chief of Staff, and we are still around!

It should be mentioned, however, that even when Dan Halutz was kicked out of the army in infamy, his fall was soft and cushioned - directly into a prestigious course at Harvard University, participation in which is considered as a major gateway into the world of international business. 56,000 Dollars is the price of participation in that course. It was, of course, paid by the IDF out of our tax money. Now, the directors of big companies stand in line to offer Mr. Halutz senior management positions. And in two or three years he intends to go into politics. Not just into politics. Not for him "just a miserable humdrum ministry". He will settle for nothing less than the Ministry of Defence. And in our nice country, it is far from inconceivable that he will get his wish. "He will still be back" as the song says.

I spoke a lot about Dan Halutz, not because that man is so important in himself. He simply represents and symbolizes perfectly so many phenomena, the connection between occupation and corruption, and between Israeli chutzpah and war crimes, and between capital and politics, and between the army and capital, and what "Pioneer" signified two generations ago and what it means now. ["Halutz" is "Pioneer" in Hebrew].

I would like to conclude with a few wishes. First, and perhaps the most important, I would like to wish all of us never to break and despair - even when the situation sometimes looks quite hopeless. And let us always remember that we are not only struggling to free the oppressed Palestinians, which is a worthy and righteous cause. We are fighting to preserve our own future in this land.

I would like to wish that there will be no third generation of occupation refusers. A second generation of refusers we already have. In many families the father went to prison fifteen or twenty years ago, for refusing to serve the occupation, and now the sons - and also the daughters - go to prison in their turn. For myself, for many years I had been thinking of 2002 as a small cloud of the horizon, which kept becoming bigger and bigger. 2002 was when my son Uri was going to be eighteen years old. And then 2002 came around, and Uri went to prison for half a year, and I am very proud of him.

At least for the children who are now in the elementary schools, and in the kindergartens, and in the cradles, and those who are not yet born, I can still hope. I wish they would never get to see the inside of Military Prison 4 and Military Prison 6, that they will know of occupation and oppression only from history books.

And I would like to wish that an Independence Day will come when this square will be empty. That the State of Israel will change and we will no longer feel alienated by its official holidays and official ceremonies, and will no longer feel the need to have our own alternative ceremonies in order not to suffocate completely. And that there will be no longer a need for a movement called "Yesh Gvul" ["There is a Border/There is a Limit"] because it will be generally accepted and recognized that the state of Israel has a physical border, a border of peace recognized by the neighbours and in International Law, and that it has moral limits defining what the state and its army may do - and what they may not.

Now, I have the honour of lighting this torch for the glory of the State of Israel and the State of Palestine, living side by side in peace and good neighbourliness, without occupation, without oppression and without discrimination, and building together a future of peace.

[Words spoken by Adam Keller at the Alternative Beacon Lighting Ceremony of Yesh Gvul, Emil Grunzweig Square, Jerusalem, April 23, 2007]

See also: Yesh Gvul's alternative ceremony, a report

For photos, click here

Report by Yesh Gvul