Posted on 09/08/2003 8:40:30 AM PDT by US admirer
A failed Israeli society is collapsing, The end of Zionism?
JERUSALEM The Zionist revolution has always rested on two pillars: a just path and an ethical leadership. Neither of these is operative any longer. The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice. As such, the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep. There is a real chance that ours will be the last Zionist generation. There may yet be a Jewish state in the Middle East, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly.
There is time to change course, but not much. What is needed is a new vision of a just society and the political will to implement it. Nor is this merely an internal Israeli affair. Diaspora Jews for whom Israel is a central pillar of their identity must pay heed and speak out. If the pillar collapses, the upper floors will come crashing down.
The Israeli opposition does not exist, and the coalition government, with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at its head, claims the right to remain silent. In a nation of chatterboxes, everyone has suddenly fallen dumb, because there's nothing left to say. We live in a thunderously failed reality.
Yes, we Israelis have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or antimissile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed.
It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.
It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. From the window you can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvillea and not see the occupation. Traveling on the fast highway that takes you from Ramot on Jerusalem's northern edge to Gilo on the southern edge, a 12-minute trip just west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied.
This cannot work. Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger forever, it won't work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism's superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing.
Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated.
We could kill a thousand ringleaders and engineers a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below - from the wells of hatred and anger, from the "infrastructures" of injustice and moral corruption.
If all this were inevitable, divinely ordained and immutable, I would be silent. But things could be different, and so crying out is a moral imperative.
Here is what the prime minister should say to the people:
The time for illusions is over. The time for decisions has arrived. We love the entire land of our forefathers and in some other time we would have wanted to live here alone. But that will not happen. The Arabs, too, have dreams and needs.
Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean there is no longer a clear Jewish majority. And so, fellow citizens, it is not possible to keep the whole thing without paying a price. We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world's only Jewish state - not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish.
Do you want the greater Land of Israel? No problem. Abandon democracy. Let's institute an efficient system of racial separation here, with prison camps and detention villages. Qalqilya Ghetto and Gulag Jenin.
Do you want a Jewish majority? No problem. Either put the Arabs on railway cars, buses, camels and donkeys and expel them en masse - or separate ourselves from them absolutely, without tricks and gimmicks. There is no middle path. We must remove all the settlements - all of them - and draw an internationally recognized border between the Jewish national home and the Palestinian national home. The Jewish Law of Return will apply only within our national home, and their right of return will apply only within the borders of the Palestinian state.
Do you want democracy? No problem. Either abandon the greater Land of Israel, to the last settlement and outpost, or give full citizenship and voting rights to everyone, including Arabs. The result, of course, will be that those who did not want a Palestinian state alongside us will have one in our midst, via the ballot box.
That's what the prime minister should say to the people. He should present the choices forthrightly: Jewish racism or democracy. Settlements or hope for both peoples. False visions of barbed wire, roadblocks and suicide bombers, or a recognized international border between two states and a shared capital in Jerusalem.
But there is no prime minister in Jerusalem. The disease eating away at the body of Zionism has already attacked the head. David Ben-Gurion sometimes erred, but he remained straight as an arrow. When Menachem Begin was wrong, nobody impugned his motives. No longer. Polls published two weeks ago showed that a majority of Israelis do not believe in the personal integrity of the prime minister - yet they trust his political leadership. In other words, Israel's current prime minister personally embodies both halves of the curse: suspect personal morals and open disregard for the law - combined with the brutality of occupation and the trampling of any chance for peace. This is our nation, these its leaders. The inescapable conclusion is that the Zionist revolution is dead.
Why, then, is the opposition so quiet? Perhaps because it's summer, or because they are tired, or because some would like to join the government at any price, even the price of participating in the sickness. But while they dither, the forces of good lose hope.
This is the time for clear alternatives. Anyone who declines to present a clear-cut position - black or white - is in effect collaborating in the decline. It is not a matter of Labor versus Likud or right versus left, but of right versus wrong, acceptable versus unacceptable. The law-abiding versus the lawbreakers. What is needed is not a political replacement for the Sharon government but a vision of hope, an alternative to the destruction of Zionism and its values by the deaf, dumb and callous.
Israel's friends abroad - Jewish and non-Jewish alike, presidents and prime ministers, rabbis and lay people - should choose as well. They must reach out and help Israel to navigate the road map toward our national destiny as a light unto the nations and a society of peace, justice and equality.
Leaving the accuser out of it, what does that mean, that if he's a racist (I don't know if he is) he can't be an inhabitant of the far left?
Racist=conservative or racist=Israeli mainstream?
No, it means the Palestinians hate all Jews, even the ones on the far left.
The Zionist revolution has always rested on two pillars: a just path and an ethical leadership.
Wrong. Judaism has these as pillars. The Zionist "revolution" (not a complete misuse of the word: there was no revolution; there was a movement; the man can't think) was about creation of a home for the Jewish people. Once created, of course, that homeland was desired to be just, fair, etc. Just as our own Founding Fathers, just as any society being reborn, they were concerned about the nature of the society being reborn in Palestine and then Israel. But that was NOT the "pillar."
Diaspora Jews for whom Israel is a central pillar of their identity must pay heed and speak out.
This moron should speak for himself. I am a Jew, and Israel is NOT a pillar of my identity. Surely, Israel is very important to me --- as a hope that my almost continually endangered people will survive. Israel is important to me because it is comprised of so many survivors of the Holocaust, in which a large part of my own family has perished as well. But Israel is not a "pillar of my identity."
We are traded on the NASDAQ. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or antimissile missiles.
Certainly not. And Israel would not be doing such things had it not been attacked at least once every decade of its existence --- with the purpose not to annex SOME territory but complete and final annihilation of the nation. This purpose is still in the charter of the PLO. Is the author unaware of that? Is there any other nation on earth that does not do the same in similar circumstances? Have we not invested trillions of dollars into our own defense when faced with the danger from the Soviet Union? Not that we have not been attacked: there was only a threat thereof. Israel has been attacked --- on the second day of its existence and repeatedly afterwards. And the author expects him NOT to invest in weapons?
Furthermore, why bring up NASDAQ as a measure of success? Anti-Semites usually do that --- Jews and money, you know. Is the author unaware of the HIGE numbers of persons of Jewish faith and/or upbringing among in the sciences, literature and arts, including so many Nobel Prize winners? Author's retention of information is very selective and prejudicial, wouldn't you say? Incidentally, when speaking of NASDAQ, he should not be using the word "we." This is because (i) the companies created by entrepreneurs are traded on NASDAQ; he has not created anything but trouble, and (ii) if the is successful in rebuilding the Israeli, and world, society, there will be no NASDAQ. Right here you have an explanation for his unduly strong focus on NASDAQ: as a leftist, he hates it as a symbol of productive capitalism. He would rather replace it with a redistributive socialism. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations.
Oh my, I never thought I would hear HIM say that. That is the purely religious, Judaic concept. Ask this Leftists scum when he last set his foot into the synagogue. I mean it, go ahead, write to him, and ask. This anti-religious bigot appeals to religious notions when it suits him. Pure hypocrisy. And you find that he "makes sense?" The Israeli opposition does not exist This is a joke. With the number of parties and coalitions comparable only to Italy, which had 50 governments in 50 years, Israel does not have an opposition?
What he means is that Leftist extremisms is under-represented. American communists and Barbara Lee supporters complain about the same thing: they want to see the red banners on every street an America, and we fail them. We live in a thunderously failed reality.
I wonder whether he has a high school diploma. Failed reality? Perhaps someone should inform the author that reality is what it is --- it's the plans that may fail.
I am willing to respect an opinion that differs from mine if its bearer has arrived at it in an intellectually honest way. As you can see, neither intellectual honesty nor intelligence have not even visited the author of the article. I am really, really sorry that you found sense in his vitriol. Perhaps you should really ask yourself how it could've happened and whether your own opinions have been formed trough an intellectually honest process.
I don't agree with everything that the writer said. Not for one minute do I believe suicide bombers are motivated by despair. On the contrary, they are motivated by peer pressure and religious fanatism.
But, the settlers are fanatics too. Israel should cut them loose.
This is very true. But, the settlements should be abandoned. It's just too difficult to maintain them.
That's a good route for the fence.
Case in point: "The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or antimissile missiles."
No, we did not... but, in blaming the victim for arming and defending itself, rather than decently laying down and dying quietly -- instead of the actual, bloody-minded aggressor -- the author gives intellectual aid and comfort to those for whom the very notion of a free and independent Jewish state is anathema.
On what do you base this? Have you ever been to a "settlement"? Most are suburbs of Jerusalem, or Israeli towns built at high points along the green line.
I have family in Alfei Menashe. It is nine miles from the sea at a place where Israel is just seven miles wide. It sits on a high hill in the west of Samaria. On a clear day you can see from Haifa in the North, to Hadera, to Netanya, to Tel Aviv, and all the way to Ashdod in the south. Alfei Menashe overlooks about 70% of Israel's population. Do you know what it was before 1967? A barren hill with a Jordanian gun emplacement on the top. It was a place for Arabs to reign down death upon Israel.
Tell me, should Israel give up Alfei Menashe?
FWIW, Alfei Menashe is on the Israeli side of the fence. It is about five minutes from Kfar Saba.
75% of "settlers" live in such places, close in suburbs of Jerusalem or key strategic points along the green line.
On what do you base this claim? I ask again, have you ever been to a settlement?
Many "settlements" are bedroom communities for Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Netanya. People moved there for inexpensive, government subsidized housing, not out of any strong beliefs. Many vote Labour. Some even vote Meretz.
Are there fanatics among settlers? Yes, certainly, especially in some small settlements deep in the territories. They are a small minority of the total.
You have been watching too much of the mainstream American media who take a pro-Palestinian line. Why not come to Israel and learn the truth for yourself?
I'm sure there is.
But Israel has uniformly proceeded with a measured military response while the Arabs conduct themselves with unexampled savagery.
Both sides are locked-in and trapped in hate.
I disagree.
Going by the Israeli press, only a small percentage of Israelis seem willing to characterize Arabs as non-human animals. Going by the Arabic press, only a small percentage of Arabs seem willing to admit that Jews are human beings.
And there is no solution.
There is a solution, but precisely because Israelis don't really hate Arabs they can't bring themselves to use the solution.
The solution is to drive all Arabs unwilling to be productive citizens of Israel over the border.
That solution is still more humane that the one the US meted out to Indians who were not willing to be productive members of US society.
Something tells me if Apache terrorists were blowing themselves up in American casinos and strip malls we'd adopt even harsher tactics than Israel has.
Such a strong definitive statement. Tell me, have you spent much time in Israel? Do you know first-hand what most Israelis think?
Let me tell you, most Israelis, left to center-right, want peace. Most Israelis, Labourite or Likudnik, will make painful sacrifices to have peace. You can only have peace if both sides are willing to have it.
Show me where the Palestinians have ever been willing to compromise?
Israelis are not consumed with hate. Far from it.
Blame? The only reason the Palestinians don't already have their own state is their unwillingness to compromise or to allow Israel to exist in peace:
Tell me, how is Israel to blame? What historical fact can you use to justify the Palestinians refusal to compromise and live in peace with Israel?
The Palestinian people suffer mightily because of their own leadership.
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