Leftist Anti-Semitic Double Standard Hurl Alert!
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.
Although I am not familiar with the author, I asume he is a respected Isreali politician with no particular axe to grind, although the Arab American Institute has labelled him a racist for remarks made on Thursday, August 2,on "Nightline" (so I would take it he is unlikley to be labelled a Palestinian sympathizer or dupe). Regretfully, I believe he makes much sense. I am posting this for the benefit of those who have not had the opportunity to consider his opinions rather than to argue the issue with those who disagree.
You assume wrong. He is a bitter, angry old leftist who is still seething that his party was knocked out of power after the Oslo debacle.
FREEPmail me to be added or removed from this Mideast ping list.
Accurate summation.
He puts all the blame on Israel, and none on the Palestinians. How does that make sense?
It's not a new view and it belongs in the same category as "9/11 happened because America is mean."
It's a pathetic, childish argument no matter what rehtorical flourishes it is couched in.
Leftist Anti-Semitic Double Standard Hurl Alert!
I completely disagree with MK Burg's assessment of the state of Israeli society and Zionism. In my view both are alive and healthy. Most Israelis, and most Americans who are in Israel often, seem to be very optimistic about Israel's future. The pessimism comes from two corners: the left wing, who no longer has the influence it once had, and indeed very little influence at all; and American and other diaspora Jews who have not been to Israel lately and make their judgements based on what they see on CNN and the nightly news.
I agree with Avraham Burg on only one fundemental point: there must be a separation between Palestinians and Jews. This does not require "transfer", the mass expulsion that Burg talks about and National Union advocates, nor does it require adandoning all of Judea and Samaria.
Prime Minister Sharon has said that Israel cannot rule over 3.5 million Palestinians, and he even dared use the Palestinian's favorite word: occupation. That does not mean that Israel must succumb to terror.
I have long been an advocate of separation, or as then Prime Minister Ehud Barak put it, "Us here. Them there." However, that has never meant a retreat to 1967 borders. IMHO, those in Labour who advocate separation, including Mr. Burg, fail to realize that any unilateral redrawing of Israel's borders must be done in a way that will not be seen as weakness by the Arabs. Weakness, as President Bush said in his speech, invites more terrorism.
Similarly, the right doesn't get it either. They read the biblical promise and history and assume that the Jewish people have a G-d given right to Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. Look at those biblical maps again. Most of Gaza isn't included, and staying there serves little purpose other than to create a flashpoint. Judea and Samaria, as well as parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon were promised to the Jewish people, and will be Jewish when meshiach comes, not because we put up settlements next to Arab cities.
I believe Prime Minister Sharon must finish the security fence. It should take in settlements that were built for security reasons along the green line, major blocs of Jewish population, and all of Jerusalem. Unlike Mr. Burg I believe that the IDF can seriously damage the terrorists' ability to strike Israel. Once that is done and the fence is completed we can leave the Palestinians in their walled-in pseudo-state to do whatever they will so long as they do not threaten Israel. The IDF will, of course, deal with any threats.
Once the Palestinians are walled in and basically powerless perhaps they will see the value of compromise. In any case, Israel will no longer be ruling over them, nor will we be providing services to them as we do now. Whatever the fate of the Palestinian Arabs, it will be their own doing.
I must ask US admirer: Have you been to Israel lately? Have you lived in Israel? What is the basis of your agreement with MK Burg?
Sometimes I think I should give up my career and start a new, centrist political movement. Then I realize that nobody will listen to me anyway :)
Maybe that's why Israel is in such trouble?
Sheila Jackson-Lee, 2nd , I asume she is a respected Isreali American politician with no particular axe to grind.
Howard Dean , I asume he is a respected Isreali American politician with no particular axe to grind.
John Conyers, I asume he is a respected Isreali American politician with no particular axe to grind.
David Bonior ,I asume she is a respected Isreali American politician with no particular axe to grind.
Barbara Lee,I asume she is a respected Isreali American politician with no particular axe to grind.
Terry McAuliffe,I asume he is a respected Isreali American politician with no particular axe to grind.
Patty Murray ,I asume she is a respected Isreali American politician with no particular axe to grind.
You get the idea. If you inhabit the far left, he's a respected Isreali politician with no particular axe to grind. Absent knowledge of a situation, it's dangerous to make assumptions.
Sheila Jackson-Lee, 2nd , I asume she is a respected Isreali American politician with no particular axe to grind.
Howard Dean , I asume he is a respected Isreali American politician with no particular axe to grind.
John Conyers, I asume he is a respected Isreali American politician with no particular axe to grind.
David Bonior ,I asume she is a respected Isreali American politician with no particular axe to grind.
Barbara Lee,I asume she is a respected Isreali American politician with no particular axe to grind.
Terry McAuliffe,I asume he is a respected Isreali American politician with no particular axe to grind.
Patty Murray ,I asume she is a respected Isreali American politician with no particular axe to grind.
You get the idea. If you inhabit the far left, he's a respected Isreali politician with no particular axe to grind. Absent knowledge of a situation, it's dangerous to make assumptions.
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