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A failed Israeli society is collapsing
The International Herald Tribune - first appeared in English in The Forward (New York), was adapted ^ | Saturday, September 6, 2003 | Avraham Burg

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.


TOPICS: Editorial; Extended News; Foreign Affairs; Israel; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: avrahamburg; israel; palestinians; separation; sharon; zionism
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To: ultima ratio
"sites" = cites; "latt" = latter.
101 posted on 09/08/2003 8:50:49 PM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle ("The Clintons have damaged our country. They have done it together, in unison." -- Peggy Noonan)
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To: ultima ratio
Where is the "falsification of data" that you claimed?

Section V. of Post #73, "REWRITING ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS"

Your lame response shows that you didn't even bother to read the post.


102 posted on 09/08/2003 8:50:58 PM PDT by Alouette (The bombing begins in five minutes.)
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To: KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
I'm about as pro-Israel as one can get.
You are now on mine.
Thanks!
103 posted on 09/08/2003 8:51:07 PM PDT by TexasCowboy (COB1)
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To: Alouette
Sacre bleu, Alouette!

Magnifique.
104 posted on 09/08/2003 8:51:10 PM PDT by adam_az
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To: ultima ratio
Morris *WAS* out in left field when he wrote that. See Alouettes long, long post above.
105 posted on 09/08/2003 8:51:55 PM PDT by adam_az
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To: ultima ratio
This is my last post on the subject--go browbeat somebody else with your ravings.

Good riddance, creep!
106 posted on 09/08/2003 8:53:44 PM PDT by adam_az
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To: US admirer
"We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed. "

Burg, you boob, listen up

I'm an authentic american goy truck driver. You have been, and are, a light to the nations. You're a major means which God uses to bless the rest of us, whether through our Jewish doctor, or our Jewish Messiah, or the ethics and inspiration of our Jewish Scriptures. The state of Israel, too is a blessing. A moral rebuke to the brutal tribal chieftans of the Middle East, a people struggling, however imperfectly to establish justice in a morally savage land. And an inspiration highlighting the creativity that dwells in all of us. You can't help yourself, it's your fate.

The problem for the Israelis, is that the Arabs want what you have, they want your very life. So far, they have, as a whole, shown very little interest in peace, justice or neighborliness. You're old, I guess you're allowed to be tired. But you're wrong to discourage the young in this way. Point to the ideals of Zionism, of the ethics that flow from the God of the Jews, but please stop this "end of Israel" crap

. Thank you,

---your estranged friend, Phil

107 posted on 09/08/2003 9:15:06 PM PDT by cookcounty
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To: anotherview
"What is undisputed is that they were not given the right of all refugees to return to their homes and villages."

What the heck is this comment about? My (German) family is from Tilsit, East Prussia. After 1945, the Germans were kicked out (some escaped west, most disappeared into Siberia). The cities were emptied, the street names changed, the property records destroyed. The cities re-populated with Russians. Yes the Germans did wrong, trying to exterminate the Jews (with the help of the Palestinian leadership as sidekicks.) They did evil and chose the (morally) wrong side of history--just like the Arabs. My family has no right in Russian law or German Law or any other Law to go back to what is now the "Kaliningrad Salient.". When your people do evil, you admit it, get purged through repentance and MOVE ON --God forgives.

As to international "rights of refugees," The writer of this quoted comment is delusional.

108 posted on 09/08/2003 9:33:31 PM PDT by cookcounty
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To: philosofy123
The hate has infected both sides, and even traveled across the oceans to infect America (born again evangalists), and Asia Indonesia, Pakistan, the Phillipines...).

Wow all this hatred stems from... Palestine?

109 posted on 09/08/2003 10:13:32 PM PDT by TopQuark
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To: Radix
Your own post says more about you than I ever could.

This statement is a tautology, stupid: of course I can speak about myself better than you, who has never even read my posts.

Next time, take you medication before you start typing: you don't make much sense on the quoted or any previous posts.

110 posted on 09/08/2003 10:24:56 PM PDT by TopQuark
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To: TopQuark
OK Mr Tautological Reasoning. You go ahead and phrase your comments about justifying your criticisms of Israel with the fact of your jewishness (as if that is relevant), and I will keep my medication levels current.

I like it when people use mathematical and/or logical terms in order to refute me. Is it always true that a person can criticize Jews and or Israel because they are jewish? I think that is what I read from you.

You might want to reread your own words before you come down so hard on me. If you think that Israel is not a pillar in your life then you IMO have not truly considered the matter.

If there were no Israel, then there is a good chance that there would be no you. You may believe that is a non sequitor, but many others have dismissed their heritage in the past to their presumable regret.

I would suggest to you and other jews that you get behind the Israelis and support them. The alternative is a pretty ugly thing. You do not have to take my word for it. Just pick up a history book, or better yet, a current newspaper.
111 posted on 09/09/2003 3:27:54 AM PDT by Radix (.)
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To: adam_az; Radix; Alouette; All
I am neither gay nor anti-semitic--though I could be the latter after the treatment I received on this thread--which prompts this final response. Fortunately I have enough sense not to blame the many for the stupidities and insults of the few.

The claim by Alouette--and check her original comment--was that Benny Morris was a self-admitted falsifier of data. He was not. He only repudiated his feelings of sympathy for the Palestinians, but he never repudiated the authenticity of the studies he has published. He now simply reinterprets the same data, claiming Ben Gurion did not go far enough in his purge of the Arabs. But the data stands. The Palestinians were purged, they did not leave voluntarily. And they were robbed of their possessions illegally, their homes and property confiscated or destroyed. Many believe this original crime has yet to be faced squarely by Israel.

I agree that the NYTimes is not always an unbiased source--but an unbiased source is impossible to find when dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. EVERYBODY has an ax to grind. The NYTimes is more and more reliable the further back one goes, however, especially as one gets closer to 1948. Nor are the historical revisionists socialist wackos--they are scholars who used the archives opened to their scrutiny for the first time. Previous access had been impossible, so the accepted version of the founding of the state of Israel was based on self-glorifying myths. The hard data included in more recent studies contributes vastly to a clearer understanding of the what really happened back then. In other words, these recent studies come closer to the truth.
112 posted on 09/09/2003 4:09:06 AM PDT by ultima ratio
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To: TopQuark
Correction. All the hate stems from fanatical religions, specially Islam.
113 posted on 09/09/2003 5:37:21 AM PDT by philosofy123
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To: ultima ratio
You still have yet to answer http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/978163/posts?page=80#80

Can you refute those sources or not?
114 posted on 09/09/2003 6:46:44 AM PDT by adam_az
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To: Radix
Now, that is a proper conversation: you state your opinions in more than one line, so that I can understand you better; and you also ask some questions, which may be answered.

You go ahead and phrase your comments about justifying your criticisms of Israel I did not criticise Irsel, at least not on this thread.

with the fact of your jewishness (as if that is relevant) Anyone has a moral right to criticise a policy of any state --- as long as it is a genuine thought. The problem with many of Israle's critics is that they single out Israel for criticism, hence hide their prejudice behind it.

Is it always true that a person can criticize Jews and or Israel because they are jewish? See above: one can cricise the STATE (gove't) of the U.S.A., Canada, France, or Israel, whether Jewish or not.

I think that is what I read from you. I have not addressed this question in my posts.

You might want to reread your own words before you come down so hard on me. Forgive me if I came down hard on you: I certainly do not want to offend you. But it is you who charged onto the thread with ONE-LINE remarks that are hardly clear except for the emotions they expressed.

I suspect I know how you feel. It is tiring after a while to fight anti-Semites, whether Jewish or not. But if you want to be effective you should measure your moves and stay cool: you are more effective against enemies, and you do not kill your own by friendly fire.

And this is what you are doing with me: you have IMPUTED to me something I did not say, got offended, and accused me. Israel is not a pillar in your life then you IMO have not truly considered the matter. And here is the best proof of what I just said: I never said that that "Israel is not a pillar in your life." What I said was that Israel is not a pillar of my identity.

It is not that Israel is unimportant: if your reread my post, you will find that I said it was. It is just there are more pillars to my identity. Nor am I alone: ask yourself, did the Jews have identity before the State of Israel was reborn?

Unfortunately, most of us belong nowadays to a Reform movement, which officially declares Israel to be a pillar of identity. This is natural: when you almost entirely remove G-d from the temple and replace it with "social action" and Israeli bond drives, there is indeed nothing else left. But the Jews for millennia have survived on the Covenant and OBLIGATION to those that came before them, who lived and died as Jews. Did you personally lose anyone in the Holocaust? Most of the American Jews that today beat themselves in the chest as supporters of Israel have not. They lived fairly comfortably in the Land of the Free. And when Holocaust survivors did come in the 1950s, they did not want to hear them out. "Hey, Uncle Moishe, you are in America now. Don't think about those bad things." (You appear to be young and might not know that, go ahead inquire.)

It is noteworthy that you did not even pause on the fact that I did lose a large portion of my family. Given that you could do that, I wonder how you would treat a widow and and orphan in your midst (personally, without a food drive by the Sisterhood at the Temple). Shame on you. What moral right do YOU have to question MY Jewish identity? But that is a consistent with the Reform Temple morality: values and personal conduct are not important. You can sware, you can say blasphemous things. You can be thick-skinned to the suffering of a fellow next to you. But as long as you are part of "social action" and "support Israel" --- you are OK.

If there were no Israel, then there is a good chance that there would be no you.

You appear to have a good heart. You also appear to be young. Before it's too late, please heed my advise: rethink these matters. You repeat the words that you often heard, and they are at best misleading. In this particular case, they make you look foolish: I was born before Israel. Forgive me, but "If there were no Israel, then there is a good chance that there would be no you" is what comfortable Reform Rabbis, who grew up in comfortable suburbia without seeing any persecution whatsoever and who are as shallow as the general American public has bocome tell their congregations. This is nonsense. The Jewish people have survived DESPITE such Jews in their midst, not due to them.

I know that you'll become better with age. You'll learn to fight without barging into the room and waving your sward in all directions indiscriminantly. You'll be more pusuasive. You will excell in your chosen profession. But certain things do not come with age automatically. Before it's too late, resolve to surve your people at a deeper level. Study history. Study the lives of Rabbis. Marry a Jewish woman and raise your children Jewish.

If you do, some day you'll look back and be ashamed of the shallowness of the above-quited statements that you have inherited from not-so-Jewish rabbis.

Shana Tova. May G-d inscribe you in the book of life.

115 posted on 09/09/2003 7:15:10 AM PDT by TopQuark
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To: ultima ratio
But the data stands. The Palestinians were purged, they did not leave voluntarily

Allow me to explain the baseline rudiments of simple debate to you, here. You appear to be rather muddled as to how this sort of thing works, really.

1.) Multiple contemporaneous A-r-a-b sources, of high position and authority, have been repeatedly cited, effecitvely and absolutely demolishing your cockeyed contention.

You have, to date, publicly (and inelegantly) dodged responding in any way to said evidence no fewer than four times, now.

Everyone here, I assure you -- your evident belief to the contrary -- can see you fleeing from said evidence, shrieking, with your arms windmilling; and has drawn the inevitable conclusion that such persistent and damning failure presents, upon sober reflection.

It is not the sort of conclusion, I might point out, that flatters your position (or you) overmuch.

3.) Pay close attention, now... because this is absolutely key, all right?

Whenever grownups debate: when one side has cited hard, verifiable evidence effectively atomizing the other side's argument: said other side is intellectually required either to rebut said evidence, or -- failing any adequate and convincing rebuttal -- to graciously accept having been out-argued... and bloody move on with his/her life.

No one here has "treated" you badly; quite the opposite, in fact, given the relentless dull provocation of your unwillingness to quite drumming your heels over this matter. That sympathy card won't "play," I'm afraid.

Re: Morris: you know as well as I do -- indeed, as well as everyone here knows -- that Alouette provided you with a link to Morris publicly and unequivocally his previous writings on this subject. Your bizarre insistence upon repeatedly citing work whose own frickin' author has long since renounced it as being wholly without merit on the particulars, is -- quite frankly -- freakish. If Morris' "word" is good enough for you to cite; then it should, likewise, be good enough for you to accept once he has unequivocally withdrawn said statements, in multiple public fora.

Finally, as to whether or not you are, in fact, an anti-Semite: I invite any interested readers, at this point, to pop your screen ID into the "search" function, and see just how many postings, over the last few days, deal with your clear and manifest dislike of Jews... and to draw their own considered conclusions, thereupon.

116 posted on 09/09/2003 7:44:37 AM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle ("The Clintons have damaged our country. They have done it together, in unison." -- Peggy Noonan)
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To: KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
Missing word included: "Morris publicly and unequivocally renouncing his previous writings..."
117 posted on 09/09/2003 7:46:51 AM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle ("The Clintons have damaged our country. They have done it together, in unison." -- Peggy Noonan)
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To: KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
Out-argued--are you kidding? I've been out-insulted, out-pilloried, out-shouted. There has been no semblance of any kind of argument on this thread. Do you know how many people all at once clamored for responses--at least six, all writing profusely and demanding rebuttals to every minor point. Screw it. It would be fine if at the end of the day some mutual respect were established and some light shed on a matter. But to be called a "creep", "a homosexual" and an "anti-semite" merely because I take a contrary position is irrational and adolescent. This is not argument, it's verbal abuse.
118 posted on 09/09/2003 8:15:55 AM PDT by ultima ratio
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To: ultima ratio
Do you know how many people all at once clamored for responses--at least six, all writing profusely and demanding rebuttals to every minor point.

None of which, it should be pointed out, you have yet to competently or convincingly rebut; sulkily demanding, all the while, that others accept your arguments, no matter how readily or thoroughly discredited, "as is."

As pointed out to you before, kiddo: NOT the way grownups -- or intellectually honest adolescents, even -- handle these sorts of things, really.

For the record: you have now dodged answering the points raised no less than five separate times.

Suggestion: why not at least salvage what honor and respect you can, at this point; suck it up, like a man; stick out your hand; and admit that you weren't able to counter the evidence of contemporaneous Arab sources, or Morris' gainsaying of his own earlier works?

Even if it means you (obviously) don't end up winning the debate: you may at least score a few much-needed (IMHO) points in the Good Sportsmanship department.

119 posted on 09/09/2003 8:26:41 AM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle ("The Clintons have damaged our country. They have done it together, in unison." -- Peggy Noonan)
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To: KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
From Benny Morris, regarding the Palestinian exodus having been ordered by Arab leaders. The BBC in particular monitored all radio broadcasts in the region. These are available in the British Museum to any scholar. There is no record of any such Arab orders, as Israel had claimed.


"Had such a blanket order (or series of orders) been given, it would have found an echo in the thousands of documents produced by the Haganah's Intelligence Service, the IDF Intelligence Service, the Jewish Agency's Political Department Arab Division, the Foreign Ministry Middle East Affairs Department; or in the memoranda and dispatches of the various British and American diplomatic posts in the area (in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Amman, Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo); or in the various radio monitoring services (such as the BBC's). Any or all of these would have produced reports, memoranda, or correspondence referring to the Arab order and quoting from it. But no such reference to or quotation from such an order or series of orders exists in the contemporary documentation. This documentation, it should be noted, includes daily, almost hourly, monitoring of Arab radio broadcasts, the Arab press inside and outside Palestine, and statements by the Arab and Palestinian Arab leaders." [Tikkun, Jan/Feb 1990, p80]


120 posted on 09/09/2003 8:34:33 AM PDT by ultima ratio
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