Right, I've noticed that at the funerals, guess theres theres hate
and hate
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.
30: That's a good route for the fence (... take in settlements that were built for security reasons along the green line, major blocs of Jewish population, and all of Jerusalem...)
Are you aware that your statement's 29 and 30 are mutually exclusive?
Right, I've noticed that at the funerals, guess theres theres hate
and hate
Uh-huh.
Let's see. They hate them, but they don't say they hate them.
The Arabs suicide bomb them but, even though they hate the Arabs, Jews don't retaliate in kind.
The Arabs don't permit Jews to live in Arab countries, but Jews allow more than a million Arabs to live in the heart of Israel.
The Arabs teach their children in school that Jews are evil, but Jewish schools prefer to teach literacy and mathematics instead.
Sorry, I just don't buy your thesis.
Since each threatens the other, they hate each other.
The threats seem to run one way: I don't recall Israel ever threatening any Arab group with extinction.
That is human nature.
Perhaps. But I see that the Israelis restrain this impulse of human nature quite strongly, while the Arabs give that impulse free rein.
As for a solution--there is always the temptation in war to go beyond the parameters of civilized behavior.
Exiling those who are leagued against you to kill you is well within the parameters of civilized behavior.
It is not a lack of hatred that inhibits Jews, but an unwillingness to be uncivilized.
Your ability to see into the heart of every Jew is a remarkable skill, I'll grant you. But if they refuse to act on this hatred out of a sense of moral compunction, I don't understand your larger point.
Tell me, what gives you such an insight into the Jewish or Israeli soul? You have made a blanket statement which is patently false.
My cousin, who lives in Samaria, said he would gladly give up his home to the Palestinians for peace. He was very close friends with the muchtar of the neighboring Palestinian village when he was administrator of his town. Their families would visit each others' homes during holidays. Is that hate?
Tell me, do I hate? Do I want to kill Palestinians?
You still have not answered my question: have you spent any time in Israel?
Do not presume to judge people you don't even know, or to assume you understand their motivations.
Are you kidding?
Not at all.
800,000 Arabs were either expelled or left voluntarily in the war of 1948, depending on which authority you listen to.
770,000, but close enough. For every Arab that left Israel when the Grand Mufti told them to get out of the way of the conquering Arab armies who would drive the Jews into the sea, more than one Jew was expelled or persecuted and driven out of Arab countries. Most of these Sephardic Jews were resettled in Israel. Tell me this: Why didn't the Arab countries or the Palestinian Authority resettle their refugees as Israel did?
I'll tell you: they were forced, by their own people, to live in squalid refugee camps in order to be used as a political tool and to breed hatred. You know what, it worked. You've even bought into it.
What is undisputed is that they were not given the right of all refugees to return to their homes and villages.
Actually, in the 1950s Israel did have a program to allow Palestinians to return, mainly to reunite families. Most chose not to. So, your "fact" is not undisputed, sorry.
Instead 400 Arab villages were deliberately bulldozed by Israel. Elsewhere in towns and cities Arab property was confiscated--and not a dime given to the true owners afterwards in compensation.
Documentation please? Let's see some backup for this?
Let's be fair here and not pretend Israel is blameless and is an innocent victim of Arab irrationality. These are a pretty poor and militarily defenseless people.
Actually, the Arab people control 22 countries that have an amazing amount of oil wealth. They are poor because their leaders keep all the money and give none to the people, as is the case in most despotic regimes. Yasser Arafat's estimated net worth is US $11 billion. Tell me, how many refugees could he resettle with that money? In what kind of homes?
You are right about one thing: Arabs are not irrational. Far from it. They kept their own people poor and oppressed for political reasons and their tactics have convinced many around the world, including you.
Oh, and for defenseless people they are very good at blowing up a bus here, a restaurant there, a teen disco in Tel Aviv, filled with families and children.
They are using home-made bombs to fight a regional superpower.
Tell me, why did Israel become a regional superpower? Was it because of Arab benevolence, or was it because the Arabs attacked and repeatedly tried to destroy Israel?
The same way their terrorist brothers used box cutters to take over our planes and crash them into our buildings.
Go peddle your bullsh*t somewhere else!
I don't see it that way.
Same people, same mentality, same methods.
When was the last time you heard of an Israeli strapping a bomb around his gut and setting it off in a crowded bus?
When was the last time you heard of an Israeli hijacking an airplane and crashing it into a building?
Don't tell me it's a stretch.
It's the same thing.
When the facts don't fit their theories, they just ignore the facts.
Well put.
Sorry... but: that old blood libel won't fly. Using nothing but Arab sources, it quickly becomes apparent that the Jews had nothing to do with the (so-called) "Palestinians" leaving their homes in '48. "In his 1972 memoirs, the former prime minister of Syria, Khalid al-Az, placed the entire blame for the refugee problem on the Arabs:
"Even Mahmoud Abbas, the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, in 2003 has accused the Arab armies of having abandoned the Palestinians after they:
"In 1980, the Arab National Committee of Haifa wrote a memorandum to the Arab states that included the following:
It seems apparent that you badly need a crash course in basic Middle Eastern history. Start with these:
Myths and Facts: A Guide To the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Mitchell G. Bard
The Case For Israel, by Alan Dershowitz
From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, by Joan Peters
[quotations referenced above are from these three sources]
You are probably right, I have been basing my opinions on what I read in the media.
You are right, I made some very broad statements. Israel should not give up any strategic locations.
You are right, my mistake. See my previous posts.
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