From the spell of the Golden Calf to the worship of YHWH... and back:
A failed Israeli society is collapsing
Avraham Burg IHT
Saturday, September 6, 2003
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.
The writer was speaker of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, from 1999 to 2003 and is currently a Labor Party member of the Knesset. This comment, which first appeared in English in The Forward (New York), was adapted by the writer from an article that appeared in Yediot Ahronot and was translated by J.J. Goldberg.
iht.com
As I put it, Israelis and Zionists need a new Moses to pull them out of their Judeofascist trip... They worship the latest avatar of the Golden Calf because it gives them the illusion of power --nukes, money, American support, etc. Heck, look at the Gypsies: they too were massacred in WWII, they are still ostracized and molested throughout Europe... they don't sue Swiss banks... they don't demand a piece of India (their native land) BUT they're still there, they'll always be around.... a wandering light unto benightedness.
Gus |
