Excellent comments from Yossi Klein Halevi, a very astute Israeli centrist:
The return of poisoned discourse
By YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI
The Israeli initiators of the Geneva Accord are guilty of multiple outrages. They've summoned a campaign of international pressure against their own democratic government, hampering its diplomatic maneuverability. They've undermined the legitimacy of the Sharon government while strengthening the legitimacy of Yasser Arafat's. They've lied to the public about the accord's supposed renunciation of the right of return, when in fact the accord reaffirms it. They've negotiated away Israel's most basic assets, not least its right to defend itself, and gotten vague Palestinian promises in return. And, hardly surprising, they allowed the Geneva signing ceremony to be overtaken by a blame-Israel atmosphere without offering any defense in response.
But perhaps their greatest damage is domestic. In the past three years, Israeli society has managed two extraordinary achievements. The first is to withstand a planned, systematic terror campaign whose purpose was to break our will and slowly erode our viability. Shortly after the outbreak of the Terror War in September 2000, Ehud Barak warned that, in a contest of wills between two societies, the loser will be the one who blinks first. Now, with Geneva, a part of Israeli society has blinked.
No less serious is Geneva's erosion of Israel's second great achievement: the marginalization of both the ideological Right and Left and the end of the no-win debate between them. The combined effects of the first and second intifadas on Israeli consciousness was to convince the majority that both Greater Israel and Peace Now were delusions. And so, arguably for the first time since the 1967 Six Day War, most Israelis were no longer viewing the territories through an ideological prism of wishful thinking but facing reality, however grimly, on its own terms.
For the past three years, I've argued that the lesson of the failure of our two ideological camps is that Jews need to respect each other's insights and warnings. For though Left and Right had failed to offer us any workable solution, each understood the fatal flaw in the other's position. The Left warned us, immediately after the Six Day War, that the occupation would undermine all that we believed about ourselves and in the end occupy us; while the Right warned us, long before the Oslo process, that appeasing terrorists wouldn't bring peace but only more terrorism. Had we listened to each other, we might have spared ourselves the disastrous mistakes of unlimited settlement and empowerment of the PLO.
Finally, I felt, we were ready to start listening to each other. I believed that the Jewish people had begun to mature, and that the new centrist majority had become the permanent majority.
Evidently, though, my optimism was premature. With the Geneva temptation, the center has begun to fray. Polls show that rather than being rejected with the contempt and outrage it deserves, Geneva has generated confusion. And if all it takes to unsteady the center is a document as shoddy as Geneva's, then the obvious question is how stable this center was to begin with.
Instead of offering hope, as Geneva's initiators insist, the accord has eroded the most precious resources for a people under siege: political sobriety and minimal national unity.
My anger toward the Geneva initiators is personal: I hold them responsible for threatening my country and its ability to defend itself, for threatening the well-being of those I love. And so, despite my insistence over the last three years on the need for Jews to respect and listen to each other, I find myself now being drawn into the bitterness of Jewish discourse.
That frightens me: Because if I feel this way, I know what the crazies on the edge of the Right are thinking.
Predictably, the murderous word "treason" has made a comeback, courtesy - again - of a group of right-wing rabbis. And so the pathology of one camp incites the pathology of the other. And the poisonous cycle resumes where we left off, back before September 2000, perhaps back before November 4, 1995. And I feel helpless to resist it, even in myself.
The question of how Jews argue with each other hit home for me personally in another way. My close friend, Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, head of UCLA Hillel, recently found himself caught in a pathological turn of the Jewish discourse. During a UCLA Hillel event, a right-wing freelance journalist named Rachel Neuwirth repeatedly taunted Chaim for his left-wing politics, and finally denounced him as being "worse than a kapo." Enraged, Chaim grabbed her arm and kicked her.
Though I love and deeply respect Chaim, this must be said: There is no comparison between Neuwirth's verbal assault and Chaim's physical response. As a community leader and a role model for students, he should never have crossed the line into violence, no matter what the provocation. The real question is how this could have happened to an otherwise gentle man who is beloved on campus, who cares for Israel and the Jewish people with his whole being and who has encouraged Jewish debate.
Just before Neuwirth began shouting at him, Chaim had approached Muslim students demonstrating against Israel and tried to engage them in dialogue. For Neuwirth, that gesture confirmed Chaim as a symbol for all those unrepentant leftists who even now, after Oslo's trail of blood, persist in their dialogue of appeasement. Rachel Neuwith shouting "kapo" at Chaim Seidler-Feller is the primal Jewish scream against the return of the threat of annihilation.
For his part, Chaim Seidler-Feller lashing out against Rachel Neuwirth is the blind rage of a left-wing lover of Israel who has been called an enemy of Israel one too many times. (In fact, he was trying to convince those Muslim demonstrators of the justness of Israel's existence.) And so when Neuwirth called Chaim "worse than a kapo" - the vilest insult possible for someone from a survivor family - she became for him the symbol of all those right-wingers who routinely invoke ahavat Yisrael, love of the Jewish people, but who really love only those Jews who agree with them, and hate those Jews who don't.
Chaim Seidler-Feller and Rachel Neuwirth remind us that we are a wounded people - wounded not only by enemies but by each other. And it's no wonder that Jewish political discourse can be so bitter: We are, after all, arguing over matters of life and death. It's hard to be tolerant of each other's politics when we see those positions as mortal threats. Perhaps our healing can begin by acknowledging that there is no way we can really avoid undermining each other's basic sense of security. Yossi Beilin threatens my concept of Israel's existential needs, just as I threaten his by supporting Sharon. At the very least, though, that realization should help us accept the legitimacy of our anger. Perhaps we can even try to forgive our ideological rivals for the hurt their politics inevitably inflicts on us.
Maybe that generosity of spirit can help Chaim Seidler-Feller and Rachel Neuwirth temper their mutual rage - and help me temper mine against Yossi Beilin.
The writer is a contributing editor and Israel correspondent for the New Republic, and an associate fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.
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