Len > Iran presents a security risk to Isra'El...
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>>Israelis have always talked about peace, sung about it, made art and poetry about it as if it is something almost supernatural, some kind of a paradise that they yearn for but that has nothing to do with their everyday reality, and that they have no idea how to create. But what peace really means to these exhausted, anxious Israelis is to be left alone. It was sad and disturbing to see how desperately Israelis hold on to what they believe is ‘normality’. They are desperate to be ‘like everyone else’ in any other Western country, go to work, go shopping, go out to bars and coffee shops with friends. They feel outrage and desperation when Palestinian militants occasionally disrupt this routine of ‘normality’. To some degree I can sympathise with that. After all one of the main reasons I left Israel was that I found this way of life unbearable.
The entire spectrum of Israeli politics is in denial about Israel’s history and this is why I do not have much faith in the Israeli Left. The handful that are not in denial like Dr Ilan Pappe who visited Australia last year, or Dr Uri Davis exist outside this spectrum. Their research into the events of 1948 and the circumstances surrounding the birth of the state of Israel is not discussed on public television and is not in Israeli history books. The average Israeli does not even know who they are. Although published by reputable publishers like Cambridge University Press, Dr Pappe’s books have so far been refused publication in Hebrew. The reason offered is that they lack academic merit... The way most Israelis perceive their own history is as if they have always been the weak victim. The question of whether or not it was morally right or even wise to create a state at the expense of another people is never raised.
When Israelis engage in ‘peace talks’ it is important to understand their basic position. They have no real interest in a solution that goes to the core of their problem. They are like an individual who wants his or her symptoms to go away but refuses to do anything about their real causes. A wish ‘to be left alone’ is not much of a basis for a sustainable peace, at least not without another act of ethnic cleansing. Six million Palestinians are there to remind Israel of its past, and they are not going anywhere.
If a day comes, and I hope it does, when Israelis decide to stop living in denial, they will have to realise that real peace will only come through justice. Justice in this context means one thing, that the ideal of an exclusively Jewish state at the cost of an entire people might have to be abandoned. Only a bi-national state and a right of return for the Palestinian refugees will come close enough to rectifying some of the injustices committed in 1948 and since. Having been ethnically cleansed, this is also what the Palestinians are entitled to under international law and common human decency.<<
Maybe anywhere else -- but not in Israel. |
