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Copyright © 2003
The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
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.
Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune
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