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An Unblinking Look At The Hard Facts Of Israeli Occupation And The Palestinian Resistance
An Unblinking Look At The Hard Facts Of Israeli Occupation And The Palestinian Resistance
WITH
A Demand For Peace, Justice And Truth, The Hideously Corrupt Bush Regime Be Damned
WITH
A Demand For Peace, Justice And Truth, The Hideously Corrupt Bush Regime Be Damned
"Injustice, swift, erect, and unconfined
Sweeps the wide earth, and tramples o'er mankind."
--Homer, Greek poet, in the "Iliad", 9th Century B.C.E.
"Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims."
--Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali poet, novelist, essayist and composer, in "Stray Birds", 1916
"There is no need to fear the strong. All one needs is to know the method of overcoming them. There is a special jujitsu for every strong man."
--Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russian poet, in "A Precocious Autobiography", 1963
All hell is breaking loose in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and no one knows what is going to happen next: Israel is invading, as the world watches in horror, while the Palestinians are hunkering down and praying for a miracle.
What began in 1948, with the destruction of Palestine, and the creation of Israel, is right now, at this very moment, still unfolding before our eyes.
As I write this, the horrifying news pours in, like hot lava down the throat: Israel has sent soldiers, tanks, Apache Attack helicopters, and armored personnel carriers deep into the heart of Occupied Palestine, while the Palestinians, with no military force, try to resist; the Washington Post reports that 5 Palestinian police officers have apparently been executed, gangland-Mafia style, by Israeli soldiers; Pacifica News Service reports that 20 Palestinian civilians have been massacred by Israeli troops firing into a building; a Palestinian mother and her four children were slaughtered by Israeli forces; emergency vehicles are not being allowed by the Israeli military to take Palestinian victims to hospitals for treatment, so they die; international journalists are being shot at, abused and assaulted by the Israeli forces; and the press is being forced out of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in order to prevent more news of the onslaught from reaching the rest of the world.
In response, there are yet more suicide bombers in the Occupied Territories and in Israel, which of course leads to more acts of military force by the Israelis.
How did it come to this?
Surprisingly, the answer is more simple than you would expect from a seemingly intractable problem that has been with us since 1948, or before.
As noted above, the problems arose with the destruction of historical Palestine and the throwing off of their land, the Palestinian People. The majority of Palestinians were forced at gunpoint by the Israeli Army to flee their homes (even Israel now admits, after years of denial, that most Palestinians left involuntarily), in what amounted to a crude form of ethnic cleansing--only Jews were allowed to stay.
Those Palestinians who remained, or ended up in what are now the Palestinian Territories, came under differing forms of military occupation, from various sources, where they have remained until this very day.
It is important to remember that until the Israelis (then known as radical Zionists) came, Palestine was a country of peace and tranquility. The Palestinians lived in prosperous and bustling cities and towns and were poised to make Palestine one of the premier Arab countries in the world and a destination site for millions of tourists from around the globe.
That dream was shattered in 1948, which marked the beginning of bloodshed, on both sides, up through today. (It was the Zionists, readers will remember, who first introduced terrorism to the Middle East. The Stern Gang, among other Zionist terrorist organizations, blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and targeted and killed various British and Arab diplomats, in an effort to spread fear, confusion and terror among the people. Many of Israel's future leaders--from Prime Ministers on down--got their start as terrorists in these organizations.)
Now, when we look at the mindset of the Israeli leadership today, we see that not a lot has changed: a devastating article in the San Francisco Chronicle, dated March 31, 2002, by Fadia Issam Rafeedie, lays it all out.
Rafeedie describes how "Zionists often refer callously to a "victorious model" none of us would wish to emulate: the Native American genocide at the hands of American colonizers." (They also called the tragic attacks on the World Trade Towers last year "a golden opportunity" for them to further militarize the Occupied Territories.)
She reminds readers that while Israel destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages and successfully created the oldest and largest refugee population in the world, it has never admitted even moral, not to mention legal, responsibility for the Palestinians' disenfranchisement.
Rafeedie reminds us how tens of thousands of ancient olive trees were torn up by their roots by illegal Israeli settlers on a rampage to strike at the symbolic and material heart of Palestinian agrarian society, and how Israel wants to ethnically cleanse the remaining Palestinians out of Israel and the Occupied Territories, and how already there are beaches and roads for "Jews Only"; and she tells us that Arabs in Israel are not allowed to own land, are paid less than Jews for the same work and face daily discrimination that recalls the worst and most racist days of U.S. segregation in the Deep South.
She even describes, as readers react with horror and disbelief, how proposals in the Knesset, Israel's lawmaking body, have been offered which called for the forced sterilization of Israel's Arab citizens.
The direct parallels of the Israeli government to the Nazis of 1930s and 1940s Germany are unmistakable. (Perhaps that is one reason that Israel, nearly alone among the entire world, maintained close and very cordial ties with South Africa's racist apartheid regime before its downfall, as well as with other tyrannical and/or neo-Nazi governments, including the Mobutu dictatorship in Zaire, the governments of mass murderer Idi Amin in Uganda, Haile Selasse in Ethiopia and Emperor Bokass in the Central African Republic, in addition to various death squads and dictatorships in Latin America, Argentina and Chile.)
Now the Israelis claim they want peace, and one hopes they mean it. But, as one of Saudi Arabia's leaders is quoted as saying, "[Israel] cannot keep the land and demand peace."
Israel knows that it could end the suicide bombings, and could do it tomorrow by 12 o'clock noon if it wanted to, merely by ending its illegal, foreign military occupation. It knows full well that the Palestinian People are reacting to the violence of illegal, 24-hour-a-day occupation.
Nearly every suicide bomber that has struck Israel has left a taped message stating that their goal was to end the illegal occupation--that is no big mystery.
Israel also knows that, in the words of one Middle Eastern observer, "the bombings are the appalling, yet predictable, result of decades" of fear, repression, humiliation and anger. (It is no accident that nearly all of the suicide bombers come from the refugee camps, some of the most disease-ridden, poverty-stricken and wretched places on Earth, where young Palestinians feel that life is so miserable that death would be a blessing.)
The Israeli government has even been told by its own intelligence organization that the longer it occupies the Palestinian Territories and the more harshly and violently it treats Palestinians, the more likely it is that suicide bombings will continue.
So, why in the hell has Israel not simply shut down its illegal settlements and ended its occupation, if it knows that the result would be peace?
There are several important reasons, none of which you will find discussed in the hideously anti-Palestinian U.S. press. (So, as usual, this columnist will have to do the heavy-lifting for these brain-dead vultures.)
The single most important reason for Israel's failure to end the illegal occupation and its giant land grab is its long-standing dream, most fervently held by right-wing Israelis, for a "Greater Israel".
This "Greater Israel" would encompass all of the lands that the Palestinian People live on and are going to make a state from, and are referred to by many Israelis as the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria. Many Israeli textbooks for schoolchildren contain maps that make no mention of the Occupied Territories, referring only to the aforementioned lands of the bible.
The hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, can then be seen as a well-orchestrated, highly thought out strategic effort to wipe Palestine off the face of the Earth, so that their "Greater Israel" can become a reality.
The Israeli government reasons that if it stalls and haggles over every detail and drags its feet and slowly strangles the Palestinian People into submission, it will, by default, create "facts on the ground" (an Israeli government phrase) rendering meaningless any eventual agreement to return some land to the Palestinians.
(These so-called "facts on the ground" are one of the primary reasons that the Palestinians could not, and rightfully did not, accept the flawed Oslo Accords, in addition to the fact that the country offered to the Palestinians was dotted with thousands of Israeli military checkpoints, criss-crossed by miles of "Jews Only" roadways, and broken up into hundreds of small pieces, making it an Israeli version of the bantustans created by South Africa's racist regime, in order to keep blacks quiet, separated from each other and more easily controlled.)
A very cynical and crafty plan it is, not to mention wholly and completely in violation of international law, all rules of diplomatic and governmental conduct and common decency.
(Most of this strategizing goes on in Hebrew, Israeli peace activists tell us, which Israeli officials believe will prevent outsiders, including foreign journalists, from understanding their plotting. And I guess it has worked--until now.)
Another reason Israel won't leave the Occupied Territories it holds illegally, and refuses to allow peacekeeping troops to enter the Territories (making a mockery of Israel's so-called "desire" for peace), is because doing so would force it to relinquish control.
Israel does not merely want security, it also wants control, which to Israel is equally, if not more important.
Control of valuable water resources in the Occupied Territories, control of roads and byways, control of strategic hills and mountains, control of economic goods and finally, control of the Palestinians, the people whom Israel has kept under an iron boot for over 50 years.
Perhaps the most disturbing reason Israel refuses to end its illegal occupation was described by prominent Palestinian freedom negotiator Hanan Ashrawi, who spoke in the United States recently.
She told the audience of over a hundred, who had packed into a hall to hear her speak, what one of her Israeli friends had once said to her, in an unguarded moment of unusual candor: "We can never give you [the Palestinians] your freedom because we know you will never forgive us for what we have done to you, since we ourselves would never forgive someone who did that to us."
Ladies and gentlemen, wherever you may be reading this, whether in Montreal, Montana or Madagascar, you must do something. Take a stand for what is right and true and just. Tell your governing officials that you want them to go to the United Nations and demand that it send in a peacekeeping force into the Middle East, and that it do so immediately.
Tell them to pressure the United States government into doing more than pay lip service to the idea of peace in the Middle East. Tell them that you will not allow them to merely talk tough, and wink at, Israeli aggression, while doing nothing to stop it. The whole world must stand up to the United States government and force it to bring in peacekeeping forces to save lives, avoid more bloodshed and protect innocent civilians.
Most of the world stood by and did nothing, at the behest of the United States, while the holocaust of Rwandan genocide played nightmarishly across history's stage--we, each and every one of us, must ensure that it never, ever happens again.
Sweeps the wide earth, and tramples o'er mankind."
--Homer, Greek poet, in the "Iliad", 9th Century B.C.E.
"Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims."
--Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali poet, novelist, essayist and composer, in "Stray Birds", 1916
"There is no need to fear the strong. All one needs is to know the method of overcoming them. There is a special jujitsu for every strong man."
--Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russian poet, in "A Precocious Autobiography", 1963
All hell is breaking loose in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and no one knows what is going to happen next: Israel is invading, as the world watches in horror, while the Palestinians are hunkering down and praying for a miracle.
What began in 1948, with the destruction of Palestine, and the creation of Israel, is right now, at this very moment, still unfolding before our eyes.
As I write this, the horrifying news pours in, like hot lava down the throat: Israel has sent soldiers, tanks, Apache Attack helicopters, and armored personnel carriers deep into the heart of Occupied Palestine, while the Palestinians, with no military force, try to resist; the Washington Post reports that 5 Palestinian police officers have apparently been executed, gangland-Mafia style, by Israeli soldiers; Pacifica News Service reports that 20 Palestinian civilians have been massacred by Israeli troops firing into a building; a Palestinian mother and her four children were slaughtered by Israeli forces; emergency vehicles are not being allowed by the Israeli military to take Palestinian victims to hospitals for treatment, so they die; international journalists are being shot at, abused and assaulted by the Israeli forces; and the press is being forced out of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in order to prevent more news of the onslaught from reaching the rest of the world.
In response, there are yet more suicide bombers in the Occupied Territories and in Israel, which of course leads to more acts of military force by the Israelis.
How did it come to this?
Surprisingly, the answer is more simple than you would expect from a seemingly intractable problem that has been with us since 1948, or before.
As noted above, the problems arose with the destruction of historical Palestine and the throwing off of their land, the Palestinian People. The majority of Palestinians were forced at gunpoint by the Israeli Army to flee their homes (even Israel now admits, after years of denial, that most Palestinians left involuntarily), in what amounted to a crude form of ethnic cleansing--only Jews were allowed to stay.
Those Palestinians who remained, or ended up in what are now the Palestinian Territories, came under differing forms of military occupation, from various sources, where they have remained until this very day.
It is important to remember that until the Israelis (then known as radical Zionists) came, Palestine was a country of peace and tranquility. The Palestinians lived in prosperous and bustling cities and towns and were poised to make Palestine one of the premier Arab countries in the world and a destination site for millions of tourists from around the globe.
That dream was shattered in 1948, which marked the beginning of bloodshed, on both sides, up through today. (It was the Zionists, readers will remember, who first introduced terrorism to the Middle East. The Stern Gang, among other Zionist terrorist organizations, blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and targeted and killed various British and Arab diplomats, in an effort to spread fear, confusion and terror among the people. Many of Israel's future leaders--from Prime Ministers on down--got their start as terrorists in these organizations.)
Now, when we look at the mindset of the Israeli leadership today, we see that not a lot has changed: a devastating article in the San Francisco Chronicle, dated March 31, 2002, by Fadia Issam Rafeedie, lays it all out.
Rafeedie describes how "Zionists often refer callously to a "victorious model" none of us would wish to emulate: the Native American genocide at the hands of American colonizers." (They also called the tragic attacks on the World Trade Towers last year "a golden opportunity" for them to further militarize the Occupied Territories.)
She reminds readers that while Israel destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages and successfully created the oldest and largest refugee population in the world, it has never admitted even moral, not to mention legal, responsibility for the Palestinians' disenfranchisement.
Rafeedie reminds us how tens of thousands of ancient olive trees were torn up by their roots by illegal Israeli settlers on a rampage to strike at the symbolic and material heart of Palestinian agrarian society, and how Israel wants to ethnically cleanse the remaining Palestinians out of Israel and the Occupied Territories, and how already there are beaches and roads for "Jews Only"; and she tells us that Arabs in Israel are not allowed to own land, are paid less than Jews for the same work and face daily discrimination that recalls the worst and most racist days of U.S. segregation in the Deep South.
She even describes, as readers react with horror and disbelief, how proposals in the Knesset, Israel's lawmaking body, have been offered which called for the forced sterilization of Israel's Arab citizens.
The direct parallels of the Israeli government to the Nazis of 1930s and 1940s Germany are unmistakable. (Perhaps that is one reason that Israel, nearly alone among the entire world, maintained close and very cordial ties with South Africa's racist apartheid regime before its downfall, as well as with other tyrannical and/or neo-Nazi governments, including the Mobutu dictatorship in Zaire, the governments of mass murderer Idi Amin in Uganda, Haile Selasse in Ethiopia and Emperor Bokass in the Central African Republic, in addition to various death squads and dictatorships in Latin America, Argentina and Chile.)
Now the Israelis claim they want peace, and one hopes they mean it. But, as one of Saudi Arabia's leaders is quoted as saying, "[Israel] cannot keep the land and demand peace."
Israel knows that it could end the suicide bombings, and could do it tomorrow by 12 o'clock noon if it wanted to, merely by ending its illegal, foreign military occupation. It knows full well that the Palestinian People are reacting to the violence of illegal, 24-hour-a-day occupation.
Nearly every suicide bomber that has struck Israel has left a taped message stating that their goal was to end the illegal occupation--that is no big mystery.
Israel also knows that, in the words of one Middle Eastern observer, "the bombings are the appalling, yet predictable, result of decades" of fear, repression, humiliation and anger. (It is no accident that nearly all of the suicide bombers come from the refugee camps, some of the most disease-ridden, poverty-stricken and wretched places on Earth, where young Palestinians feel that life is so miserable that death would be a blessing.)
The Israeli government has even been told by its own intelligence organization that the longer it occupies the Palestinian Territories and the more harshly and violently it treats Palestinians, the more likely it is that suicide bombings will continue.
So, why in the hell has Israel not simply shut down its illegal settlements and ended its occupation, if it knows that the result would be peace?
There are several important reasons, none of which you will find discussed in the hideously anti-Palestinian U.S. press. (So, as usual, this columnist will have to do the heavy-lifting for these brain-dead vultures.)
The single most important reason for Israel's failure to end the illegal occupation and its giant land grab is its long-standing dream, most fervently held by right-wing Israelis, for a "Greater Israel".
This "Greater Israel" would encompass all of the lands that the Palestinian People live on and are going to make a state from, and are referred to by many Israelis as the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria. Many Israeli textbooks for schoolchildren contain maps that make no mention of the Occupied Territories, referring only to the aforementioned lands of the bible.
The hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, can then be seen as a well-orchestrated, highly thought out strategic effort to wipe Palestine off the face of the Earth, so that their "Greater Israel" can become a reality.
The Israeli government reasons that if it stalls and haggles over every detail and drags its feet and slowly strangles the Palestinian People into submission, it will, by default, create "facts on the ground" (an Israeli government phrase) rendering meaningless any eventual agreement to return some land to the Palestinians.
(These so-called "facts on the ground" are one of the primary reasons that the Palestinians could not, and rightfully did not, accept the flawed Oslo Accords, in addition to the fact that the country offered to the Palestinians was dotted with thousands of Israeli military checkpoints, criss-crossed by miles of "Jews Only" roadways, and broken up into hundreds of small pieces, making it an Israeli version of the bantustans created by South Africa's racist regime, in order to keep blacks quiet, separated from each other and more easily controlled.)
A very cynical and crafty plan it is, not to mention wholly and completely in violation of international law, all rules of diplomatic and governmental conduct and common decency.
(Most of this strategizing goes on in Hebrew, Israeli peace activists tell us, which Israeli officials believe will prevent outsiders, including foreign journalists, from understanding their plotting. And I guess it has worked--until now.)
Another reason Israel won't leave the Occupied Territories it holds illegally, and refuses to allow peacekeeping troops to enter the Territories (making a mockery of Israel's so-called "desire" for peace), is because doing so would force it to relinquish control.
Israel does not merely want security, it also wants control, which to Israel is equally, if not more important.
Control of valuable water resources in the Occupied Territories, control of roads and byways, control of strategic hills and mountains, control of economic goods and finally, control of the Palestinians, the people whom Israel has kept under an iron boot for over 50 years.
Perhaps the most disturbing reason Israel refuses to end its illegal occupation was described by prominent Palestinian freedom negotiator Hanan Ashrawi, who spoke in the United States recently.
She told the audience of over a hundred, who had packed into a hall to hear her speak, what one of her Israeli friends had once said to her, in an unguarded moment of unusual candor: "We can never give you [the Palestinians] your freedom because we know you will never forgive us for what we have done to you, since we ourselves would never forgive someone who did that to us."
Ladies and gentlemen, wherever you may be reading this, whether in Montreal, Montana or Madagascar, you must do something. Take a stand for what is right and true and just. Tell your governing officials that you want them to go to the United Nations and demand that it send in a peacekeeping force into the Middle East, and that it do so immediately.
Tell them to pressure the United States government into doing more than pay lip service to the idea of peace in the Middle East. Tell them that you will not allow them to merely talk tough, and wink at, Israeli aggression, while doing nothing to stop it. The whole world must stand up to the United States government and force it to bring in peacekeeping forces to save lives, avoid more bloodshed and protect innocent civilians.
Most of the world stood by and did nothing, at the behest of the United States, while the holocaust of Rwandan genocide played nightmarishly across history's stage--we, each and every one of us, must ensure that it never, ever happens again.
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Since Yom Kippur in 1973, Israel has not experienced a violent Arab attack so laced with savage contempt for our people and our heritage as we experienced on Pesach Eve this year.
The message Palestinian terrorists are sending us is crystal clear: We will murder you at every opportunity, in every place, at any time -- even on the holiest of your days.
An unremitting carnage that indiscriminately slaughters all who come within the murderous reach of Palestinian terrorists shows the depths of their hatred. Clearly, the only constraint for Arab terrorists is their destructive capability. Given the power, they would destroy all of us, down to the last infant.
The primary objective of Arafat's terrorist regime is not to establish the twenty-second Arab state, but to destroy the only Jewish state. This was and is the heart of the conflict.
In 1948, the Arabs rejected an international resolution that would have established an Arab state, and instead attempted to destroy an embryonic Jewish state. Fifty-two years later, Arafat rejected a similar offer and demanded the flooding of Israel with millions of Palestinians, which would effectively bring about the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.
With such a regime, whose ultimate objective is our destruction and which pursues this objective by the most barbaric means imaginable, there is no place for negotiations and no hope for reaching any sustainable peace agreement.
Indeed, the much-vaunted political solution to end the conflict was in fact attempted two years ago at Camp David, and it utterly failed.
Arafat rejected a scandalously far-reaching Israeli offer of a sovereign Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, which included half of Jerusalem, and instead chose to unleash this war of terror against Israel.There is only one option that is now available to Israel: to decisively win the war that has been forced upon us.
There is only one option that is now available to Israel: to decisively win the war that has been forced upon us. What is required of us today is not a willingness to clench our teeth and bear this ongoing violence. We must instead seek a total military victory against an implacable enemy.
First, we must immediately dismantle the Palestinian Authority and expel Arafat. Second, we must encircle the main Palestinian population centers, purge them of terrorists, and eradicate the terrorist infrastructure. Third, we must establish security separation lines that will allow Israeli armed forces to enter Palestinian territory, but prevent Palestinian terrorists from entering our towns and cities.
The choice we face today is not between military victory and a security separation. Only by combining the two can we stop the terror, restore a deterrence that has been dangerously eroded in the last two years, and enable a realistic and moderate leadership to emerge among the Palestinians with which we can pursue a political settlement in the future.
Like a partial dose of antibiotics that is not sufficient to cure the disease, the partial actions of the government and the fitful changes between a policy of restraint and half-hearted military action has not and will not achieve anything. Our excessive concern about the international community has also borne bitter fruit. Israel's refusal so far to act as would any other self-respecting nation heightens the doubts in the minds of our friends of our belief in the justice of our cause and encourages our enemies to increase the bloodshed.
The only way to win international understanding for our position, especially in America, is to steadfastly assert our basic right to defend ourselves and achieve a quick and decisive military victory.
Finally, the claim that we have tried all military means to end the terror is baseless. We have not even used a fraction of our military power, and the little we have used has not been directed at the right target, namely Arafat's regime.
What is absolutely clear is that we cannot continue, even for one more day, on a path of indecision, without a goal or a policy. We must do what any nation in our position would do: fight the war that has been forced upon us and vanquish an enemy who is determined to annihilate us.
http://www.netureikarta.org
We ought to face squarely the origins of the Palestinian descent into barbarism. In July 2000, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak made a peace offer that stunned Israel and the world: Israel would re-divide Jerusalem -- would turn over large pieces of its ancient capital to the same people who had destroyed its synagogues, desecrated its cemeteries, and banned Jews from entering when they last ran the show. Arafat rejected the offer. Then in September 2000 the new wave of murderous violence began, supposedly triggered by Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount.
In short, the Palestinian response to Israel's generous peace offer was, "Drop dead." How could that possibly have happened? A trick question -- because the obvious but wrong answer is so close to the right one that it's hard to tune the right one in. You have to fiddle the dial back and forth. Yet the difference between the two is crucial. The "lesson of appeasement" is not that appeasement is futile. Appeasement is not futile, it is dangerous. Israel's enemies claim that Israel herself provoked the ongoing Palestinian pogrom, and in a sense they might well be right. Outlaws interpret an openhanded offer as weakness, not generosity. They interpret weakness as an incitement to violence. You can goad a dangerous animal to attack by threatening or by shrinking back. Unless you want to fight, the only safe maneuver is to stand still.
Everyone knows about Munich, September 1938: Britain and France generously donate a big slice of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, in exchange for "peace with honor," "peace in our time," and the Brooklyn Bridge. Many people know about the Kristallnacht pogrom, November 1938: Germany's approach to the Jews turns from mere oppression to bloodthirsty violence. Kristallnacht was "triggered" by the murder of a German diplomat by a deranged Jew. But some (not all) historians point out the obvious: A leading cause of Kristallnacht was Munich itself. Hitler read the Munich agreements as a proclamation by England and France stating: "We are weak; you have nothing to fear; do what you like." Appeasement doesn't merely fail to prevent catastrophe, it provokes catastrophe.
The analogy is not close, just close enough. Israel is no Czechoslovakia and was not sold down the river. Barak made his offer freely and in good faith. But to a significant number of Palestinians, the offer obviously said: "We are weak; you have nothing to fear; attack." Appeasement doesn't merely fail to prevent catastrophe, it provokes catastrophe.
Now everything has changed, and we are only gradually coming to grips with the implications. Evidently the whole world is outraged by Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Even before the new violence, the world's outrage was hard to swallow. Some Israelis live among Arabs in settlements on the West Bank, some Arabs live among Jews in "settlements" (otherwise known as towns and cities) in Israel proper. What's the difference? The Israeli settlements are new, the Arab ones old. But if old settlements are legitimate and new ones aren't, what are all those mosques doing on the Temple Mount? Some European journalists refer to the great Temple Mount plaza as the "supposed" site of ancient Israel's holy temple -- as in, "that beat-up white shell on the hill in mid-Athens is supposedly the 'Parthenon.'" The plaza was expanded to its current enormous size by King Herod of Judea during the final years of the last century B.C.E. During the peace talks two thousand years later, in July 2000, a Palestinian negotiator helpfully explained why Barak's offer of control but not legal sovereignty over the Mount had been rejected: "We can't sell our Haram to the Jews," even though (he forgot to add) they built it. (Arabs refer to the Temple Mount as the Haram.)
"New" and "old" depend on your point of view. Jews have as much right as anyone to settle on the West Bank. But it long seemed to me (as to many other American Jews) that, leaving right and wrong out of it, the settlements were causing Israel more grief than they were worth and ought to be stopped. But everything has changed. Who in his right mind could still believe today that to stop building new settlements (or even to abandon old ones) would appease the Palestinians? On the contrary: Such a move is likely to be dangerous, as Barak's offer turned out to be. Palestinians don't want to live peaceably among Israelis.
We now know what Palestinians want, and what they think of Israelis. After all, what exactly is the point of sending killers to massacre children at random? What do you accomplish? You impose hatred. You ask Israel, in effect: What do we need to do to make you all (not some of you; everyone) hate us? To make you unable to look at a Palestinian without revulsion? To force you eventually to take the terrible step of setting up enclaves where Arabs are banned? Palestinians don't want to live peaceably among Israelis; the natural conclusion is that they think about Israelis as they choose for Israelis to think about them.
Everything has changed, including (for many of us) our ideas about Islam. We ought to have paid more attention to the latest developments. We now learn that suicide bombers are told to expect a heaven full of comely virgins as their next assignment. To the suicide-murderers, those waiting virgins are real as dirt. The killers call themselves "martyrs," but in their own minds they are the next thing to sex criminals. "Pardon me, sir or madam, do you know why I plan to murder your child? Because the authorities are offering me great sex -- and, after all, I don't get many opportunities."
People who think this way are shielded from view, up to a point, by their own sheer evil. They are painful to contemplate. We instinctively look away, as we do whenever we are confronted with monstrous deformity. Nothing is harder or more frightening to look at than a fellow human who is bent out of shape. And moral deformity is the most frightening kind by far. How can Muslims of good faith allow such people to call themselves Muslim? But they do allow it. What does that mean? And is it possible that we have located here, in this inspiring vision of heaven as a whorehouse, the most loathsome idea in the history of human thought? This is the civilization that condemns "licentious" America?
And what is Israel to do? Kill terrorists? Lock up incipient terrorists? Fine, but not enough. Develop the Palestinian opposition also. People who say there is none can't be serious. Among all those mothers and fathers of children who have become suicide-murderers, not one? Not one who believes: "The 'leaders' who did this to my child must be stopped"? Of course you don't dare say such things in the territories. But surely (one optimistically assures oneself), Israeli intelligence could locate a few such families if it tried, and if they were removed to safe ground and protected. "Safe ground" couldn't be Israel or America, or the credibility of this new opposition would be fatally compromised. But it could be Europe. (Khomeini preached the Iranian revolution from France.) Those few families would be mere people, not "leaders," not politicians. But prospective leaders and politicians would come. Being (as a rule) without passion themselves, they are drawn by passion. The Palestinian leadership would try hard to silence these families and their followers, but the message would get through: Our barbaric leadership is destroying us.
But what of Europe? Not long ago I picked up a copy of Le Monde, which reports on the recent meeting where work was started on a constitution for Europe -- the goal being to allow Europe to campaign, as the equal of any great power, "pour affirmer ses valeurs," to assert its values; and you can't help but wonder, exactly what "valeurs" are we talking about? Indifference? Complacency? Spiritual exhaustion? "European values" (certainly "French values") has come to sound like "Palestinian moderates" -- a contradiction in terms. To any instance of Western man -- American or not, Jew or gentile, male or female -- Europe's spiritual collapse is heartbreaking. It is strange but true that the only European country one can picture (by the remotest stretch of the imagination) cooperating on the sly with Israel to help create a Palestinian opposition is Germany - or maybe, if the Untied States made an issue of it, Britain.
THERE ARE LARGER questions about Israel's role in the World that have been pressing for years, but nowadays seem to grow more acute by the hour. The axioms that underpinned Zionism have been turned inside out. Modern Israel was conceived as a safe haven for Jews. It had other reasons for existing -- but safety, and the dignity that only comes with safety, were Zionism's emotional mainsprings. In recent decades, though, especially sine the end of Soviet tyranny, the safe-haven idea has lost cogency like an unwound watch running down. In the last few years, Israel has started to look (on the contrary) like the most dangerous place for the Jews in the world -- if we exclude the small Jewish communities that still exist in Arab countries. Israel must change the way in which it explains itself. (Yoram Hazony made essentially this claim in his seminal "The Jewish State" of 2000.)
When we look at Israel today, it is crucial that we not allow Palestinian barbarism to distract us from another part of this picture: the everyday heroism that lights the whole place up from end to end. A large proportion of Israelis have relatives or connections abroad, mainly in the United States, and they could run to safety if they wanted to. Who would blame them? Who would even have the theoretical right to blame them? But overwhelmingly they have chosen to stay and stand fast. The whole population, man, woman, and child, is holding (is refusing to abandon) a dangerous forward position under fire. It's hard for Israelis to praise Israeli courage, but Americans ought to.
Why do they do it? Partly for powerful negative reasons. It isn't easy to leave home; and many Israelis are determined that Jews will never again be driven from their homes into alien lands by thug mobs. But there is more to Israel than resolve in the face of a uniquely tragic history. Israel still pays its way using the world's only emotional currency denominated entirely in negative numbers. It needs a new currency with positive markings.Israeli thinkers have talked enough desert; it is time to talk lava.
Israeli thinkers ought to speak less about the tragedy (or the ordinariness) of Israel's 3,000-year history, and more about its luminous greatness; ought to talk up the nation's brilliant prospects, and the central role it has played from Moses to Wittgenstein in creating and molding Western civilization. They don't like to talk this way, but they ought to steel themselves and do it anyway. "The Jew is a desert region," Wittgenstein wrote, "but underneath its thin layer of rock lies the molten lava of spirit and intellect." Israeli thinkers have talked enough desert; it is time to talk lava. Much of the world is at a spiritual lowpoint right now, dragging its belly on the ground. Israel has known before what to do about that. Israel has addressed the whole world and wrought spiritual revolutions, and ought to do it again now.
Israel's offer was, "Consent to be herded into ghetto-like Bantustans, consent to be treated like animals, and we'll let you pick up the gargage at your own expence."
Israel's offer was, "Consent to be herded into ghetto-like Bantustans, consent to be treated like animals, and we'll let you pick up the gargage at your own expence."
Israel's offer was, "Consent to be herded into ghetto-like Bantustans, consent to be treated like animals, and we'll let you pick up the gargage at your own expence."