ZGram - 9/1/2003 - "ISRAEL - A FAILED EXPERIMENT!"

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ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

September 1, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

This is an absolutely MUST READING:

[START}

A Failed Israeli Society Collapses While Its Leaders Remain Silent

By AVRAHAM BURG

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
here, 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 opposition does not exist, and the coalition, with Arik 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 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 anti-missile 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 bougainvilleas and not see the
occupation. Traveling on the fast highway ›hat takes you from Ramot on
Jerusalem's northern edge to Gilo on the southern edge, a 12-minute trip
that skirts barely a half-mile 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.

We have grown accustomed to ignoring the suffering of the women at the
roadblocks. No wonder we don't hear the cries of the abused woman living
next door or the single mother struggling to support her children in
dignity. We don't even bother to count the women murdered by their
husbands.

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 racialism 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
last weekend 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's 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.

Translated by J.J. Goldberg.

Avraham Burg was speaker of Israel's Knesset from 1999 to 2003 and is a
former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel. He is currently a Labor
Party Knesset member. This essay is adapted by the author from an
article that appeared in Yediot Aharonot.

[ Source:  http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.08.29/oped3.html )