SHEIKH JARRAH, Jerusalem - As the grandson of anarchists, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for fanatics. Expressions of extremism, and passionately reasoned, exquisitely twisted world views make me feel, how shall I put this, at home.
So it was with a certain relish that I approached the cover story of a recent issue of Commentary, "The Deadly Price of Pursuing Peace," written as it was by a talented colleague and friend, Evelyn Gordon.
The thrust of the piece, which Commentary Editor John Podhoretz understandably calls "groundbreaking," is that Israel's international standing has plummeted to an unprecedented low - and the number of Palestinians killed by Israel has concurrently soared - specifically because of Israel's having done much too much for peace.
"The answer is unpleasant to contemplate, but the mounting evidence makes it inescapable," she writes. "It was Israel's very willingness to make concessions for the sake of peace that has produced its current near-pariah status."
The essay has the seamless, compellingly elegant, hyper-lucid, parallel universe logic of a hallucination - or a settlement rooted in the craw of the West Bank. Until I read it, it was difficult for me to comprehend the current runaway-freight recklessness of Israeli authorities and a certain segment of the hard right, bolstered by shady funding from abroad.
It was hard to fathom why Israeli police in this quiet hollow of the Arab half of Jerusalem, would choose to openly flout and violate the rulings of an Israeli court. I was unable to grasp why they would manhandle and arrest non-violent demonstrators - among them the executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel - for protesting the official expulsion from their homes of more than two dozen Palestinian families here, driven out and into the street, so that subsidized and sheltered settlers could move in.
...
Just as I was clueless as to why the Knesset was to vote Wednesday on a bill that would make aiding asylum seekers fleeing African genocide, granting them shelter, medical care, food, a crime subject to up to 20 years in prison.
Or why there were vigorous new campaigns to increase gender segregation at the Western Wall and on public buses, and why women have been arrested and interrogated on suspicion of having worn prayer shawls while praying on their side of a barrier raised so that they would no longer be able to watch their sons' bar mitzvah on the mens' side.
Or why a sudden and ferocious campaign against human rights organizations and charity work agencies in Israel is coinciding with new human rights outrages against Palestinians and foreigners, some of them unable to leave, others forced to.
It was not until I saw the title of the Commentary piece that it all made sense.
The right is terrified of peace. And, in the end, the right's fear of peace will be the death of Israel.
They are afraid of peace, in part, because it threatens the core of what has come to replace other values as the goal of Judaism: permanent settlement of the West Bank. But that is only a part of it.
They are afraid of peace because they are afraid of the world. They dismiss fellow Jews who want to see a two-state solution - a majority of Israelis - as unrealistic, as living in a bubble. The name of the bubble these moderates live in, however, is planet Earth.
The right, meanwhile, wants to wall off Israel as the world's last remaining legally mandated Jewish ghetto. A place where all the rules are different, exit and entry, citizenship and human rights, because the residents within are Jews. A place where non-Jews, dehumanized as congenital Jew-haters, are rendered invisible. A place which, if suffocating and insufferable, still seems safer than the scary world outside.
A place which, because of its walls and its politics and its cowardice, is losing its ability to function as a part of the world, reveling in cheap-shot humiliations of key foreign ambassadors, deliriously proud of its sense that of all the world, including most of its Jews and Israelis - only the right sees the real truth.
This braid of thought was venomously endorsed this week both by an uncharacteristically Kahane-sounding Alan Dershowitz, and the obscenely infantile Im Tirtzu movement. According to them, where Cast Lead was concerned, the real war criminals are Richard Goldstone and Naomi Chazan - two people who are open about their love of Israel, and who have worked their whole adult lives for its well-being.
The fears of the right are not mere devices of rhetoric. The risks of making peace are real. Every bit as real as the risks of failing to make peace.
It all comes down to belief. It comes down to the kind of country the believer wants Israel to be. And for that reason, there is a civil war going on for Israel's soul.
It will not be weaponry that decides this war, but courage. People who care about the direction that Israel is moving, and whose watchword is moderation, would do well to choose one facet of the fight, and join. One place to start, is to support the New Israel Fund and the groups it supports.
Another place to start is this one. At the weekend, challenging the threats of rightist thugs and law-scorning police, the weekly demonstration on behalf of the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah doubled in size. The police backed down on their vow to break up the protest, and the Kahanists barely showed.
If non-violent peace activism scares the right to this extent, there must be a great deal of power in it.
After all, most Israelis can sense that if peace is to be the enemy, more dangerous even than the threat of war, this is one doomed ghetto.
Things have reached such a devastating point, that for the first time in recent memory, even Ehud Barak is beginning to get it: "The simple truth is, if there is one state" including Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, "it will have to be either binational or undemocratic," Barak told the Herzliya Conference Tuesday.
"If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."
The fear of peace has left Israel as a country which is prepared for nuclear warfare but not for non-violent protest on behalf of Palestinians. The fear of peace, and the blackmail of the right on behalf of settlement, has contorted Israel into a body which, unable to countenance the perils of treating the sickness of occupation, will eventually be killed by it.
Israel's defense minister, for one, is convinced: "The lack of a solution to the problem of border demarcation within the historic Land of Israel - and not an Iranian bomb - is the most serious threat to Israel's future."
For the full post, please see: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1147257.html
Follow Bradley Burston on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bradleyburston
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evelyn-leopold/livliest-debate-over-gold_b_448760.html
As you and so many on the far left and right - your mantra should be -
"We see the world not as it is but as we are." (either Talmud or Anais Nin)
Do you feel that another fear of the right is that with peace comes the serious conversations about what kind of nation Israel will be? It's the same tactics the Bush administration used in the US. Anytime a serious conversation was attempted about domestic issues in the US, someone would bring up 9/11 and terrorism.
Right now, the Orthodox controls a lot in the Israeli government. But there are strong movements to make Israel a more pluralistic and secular country (ironic that it's necessary, considering there is technically no official state religion). A country where Reform Jews have the right to get married, where women are allowed to pray at the Wall and perhaps, someday, may even have an equal partition!
Israel always had inner turmoil when there was a stretch of peace on the borders. Maybe the right is terrified of what that turmoil may bring...
Left in "peace" the Jewish state would probably rip itself apart what with religious-secular disputes; ashkenazi-sephardi disputes; who-is-a-Jew?; right wing-left wing.
Thank goodness Israelis have the Palestinians and Iranians to distract them.
Arab and Jewsh Palestinain refugees-- reparations paid by all those responsible for refugees-- Palestinains, Israeli, Jordan, Egytp, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon. Only those still alive are paid reparations.
Descendants of original refugee, Jewish and Arab, are paid nothing.
Automatic dismantling of all Palestinian refugee camps through out Middle East. Disbandment of UN Palestinian refugee organization.
Take it or leave it.
Stipulation-- if the deal is not accepted-- each year the land offer goes down by 1 %.
Voila...
We've already got a precursor, the PA, to give us some clues.
So, there's the soccer stadium that is being constructed, well, at least attempted to be constructed, in an area that is supposed to be under PA control, and yet, despite being located entirely within a non-Jewish municipality, turns out that there is a patch of ground somewhere there that would be part of that Danegeld the Israelis insist on. As are several other small patches scattered around the community. (the most interesting thing is, there is no way for the Palestinians to know where these patches are until they get a letter from the Israelis saying they've built something, or are trying to build something, on one, and that they have to demolish it)
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1129433.html
Take one of those Lego tables, toss a bunch of marbles on it, then try to build something on it when you can't build where a marble is.
Peace treeaty first.
"A place where non-Jews, dehumanized as congenital Jew-haters, are rendered invisible." Bullshit. Israeli Arabs are 20% of the population; they have representation in the Knesset, and are seen on TV every night; there is Arabic on street signs, on Israeli stamps, and money, as the second official language. Why such lies??
"A place which, if suffocating and insufferable, " perhaps to Burston, but certainly not to Israel's people; not even to its Arab citizens, who militate against any concept that would include their citizenship being trasferred to a putative Palestinian state.
"its cowardice" - "COWARDICE"??? Even the most murderous of Arab terrorists have never claimed that.
"The fear of peace" - what kind of peace? A peace that leaves Israel without defense? Without Jerusalem? Without Judaism?
"the sickness of occupation" - that "sickness" then, was injected by the Arab syringe of attack after attack; loss after loss, in an effort to accomplish the extermination of the Jewish state by force of arms, and what Burston is trying today to accomplish by force of words.
"a sudden and ferocious campaign against human rights organizations and charity work agencies in Israel " - committed to bringing about the demise of the Jewish state.
"new human rights outrages against Palestinians and foreigners, " What would the "new ones" be. They had so much to work with with the "old ones"?
"permanent settlement of the West Bank" - since 1967, all 2% of it.
"they are afraid of the world" - with good reason, based on past and recent history.
"all the rules are different, exit and entry, citizenship and human rights, because the residents within are Jews" - indeed they are. Because this is a Jewish state. Immigration requirements reflect that. Holidays and the calendar reflect that. NOT SO, human rights, unless they are trying to murder Jews.
Perfect or what?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/17/newsid_2519000/2519637.stm
If Israeli politicians would've been more politically sophisticated they would've heeded examples of Arafat's duplicity in Jordan,.Lebanon and Kuwait.
The rift is complicated by the fact that Iran and Syria are totally uninterested in a peace deal between Israel and Palestinians.
Syrians are using Hamas to try to get Golan Heights back, and Iran is using Hamas in a proxy war with Israel on religious grounds.
Even when Palestinians were united behind Arafat they couldn't bring themselves to n
egotiate in Ernest,
And now, divided and at war with each other facing a right wing Israeli government.... What kind of deal does this blogger think can be worked out?
"The New Israel Fund recently came under fire to funding I'lam, an Arab NGO that supposedly calls for the end of Israel as a Jewish state and whose founder, Hanin Zoabi, stated that she supports Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons to be used as a counterbalance to Israel"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Israel_Fund
There are those around here who support the end of Israel as a Jewish state, but I am not one of them.
A fabulous mix of humour and wry observations delivering a killer take on the present dilemma of Israel's right wing.
Fantastic from beginning to end.
The shift in public opinion is palpable as Israel's own actions transform it into a pariah whose driving forces are not the liberal democratic values with which it claims to identify, but ultra-nationalism, racism, religious fanaticism, settler-colonialism and a Jewish supremacist order maintained by frequent massacres.
The universalist cause of justice and liberation for Palestinians is gaining adherents and momentum especially among the young. Against this flowering of activism, Zionism is struggling to rejuvenate its dwindling base of support.
Multi-million dollar programmes aimed at recruiting and Zionising young American Jews are struggling to compete against organisations like the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, which run not on money but principled commitment to human equality.
Increasingly, we see that Israel's hasbara [propaganda] efforts have no positive message, offer no plausible case for maintaining a status quo of unspeakable repression and violence, and rely instead on racist demonisation and dehumanisation of Arabs and Muslims to justify Israel's actions and even its very existence.
In acting this way, Israel increasingly resembles a morally bankrupt, apartheid, oppressive, racist, failed state, not a regime confident about its legitimacy and longevity.
That pretty much says it all.
Excellent article! Thank you.
Just like Sharon's act at the Noble Sanctuary was used as a provocation, Israel needs violence to maintain their victim status. Inspite of U.S. political cover, the world is beginning to see the truth which manifests itself as anti-Isreal sentiment (not anti-semitic as Isreali Hasbara tries to spin).
And if the visit of a Jewish man, to Judaism holiest site is considered a "provocation", it is easy to understand that the very existence of a Jewish state is considered "aggression" and a "provocation".