After
reading one of my essays about Einstein and
Zionism, I was contacted by a staff of the
Albert Einstein Archive at the Hebrew University
in Jerusalem. It is the official archive of
all the works of Einstein, a good part of
which is gradually coming online. One of the
contact persons at the archive has been appreciative
of my essay about Einstein. Recently, that
person forwarded the following illuminating
piece about Israel to me.
It is written by Avraham Burg. He 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.
I have not read such a powerfully forthright
and self-critical commentary from such an
eminent Israeili in quite some time. I am
deeply moved. I wanted to highlight in red
some important aspects of this piece. Soon,
the whole thing was turning red. Still, please
specially note the part that I demarcated
by *** asterisks. There is no religious or
moral justification of the extremism shown
by some Palestinians. However, there is a
logic of life and Avraham Burg seems to show
a great deal of understanding of that logic
of life.
I believe we need people like Avraham Burg
on both sides of the aisle, who can serve
as the voices of conscience and enlightenment.
By the way, what he writes is not the wisdom
of a rather old or aged man. He is merely
48. You can read more about him at http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/biography/ABurg.html
---------------------------------------------------------
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 that 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 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.
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