even the old zionists no longer have any dreams; yes, all the dreams are
dead; but out of this gross stupidity, perhaps, perhaps people can face each
other without illusions and lies.
___________________________________
ADRIFT IN ISRAEL?S DREAMLESS
Yossi Klein Halevi
Washington Post, November 26, 2000
One day in the early 1980s, I joined a friend at the dedication ceremony
for a new Jewish settlement on the West Bank that was about to become his
home. Perhaps a dozen mobile homes were clustered on the edge of a desert
valley. A banner quoted the prophet Amos, who is believed to have lived at
that site: "I will restore my people Israel; they shall rebuild ruined
cities and inhabit them." At that moment, all of Jewish history seemed mere
prelude for our generation, whose very existence fulfilled biblical prophecy
and Jewish prayer.
That was the kind of romantic vision that sustained this country through
its history of conflict, enabling Israelis to overcome repeated obstacles.
But now, at this perilous time that could prefigure the next Middle East
war, we lack any compelling vision, from the left or the right, to inspire
us.
The settlement movement, which began after the 1967 Six-Day War,
succeeded because it offered Israelis the promise of wholeness, conveyed by
the Hebrew expression Eretz Yisrael Hashlemah?"the Complete Land of Israel."
In English, the term was translated awkwardly as "Greater Israel," which
missed the subtle appeal of the settlements to the Jewish soul. The Six-Day
War replaced the fragile outline of Israel, eight miles wide at its
narrowest point, with broader, diamond-shaped borders, hard and durable. A
mere two decades after the Holocaust, which denied us even graves at which
to mourn, we returned to the tombs of our biblical ancestors in Hebron and
Bethlehem. No generation of Jews, least of all ours, could have resisted the
temptation to reinhabit our mythic landscape, longed for in exile and won
fairly in a war of survival.
Then came the intifada, the Palestinian uprising of the late '80s. All
Israelis but the true believers on the right suddenly understood what the
left had been arguing all along: The land of Israel couldn't be spiritually
"complete" while its Arab inhabitants were occupied and suppressed.
The intifada led to the Oslo peace process in 1993, and the "complete
land of Israel" was challenged by an alternative vision of wholeness. Where
the religious right promised a return to biblical glory through settlement
of the biblical heartland, the secular left now offered a "new Middle East"
that would replace nationalist competition with economic cooperation?just
like Western Europe after World War II, as Shimon Peres, former prime
minister and architect of the Oslo accords, insisted. The debate between
right and left became a clash between the two forms of messianism identified
by the late historian of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem?seeking either
the restoration of an illusory golden age from the ancient past or
anticipating a futuristic era of utopian harmony.
As a centrist wary of all our ideological certainties, I found myself
unable to choose sides in our most passionate national debate. Still, I was
eager to join in personal acts of peacemaking, however much I distrusted
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
In 1998, I participated in a conference held on the Greek isle of Rhodes
for Israeli and Palestinian journalists. Our host, the European Union,
assumed that simply removing us from the scene of conflict to a five-star
hotel on the beach would allow us to replace our Middle Eastern passions
with a more benign Mediterranean discourse. Astonishingly, it worked.
Palestinians and Israelis discovered that we shared the same ironic humor,
the same love of nation tempered by an awareness of its flaws. While they
took hard-line stances at the public sessions, rejecting Israeli pleas for
dialogue beyond slogans, the Palestinian journalists were far more
forthcoming in private. One man, a former leader of the intifada, told me
that he had come to realize that Zionism wasn't just a colonialist invention
but the movement of a people returning home. On our last night, we all
danced for hours to Greek music around the hotel pool.
Then we returned to the Middle East, back to reality. That same night,
Israel Television broadcast a clip from Palestine Television, showing a
group of kindergarten-age children declaring their intention to become
suicide bombers, while their teacher applauded. I had just spent four days
making peace with Palestinian journalists, but they were obviously not the
people setting policy at Palestine TV.
The premise of the Oslo process was that Israel's voluntary territorial
constriction would be reciprocated by a Palestinian constriction of hatred.
But Arafat continued to incite his people with dreams of holy war, lauded
Hamas suicide bombers as martyrs and kept the name "Israel" off the maps in
Palestinian schools. Still, the Israeli left assured us that, when the time
came, Arafat would reveal himself as the only Palestinian capable of making
the hard compromises for peace.
The time came this past July. At the Camp David summit hastily convened
by President Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to withdraw
from as much as 95 percent of the West Bank, to compensate the Palestinians
for the rest by giving them territory in Israel, to resettle tens of
thousands of Palestinian refugees and to redivide Jerusalem. Israel, at
least, proved that it indeed resembled Western Europe after World War II,
exhausted by conflict and longing more for peace than for national glory.
But Arafat and his Arab allies responded to Barak's unprecedented offer with
violence and anti-Jewish hysteria, revealing that the Arab world more
closely resembled Western Europe after World War I, still caught in
fantasies of vengeance.
Aside from the diminishing camp of true believers on the left, Israelis
now understand that trying to make peace with Arafat was as ludicrous as
trying to "complete" the land of Israel through occupation. "Greater Israel"
and the Oslo process failed for the same reason: Israel tried to impose its
utopian conceits on an Arab world that had its own dream agenda.
Now we are stuck with the follies of right and left?settlements embedded
in the Palestinian heartland, an emerging Palestinian state whose police
increasingly act like terrorists. There is neither a biblical past to escape
to nor a peaceful future to anticipate. We are caught in a dreamless
present, a confused and fearful Israel in the old Middle East.
On Nov. 4, I attended the annual memorial for Yitzhak Rabin, the late
prime minister who signed the Oslo accords, at the site of his assassination
five years ago?now Tel Aviv's Rabin Square. In previous years, the gathering
had been a rallying point for support of the Oslo process. But this year,
aside from Peres, no speaker even mentioned the word "Oslo." Barak won the
crowd's most vigorous applause when he called on Arafat?"the hand that shook
Yitzhak Rabin's hand"?to end the violence. Even the myth of the Israeli
leader martyred for a noble peace had now been taken from us.
Perhaps for the first time since the birth of Zionism a century ago, we
are a people without a vision. We fight battles that we know won't bring us
security and persist in negotiations that we know won't bring us peace. And
so there is despair in the land. We are in mourning for the passing of our
messianic delusions. Many Israelis even wonder whether it was mad to try to
normalize Jewish existence in a land sacred to three competing faiths and in
a region that despises democracy and diversity. One friend said to me,
"Maybe the Arabs are right and we'll turn out to be like the Crusader
kingdom, a passing phase in the Middle East."
Still, this is a precious moment of clarity. We are finally facing
reality without ideological blinders. Discovering the next Israeli vision
will depend on learning patience, what the Palestinians under occupation
once called sumud, steadfastness. And also on learning humility: Zionism
allowed us to determine our own destiny; it didn't give us the ability or
the right to transform the Middle East.
(Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior writer for the Jerusalem Report
and a contributing editor to the New Republic.)
>From: Clifford Duffy <cwduff@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>Reply-To: deleuze-guattari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>To: deleuze-guattari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: finally
>Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 21:07:31 -0500
>
>finally -- I dont think that there can be any peace in the Middle East
>without Justice; that Justice must go first of all to the Palestinians.
>they
>have no illusions; they lost the other war long ago; it is the Israelis who
>have illusions; necessary illusions to manufacture the consensus they wish
>to create both there and in America where the Jewish lobby is so pervasive.
>It is interesting. About a month a former American congressman spoke at
>Concordia University about the Jewish lobby. And how they have dominated
>American politics for so long as far as the agenda for the Middle East. and
>in any case, I dont need to document this; it is on the records, in the
>books. And I dont think there are any "radical" Palestinians. Lenin once
>said one can never be radical enough. So for those who struggle for their
>land, how can there be radical? Perhaps it is better to see "them" as
>radicles in the sense of the rhizome discussed by Guattari.
>_____________________________________________________________________________________
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