Uri Avnery
December
5, 2015
IT WAS wonderful.
I went to the seashore
for the first time since my operation three weeks ago. A five minute walk from
my home.
The sea was placid,
smooth. A mild sun was shining near the horizon, not too hot, not too cold,
just as we like it. A cool wind, not too cold, was blowing.
I was sipping a cup of
"americano" coffee, thinking that all was well with the best of all
possible words.
BUT OF course it
wasn't. In fact, all was wrong with the worst of all possible worlds.
True, beyond the blue
sea, in faraway Paris,
the largest assembly ever of world leaders was deliberating on how to save the
planet from climate disaster. Our own Binyamin Netanyahu was there with a huge
delegation, though most Israelis, including Netanyahu, have only contempt for
the issue, which they consider a phony problem for pampered countries which
have no real problems, as we have aplenty.
He went there only to
shake hands and have his picture taken shaking the hands of all the world's
great leaders, including Arabs, giving the lie to all those who bemoan Israel's
growing isolation in the world.
But all this was sham.
Israel, the country I love, is in grave danger. Actually, it is in more dangers
than one.
LOOKING OUT at the
sea, I thought about the three great dangers I perceive, and which I could not
forget even in hospital.
First, there is the
danger of Israel
becoming an apartheid state (which is already the situation in the occupied
Palestinian territories.)
Sooner or later, the
imaginary border between Israel
and "the territories" will completely disappear. It still exists in
legal terms. For how long?
Between the
Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River there
live Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs in more or less equal numbers – some
6.5 million each. This will be an apartheid state in the worst meaning of the
word.
If Israel may
eventually be compelled to grant equal rights to the Arab inhabitants, such as
the right to vote (something that seems far-far away) this will be a state of
perpetual civil war. These two peoples have nothing in common – socially,
culturally, religiously, economically – except their mutual hatred.
The second danger is
symbolized by Daesh (or IS/ISIL/ISIS). All the neighboring states may unite
under the black banner of Allah, and turn against us. It happened 900 years
ago, when the great Salah-ad-Din
(Saladin) united the Arab world against the Crusaders and threw them
into the sea. (Saladin himself was no Arab, but a Kurd from Northern
Iraq.)
Waiting for this
eventuality, Israel
will remain armed to the teeth, with nuclear bombs galore, becoming more and
more militarized, Spartanized, religiously fanatical, a Jewish mirror image of
the Islamic Khaliphate.
The third danger may
be the worst: that growing numbers of young, well-educated, talented Israelis
will emigrate to the US and Germany, leaving behind the less-educated, more
primitive, less productive population. This is already happening. Almost all of
my friends have sons and daughters living abroad.
By the way, distance
seems to increase "patriotism" – indeed, Netanyahu is working now to
confer voting right on Israelis living permanently abroad, obviously believing
that most of them will vote for the extreme right.
And what about the
future of the globe? To hell with it.
VERY FEW people talk
about these dangers. They silently agree that "there are no
solutions". So why "break our heads" about them?
But there is another
danger, about which everybody talks endlessly: the breaking apart of Israeli
society.
When I was young,
before the birth of the State of Israel, we were determined to
create a new society, indeed a new nation, a new Hebrew nation. We shunned the
appellation "Jewish", because we were different from world Jewry – earthbound,
territorial, national.
We consciously
celebrated the "Sabra" prototype. Sabra is the Hebrew word for the
cactus plant, which we considered native to our country (though actually an
immigrant from Mexico).
The appellation was given to the new generation born in the country. The Sabra
was supposed to be practical, matter-of-fact, far from Jewish sophistry.
Unconsciously we assumed that the new type was Ashkenazi, blue-eyed, of
European descent.
Under this banner we
created what we considered a new Hebrew culture. This culture consisted, for
us, not only of literature, poetry, music and such, but also of military and
civilian norms, everything.
There was a lot of
conceit in this, but we were proud of creating something completely new. It
helped us to stand on our own feet, win (albeit barely) the 1948 war and found
the state.
We brought in a huge
wave of new immigrants, and that's where the trouble started. At the
"outbreak of the state", as we say jokingly in Hebrew, we were around
650,000 souls. In a short time, we brought in more than a million new
immigrants – not only the remnants of the Holocaust in Europe
but also almost all the Jews from Muslim countries.
Those who hesitated
were helped along. In Iraq,
Israeli secret agents planted bombs in some synagogues to convince the Jews
that they must leave.
We expected the new
immigrants to become like us, if not immediately, then in a generation. It did
not happen. The "orientals" had their own culture and traditions,
they had no desire at all to become "Sabras".
The hope of people
like David Ben-Gurion that the problem would solve itself within a few years
came to nought. It didn't. On the contrary, resentment and mutual antipathy
grew with time. Today, a third and fourth generation is conscious of it more
than ever.
THEN THERE is the
"national-religious" camp, those who wear knitted kippahs.
When the state broke
out, everyone expected religion to die out. Hebrew nationalism had taken over,
the Jewish religion belongs to the Diaspora and will disappear in this country
together with the old people who still cling to it. They were treated with
benign contempt.
The opposite happened.
After the 1967 war, which brought Israeli soldiers to the ancient biblical
sites, religion revived in leaps and bounds. It created the settlers' movement,
took hold of the rightist camp, and is now a dominant force in Israeli life and
politics, slowly taking hold of the all-powerful army.
The "knitted
ones", as we call them, are distinct from the Orthodox, a separate
population living in their closed quarters, wearing black hats and clothes.
They reject Zionism altogether but use their electoral power to compel the
state to support their innumerable children.
After the breakdown of
the Soviet Union, a huge wave of Russian
Jewish immigrants reached the country. Every fifth or so Israeli is now a
"Russian" (including all former Soviet countries). Most of them
detest everything that smells of socialism or leftism and tend to be extremely
rightist, nationalistic and even racist.
All these in addition
to the 20% or so of Israeli citizens who are Arabs – belonging and not
belonging, more integrated than many of them realize, but considered enemies by
many. The call "Death to the Arabs" is routinely chanted at soccer
matches.
The dream of a
unified, homogeneous new Hebrew nation is long dead. Israel is now a very
heterogeneous country, rather like a federation of separate
"sectors", who don't like each other very much: Ashkenazis,
Orientals, National-religious, Orthodox, "Russians" and Arabs, with
many subdivisions.
The one bond that
unites most of these sectors is the army, in which all of them (except the
orthodox and the Arabs) serve together.
And of course the one
great unifier: War.
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