Uri Avnery
March 11, 2017
Perhaps the Messiah will Come
IF SOMEONE had told
me 50 years ago that the rulers of Israel, Jordan and Egypt had met in
secret to make peace, I would have thought that I was dreaming.
If I had been told
that the leaders of Egypt and Jordan had offered Israel complete peace
in return for leaving the occupied territories, with some exchanges of
territory and a token return of refugees, I would have thought that the
Messiah had come. I would have started to believe in God or Allah or
whoever there is up there.
Yet a few weeks ago
it was disclosed that the rulers of Egypt and Jordan had indeed met in
secret last year with the Prime Minister of Israel in Aqaba, the
pleasant sea resort where the three states touch each other. The two
Arab leaders, acting de facto for the entire Arab world, had made this offer. Benyamin Netanyahu gave no answer and went home.
So did the Messiah.
DONALD TRUMP, the
comedian-in-chief of the US, some time ago gave his answer to the
question about the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Two-states, one-state, whatever the two sides agree on, he answered.
He could just as well have answered: "Two-states, one-state, three-states, four-states, take your pick!"
And indeed, if you
live in la-la-land, there is no limit to the number of states. Ten
states is as good as one state. The more the merrier.
Perhaps it needed a total innocent like Trump to illustrate how much nonsense can be talked about that choice.
ON THE fifth day of
the Six-day war, I published an open letter to the Prime Minister, Levy
Eshkol, urging him to offer the Palestinians the opportunity to set up a
state of their own in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with East
Jerusalem as its capital.
Immediately after
the war, Eshkol invited me for a private conversation. He listened
patiently while I explained to him the idea. At the end he said, with a
benevolent smile: "Uri, what kind of a merchant are you? A good merchant
starts by demanding the maximum and offering the minimum. Then one
haggles, and in the end a compromise is reached somewhere in the
middle."
"True," I answered, "if one wants to sell a used car. But here we want to change history!"
The fact is that at
the time, nobody believed that Israel would be allowed to keep the
territories. It is said that generals always fight the last war. The
same is true for statesmen. On the day after the six-day war, Israeli
leaders called to mind the day after the 1956 war, when the US President
Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Soviet President Nikolai Bulganin
compelled David Ben-Gurion to give back all the occupied territory
ignominiously.
So there seemed to
be only one choice: to give the territories back to King Hussein of
Jordan, as the great majority advocated, or to give them to the
Palestinian people, as my friends and I, a tiny minority, suggested.
I remember another
conversation. The Minister of Trade and Industry, Haim Zadok, a very
clever lawyer, made a fiery speech in the Knesset. When he came out of
the plenum, I admonished him: "But you don't believe a single world you
just said!" To which he replied, laughingly, "Anybody can make a good
speech about things he believes in. The art is to make a good speech
about things you don't believe in!"
Then he added
seriously: "If they compel us to give back all the territories, we shall
give back all the territories. If they compel us to give back part of
the territories, we shall give back part of the territories. If they
don't compel us to give back anything, we shall keep everything."
The incredible
happened. President Lyndon Johnson and the entire world did not give a
damn. We were left with the entire loot, to this very day.
I CANNOT resist the temptation to repeat again an old joke:
Right after the
foundation of the State of Israel, God appeared to David Ben-Gurion and
told him: "You have done good by my people. Utter a wish and I shall
grant it".
"I wish that Israel
shall be a Jewish and a democratic state and encompass all the country
between the Mediterranean and the Jordan," Ben-Gurion replied.
"That is too much
even for me!" God exclaimed. "But I will grant you two of the three."
Since then we can choose between a Jewish and democratic Israel in a
part of the country, a democratic state in all of the country that will
not be Jewish or a Jewish state in all of the country that will not be
democratic.
That is the choice we still face, after all this time.
The Jewish state in
all of the country means apartheid. Israel always maintained cordial
relations with the racist Afrikaner state in South Africa, until it
collapsed. Creating such a state here is sheer lunacy.
The annexationists
have a trick up their sleeve: to annex the West Bank, but not the Gaza
Strip. This would create a state with only a 40% Palestinian minority.
In such a country there would rage a perpetual intifada.
But in reality, even
this is a pipe dream. Gaza cannot be separated forever from Palestine.
It has been part of the country since time immemorial. It would have to
be annexed, too. This would create a state with a slight Arab majority, a
majority bereft of national and civil rights. This majority would grow
rapidly.
Such a situation would be untenable in the long run. Israel would be compelled to give the vote to the Arabs.
Utopian idealists
would welcome such a solution. How wonderful! The One-state solution!
Democracy, equality, the end of nationalism. When I was very young, I
too hoped for this solution. Life has cured me. Anyone actually living
in the country knows that this is totally impossible. The two nations
would fight each other. At least for the first one or two hundred years.
I have never seen a
detailed plan of how such a state would function. Except once: Vladimir
Jabotinsky, the brilliant leader of the Zionist far-right, wrote such a
plan for the Allies in 1940. If the President of the state will be
Jewish, he decreed, the Prime Minister will be Arab. And so on.
Jabotinsky died a few months later, along with his plan.
Zionists came here
to live in a Jewish state. That was their dominant motive. They cannot
even imagine an existence as another Jewish minority. In such a
situation, they would slowly emigrate, as the Afrikaners do. Indeed,
such an emigration to the US and Germany is already happening under the
radar. Zionism has always been a one-way street – towards Palestine.
After this "solution", it would go the other way.
TRUTH IS that there is no choice at all.
The only real
solution is the much-maligned "Two States for Two peoples", the one
declared dead many times. It's either that solution or the destruction
of both peoples.
So how do Israelis
face this reality? They face it the Israeli way: by not facing the
reality. They just go on living, day by day, hoping that the problem
will just go away.
Perhaps the Messiah will come after all.
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