With Israeli President Peres having called on Bibi Netanyahu to form a Government the prognosis for any settlement of the Israel-Palestinian issue becomes even more remote. But, then, as this piece from BERNARD AVISHAI DOT COM would suggest is Nethanyahu only following on from what has been Israeli policy almost from its establishment?
"Can't you understand simple arithmetic? Why, the very point of [our] program is to have as much land as possible and as few Arabs as possible!"
Avigdor Lieberman in 2009? Actually, Yitzhak Navon, Labor leader, and former president of the state, at an election rally in Yoqneam in 1984.
My point is that there is a bigger crisis here than the emergence of a "neo-fascist," as Marty Peretz called Lieberman (or shall we say even Marty Peretz, as Fareed Zacharia implied). There is the question of what national unity means, or at least how it plays. By 1984, the great danger to Israeli democracy was allegedly Meir Kahane, the caustic, menacing, ultra du jour. But his power stemmed, much like Lieberman's today, from his saying bluntly what a generation of leaders before him had fudged politely.
That Israel is for Jews, and let's not be too fine about what Jewish means. That "Jewish and democratic" means doing what we've done to privilege "Zionism"--exclude non-Jews from "nationalized" land, empower (or pander to) orthodox rabbis, root identity, even citizenship, in bloodlines, sacralize Jerusalem--and continue doing so as long as there are more of us than them. That Israel's fate is to hit regularly at Palestinian insurgents and other enemies--"mow the lawn," in the words of an Israeli intelligence officer I know--and that so long as we are not at peace, we might as well cultivate national unity by supporting, or just overlooking, West Bank settlements, whose leaders are custodians of classical Zionism's heroic spirit."
"Can't you understand simple arithmetic? Why, the very point of [our] program is to have as much land as possible and as few Arabs as possible!"
Avigdor Lieberman in 2009? Actually, Yitzhak Navon, Labor leader, and former president of the state, at an election rally in Yoqneam in 1984.
My point is that there is a bigger crisis here than the emergence of a "neo-fascist," as Marty Peretz called Lieberman (or shall we say even Marty Peretz, as Fareed Zacharia implied). There is the question of what national unity means, or at least how it plays. By 1984, the great danger to Israeli democracy was allegedly Meir Kahane, the caustic, menacing, ultra du jour. But his power stemmed, much like Lieberman's today, from his saying bluntly what a generation of leaders before him had fudged politely.
That Israel is for Jews, and let's not be too fine about what Jewish means. That "Jewish and democratic" means doing what we've done to privilege "Zionism"--exclude non-Jews from "nationalized" land, empower (or pander to) orthodox rabbis, root identity, even citizenship, in bloodlines, sacralize Jerusalem--and continue doing so as long as there are more of us than them. That Israel's fate is to hit regularly at Palestinian insurgents and other enemies--"mow the lawn," in the words of an Israeli intelligence officer I know--and that so long as we are not at peace, we might as well cultivate national unity by supporting, or just overlooking, West Bank settlements, whose leaders are custodians of classical Zionism's heroic spirit."
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