MCC Palestine Update #86

MCC Palestine Update #86

October 15, 2003

Bill Janzen, the director of Mennonite Central Committee’s Ottawa office, was in the occupied Palestinian territories for a work visit October 1-3. Bill and I spent most of our time visiting MCC partner organizations whose work is threatened by the continuing construction of what Israel calls a security fence and what Palestinians call an apartheid wall, or segregation barrier. In Bethlehem, we met with the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem, an MCC partner organization working with farmers to introduce seed varieties adapted to rain fed farming conditions.

Many of these farmers have had their lands confiscated for the construction of the barrier—a network of electronic fences, with trenches, patrol roads, and dirt roads. ARIJ director Jad Ishaq, using satellite imaging and mapping, showed how us how the barrier, coupled with ongoing construction of illegal Israeli colonies, is encircling the Bethlehem area, cutting it off from Jerusalem and leaving no room for growth.

The families in the Greek Orthodox Housing Project in Beit Sahour, meanwhile, are finding themselves slowly encircled by the fence—they will need special passes to leave and return to their homes.

A trip to the Qalqilyah area reinforced the damage being done by the segregation barrier: in Jayyous village north of Qalqilyah, farmers had been waiting all morning for Israeli soldiers to open the gate in the fence so that they could access their fields; the soldiers had told the villagers that only persons over 38 would be allowed to cross once the gate opened; one elderly man said to us, “Why can’t my sons enter? How can I farm the land myself?”

In Azzoun village, residents had recently broken open the lock on the gate which Israeli soldiers had installed in order to close off the village; in retaliation, the Israeli military had just come with bulldozers and made large dirt mounds to shut off the road once more.

Finally, in Qalqilyah itself, a city of 40,000 people surrounded by a 25-foot concrete wall on one side and a network of electronic fences on the other, left with only one entrance, we heard from farmers who have been cut off from their lands and water sources by the fence. MCC and Catholic Relief Services are joining with the Palestinian Hydrology Group to help these farmers maximize the use of those wells to which they still have access.

Good fences may make good neighbors, according to Robert Frost’s poem, but the Palestinians with whom we met did not view the fence as a good fence: rather, by dispossessing tens of thousands of Palestinians, the fence/wall/barrier is increasing Palestinian despair and thwarting short- and long-term attempts at reconciliation.

The Palestinian Environmental NGO Network (PENGON), an MCC partner, has just launched a new website with information, personal stories, and responses to frequently asked questions about the wall: http://www.stopthewall.org/

The World Council of Churches recently released a report entitled, “Security or Segregation? The Humanitarian Consequences of Israel’s Wall of Separation.” It can be viewed at: http://www.wcc-coe.org/wcc/what/international/palestine/securityorsegregation.html/

The World Vision-Jerusalem/West Bank/Gaza office has just issued a moving report entitled “Who Will Wipe Away Their Tears? A Call to End Violence Against Children in Israel and Palestine?” World Vision Jerusalem director writes, “No child should ever have reason to fear—let alone die from—a suicide bomber. No child should ever fear a violent death from an occupying military. No child should experience the trauma of bombings, tanks, and undercover death squads. No children should die for the sins of adults.” Copies of this powerful report can be obtained by e-mailing Allyn Dhynes (allyn_dhynes@wvi.org) or Holly Dhynes (holly_dhynes@wvi.org).

Below you will find three pieces. The first, by Palestinian Christian leader Bernard Sabella, offers a poignant reflection on the pressing need for moral leadership. In the second piece, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy looks at the ever-smaller prisons to which Palestinians are being confined. In the final piece, from the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt argues that, with Israeli colonization of the occupied territories having undermined a viable two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the time has come for alternative thinking. Judt’s proposal of one, binational state in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews might like in equality is a provocative mix of realism and utopian thinking.

--Alain Epp Weaver


1. "Of Pilots, Suicide Bombings and Leadership"
By Dr. Bernard Sabella, Executive Secretary Department of Service to Palestinian Refugees, Middle East Council of Churches
Jerusalem - October 6th, 2003

I usually try to detach myself from what goes on around me in this Holy Land in order to concentrate on my work and maybe also to keep my sanity. But there are events, developments, happenings and non-happenings that force themselves into one's space and one's life. Such events and developments highlight choices and commitments that people make. Of Israeli pilots who refuse on principle to carry out bombing raids that could kill innocent Palestinian civilians, I cannot but respect their courage. Whether the debate raging in Israel over their letter of refusal would widen the choices open to other Israelis, this remains to be seen. But the commitment and the choice made by these pilots are to be acknowledged in the quest towards a more humane relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. The suicide bombing in Maxim Restaurant in Haifa is a very painful event. Not simply the human cost paid by everyone but especially the devastation that befell families of those working and dining in the restaurant make the heart ache. There is no excuse for anyone carrying out a suicide bombing. Justifications for suicide bombings could range from personal to political and ideological reasons but these justifications fail to see the human face of the other. If I argue that all Israelis are alike and they all carry the ugly face of military occupation, am I better than those Israelis who argue that all Palestinians are terrorists and hence without a human face? Suicide bombings, like indiscriminate air strikes, hurt all of us as they rob us of our humanity and narrow the possibilities for peace-making and eventual reconciliation. Leaders, on both sides, have not yet made the needed choices and commitments for peace. Military retaliation, on the Israeli side, not only reflects the superiority of the military machine and air force but also the moral bankruptcy of Israeli politicians. They fail to understand that peace with their neighbors necessitates ending the occupation of Palestinian and Arab lands. It takes great leaders to initiate the process of ending a military occupation. Instead, the Israeli government decides to strike at Syria in retaliation for the Maxim Restaurant bombing. If Syria is to be impressed then it has to be gained to a peace process and not attacked. Desperate politicians, like those presently at the helm of the government in Israel, need to ask themselves why they feel so desperate, at present? Palestinian leaders are also challenged to put their house in order. In the first Intifada (1988 - 1993) Palestinian children with stones in their hands gained world wide sympathy for the Palestinian cause. We have more arms and gun power today in the second Intifada but we do not have the vision and we definitely have lost the moral edge of the first Intifada. Our leaders, of all factions and groups, need to work on the vision for the society and its future. It is not a question of checking the Islamist groups and disarming their members, it is a question of whether we are all together onto working for the vision of Palestinian society? If we are, then our response to continued Israeli occupation should have a framework that would ensure the moral and humane dimensions of our struggle. Our cause is a clear one: occupation should end and a Palestinian state should rise! But not at any cost. It may take us longer time to achieve our goal if we adopt a clear framework with moral and humane dimensions of struggle. Such a framework would not only gain us the support of the world but more important it would reaffirm what is best in our Palestinian culture and heritage. In the final analysis, there is no other way.


2. A prison that keeps getting smaller
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, October 12, 2003

Last Wednesday, Hoda Shadub, a woman of about 50, wanted to go home after having eye surgery at an East Jerusalem hospital. She waited for hours at the Hawara checkpoint, which blocks access to her city, Nablus, but the soldiers refused to let her through. According to the new orders, they said, only ambulances could pass. The Physicians for Human Rights association had to intervene to get an ambulance for Shadub, who finally got home - exhausted and embittered. No one can seriously claim that security reasons are behind the decision to keep an ailing Palestinian woman from getting home. Nor can anyone find a connection between a murderous terrorist attack in Haifa and the return of an innocent resident to her hometown. Last week, following the suicide bombing at the Maxim Restaurant in Haifa, the Israel Defense Forces again imposed harsh new restrictions on movement in the territories. In the West Bank, the ban on the use of Palestinian cars was expanded, and farmers were forbidden to work their fields across the separation barrier. The Gaza Strip was sliced into four sections, in the course of which several roads south of Gaza City were destroyed, according to a report on the weekend by the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. Not one suicide bombing in Israel has originated in the Gaza Strip, but that makes no difference when Israel decides to impose collective punishments on the Palestinians. Whenever the Palestinians start to think the worst is behind them, they get a rude jolt from reality. Since 1991, when the first closure was imposed on the territories, their prison has been getting smaller. The imprisonment of the Palestinian people, which has been ongoing for more than a decade, is perpetrated with varying degrees of severity, not all of which have been related to security for Israelis. Even the few "relaxations of the closure" that were occasionally declared in the media did not meet the test of reality in the field. When Israel finally declared a "goodwill gesture" - opening a road to traffic - tanks deployed on the road and prevented anyone from getting through, as occurred, for example, a few months ago on the Jenin-Yabad road or on the Tancher road in the Gaza Strip. From the moment the decision was made to imprison the Palestinian people, the only changes have been in the size of the prison and the prison cells. They are continually becoming smaller and narrower: from the big prison of the occupied territories, to the solitary confinement cell, in which residents are not allowed to leave their towns or villages, sometimes even their homes, and even rooms within the home when the IDF seizes control of it. At first, they were all allowed to enter Israel, apart from those on a list who were denied access. In short order, the situation was reversed: everyone was denied access, apart from those on a list who were allowed in. The latter number was constantly reduced, and, in parallel, Israel began systematically to narrow the detention cells that were alloted to the Palestinians. First, the Gaza Strip was cut off from the West Bank, and East Jerusalem from the rest of the Palestinian territories. Then, with the eruption of the current intifada, Israel added the siege to the closure: in order to get from town to town, a special permit - which was difficult to obtain - was needed, and the living area was made smaller and smaller. The measures utilized were also aggravated and their cruelty intensified: from manned roadblocks - where it was still perhaps possible to rely on the humanity of the soldiers to allow women in labor or dying people to pass - to locked iron gates, earth ramparts, trenches and concrete blocks that make passage totally impossible. These means have now been bolstered by the separation barrier, which severs farmers from their land, students from their schools and workers from their place of employment. It was obvious from the outset that the gates in the separation fence, which initially were open, would quickly be closed after every attack or warning of an attack. And that is exactly what happened last week. Security considerations can no longer be cited as an excuse for this array of edicts and decrees. It has long since been shown that the mass imprisonment, far from preventing terrorism, only encourages it. The IDF prevented the terminally ill father of the woman who blew herself up in the Haifa restaurant from entering Israel for medical treatment, as MK Ahmed Tibi (Hadash) related last week. (Tibi was involved in the attempt to get him the entry permit.) A few days after Tibi's secretary informed the family that, for security reasons, the father would not be able to get to Rambam Medical Center in Haifa for treatment, his daughter carried out the suicide bombing. It's hard to understand what went through the mind of the woman, whose brother and cousin were killed by the IDF, but isn't it possible that if her father had been taken for medical treatment in Israel, the monstrous deed she committed might have been avoided? Nor can anyone seriously claim that preventing passage from Beit Fouriq to Nablus, preventing the olive harvest at Jeyus or preventing the harvest in the hothouses at Zeita, or building gigantic earth ramparts at Azoun last week, after the residents destroyed the lock on their cage/village, have anything to do with security. This week, while the Jewish people celebrate Sukkot in trips throughout Israel and trips abroad, it's worth remembering that living alongside us is a nation in a narrow prison, which is constantly closing in on them, almost to the limits of human endurance.


3.Israel: The Alternative
Tony Judt
The New York Review of Books,
Volume 50, Number 16 · October 23, 2003
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16671

The Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed. Mahmoud Abbas was undermined by the President of the Palestinian Authority and humiliated by the Prime Minister of Israel. His successor awaits a similar fate. Israel continues to mock its American patron, building illegal settlements in cynical disregard of the "road map." The President of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist's dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line: "It's all Arafat's fault." Israelis themselves grimly await the next bomber. Palestinian Arabs, corralled into shrinking Bantustans, subsist on EU handouts. On the corpse-strewn landscape of the Fertile Crescent, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and a handful of terrorists can all claim victory, and they do. Have we reached the end of the road? What is to be done?

At the dawn of the twentieth century, in the twilight of the continental empires, Europe's subject peoples dreamed of forming "nation-states," territorial homelands where Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Armenians, and others might live free, masters of their own fate. When the Habsburg and Romanov empires collapsed after World War I, their leaders seized the opportunity. A flurry of new states emerged; and the first thing they did was set about privileging their national, "ethnic" majority—defined by language, or religion, or antiquity, or all three—at the expense of inconvenient local minorities, who were consigned to second-class status: permanently resident strangers in their own home.

But one nationalist movement, Zionism, was frustrated in its ambitions. The dream of an appropriately sited Jewish national home in the middle of the defunct Turkish Empire had to wait upon the retreat of imperial Britain: a process that took three more decades and a second world war. And thus it was only in 1948 that a Jewish nation-state was established in formerly Ottoman Palestine. But the founders of the Jewish state had been influenced by the same concepts and categories as their fin-de-siècle contemporaries back in Warsaw, or Odessa, or Bucharest; not surprisingly, Israel's ethno-religious self-definition, and its discrimination against internal "foreigners," has always had more in common with, say, the practices of post-Habsburg Romania than either party might care to acknowledge.

The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European "enclave" in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a "Jewish state"—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded— is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.

In one vital attribute, however, Israel is quite different from previous insecure, defensive microstates born of imperial collapse: it is a democracy. Hence its present dilemma. Thanks to its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces three unattractive choices. It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in the territories, return to the 1967 state borders within which Jews constitute a clear majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, albeit one with a constitutionally anomalous community of second-class Arab citizens.

Alternatively, Israel can continue to occupy "Samaria," "Judea," and Gaza, whose Arab population—added to that of present-day Israel—will become the demographic majority within five to eight years: in which case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an ever-larger majority of unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy. But logically it cannot be both.

Or else Israel can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get rid of the overwhelming majority of the Arab population: either by forcible expulsion or else by starving them of land and livelihood, leaving them no option but to go into exile. In this way Israel could indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic: but at the cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel forever to the status of an outlaw state, an international pariah.

Anyone who supposes that this third option is unthinkable above all for a Jewish state has not been watching the steady accretion of settlements and land seizures in the West Bank over the past quarter-century, or listening to generals and politicians on the Israeli right, some of them currently in government. The middle ground of Israeli politics today is occupied by the Likud. Its major component is the late Menachem Begin's Herut Party. Herut is the successor to Vladimir Jabotinsky's interwar Revisionist Zionists, whose uncompromising indifference to legal and territorial niceties once attracted from left-leaning Zionists the epithet "fascist." When one hears Israel's deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, proudly insist that his country has not excluded the option of assassinating the elected president of the Palestinian Authority, it is clear that the label fits better than ever. Political murder is what fascists do.

The situation of Israel is not desperate, but it may be close to hopeless. Suicide bombers will never bring down the Israeli state, and the Palestinians have no other weapons. There are indeed Arab radicals who will not rest until every Jew is pushed into the Mediterranean, but they represent no strategic threat to Israel, and the Israeli military knows it. What sensible Israelis fear much more than Hamas or the al-Aqsa Brigade is the steady emergence of an Arab majority in "Greater Israel," and above all the erosion of the political culture and civic morale of their society. As the prominent Labor politician Avraham Burg recently wrote, "After two thousand years of struggle for survival, the reality of Israel is a colonial state, run by a corrupt clique which scorns and mocks law and civic morality."[1] Unless something changes, Israel in half a decade will be neither Jewish nor democratic.

This is where the US enters the picture. Israel's behavior has been a disaster for American foreign policy. With American support, Jerusalem has consistently and blatantly flouted UN resolutions requiring it to withdraw from land seized and occupied in war. Israel is the only Middle Eastern state known to possess genuine and lethal weapons of mass destruction. By turning a blind eye, the US has effectively scuttled its own increasingly frantic efforts to prevent such weapons from falling into the hands of other small and potentially belligerent states. Washington's unconditional support for Israel even in spite of (silent) misgivings is the main reason why most of the rest of the world no longer credits our good faith.

It is now tacitly conceded by those in a position to know that America's reasons for going to war in Iraq were not necessarily those advertised at the time.[2] For many in the current US administration, a major strategic consideration was the need to destabilize and then reconfigure the Middle East in a manner thought favorable to Israel. This story continues. We are now making belligerent noises toward Syria because Israeli intelligence has assured us that Iraqi weapons have been moved there—a claim for which there is no corroborating evidence from any other source. Syria backs Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad: sworn foes of Israel, to be sure, but hardly a significant international threat. However, Damascus has hitherto been providing the US with critical data on al-Qaeda. Like Iran, another longstanding target of Israeli wrath whom we are actively alienating, Syria is more use to the United States as a friend than an enemy. Which war are we fighting?

On September 16, 2003, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution asking Israel to desist from its threat to deport Yasser Arafat. Even American officials themselves recognize, off the record, that the resolution was reasonable and prudent, and that the increasingly wild pronouncements of Israel's present leadership, by restoring Arafat's standing in the Arab world, are a major impediment to peace. But the US blocked the resolution all the same, further undermining our credibility as an honest broker in the region. America's friends and allies around the world are no longer surprised at such actions, but they are saddened and disappointed all the same.

Israeli politicians have been actively contributing to their own difficulties for many years; why do we continue to aid and abet them in their mistakes? The US has tentatively sought in the past to pressure Israel by threatening to withhold from its annual aid package some of the money that goes to subsidizing West Bank settlers. But the last time this was attempted, during the Clinton administration, Jerusalem got around it by taking the money as "security expenditure." Washington went along with the subterfuge, and of $10 billion of American aid over four years, between 1993 and 1997, less than $775 million was kept back. The settlement program went ahead unimpeded. Now we don't even try to stop it.

This reluctance to speak or act does no one any favors. It has also corroded American domestic debate. Rather than think straight about the Middle East, American politicians and pundits slander our European allies when they dissent, speak glibly and irresponsibly of resurgent anti-Semitism when Israel is criticized, and censoriously rebuke any public figure at home who tries to break from the consensus.

But the crisis in the Middle East won't go away. President Bush will probably be conspicuous by his absence from the fray for the coming year, having said just enough about the "road map" in June to placate Tony Blair. But sooner or later an American statesman is going to have to tell the truth to an Israeli prime minister and find a way to make him listen. Israeli liberals and moderate Palestinians have for two decades been thanklessly insisting that the only hope was for Israel to dismantle nearly all the settlements and return to the 1967 borders, in exchange for real Arab recognition of those frontiers and a stable, terrorist-free Palestinian state underwritten (and constrained) by Western and international agencies. This is still the conventional consensus, and it was once a just and possible solution.

But I suspect that we are already too late for that. There are too many settlements, too many Jewish settlers, and too many Palestinians, and they all live together, albeit separated by barbed wire and pass laws. Whatever the "road map" says, the real map is the one on the ground, and that, as Israelis say, reflects facts. It may be that over a quarter of a million heavily armed and subsidized Jewish settlers would leave Arab Palestine voluntarily; but no one I know believes it will happen. Many of those settlers will die—and kill— rather than move. The last Israeli politician to shoot Jews in pursuit of state policy was David Ben-Gurion, who forcibly disarmed Begin's illegal Irgun militia in 1948 and integrated it into the new Israel Defense Forces. Ariel Sharon is not Ben-Gurion.[3]

The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution— the core of the Oslo process and the present "road map"—is probably already doomed. With every passing year we are postponing an inevitable, harder choice that only the far right and far left have so far acknowledged, each for its own reasons. The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. That is indeed how the hard-liners in Sharon's cabinet see the choice; and that is why they anticipate the removal of the Arabs as the ineluctable condition for the survival of a Jewish state.

But what if there were no place in the world today for a "Jewish state"? What if the binational solution were not just increasingly likely, but actually a desirable outcome? It is not such a very odd thought. Most of the readers of this essay live in pluralist states which have long since become multiethnic and multicultural. "Christian Europe," pace M. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, is a dead letter; Western civilization today is a patchwork of colors and religions and languages, of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Indians, and many others—as any visitor to London or Paris or Geneva will know.[4]

Israel itself is a multicultural society in all but name; yet it remains distinctive among democratic states in its resort to ethnoreligious criteria with which to denominate and rank its citizens. It is an oddity among modern nations not—as its more paranoid supporters assert—because it is a Jewish state and no one wants the Jews to have a state; but because it is a Jewish state in which one community—Jews —is set above others, in an age when that sort of state has no place.

For many years, Israel had a special meaning for the Jewish people. After 1948 it took in hundreds of thousands of helpless survivors who had nowhere else to go; without Israel their condition would have been desperate in the extreme. Israel needed Jews, and Jews needed Israel. The circumstances of its birth have thus bound Israel's identity inextricably to the Shoah, the German project to exterminate the Jews of Europe. As a result, all criticism of Israel is drawn ineluctably back to the memory of that project, something that Israel's American apologists are shamefully quick to exploit. To find fault with the Jewish state is to think ill of Jews; even to imagine an alternative configuration in the Middle East is to indulge the moral equivalent of genocide.

In the years after World War II, those many millions of Jews who did not live in Israel were often reassured by its very existence—whether they thought of it as an insurance policy against renascent anti-Semitism or simply a reminder to the world that Jews could and would fight back. Before there was a Jewish state, Jewish minorities in Christian societies would peer anxiously over their shoulders and keep a low profile; since 1948, they could walk tall. But in recent years, the situation has tragically reversed.

Today, non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn't do. But this time it is a Jewish state, not a Christian one, which is holding them hostage for its own actions. Diaspora Jews cannot influence Israeli policies, but they are implicitly identified with them, not least by Israel's own insistent claims upon their allegiance. The behavior of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews. The increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel. The depressing truth is that Israel's current behavior is not just bad for America, though it surely is. It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews.

In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one. In today's "clash of cultures" between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states, Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp.

To convert Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one would not be easy, though not quite as impossible as it sounds: the process has already begun de facto. But it would cause far less disruption to most Jews and Arabs than its religious and nationalist foes will claim. In any case, no one I know of has a better idea: anyone who genuinely supposes that the controversial electronic fence now being built will resolve matters has missed the last fifty years of history. The "fence"—actually an armored zone of ditches, fences, sensors, dirt roads (for tracking footprints), and a wall up to twenty-eight feet tall in places—occupies, divides, and steals Arab farmland; it will destroy villages, livelihoods, and whatever remains of Arab-Jewish community. It costs approximately $1 million per mile and will bring nothing but humiliation and discomfort to both sides. Like the Berlin Wall, it confirms the moral and institutional bankruptcy of the regime it is intended to protect.

A binational state in the Middle East would require a brave and relentlessly engaged American leadership. The security of Jews and Arabs alike would need to be guaranteed by international force—though a legitimately constituted binational state would find it much easier policing militants of all kinds inside its borders than when they are free to infiltrate them from outside and can appeal to an angry, excluded constituency on both sides of the border.[5] A binational state in the Middle East would require the emergence, among Jews and Arabs alike, of a new political class. The very idea is an unpromising mix of realism and utopia, hardly an auspicious place to begin. But the alternatives are far, far worse.

—September 25, 2003

Notes

[1] See Burg's essay, "La révolution sioniste est morte," Le Monde, September 11, 2003. A former head of the Jewish Agency, the writer was speaker of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, between 1999 and 2003 and is currently a Labor Party member of the Knesset. His essay first appeared in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot; it has been widely republished, notably in the Forward (August 29, 2003) and the London Guardian (September 15, 2003).

[2] See the interview with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in the July 2003 issue of Vanity Fair.

[3] In 1979, following the peace agreement with Anwar Sadat, Prime Minister Begin and Defense Minister Sharon did indeed instruct the army to close down Jewish settlements in the territory belonging to Egypt. The angry resistance of some of the settlers was overcome with force, though no one was killed. But then the army was facing three thousand extremists, not a quarter of a million, and the land in question was the Sinai Desert, not "biblical Samaria and Judea."

[4] Albanians in Italy, Arabs and black Africans in France, Asians in England all continue to encounter hostility. A minority of voters in France, or Belgium, or even Denmark and Norway, support political parties whose hostility to "immigration" is sometimes their only platform. But compared with thirty years ago, Europe is a multicolored patchwork of equal citizens, and that, without question, is the shape of its future.

[5] As Burg notes, Israel's current policies are the terrorists' best recruiting tool: "We are indifferent to the fate of Palestinian children, hungry and humiliated; so why are we surprised when they blow us up in our restaurants? Even if we killed 1000 terrorists a day it would change nothing." See Burg, "La révolution sioniste est morte."