Biography

What do the Israelis want?

It is baffling that the people who are renowned world leaders in so many fields of the arts, sciences, philosophy, philanthropy, finance, the media and more, i.e. the Jewish people, have unfortunately abdicated their authentic Jewish ideals and their notorious intellectual independence at the hands of extremist politicians and religious fundamentalists. Not only that, but they almost blindly and unquestionably support a state that advertises itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East”, but that has become a leader in human rights abuses, like many of their neighbouring Arab states, though with a thin legal veneer.

A huge deal of effort, time, diligence, money and intellectual creativity is spent by governments, organizations and academic think tanks on perpetuating the memory of tragedies that befell the Jewish people in history. The same amount of zeal is spent on finding terrorism in anything and everything that is Arab or Islamic. Had half of those resources been invested in finding a reasonable and mutually satisfactory accommodation between the Israelis and their Palestinian neighbours, a settlement to the problem could have been found a long time ago.

The onus of the initiative falls primarily on the Israelis because they are the occupiers. The Palestinians must behave responsibly as full-fledged partners. Painful as it is, and despite all their sufferings, whether they live in the West Bank, Gaza or anywhere else in the world, it is up to the Palestinian people to work hard and persevere in using all the means available to them to strengthen their internal and external steadfastness. They should not waste the opportunity of finding a mutually satisfactory settlement before the opportunity for a future peace with their adversary is lost forever.

Whatever “generous offer” made to the Palestinians by Israel that was “rejected by the late Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat”, as former Israeli Prime Minister General Ehud Barak keeps talking about repeatedly is simply hogwash. It is no more than one of those advertising slogans or one-liners that are invented every now and then and hammered into peoples’ minds as an absolute truth. Barak keeps repeating this mantra, which is similar to that of “a land without a people for a people without a land”, and everybody else parrots him. He knows that well. He would have been the first to reject such a “generous” offer had the tables been turned.

Adherents of the Jewish faith have already achieved the ingathering they have dreamt of throughout their history, which also put not just Jewish, but also Christian and Muslim holy shrines in their hands. The government of Israel’s ongoing policy on behalf of all Jews in the world, of pulling more land from under the Palestinians to build settlements or other schemes, is nothing short of institutionalized greed. Fortunately, not all Jews in Israel and in the rest of the world condone such practices.

In his 2009 book “One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict” about the various ideas regarding possible future solutions to the Palestine Question, Benny Morris quotes grudgingly from an article entitled “Israel: The Alternative”, published by Tony Judt “himself a Diaspora Jew”, in 2003 in the New York Review of Books. Judt says that “non-Israeli Jews feel themselves ... exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn’t do (that is, Israel’s behaviour in the occupied territories – Benny Morris’ clarification). But this time it is a Jewish state, not a Christian one, which is holding them hostage for its own actions. “The depressing truth,” Judt told his readers, “is that Israel today is bad for the Jews”.³⁷

Benny Morris states that “it is today clear that no Israeli leader will initiate a pullout from the West Bank – unilaterally or in agreement with the Palestinians – before the IDF acquires the technological capability to protect its population centers from short-range missile attacks (from Gaza). But that is only a fig leaf. The real reason is that they don’t want to let go of the land. Morris then states that “a majority of Israelis still favor a pullback from the West Bank within the framework of a peace agreement with the Palestinians”. Even though he qualifies his statement by saying that it is “unclear whether most Israelis would support an agreement providing for Israeli withdrawal from all or large parts of Jerusalem without a full, definitive peace settlement”. Relying on opinion polls results among Israelis, Morris concluded that “the overwhelming majority of Israelis, as opinion polls have consistently shown for decades, support partition and a two-state settlement of the conflict.”³⁸

Today, nobody cares on both sides. In some cases the Israeli soldiers do what they are ordered to do without thinking twice; in other cases, the soldiers, the officers and senior commanders themselves come from families belonging to religious fundamentalist or politically extremist groups, and are convinced as to the righteousness of their actions.

The Palestinians, on their side, consider that they have nothing to lose by dying but their chains. To them though, keeping their steadfastness and armed resistance to the occupier is the only thing to be proud of that is left to them under the circumstances. Their situation resembles that of the French resistance to the Nazi occupation of France during WW II. Neither resistance was particularly decisive in the field, yet the people could not just stand there and let their enemy crush them. The Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto against the Nazis, who also built a separation wall around the Jewish Ghetto, was another example along those lines. The rockets launched at Israeli settlements may provide the launchers with psychological satisfaction, yet they offer the Israelis what they would pay gold for, namely, a justification for their brutal retaliation in the name of self-defence. And the world is buying the argument!

As the saying goes, where there is a will, there is a way. But today there is simply no will, and whenever a way appeared on the horizon, it was bypassed, ignored, or assassinated. The Israeli extremists and the AIPAC king-makers, who consider themselves to be the real or sole stakeholders, are not interested in any solution that does not give them the whole of Palestine without one single breathing Palestinian on its territory. If they were capable of eradicating the Palestinians (the infamous German word for that is Vernichtung) or at least pushing them across the border into Jordan, Lebanon, Syria or Egypt, or dumping them in some faraway land, they would have done so long time ago.