November 07, 2004
Schwartz - An American Storm in the Holy Land
"I get so frustrated by visitors to this place. They all act like we live in a bubble, as if what we're doing here is an illusion and that what's going on out there, in Israel and Palestine, is the reality. But this is the reality. Israelis and Palestinians have been living together for fifty years, but they keep believing otherwise."
-Rayek Rizak, former mayor of Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salaam
Thursday, 12 August 2004
For the last few days I have been working with Voltaire, a Palestinian resident here at Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salaam, former shepherd and now teacher at the village's elementary school. We have been digging holes and posting signs along the side of the road that winds its way up to the village from the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway. It's good, hard work. I have to wake up by 6 AM every morning--quite a feat for a city boy!--and work for several hours on this project. Voltaire is excellent company. True to his name (the philosopher was his grandfather's favorite, which was why Voltaire's father chose the name for him), he is very calm, reflective, meditative, with a Socratic gaze as sharp as the pickaxe he wields.
By 10 AM, the unmerciful Middle Eastern sun finally begins to reach the peak of its Apollo journey to the throne of Allah in the center of the firmament. But before that happens, the earth is blanketed by the cool shadows of long white clouds, and a refreshing, electric breeze rolls down the valleys. It caresses my face; a static charge tickles the stubble on my chin and swirls like a dustdevil in my nostrils. We're at the top of one of the hills that rise toward the peak upon which sits the village. I take a moment to look out across the land. To my left, the farms of a nearby kibbutz, one of the legions of enclosed, ideologically-driven (usually Marxist) Jewish communities that helped establish the State of Israel. To my right, the agricultural fields of local moshavim, semi-socialist Jewish towns which have also played a fundamental role in the life of the country. Beyond the farmlands are the wineries of a centuries-old French trappist monastery, and even further the mountains of the West Bank, speckled with ancient Palestinian towns and new Israeli settlements. And behind me, the world's only cooperative Jewish-Arab village.
Over 25 years ago Bruno Hussar, a half-Jewish Dominican priest who spent his youth in Egypt,[1] established an outpost of Israeli-Palestinian/Jewish-Christian-Muslim cooperation atop one of the highest peaks here, in the ancient al-Latrun region. His dream was to establish, amidst the ruins of Crusader castles, rusting husks of Israeli tanks, and the ghosts of Palestinian villages massacred and "evacuated"; in the bloody wars of 1948 and 1967, a sacred "Oasis of Peace."[2] At first only he and a few international volunteers lived here, in tents and fragile wooden huts, with no infrastructure, stricken by mosquitos and exposure, challenged by Satan at every turn with disease, obscurity and hopelessness. Then in the early 1980s the first Israeli and Palestinian families began to settle, a School for Peace was established, and slowly something miraculous appeared: a miniature binational society. You see, in all of Israel-Palestine there are many mixed cities and towns, but none are so by choice: from Hebron to Haifa, wherever Jews and Arabs can be found living together--almost always unhappily--it is because the unholy forces of nationalism, fanaticism and armed conflict thrusted them together. Today 50 families, 25 Israeli and 25 Palestinian, all citizens of Israel, now live upon the hilltop, and soon 90 more families shall join the community. The wilderness has been conquered; the mosquitos are gone, and the terrain is resplendent with green; and despite the immense difficulties generated by the ongoing Intifada, existence here is otherwise very ordinary, marked by all the peaks and pitfalls of normal middle-class First World life. The villagers have developed a web of friendships, rivalries and private traditions based more upon the everyday frictions, fancies and feelings common to small-town culture than the serpentine faultlines of the "Situation"--but because the vicious Conflict exists, a war in which two wounded peoples vie to carve up their shared land into two ethnocentric and ethnocrazed semi-states, it is this very mundaneness which makes Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salaam so revolutionary, so experimental.
Looking out over the vistas of al-Latrun, I see all around me the vigorous spirit of experimentation, of newness, the spirit of any young state such as Israel. Then I glance at Voltaire, who stabs at the earth with his tools, and I remember that the farmland around me was once Palestinian villages, and the youthfulness of the State of Israel was once the ancientness of Syria-Palestine. I suddenly recall last night: I was with the village's Palestinian workers, smoking the nargila, when word reached us that soldiers were in the village. Instantly the lights were shut off and I and one of the older workers snuck out to survey the scene as the others nervously peered through the doorway. The soldiers were only waiting for the bus to come get them, but their presence was enough to terrify my acquaintances. As we settled back down, I remember that I found myself also thinking that were I in a Tel Aviv cafe, the presence of a Palestinian in a heavy jacket would be enough to incite terror in the hearts of those around me, as well. Then, back in the present, atop the hill, the blizzard of memory suddenly fades, and I find lying in the snow of my consciousness an idea: today's Israel-Palestine is what America was, in the 19th Century, back in the days of the Frontier.
Click on "continue reading."
Thursday, 12 August 1899
The American Frontier was where the persecuted masses of Europe (Scottish, Puritan and then Catholic English, Irish) collided with the natives of an ancient continent, a land the newcomers claimed was "empty" and "undeveloped." This is Israel-Palestine, where another persecuted people of Europe (the Ashkenazim) have collided with a native population whose land they too declared "empty" and "undeveloped" (the old, pre-1948 Zionist slogan went, “Land without people for a people with no land.” Golda Meir, third Israeli Prime Minister, infamously remarked in 1969, “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”)[3]
As in the case of America, the newcomers seek to "modernize" the land--huge rational agricultural projects, cities sprouting left and right--while their opponents, the indigents, seek to "preserve" the territory, or, recognizing that they have lost much of their old homeland, then fight to prevent "cultivation/corruption" in what remains.
As in the case of America, particular segments of the formerly persecuted Europeans rise to the top of the newly established regional socioeconomic ladder (New England Puritans and Southern Anglicans; Northern and Western European Ashkenazim) and send their former kinsmen (America's poor whites; the Eastern European Ashkenazim and the Sephardim) alongside new members of the underclass (Irish, Africans; Falashim and other Asian-African Jews) to die suppressing the natives' growing insurrection.[4]
As in the case of America, the natives resort to a dubious mix of armed freedom-fighting and terrorism (Geronimo; Yassir Arafat), even millenialism (the Ghost Dance; HAMAS' aims to establish an Islamist state in all of mandatory Palestine).[5] Moreover, as in America, the natives are being relegated to a bantustan existence (the "sovereign nations" of the Amerindian Reservations; Clinton and Sharon's proposed "Palestinian State," which is actually a hodgepodge of territories lacking control of their own resources and airspace).[6]
But also, as in America, there is a brave urge to experiment with new socioeconomic arrangements (the Massachusetts Commonwealth, the Oneidan Community, Nauvoo; the kibbutzim and moshavim, Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salaam), and a desire from all the peoples, newcomer and native, to be one with the land, to be rooted.
The Wild Mideast and a World-Wide-War
There are major exceptions to my comparisons.
Very importantly, Isreal does not have slaves, at least not in the classical senses.[7] While Palestinians, Bedouins, Sephardim and Falashim (as well as growing numbers of Thais, Fillipinos and Africans) serve as a cheap, indentured source of labor, Israel's economy is fundamentally dependent on American foreign aid and global Jewish donations. Ask any everyday Israeli and they will readily confess, "Were the US to end aid to us, we would vanish." In other words, Israel isn't getting a free ride to prosperity like America did (and for that matter, America didn't either: remember that little snaffu, the Civil War?) In point of fact, unlike the Amerindians, who were left to rot under the foot of American soldiers by the world and often by their own kindred, the Palestinians receive monetary aid from the European Union and global Palestinian, Christian and Muslim networks.
Unlike the case of the Europeans who flooded the shores of North America centuries ago, the Jews are not "newcomers" in the strictest sense of the word, being that this territory was theirs 2000 years ago, though conquered from and reluctantly shared with a number of gentile groups (take a gander at the Biblical books Judges, Kings and Chronicles, or look up the Apocrypha.)
Also, in Israel all Jews serve in the military, unlike in the days of the American Frontier (and today) usually only the optionless poor served, and if the rich took part, it was (and is) as the officer corps.
While there are those in Israel and the US who are trying to make this next fact otherwise, legally the West Bank and Gaza are occupied by Israel, not annexed as was the case of the vast territories that comprised the American Wild West. And while the Occupation is a martial endeavor to support the thoroughly worldly aims of politicians and zealots of the religious, nationalist and even economic variety--as was the case of Manifest Destiny in America--in the West Bank, the Occupation is in a much physically tinier geographic space than the American Wild West. Moreover, the Occupation is conducted with modern, deadlier and less-accident-prone weaponry--that is to say, many of the IDF's claims that so-and-so's death or the demolition of so-and-so's house were "accidental" are suspect on technological, not to mention professional, grounds.[8] While America's weaponry in the Wild West was cutting-edge, that did not mean America could have conquered the Wild West easily if it just decided to; take for example Custard's Last Stand and the Red Cloud War. In the case of Israel (which, ironically, receives most of its cutting-edge weaponry from America[9]), if the Jewish State decided to do so tomorrow, it could end the Intifada with a gigantic Wounded Knee Massacre by blitzkrieging or carpet-bombing the West Bank. Instead, because of the not-always-all-seeing eye of the international community, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has had to settle for a two-faced policy of transfer, ghettoization and colonization, a policy very much in the spirit of the merciless Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson, the US' great warrior of the Indian Wars and champion of the pre-Civil War Indian Removal Policy.
Yet, this leads me to an even greater difference between America's Wild West and Israel's Wild East: in the 19th Century, the world, most non-native Americans, and many Amerindians themselves, turned a blind eye to the what was happening beyond the Mississippi. However in Israel-Palestine, the world is paying attention. But how the world has done so is a much more complicated matter. As often as the world has tried to do right by the Jewish and the Arab peoples, it has also done wrong by both peoples. States and organizations have exploited the conflict for their own dubious ends: the Republican Party of the United States, for example, has used the "cause of Israel" to promote imperialist aims abroad and stifle dissent at home, while the Arab regimes have used the "cause of Palestine" to obscure their own domestic injustices. Moreover, the world has increasingly allowed itself to be perverted by the distorted perspectives that are sprouting from the violence: the fascist, imperialist and eschatological ideologies of Christian Zionism, ultra-Orthodox Judaism and al-Qaeda, and the regressive "progressive," violent "non-violent," globalized "anti-globalization" movements of neo-Marxism and neo-Anarchism, all have their propaganda roots firmly planted in the blood-drenched soil of the Holy Land.
Frontiers
It has been said that everyone considers his or her own turmoil as if in a dark cave, wherein all other people are but mere shadows on the walls, their trials and tribulations nonexistent. The Israelis and Palestinians have spent fifty years digging themselves such a pit, and since the start of the al-Aqsa Intifada, they have plunged themselves head first into the darkness. If the Conflict is a kind of dialogue, political polarization has rapidly reduced the vocabulary of peace on both sides in favor of a demagogy of absolute war. Sharon--instigator of the current uprising and, since the 1980s, the champion of the illegal Israeli settlements[10]--has vowed to impose a peace upon the Palestinians. His "peace" is in truth the ringing silence that follows a gunshot. He has sidelined Arafat and with him any form of binationalism, allowing the religious and nationalist fanaticisms of HAMAS, Islamic Jihad and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade to fill the growing chasm of ideological legitimacy that has been widening in the minds of Palestinian youth. With each terrorist attack, the frightened and misinformed Israeli public--more and more of whom have served as soldiers of the Occupation, forced to oppress and even murder innocent Palestinians, and repress their own ethical instincts, for a shadowy imperialist agenda--becomes more racist and desperately bourgeoisie, surrenders more responsibility over to their prime minister, and looks away as he builds his incredible, illegal and immoral "security fence," a Hebrew Great Wall of China, which is devouring the most precious properties and resources of the West Bank as he prepares for apartheid and neverending war.[11]
It is no small wonder, then, that both Israelis and Palestinians irrationally insist that theirs is the greatest and most unique conflict of the 21st Century. Recently I met a young activist from Northern Ireland, who was touring experimental communities in Israel-Palestine. She was quite distressed: "I don't know if you know what I'm talking about," she said to me with a thick brogue, "but everywhere I go here it's like I'm looking at my own home. Of course there are big differences-I don't think we ever got this bad, this hot and violent-but at the heart of it, it seems to me like the same conflict, which means it probably is going to require a similar solution, similar conclusions..." She hesitated, then gushed: "But no one here wants to hear that! They get so angry and insist, 'No! You're just some stupid European! What's going on here is totally different! They"--Palestinians or Israelis--"are barbarians that can't be trusted!'"
I knew exactly what she meant. Increasingly, global Jewry and the worldwide Arab community see the Conflict as both absolutely unique and absolutely unsolvable, that is to say, only one side can and must "win." I remember when I was a student in the London University School of Oriental and African Studies, one day I got into a series of arguments with two Arab and Jewish students. My question to the Arab was, "Look, why can't the Intifada be fought with Gandhian methods?" to which he angrilly responded, "Gandhi only worked because the British were civilized. The Israelis aren't civilized. They bulldoze our homes, our families." I insisted and he retorted, "You don't understand. If you only understood the reality of the Occupation, you would know the truth." My question to the Jew was, "If Israel left the West Bank and Gaza, pulled back to the 1967 borders, would there not be peace?" She replied, "You're talking about retreat, negotiation. That can only work if your opponent is civilized. The Palestinians aren't civilized. They have their children blow themselves up to kill Israel's kids in nightclubs and markets." I insisted. Her exact choice of words was uncannily, unnervingly the same as the Arab's: "You don't understand. If you only understood the reality of the Situation, you would know the truth."
In a way, they are correct that there is something special about the Conflict. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the kamikaze attacks of September 11th, as a species we are awaking to the reality that we are living in an amazing, tumultous, dangerous era of new frontiers. Scientists, artists, activists, leaders and thinkers are trailblazing across heretofore hidden realms of possibility in religion, art, science, politics, economics and morality. The boundaries of human civilization are reaching once unimaginable new heights, with results both glorious--from the first steam engine to the Space Race to the Internet, from from the Bill of Rights to the global spread of democracy and humanism, from Jefferson to Gandhi to King to Chomsky to Taha and Rorty--and grotesque--Manifest Destiny, the French Revolution, the World Wars, the Cold War, the Viet Nam War, the Cultural Revolution, Third World poverty, AIDS, September 11th, Beslan-and all of these frontiers are violently converging upon one ancient terrain: Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho, Jenin, places as old as history, once the battlegrounds for polytheistic, monotheistic and doctrinal frontiers now long gone but whose expansions and clashes charted the course of human development for an eon.
Thus, the most obvious and I believe most pertinent correlation between the American Frontier and today's Israel-Palestine is this: it is an old yet new, and infinitely tragic war for stolen but sacred land, loved by two hurt and scared peoples--indeed, often lusted for and horded by each nation--and it is an even more tragic civil war of a shared and very human, timeless dream to find a place to call home. In the modern Holy Land, this dream that has been cleaved into two resentful, competing and almost irreconciable halves. This was the American Frontier, which was more than just a black marker line moving across a map drawn by business interests, zealots and berserker patriots, but was really the thunderstorm of human potential sweeping across the wilderness of existence, its black folds glistening with lightning bolts of ideas, stretching, expanding further and further. No wonder I can smell an electricity in the air...
Endnotes
Thanks to Rayek Rizak and Ariela Bairey Ben Ishay for their editorial assistance!
[1] Hussar, Bruno. When the Cloud Lifted... The Testimony of an Israeli Priest. Veritas Publications, 1989. In the first chapter, which takes place shortly after the 1967 War, Hussar writes, “Let me introduce myself: I am a Catholic priest, a Jew, an Israeli citizen, born in Egypt where I lived for eighteen years. I feel I have four selves: I really am a Christian and a priest, I really am a Jew, I really am an Israeli and if I don't feel I really am an Egyptian, I do at least feel very close to the Arabs whom I know and love. It isn’t easy, especially in the present circumstances, to hold on to these four selves within me. They are often at odds with one another and there’s a great temptation to identify with one of them and push the other three aside: to be the Israeli, relieved and elated by the recent victory [the 1967 War], forgetting the humiliation and suffering of the Arabs; or to be the Christian, tempted to look down in judgement from the heights, in the name of abstract principles, forgetting that I am also a Jew who lives events, and endures harsh ordeals. No! I must acknowledge all four selves. They are all good and God-given—though all badly flawed with impurities: selfishness, pride, bias, narrow-mindedness. The pain and purification that comes from the interplay of each of these selves must be accepted. And I feel torn like this (a horizontal gesture) and like this (a vertical gesture): that means living the mystery of the Cross.”
[2] Hussar, When the Clouds Lifted, chapter 14. Also: Feuerverger, Grace, Ph.D. Oasis of Dreams: Teaching and Learning Peace in a Jewish-Palestinian Village in Israel. RoutledgeFalmer, 2001, chapter 1. (Note: the village’s name comes from the Bible, Isaiah 32.18, “My people shall live in an oasis of peace,” “neve shalom” in Hebrew, “wahat as-salaam” in Arabic.)
[3] For an anti-imperialist perspective on this matter, read "Palestine: The Myth of the Empty Land" by Sue Boland on Green Left Weekly Online, http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2000/425/425p18.htm. There was a contradiction in the Zionist belief, of course. In his diaries, in 1895, Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism, wrote, “We shall try to spirit the penniless Arab population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country,” a tacit recognition of the presence of an indigenous population. Many Jews, in particular those part of the yishuv in Mandatory Palestine, and the gentile residents of the territory were also concerned about the genocidal implications of a Jewish colonial project. For instance here is one Yosef Diya al-Khalidi, Arab resident of Jerusalem, in a letter to Theodor Herzl dated March 1, 1899: "It is necessary, therefore, for the peace of the Jews in [the Ottoman Empire] that the Zionist Movement... stop... Good lord, the world is vast enough, there are still uninhabited countries where one could settle millions of poor Jews who may perhaps become happy there and one day constitute a nation... In the name of God, let Palestine be left in peace." This myth was also opposed, either tacitly or outrightly, by the binational Zionists. For more information on old and modern binational Zionism, check out these interesting articles and notes: Shavit, Ari. "No more two-state solution?" Ha'aretz, August 28th, 2003; Kotzin, Daniel P. "An Attempt to Americanize the Yishuv: Judah L. Magnes in Mandatory Palestine." Israel Studies, Volume 5, Number 1; and Khaldi, Kalam. "Cultural Zionism and the Binational State in Palestine."
[4] Bhaumik, Subir. "Mizo 'Jews' Seek Israel visas." BBC Online. December 23rd, 2003. See also: Tudor Parfitt’s works The Lost Tribes of Israel: The Hystory of a Myth. Phoenix (November 1st, 2003) and (with Emanuela Trevisan Semi) Judaising Movements: Studies in the Margins of Judaism in Modern Times. Curzon Press (April 2nd, 2002). According to Ori Sonnenschein, a life-long resident of Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salaam who currently works in the examinations division of the Israel Defense Forces (the office which determines who is given what assignments), it is not true, as it has been alleged by critics of the State of Israel, including myself, that “some Jews are more equal than other Jews” in regards to military assignments. The fact that a high percentage of Israeli soldiers in combat right now in the West Bank and Gaza are Sephardim is not due to intentional racism as it is truly due to institutional racism, a socioeconomic pattern knitted into the fabric of contemporary Israeli society. As with Blacks and Hispanics in the US, Sephardim more often than not live in conditions of poverty. In the US, minorites enter the voluntary military in the hopes of improving their financial conditions. In Israel, where military service is compulsary for all citizens, upon entrance into the military all conscripts are tested for various physical and mental aptitudes. Ashkenazim Jews, who have greater resources and thus better education, often score in ways that make them more suitable for noncombative assignments, such as intelligence, warehouse management, etc. Sephardim Jews, however, tend not to receive good education, and so are less skilled and intellectually cultivated, and thus more “suitable” for the gruntwork of combat duty. So, while American minorities and Israeli minorites might start from very different points of origin, ironically they end up in the same place: in the line of fire protecting the misguided interests of the rich and powerful. Sonnenschein had this also to say: “The problem isn't that the military is segregated. In fact, like in America, the military is a model of integration. But all the money we spend on trying to better integrate the military could be better spent elsewhere. The problem is that we even have a military at all: what has happened historically to require such a huge army? Why are we at war with our neighbors?”
[5] There is a bitter joke in the Gaza Strip: “A rich man had a dog who was unhappy where they lived in America, so the rich man moved to India, but the dog was still unhappy. Then he moved to Korea, but the dog was still unhappy. So he moved again, to Egypt, and the dog was not as unhappy, but still discontent. Then he moved to Gaza City, and the dog frollicked joyfully. The man asked it, ‘Why are you so happy?’ The dog replied, ‘Because here is the life for dogs!’”
[6] United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and ReliefWeb; Foundation for Middle East Peace; GlobalSecurity.org. For a good article on the current Intifada and prospects for a binational solution, read Jeff Halpern’s The Key to Peace: Dismantling the Matrix of Control, located on the website of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).
[7] Slavery is typically defined as a social institution defined by law and custom as the most absolute involuntary form of human servitude. The definitive characteristics of slaves are as follows: their labor or services are obtained through force; their physical beings are regarded as the property of another person, their owner; and they are entirely subject to their owner's will. Since earliest times slaves have been legally defined as things; therefore, they could, among other possibilities, be bought, sold, traded, given as a gift, or pledged for a debt by their owner, usually without any recourse to personal or legal objection or restraint. In my opinion, the situation of the West Bank Palestinians is more like a strangely system of indentured servitude similar to the exploitation of Mexican laborers in the United States, with elements of industrialized serfdom. And that’s the keyword: exploitation, the employment of a people’s labor in which the gain of the employer is ludricously and unjustly disproportionate to the the gain of the employee, both in hard monetary terms and in the more elusive, sublime category of spiritual satisfaction.
[8] Rabbi Gvirtz of ICAHD informed me that nowadays, Caterpillar bulldozers ride alongside IDF armored divisions in every mission, routine or special. According to ICAHD, during the Oslo period in the years 1993-2000, 700 Palestinian houses were demolished; in the four years of the al-Aqsa Intifada, over 5000 Palestinian houses have been destroyed. Givirtz put it well: “If you want to achieve peace, the process of expelling Palestinians from their homes must be stopped.”
[9] See this Federation of American Scientists summary. Also involved are Canada and Britain, and there is an unsettling nuclear connection with France (and this article.)
[10] According to ICAHD, before the Oslo period, 100,000 Israelis had illegally settled in Palestinian territories; during 1993-2000, there was a 100% increase, so that by the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifida, 200,000 settlers lived in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, using up over 50% of the land. “This is the basic reason for the second Intifada,” explained Rabbi Gvirtz, “the Palestinians couldn’t tolerate it anymore. All the rest—Arafat did this, Arafat did that—is political gossip.” Recently I took a tour of Bethlehem with the Wi`am Palestinian Center for Conflict Resolution and IFOR. The Wi`am guides took us to a spot where we could see the Har Homa settlement, a gargantuan complex of concrete highrises built on the peak of a bulldozed mountain. It has capacity for 60,000 Israelis (see my entry, “To Bethlehem and Back”.). James Bennet, in his August 15th, 2004, New York Times Magazine article "Sharon’s Wars,” writes, “For Palestinians, Oslo failed because Israel dragged its feet in ceding authority in the West Bank, while settlements there doubled in population to more than 200,000. For them, the Israeli offer in the Camp David talks of the summer of 2000 was a ploy, a stinting proposal to make Palestinians look rejectionist. (The Palestinian leadership, of course, obliged.) For Palestinians, Sharon detonated this uprising with the provocative visit he made on September 28th, 2000, in the company of hundreds of policemen and soldiers, to the [the Dome of the Rock.]” I should take a moment to note the collapse of Oslo from the Israeli perspective, which Bennet summarizes: “The Israeli version is, if anything, engraved more deeply: the Palestinians—the Arabs—never wanted peace. The conflict is not about Oslo, not about settlements, not even about the occupation that began in 1967. It is about any Jewish state in the region. To Israelis, Yasir Arafat walked away from Camp David because we wanted, and wants, to destroy Israel, not build a state beside it. Not only the suicide bombers but also the enduring chill of the quarter-century peace with Egypt undermined the premises of Israel’s left, enabling Sharon to seize the political center and, through constant maneuvering, to hold it.”
[11] Bennet writes in his article, “It may be that nations need illusions to make peace. It may be, indeed, that illusions are among the most precious things we have. But Sharon does not believe a Jewish state can afford them. Today, his story has become Israel’s story, and today’s Israel—with its won’t-be-fooled-again attitude about any warm peace with Arabs—is Sharon’s Israel... Now, as prime minister, he is building a barrier against West Bank Palestinians that is the single biggest change in the land since the Six-Day War. And he is trying to tear down some of the Israeli settlements he build in Gaza and the West Bank—something no Israeli prime minister has ever done. He is not doing this because he sees a path to imminent peace. Capitalizing on a White House that has chosen to view the world much as he does, he is trying to gird Israel for a conflict—not merely with Palestinians—whose end he cannot foresee... For Sharon and many Israelis, the wall that now separates Abu Dis on the West Bank from Jerusalem may be as much a mental barrier as a physical one. ‘What we really want is to turn our backs on the Arabs and never deal with them again,’ says one of the prime minister’s advisers.”
