Controversial David Grossman

(Ben Heine © Cartoons)

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Deconstructing David Grossman: If he is the Israeli Left,

then who needs the Right?

By Gilad Atzmon

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The world, so it seems, is giving a standing ovation to the new Israeli orator, the author, David Grossman. Israel's public relations desperately needs a righteous intellectual, an author who ‘talks peace’, a man who preaches ‘reconciliation’, a man of shalom . Yesterday the Guardian published Grossman’s last week speech at the Yitzchak Rabin memorial in Tel Aviv.

Grossman is a ‘matured enlightened Israeli’, a light left Zionist who craves for a change. I read Grossman’s speech, and I must say that though the man is seen by some as an Israeli left intellectual, I see in his speech nothing but hard core Jewish supremacy and even maintenance of the old crude Zionist racial agenda. Grossman, like other Israelis, is totally submerged within a Zio-centric chauvinist discourse, a discourse of denial of the Palestinian cause; i.e., the right of return.

I have collected and highlighted some outrageous extracts made by the newly emerging Hebraic left orator.

Grossman And The Myth Of ‘Jewish Universal Values’

Grossman, the Israeli some of us love to love, serves us with a major glimpse into the Zionist secular mind. “I am”, so he says about himself “a man entirely without religious faith”. However, Grossman doesn’t stop just there. “For me, the establishment - and very existence - of the state of Israel is something of a miracle that happened to us as a people; a political, national, human miracle.” And I ask myself, since when do secular beings believe in miracles? One may have to remind the ‘Israeli secular intellectual’ that a miracle is ‘an effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause’.

Indeed, Grossman, like many other Israelis, has managed to follow a new form of secularism. It is an atheism that ‘ascribes to some supernatural cause’. Bizarrely enough, the Zionist seculars are pretty fundamentally orthodox about their new pathetic religion. I may help Grossman and suggest to him that there is no real truly heroic miracle about Israel. Israel is just a vulgar racist ultra nationalist state. Israel's relative success seems miraculous just because it took its Arab neighbors a few generations to adapt to the level of Zionist barbarism.

According to Grossman, Israel wasted that ‘miracle’, that “great and rare opportunity that history granted it, the opportunity to create an enlightened, properly functioning democratic state that would act in accordance with Jewish and universal values.”

Following Grossman's glimpse into the Jewish spirit, enlightenment and democracy are foreign to Jews and their occurrence within the Jewish sphere should be realised as a miracle. Probably without realizing Grossman admits here that ‘enlightenment’ and ‘democracy’ oppose the Jewish spirit. Certainly, this intellectual current is not new, neither is it original. The early waves of Zionist ideologists believed that in Zion, a new Jew would emerge: a civilized, secular, democratic and enlightened Jew who rebels against his morally degenerate Diaspora ancestor.

More worryingly, Grossman bluntly deceives his listeners by referring to ‘Jewish universal values’ as if such values are nothing but an accepted common knowledge. As bizarre it may seem to some, there is no general accepted set of ‘Jewish universal values’. Is there a book that presents a notion ‘Jewish universal values’? I don’t think so. If there is a set of values that should be realised as ‘Jewish universal values’, those are properly conveyed by the Judaic core. I believe that Torah Jews who genuinely support the Palestinian cause may know something about universal values. Yet, Grossman portrays himself as a secular man. Surely it isn’t the Judaic orthodox interpretation he thinks of when referring to Jewish universality.

In fact, it is Christianity that translates Judaism into a universal value system. It is Christianity that transforms the ‘neighbor’ into a ‘universal other’. Without a doubt, there are plenty of universal humanists who happen to be Jewish by origin, yet there is no recognized set of ‘Jewish universal values’. Grossman and other Jewish intellectuals who spread the myth of ‘Jewish universalism’ are deceiving themselves and their listeners. Moreover, the fact that Jewish secularism lacks a philosophical background may explain the general moral bankruptcy of the Jewish state. As we will read soon, even Grossman himself, falls into the same trap. He may be aware of the concept of morality but he fails in presenting a consistent moral worldview. He may be aware of the negative effect of racism but he himself, manages to fall into supremacist bigotry rather easily.

Grossman The Blunt Racist

Grossman is courageous enough to stand up and admit that “violence and racism” has taken control of his home, Israel. So far so good. For a second I tend to believe that Grossman is indeed an enlightened anti racist secular Jew but then, just a sentence later he asks, "how can it be that a people with our powers of creativity and regeneration” has managed to find itself today “in such a feeble, helpless state”? The critical reader may ask oneself what Grossman really refers to when he says “people with our powers of creativity and regeneration”? It is rather simple. Grossman truly believes in the uniqueness of the chosen people. In other words, Grossman is not more than a biological determinist.

The question to be asked here is how come the Guardian dedicates three pages to a Jewish supremacist? I believe that Jews do enjoy some freedoms the rest of humanity lack. For instance, I find it hard to believe that the Guardian would give a voice to a German philosopher who praises Aryan people’s ‘powers of creativity and regeneration’. Somehow, a Jewish intellectual can get away doing just that. Although Grossman is honest enough to admit that the Palestinians have placed Hamas in their leadership, he calls Olmert to “appeal to the Palestinians over Hamas's head. Appeal to the moderates among them, to those who, like you and me, oppose Hamas and its ideology”.

Mr. Grossman, if you are indeed a universal humanist, something I obviously suspect, you then better learn to listen to the Hamas rather than speaking to the Palestinians over their elected leader’s heads. Grossman obviously fail to respect his neighbor, he fails to respect their democratic choice. Generally speaking, I suggest that we leave the despicable method of speaking over heads to Bush and Blair. Intellectuals have the privilege to listen and to act ethically.

Grossman the Victim

But Grossman's Jewish chutzpah doesn’t stop just there. “Look at the Palestinians, just once” he tells Olmert. “You will see a people no less tortured than we are.” Yes, this isn’t a joke.

Grossman, the colonialist Jew who dwells on occupied Palestinian land while practicing ethnic cleansing of an indigenous nation, is looking at the Palestinian terrorised victims while saying ‘they are almost as tortured as me’. This probably says it all. It summarizes the level of the Zio-left blindness. Indeed, if these are the Israeli Leftists, who needs the Right?

Indeed, in his concluding paragraph Grossman admits: “The differences between right and left are not that great today”. He is correct. Within the European political discourse, Grossman, the Israeli left intellectual icon, is nothing other than a banal right wing neocon. A man who preaches racism in the name of goodwill. A man who talks over the heads of other people.

Grossman and the Two State Solution

Grossman is deceiving himself and his listeners by saying that “the land will be divided, that there will be a Palestinian state”. You are partially wrong, Mr. Grossman. This land will never be divided. I will make it very simple so you and your very few Zio leftists may realise once and for all. Palestine is a land, Israel is a state. Palestine will always be Palestine; i.e., a land. Israel, on the other hand, is a racist nationalist state and will disappear. The land won’t be divided. It will re-unite into One Palestine. Rather than maintaining a racist nationalist state I call Grossman and his friends to join the one Palestine movement. A movement that endorses equality in the land of Palestine. Palestine, where values are universal.

This essay first appeared on PeacePalestine

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Hollow Visions of Palestine's Future Peace

will need more than David Grossman –

or Uri Avnery

by Jonathan Cook

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David Grossman's widely publicized speech at the annual memorial rally for Yitzhak Rabin earlier this month has prompted some fine deconstruction of his "words of peace" from critics.

Grossman, one of Israel's foremost writers and a figurehead for its main peace movement, Peace Now, personifies the caring, tortured face of Zionism that so many of the country's apologists – in Israel and abroad, trenchant and wavering alike – desperately want to believe survives, despite the evidence of the Qanas, Beit Hanouns and other massacres committed by the Israeli army against Arab civilians. Grossman makes it possible to believe, for a moment, that the Ariel Sharons and Ehud Olmerts are not the real upholders of Zionism's legacy, merely a temporary deviation from its true path.

In reality, of course, Grossman draws from the same ideological well-spring as Israel's founders and its greatest warriors. He embodies the same anguished values of Labor Zionism that won Israel international legitimacy just as it was carrying out one of history's great acts of ethnic cleansing: the expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians, or 80 per cent the native population, from the borders of the newly established Jewish state.

(Even critical historians usually gloss over the fact that the percentage of the Palestinian population expelled by the Israeli army was, in truth, far higher. Many Palestinians forced out during the 1948 war ended up back inside Israel's borders either because under the terms of the 1949 armistice with Jordan they were annexed to Israel, along with a small but densely populated area of the West Bank known as the Little Triangle, or because they managed to slip back across the porous border with Lebanon and Syria in the months following the war and hide inside the few Palestinian villages inside Israel that had not been destroyed.)

Remove the halo with which he has been crowned by the world's liberal media and Grossman is little different from Zionism's most distinguished statesmen, those who also ostentatiously displayed their hand-wringing or peace credentials as, first, they dispossessed the Palestinian people of most of their homeland; then dispossessed them of the rest; then ensured the original act of ethnic cleansing would not unravel; and today are working on the slow genocide of the Palestinians, through a combined strategy of their physical destruction and their dispersion as a people.

David Ben Gurion, for example, masterminded the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 before very publicly agonizing over the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza – even if only because of the demographic damage that would be done to the Jewish state as a result.

Golda Meir refused to recognize the existence of the Palestinian people as she launched the settlement enterprise in the occupied territories, but did recognize the anguish of Jewish soldiers forced to "shoot and cry" to defend the settlements. Or as she put it: "We can forgive you [the Palestinians] for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours."

Yitzhak Rabin, Grossman's most direct inspiration, may have initiated a "peace process" at Oslo (even if only the terminally optimistic today believe that peace was really its goal), but as a soldier and politician he also personally oversaw the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian cities like Lid in 1948; he ordered tanks into Arab villages inside Israel during the Land Day protests of 1976, leading to the deaths of half a dozen unarmed Palestinian citizens; and in 1988 he ordered his army to crush the first intifada by "breaking the bones" of Palestinians, including women and children, who threw stones at the occupying troops.

Like them, Grossman conspires in these original war crimes by preferring to hold on to what Israel has, or even extend it further, rather than confront the genuinely painful truth of his responsibility for the fate of the Palestinians, including the hundreds of thousands of refugees and the millions of their descendants.

Every day that Grossman denies a Right of Return for the Palestinians, even as he supports a Law of Return for the Jews, he excuses and maintains the act of ethnic cleansing that dispossessed the Palestinian refugees more than half a century ago.

And every day that he sells a message of peace to Israelis who look to him for moral guidance that fails to offer the Palestinians a just solution – and that takes instead as its moral yardstick the primacy of Israel's survival as a Jewish state – then he perverts the meaning of peace.

Another Israeli peace activist, Uri Avnery, diagnoses the problem posed by Grossman and his ilk with acute insight in a recent article. Although Grossman wants peace in the abstract, Avnery observes, he offers no solutions as to how it might be secured in concrete terms and no clues about what sacrifices he or other Israelis will have to make to achieve it. His "peace" is empty of content, a mere rhetorical device.

Rather than suggest what Israel should talk about to the Palestinians' elected leaders, Grossman argues that Israel should talk over their heads to the "moderates," Palestinians with whom Israel's leaders can do business. The goal is to find Palestinians, any Palestinians, who will agree to Israel's "peace." The Oslo process in new clothes.

Grossman's speech looks like a gesture towards a solution only because Israel's current leaders do not want to speak with anybody on the Palestinian side, whether "moderate" or "fanatic." The only interlocutor is Washington, and a passive one at that.

If Grossman's words are as as "hollow" as those of Ehud Olmert, Avnery offers no clue as to reasons for the author's evasiveness. In truth, Grossman cannot deal in solutions because there is almost no constituency in Israel for the kind of peace plan that might prove acceptable even to the Palestinian "moderates" Grossman so wants his government to talk to.

Were Grossman to set out the terms of his vision of peace, it might become clear to all that the problem is not Palestinian intransigence.

Although surveys regularly show that a majority of Israelis support a Palestinian state, they are conducted by pollsters who never specify to their sampling audience what might be entailed by the creation of the state posited in their question. Equally the pollsters do not require from their Israeli respondents any information about what kind of Palestinian state each envisages. This makes the nature of the Palestinian state being talked about by Israelis almost as empty of content as the alluring word "peace."

After all, according to most Israelis, Gazans are enjoying the fruits of the end of Israel's occupation. And according to Olmert, his proposed "convergence" – a very limited withdrawal from the West Bank – would have established the basis for a Palestinian state there too.

When Israelis are asked about their view of more specific peace plans, their responses are overwhelmingly negative. In 2003, for example, 78 per cent of Israeli Jews said they favored a two-state solution, but when asked if they supported the Geneva Initiative – which envisions a very circumscribed Palestinian state on less than all of the West Bank and Gaza – only a quarter did so. Barely more than half of the supposedly leftwing voters of Labor backed the Geneva Initiative.

This low level of support for a barely viable Palestinian state contrasts with the consistently high levels of support among Israeli Jews for a concrete, but very different, solution to the conflict: "transfer," or ethnic cleansing. In opinion polls, 60 per cent of Israeli Jews regularly favor the emigration of Arab citizens from the as-yet-undetermined borders of the Jewish state.

So when Grossman warns us that "a peace of no choice" is inevitable and that "the land will be divided, a Palestinian state will arise," we should not be lulled into false hopes. Grossman's state is almost certainly as "hollow" as his audience's idea of peace.

Grossman's refusal to confront the lack of sympathy among the Israeli public for the Palestinians, or challenge it with solutions that will require of Israelis that they make real sacrifices for peace, deserves our condemnation. He and the other gurus of Israel's mainstream peace movement, writers like Amos Oz and A B Yehoshua, have failed in their duty to articulate to Israelis a vision of a fair future and a lasting peace.

So what is the way out of the impasse created by the beatification of figures like Grossman? What other routes are open to those of us who refuse to believe that Grossman stands at the very precipice before which any sane peace activist would tremble? Can we look to other members of the Israeli left for inspiration?

Uri Avnery again steps forward. He claims that there are only two peace camps in Israel: a Zionist one, based on a national consensus rooted in the Peace Now of David Grossman; and what he calls a "radical peace camp" led by … well, himself and his group of a few thousand Israelis known as Gush Shalom.

By this, one might be tempted to infer that Avnery styles his own peace bloc as non-Zionist or even anti-Zionist. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Avnery and most, though not all, of his supporters in Israel are staunchly in the Zionist camp.

The bottom line in any peace for Avnery is the continued existence and success of Israel as a Jewish state. That rigidly limits his ideas about what sort of peace a "radical" Israeli peace activist ought to be pursuing.

Like Grossman, Avnery supports a two-state solution because, in both their views, the future of the Jewish state cannot be guaranteed without a Palestinian state alongside it. This is why Avnery finds himself agreeing with 90 per cent of Grossman's speech. If the Jews are to prosper as a demographic (and democratic) majority in their state, then the non-Jews must have a state too, one in which they can exercise their own, separate sovereign rights and, consequently, abandon any claims on the Jewish state.

However, unlike Grossman, Avnery not only supports a Palestinian state in the abstract but a "just" Palestinian state in the concrete, meaning for him the evacuation of all the settlers and a full withdrawal by the Israeli army to the 1967 lines. Avnery's peace plan would give back east Jerusalem and the whole of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians.

The difference between Grossman and Avnery on this point can be explained by their different understanding of what is needed to ensure the Jewish state's survival. Avnery believes that a lasting peace will hold only if the Palestinian state meets the minimal aspirations of the Palestinian people. In his view, the Palestinians can be persuaded under the right leadership to settle for 22 per cent of their historic homeland – and in that way the Jewish state will be saved.

Of itself, there is nothing wrong with Avnery's position. It has encouraged him to take a leading and impressive role in the Israeli peace movement for many decades. Bravely he has crossed over national confrontation lines to visit the besieged Palestinian leadership when other Israelis have shied away. He has taken a courageous stand against the separation wall, facing down Israeli soldiers alongside Palestinian, Israeli and foreign peace activists. And through his journalism he has highlighted the Palestinian cause and educated Israelis, Palestinians and outside observers about the conflict. For all these reasons, Avnery should be praised as a genuine peacemaker.

But there is a serious danger that, because Palestinian solidarity movements have misunderstood Avnery's motives, they may continue to be guided by him beyond the point where he is contributing to a peaceful solution or a just future for the Palestinians. In fact, that moment may be upon us.

During the Oslo years, Avnery was desperate to see Israel complete its supposed peace agreement with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. As he often argued, he believed that Arafat alone could unify the Palestinians and persuade them to settle for the only two-state solution on the table: a big Israel, alongside a small Palestine.

In truth, Avnery's position was no so far from that of the distinctly unradical Oslo crowd of Rabin, Peres and Yossi Beilin. All four of them regarded Arafat as the Palestinian strongman who could secure Israel's future: Rabin hoped Arafat would police the Palestinians on Israel's behalf in their ghettoes; while Avnery hoped Arafat would forge a nation, democratic or otherwise, that would contain the Palestinians' ambitions for territory and a just solution to the refugee problem.

Now with Arafat gone, Avnery and Gush Shalom have lost their ready-made solution to the conflict. Today, they still back two states and support engagement with Hamas. They have also not deviated from their long-standing positions on the main issues – Jerusalem, borders, settlements and refugees – even if they no longer have the glue, Arafat, that was supposed to make it all stick together.

But without Arafat as their strongman, Gush Shalom have no idea about how to address the impending issues of factionalism and potential civil war that Israel's meddling in the Palestinian political process are unleashing.

They will also have no response if the tide on the Palestinian street turns against the two-state mirage offered by Oslo. If Palestinians look for other ways out of the current impasse, as they are starting to do, Avnery will quickly become an obstacle to peace rather than its great defender.

In fact, such a development is all but certain. Few knowledgeable observers of the conflict believe the two-state solution based on the 1967 lines is feasible any longer, given Israel's entrenchment of its settlers in Jerusalem and the West Bank, now numbering nearly half a million. Even the Americans have publicly admitted that most of the settlements cannot be undone. It is only a matter of time before Palestinians make the same calculation.

What will Avnery, and the die-hards of Gush Shalom, do in this event? How will they respond if Palestinians start to clamor for a single state embracing both Israelis and Palestinians, for example?

The answer is that the "radical" peaceniks will quickly need to find another solution to protect their Jewish state. There are not too many available:

• There is the "Carry on with the occupation regardless" of Binyamin Netanyahu and Likud;
  
• There is the "Seal the Palestinians into ghettoes and hope eventually they will leave of their own accord," in its Kadima (hard) and Labor (soft) incarnations;
  
• And there is the "Expel them all" of Avigdor Lieberman, Olmert's new Minister of Strategic Threats.

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Paradoxically, a variation on the last option may be the most appealing to the disillusioned peaceniks of Gush Shalom. Lieberman has his own fanatical and moderate positions, depending on his audience and the current realities. To some he says he wants all Palestinians expelled from Greater Israel so that it is available only for Jews. But to others, particularly in the diplomatic arena, he suggests a formula of territorial and population swaps between Israel and the Palestinians that would create a "Separation of Nations." Israel would get the settlements back in return for handing over some small areas of Israel, like the Little Triangle, densely populated with Palestinians.

A generous version of such an exchange – though a violation of international law – would achieve a similar outcome to Gush Shalom's attempts to create a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel. Even if Avnery is unlikely to be lured down this path himself, there is a real danger that others in the "radical" peace camp will prefer this kind of solution over sacrificing their commitment at any price to the Jewish state.

But fortunately, whatever Avnery claims, his peace camp is not the only alternative to the sham agonizing of Peace Now. Avnery is no more standing at the very edge of the abyss than Grossman. The only abyss Avnery is looking into is the demise of his Jewish state.

Other Zionist Jews, in Israel and abroad, have been grappling with the same kinds of issues as Avnery but begun to move in a different direction, away from the doomed two-state solution towards a binational state. A few prominent intellectuals like Tony Judt, Meron Benvenisti and Jeff Halper have publicly begun to question their commitment to Zionism and consider whether it is not part of the problem rather than the solution.

They are not doing this alone. Small groups of Israelis, smaller than Gush Shalom, are abandoning Zionism and coalescing around new ideas about how Israeli Jews and Palestinians might live peacefully together, including inside a single state. They include Taayush, Anarchists Against the Wall, Zochrot and elements within the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions and Gush Shalom itself.

Avnery hopes that his peace camp may be the small wheel that can push the larger wheel of organizations like Peace Now in a new direction and thereby shift Israeli opinion towards a real two-state solution. Given the realities on the ground, that seems highly unlikely. But one day, wheels currently smaller than Gush Shalom may begin to push Israel in the direction needed for peace.

These essay first appeared on Antiwar

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Paradoxical David Grossman

(Ben Heine © Cartoons)

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David Grossman's speech at the Rabin memorial

The annual memorial ceremony for Yitzhak Rabin is the moment when we pause for a while to remember Rabin the man, the leader. And we also take a look at ourselves, at Israeli society, its leadership, the national mood, the state of the peace process, at ourselves as individuals in the face of national events.

It is not easy to take a look at ourselves this year. There was a war, and Israel flexed its massive military muscle, but also exposed Israel's fragility. We discovered that our military might ultimately cannot be the only guarantee of our existence. Primarily, we have found that the crisis Israel is experiencing is far deeper than we had feared, in almost every way.

I am speaking here tonight as a person whose love for the land is overwhelming and complex, and yet it is unequivocal, and as one whose continuous covenant with the land has turned his personal calamity into a covenant of blood.

I am totally secular, and yet in my eyes the establishment and the very existence of the State of Israel is a miracle of sorts that happened to us as a nation - a political, national, human miracle.

I do not forget this for a single moment. Even when many things in the reality of our lives enrage and depress me, even when the miracle is broken down to routine and wretchedness, to corruption and cynicism, even when reality seems like nothing but a poor parody of this miracle, I always remember. And with these feelings, I address you tonight.

"Behold land, for we hath squandered," wrote the poet Saul Tchernikovsky in Tel Aviv in 1938. He lamented the burial of our young again and again in the soil of the Land of Israel. The death of young people is a horrible, ghastly waste.

But no less dreadful is the sense that for many years, the State of Israel has been squandering, not only the lives of its sons, but also its miracle; that grand and rare opportunity that history bestowed upon it, the opportunity to establish here a state that is efficient, democratic, which abides by Jewish and universal values; a state that would be a national home and haven, but not only a haven, also a place that would offer a new meaning to Jewish existence; a state that holds as an integral and essential part of its Jewish identity and its Jewish ethos, the observance of full equality and respect for its non-Jewish citizens.

Look at what befell us. Look what befell the young, bold, passionate country we had here, and how, as if it had undergone a quickened ageing process, Israel lurched from infancy and youth to a perpetual state of gripe, weakness and sourness.

How did this happen? When did we lose even the hope that we would eventually be able to live a different, better life? Moreover, how do we continue to watch from the side as though hypnotized by the insanity, rudeness, violence and racism that has overtaken our home?

And I ask you: How could it be that a people with such powers of creativity, renewal and vivacity as ours, a people that knew how to rise from the ashes time and again, finds itself today, despite its great military might, at such a state of laxity and inanity, a state where it is the victim once more, but this time its own victim, of its anxieties, its short-sightedness.

One of the most difficult outcomes of the recent war is the heightened realization that at this time there is no king in Israel, that our leadership is hollow. Our military and political leadership is hollow. I am not even talking about the obvious blunders in running the war, of the collapse of the home front, nor of the large-scale and small-time corruption.

I am talking about the fact that the people leading Israel today are unable to connect Israelis to their identity. Certainly not with the healthy, vitalizing and productive areas of this identity, with those areas of identity and memory and fundamental values that would give us hope and strength, that would be the antidote to the waning of mutual trust, of the bonds to the land, that would give some meaning to the exhausting and despairing struggle for existence.

The fundamental characteristics of the current Israeli leadership are primarily anxiety and intimidation, of the charade of power, the wink of the dirty deal, of selling out our most prized possessions. In this sense they are not true leaders, certainly they are not the leaders of a people in such a complicated position that has lost the way it so desperately needs. Sometimes it seems that the sound box of their self-importance, of their memories of history, of their vision, of what they really care for, exist only in the miniscule space between two headlines of a newspaper or between two investigations by the attorney general.

Look at those who lead us. Not all of them, of course, but many among them. Behold their petrified, suspicious, sweaty conduct. The conduct of advocates and scoundrels. It is preposterous to expect to hear wisdom emerge from them, that some vision or even just an original, truly creative, bold and ingenuous idea would emanate from them.

When was the last time a prime minister formulated or took a step that could open up a new horizon for Israelis, for a better future? When did he initiate a social or cultural or ideological move, instead of merely reacting feverishly to moves forced upon him by others?

Mister Prime Minister, I am not saying these words out of feelings of rage or revenge. I have waited long enough to avoid responding on impulse. You will not be able to dismiss my words tonight by saying a grieving man cannot be judged. Certainly I am grieving, but I am more pained than angry. This country and what you and your friends are doing to it pains me.

Trust me, your success is important to me, because the future of all of us depends on our ability to act. Yitzhak Rabin took the road of peace with the Palestinians, not because he possessed great affection for them or their leaders. Even then, as you recall, common belief was that we had no partner and we had nothing to discuss with them.

Rabin decided to act, because he discerned very wisely that Israeli society would not be able to sustain itself endlessly in a state of an unresolved conflict. He realized long before many others that life in a climate of violence, occupation, terror, anxiety and hopelessness, extracts a price Israel cannot afford. This is all relevant today, even more so. We will soon talk about the partner that we do or do not have, but before that, let us take a look at ourselves.

We have been living in this struggle for more than 100 years. We, the citizens of this conflict, have been born into war and raised in it, and in a certain sense indoctrinated by it. Maybe this is why we sometimes think that this madness in which we live for over 100 years is the only real thing, the only life for us, and that we do not have the option or even the right to aspire for a different life.

By our sword we shall live and by our sword we shall die and the sword shall devour forever. Maybe this would explain the indifference with which we accept the utter failure of the peace process, a failure that has lasted for years and claims more and more victims.

This could explain also the lack of reaction by most of us to the harsh blow to democracy caused by the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as a senior minister with the support of the Labor Party - the appointment of a habitual pyromaniac as director of the nation's firefighters.

And these are partly the cause of Israel's quick descent into the heartless, essentially brutal treatment of its poor and suffering. This indifference to the fate of the hungry, the elderly, the sick and the disabled, all those who are weak, this equanimity of the State of Israel in the face of human trafficking or the appalling employment conditions of our foreign workers, which border on slavery, to the deeply ingrained institutionalized racism against the Arab minority.

When this takes place here so naturally, without shock, without protest, as though it were obvious, that we would never be able to get the wheel back on track, when all of this takes place, I begin to fear that even if peace were to arrive tomorrow, and even if we ever regained some normalcy, we may have lost our chance for full recovery.

The calamity that struck my family and myself with the falling of our son, Uri, does not grant me any additional rights in the public discourse, but I believe that the experience of facing death and the loss brings with it a sobriety and lucidity, at least regarding the distinction between the important and the unimportant, between the attainable and the unattainable.

Any reasonable person in Israel, and I will say in Palestine too, knows exactly the outline of a possible solution to the conflict between the two peoples. Any reasonable person here and over there knows deep in their heart the difference between dreams and the heart's desire, between what is possible and what is not possible by the conclusion of negotiations. Anyone who does not know, who refuses to acknowledge this, is already not a partner, be he Jew or Arab, is entrapped in his hermetic fanaticism, and is therefore not a partner.

Let us take a look at those who are meant to be our partners. The Palestinians have elected Hamas to lead them, Hamas who refuses to negotiate with us, refuses even to recognize us. What can be done in such a position? Keep strangling them more and more, keep mowing down hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, most of whom are innocent civilians like us? Kill them and get killed for all eternity?

Turn to the Palestinians, Mr. Olmert, address them over the heads of Hamas, appeal to their moderates, those who like you and I oppose Hamas and its ways, turn to the Palestinian people, speak to their deep grief and wounds, acknowledge their ongoing suffering.

Nothing would be taken away from you or Israel's standing in future negotiations. Our hearts will only open up to one another slightly, and this has a tremendous power, the power of a force majeur. The power of simple human compassion, particularly in this a state of deadlock and dread. Just once, look at them not through the sights of a gun, and not behind a closed roadblock. You will see there a people that is tortured no less than us. An oppressed, occupied people bereft of hope.

Certainly, the Palestinians are also to blame for the impasse, certainly they played their role in the failure of the peace process. But take a look at them from a different perspective, not only at the radicals in their midst, not only at those who share interests with our own radicals. Take a look at the overwhelming majority of this miserable people, whose fate is entangled with our own, whether we like it or not.

Go to the Palestinians, Mr. Olmert, do not search all the time for reasons for not to talk to them. You backed down on the unilateral convergence, and that's a good thing, but do not leave a vacuum. It will be occupied instantly with violence, destruction. Talk to them, make them an offer their moderates can accept. They argue among themselves far more than we are shown in the media. Make them an offer that will force them to choose between accepting it or prefering to remain hostage to fanatical Islam.

Approach them with the bravest and most serious plan Israel can offer. With the offer than any reasonable Palestinian and Israeli knows is the boundary of their refusal and our concession. There is no time. Should you delay, in a short while we will look back with longing at the amateur Palestinian terror. We will hit our heads and yell at our failure to exercise all of our mental flexibility, all of the Israeli ingenuity to uproot our enemies from their self-entrapment. We have no choice and they have no choice. And a peace of no choice should be approached with the same determination and creativity as one approaches a war of no choice. And those who believe we do have a choice, or that time is on our side do not comprehend the deeply dangerous processes already in motion.

Maybe, Mr. Prime Minister, you need to be reminded, that if an Arab leader is sending a peace signal, be it the slightest and most hesitant, you must accept it, you must test immediately its sincerity and seriousness. You do not have the moral right not to respond.

You owe it to those whom you would ask to sacrifice their lives should another war break out. Therefore, if President Assad says that Syria wants peace, even if you don't believe him, and we are all suspicious of him, you must offer to meet him that same day.

Don't wait a single day. When you launched the last war you did not even wait one hour. You charged with full force, with the complete arsenal, with the full power of destruction. Why, when a glimmer of peace surfaces, must you reject it immediately, dissolve it? What have you got to lose? Are you suspicious of it? Go and offer him such terms that would expose his schemes. Offer him a peace process that would last over several years, and only at its conclusion, and provided he meets all the conditions and restrictions, will he get back the Golan. Commit him to a prolonged process, act so that his people also become aware of this possibility. Help the moderates, who must exist there as well. Try to shape reality. Not only serve as its collaborator. This is what you were elected to do.

Certainly, not all depends on our actions. There are major powers active in our region and in the world. Some, like Iran, like radical Islam, seek our doom and despite that, so much depends on what we do, on what we become.

Disagreements today between right and left are not that significant. The vast majority of Israel's citizens understand this already, and know what the outline for the resolution of the conflict would look like. Most of us understand, therefore, that the land would be divided, that a Palestinian state would be established.

Why, then, do we keep exhausting ourselves with the internal bickering that has gone on for 40 years? Why does our political leadership continue to reflect the position of the radicals and not that held by the majority of the public? It is better to reach national consensus before circumstances or God forbid another war force us to reach it. If we do it, we would save ourselves years of decline and error, years when we will cry time and again: "Behold land, for we hath squandered."

From where I stand right now, I beseech, I call on all those who listen, the young who came back from the war, who know they are the ones to be called upon to pay the price of the next war, on citizens, Jew and Arab, people on the right and the left, the secular, the religious, stop for a moment, take a look into the abyss. Think of how close we are to losing all that we have created here. Ask yourselves if this is not the time to get a grip, to break free of this paralysis, to finally claim the lives we deserve to live.

This text was first published in the Haaretz

(Translated by Orr Scharf)

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We must remain united !

By Steve Amsel
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A post from DesertPeace

Jonathan Cook is one of my favourite journalists. He is based in Nazareth and has written extensively on the conditions and situation of the Palestinian people in regard to their struggle for justice and nationhood. He is definitely one of the few foreign journalists that have an understanding of the problems facing these people.

However, in my humble opinion, when it comes to analysis of the Jewish 'left' in Israel, he is not that knowledgeable. Case in point is THIS article from the ElectricIntifada. In it he is critical of both Israeli author David Grossman as well as one of Israel's most respected Statesman of Justice, Uri Avnery. Both of these fine gentleman are not worthy of the negativity expressed towards them.

Let's take a look at the men in question... the descriptions found on Wikipedia are quite good...

First David Grossman

Then Uri Avnery

Both of these men have been outspoken in issues they believe in. Both have supported the struggles of the Palestinian people in one way or another.

Neither are perfect! Both are capable of saying things that not everyone agrees with. BUT.... we must look at the entire picture... we must ask ourselves if their role has been a positive one up to now, and if we agree that if it was we must not be as critical of them as many have been. We must all work together to defeat the zionist beast. We must work together to help the Palestinian people in their struggle. The attacks on anyone else only aids the enemy and divides our forces... let's not allow that to happen.

First appeared on DesertPeace