Haaretz
Tishrei 16, 5765
The profound traditional wisdom of starting to
build the sukkah right after the end of Yom Kippur clashed with stupidity
last week. On that very day of fasting, the Israel Defense Forces
demolished 10 houses in Khan Yunis in response to the killing of three
Givati Brigade soldiers near Morag, and the firing of a mortar shell that
killed Tiferet Tratner in Neveh Dekalim. This was one of those follies
that are born of the coupling of vengeance and confusion.
Within
distressing anxieties, Israel is very confused at the end of four years of
intifada, with 1,071 Israelis dead, among them 703 civilians, 5,598
wounded, three times as many Palestinian dead and more than 20,000
Palestinians wounded. And the Qassams are continuing to fall on
Sderot.
During this lost time, more than 3,500 Palestinian homes
have been demolished and tens of thousands of housing units have been
built in the Jewish settlements in the territories - the precise number is
unknown - despite the freeze orders. Now the prime minister intends to
evacuate the Jewish settlements in Gaza in order to build up what looks to
him and to the Israeli majority as a chance to approach an agreement. This
tragic conjunction of building and destruction, between the will to live
and the fear of death, after 17 years of Palestinian revolt has become the
national agenda.
In a parallel move, the thought of a comprehensive
agreement has been plucked from the Israeli mind. Oslo has been
reincarnated as Auschwitz. Camp David has become a malediction, and not
only because of destructive Palestinian stubbornness. To a large extent
this was the contribution of former prime minister Ehud Barak: He was
there and he came back with the claim that there was no one with whom to
talk.
Yonatan Bassy, a National Religious Party man of the good old
sort who has been the object of threats to his life as head of the
Disengagement Administration, courageously and accurately spoke this week
of the "life in a state of psychological repression" among the Jewish
settlers. But this process is happening not only among settlements in the
territories that are slated for evacuation.
For many years now
Israel has been sweeping under its rug the truth at the heart of the
conflict. The continued building of the state will be possible only at the
price of destroying the shaky scaffolding of Jewish settlement in the
midst of an Arab population. This truth is sharp and painful. The more
acute this desperate and useless battle between Israeli force and
Palestinian despair becomes, the harder it becomes to digest.
But
there are facts that speak for themselves and are no less painful. The
Israel Defense Forces has failed in offering a solution to terror attacks.
The army can point to prevention, to the thwarting of a larger number of
murders. The Mossad - if it was indeed the Mossad - is capable of
stretching a long arm to Damascus. In the long run, in vain.
It is
not Israeli impotence that is allowing Qassams to fall on Sderot. It is
not flabbiness and a lack of resourcefulness that are preventing the
mythological amputation of the arm of terror. This is an old matter that
goes far beyond the capability of any occupying nation - the United States
in Iraq, mandatory Britain, France in Algeria, or if you want a
non-colonialist example, the war in former Yugoslavia.
There is no
answer to terror except an agreement, and in such cases the agreement is
always complicated and takes a long time; its way is paved with
disappointments and it demands severe concessions.
We dwell among
our own people and we hear the increasingly preponderant voices warning of
the danger to the Israeli enterprise. Not those of a fanatic right that is
crying out against sinking because of abandoning of the values of the
greater land of Israel. The existential fear of the future is today the
domain of many Israelis. Their simple and non-ideological worry is for
their children's fate.
There is the sukkah of peace and there is
David's falling tabernacle. Between them, the Israeli reality is in the
worst possible state: treading air. The disengagement will not remove the
blindfold, and it will not cancel out the repression in full. If it is
carried out, the withdrawal and the evacuation will be but a small part of
what is waiting around the bend in the road. But with all its limitations,
it serves up a lot more than the nothing at all of Israeli policy during
the past decade. Supporting it is the order of the day at a time of great
confusion.