Lawrence of Cyberia

Abu Mazen As Ben-Gurion

Same sh*t, different day. Abu Mazen, who won't lift a finger to dismantle the infrastructure of terror is whining again that Israel's "security measures" are only making things worse:

Two hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians in East Jerusalem and suburbs, the core of our nation's social and industrial life, and thirty thousand Palestinians in Bethlehem, are isolated from all normal contact with the outside world, facing complete breakdown of the mechanism of civilized life apart from food supplies and a skeleton medical service. Industry crippled, trade paralyzed, unemployment threatening to become catastrophic. Industrial raw materials cannot enter, goods manufactured with available stock cannot be marketed outside. Workers cut off from places of work, children from schools. These restrictions have not affected terrorists nor stopped their outrages but instead have increased resentment of the hard-hit population, created fertile soil for terrorist propaganda, frustrating the Authority's attempt to combat terrorism by itself. Collective punishment is absolutely futile and senseless unless its real intention is to punish the whole community, ruin its economy and destroy the possibility of a viable Palestinian state.

Actually, Abu Mazen never really said that. But it sounds just like him doesn't it? Funnily enough, it's actually based on a quote by David Ben-Gurion, from an opinion piece he had published in the London Times in 1948, decrying the use of martial law in response to Zionist terrorism in Palestine. This is what he really wrote:

Two hundred and fifty thousand Jews of Tel Aviv and suburbs, core of country's social and industrial life, and thirty thousands of Jews in Jerusalem, mostly working-class quarters, isolated from all normal contact with outside world, facing complete breakdown of [the] mechanism [of] civilized life apart from food supplies and skeleton medical service. Industry crippled, trade paralyzed, unemployment threatening to become catastrophic. Industrial raw materials cannot enter, goods manufactured with available stock cannot be marketed outside. Workers cut off from places of work, children from schools. These restrictions have not affected terrorists nor stopped their outrages but instead have increased resentment of hard-hit population, created fertile soil for terrorist propaganda, frustrating community's attempt to combat terrorism by itself. Martial Law absolutely futile and senseless unless really meant to punish whole community, ruin its economy and destroy the foundations of the Jewish National Home. ...

The Other Road Map

Back to answering my “on hiatus” email. This is in response to reader A.H. who wanted to know “how can you possibly negotiate with the kind of people who would do this to a civilian bus?”, with a link to details of the suicide bombing of a Jerusalem bus in February 2004, in which eight Israelis were killed.

Well, there are two answers to that. The utilitarian answer is that you negotiate, even when people who do not support negotiations are committing acts of murder, because if you stop negotiating on behalf of the majority who want a political settlement every time there is an act of terror, then you are effectively giving a veto over the entire political process to the last uncooperative person or rejectionist faction with a gun or a bomb. You negotiate as if there is no terror and fight terror as if there were no negotiations, to borrow a phrase from Yitzhak Rabin. If you believe in a negotiated settlement, then stopping talks every time there is an act of violence is only shooting yourself in the foot. If on the other hand you don’t really believe in negotiations anyway, and the terror attacks are simply your pretext for not engaging in them, then at least have the honesty to that admit that you fear talking more than you fear terrorism, and that a little bit of terror actually suits you just fine.

The metaphysical answer is that there is no such thing as a “kind of people” that blow up busloads of civilians. If you claim that someone who would attack a bus is intrinsically a different kind of humanity from the rest of us, then you are simply making stuff up to avoid having to confront the fact that people just like us might do something so terrible, and having to ask yourself why that might be.

Palestinian terrorists do not attack civilian buses because they are a different species to the rest of us, they attack civilians because Israel enjoys overwhelming military superiority over them, and choose buses in particular because buses are uniquely vulnerable: they are numerous and therefore difficult to defend individually; they carry a large number of people in a small enclosed space which maximizes casualties; and they run on a published timetable, which makes them easy to ambush. In short, Palestinian militants choose to attack civilian buses for the same reasons that militants with a political agenda target civilian buses in Sri Lanka, and in Iraq, and in Colombia, and in Kosovo, and for the same reasons that Zionist militants targetted Palestinian civilian buses in British Palestine, which they did, by the way, with a regularity that makes Hamas et al look like a bunch of slackers. (Click on map to enlarge)

Careful What You Wish For

The Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism. The Israelis are like a guy who sets fire to his hair and then tries to put it out by hitting it with a hammer. They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than curb it.

-- Larry Johnson, Deputy Director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, 1989 - 1993.

We've all done things that didn’t turn out as we planned and that, with hindsight, we probably wouldn't embark upon again. If Israelis could undo one decision that turned out to have unforeseen and disastrous consequences, certainly some of them would choose to reverse the 1967 government's decision to ignore David Ben-Gurion's advice to get out quickly from the newly-occupied Palestinian Territories. But if there is one step that virtually all Israelis would now choose to undo, it would surely be the policy followed by successive Israeli governments in the late 1970's and early 1980's of actively assisting in the development of an Islamist infrastructure in the Occupied Territories, "to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative", as one former senior CIA official put it.

Unlike the PLO, Islamic organizations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were granted licences to operate by the Israeli occupation authorities, allowing them to establish charitable institutions for the propagation of Islam, and to recruit supporters. Israel also provided them with financial support through Brigadier General Yithzak Segev, the former military governor of Gaza, who told journalist Graham Usher: "The Israeli government gives me a budget and we extend some financial aid to Islamic groups via mosques and religious schools, in order to help create a force that can stand up against the leftist forces that support the PLO." According to Segev's memoirs: "There was no doubt that during a certain period the Israeli governments perceived it [Islamic fundamentalism] as a healthy phenomenon that could counter the PLO".

Arna's Last Child

Arna Mer (right, click all thumbnails to enlarge) was a Zionist pioneer in 1930's Palestine under the British Mandate. From the founding of the Jewish state in 1948, she campaigned for human rights in Israel, which for the most part meant speaking out for the rights of the Palestinian population. She became Arna Mer-Khamis when she married Saliba Khamis, a Palestinian Arab and leader of the Israeli Communist party. After the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, she was imprisoned several times for protests and demonstrations against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

During the first Palestinian intifada, when Israel closed all Palestinian schools, Arna Mer-Khamis opened a series of Care and Learning Centres in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, to meet the needs of the Palestinian children most affected by the daily unrest. She explained: "I have not come here because of philanthropic reasons. I have not come here in order to show that there are nice Jews that help the Arabs. I came to struggle against the Israeli occupation". At one of her Learning Centres, in the squalid refugee camp in Jenin, she opened a theatre - "Arna's House" - on the top floor of a building donated by a local woman, Samira Zubeida. The theatre troupe comprised a dozen local nine- and ten-year-olds, and the purpose of Arna's House was to give them a place where they could express creatively their everyday frustrations, anger and fear.

Arna's son, Israeli actor Juliano Mer-Khamis, helped select members for the troupe, filmed their earliest rehearsals and performances in 1987, and interviewed the child actors. "It was very easy to attract the children", he recalls. "The only option they had for playing was to beat the swamps with a stick. Anything would amuse them. Anyone who performed pantomimes for them would win them. You did not need much".

Juliano (left) returned to the theatre in 1995 on his mother's final visit to Jenin (Arna was in the final stages of terminal illness at that time), and recorded on film how the now-teenage actors were progressing under Oslo. Juliano returned with his video camera for a final visit in May 2002, immediately after the IDF's reinvasion of Jenin, to find out how the (now) young men who had once performed at Arna's House had fared in the battle, which had decimated the center of Jenin refugee camp where their family homes were located and where the theatre stood.

From his 15-years' worth of video footage, Juliano created a movie - Arna's Children - that described what became of the children in the Jenin theatre group through years of occupation, "peace process" and military invasion. The film follows in particular the progress of five leading members of the troupe - Ashraf, Nidal, Yusuf, Ala'a and Zakaria - and through their desperate lives, shows us what makes a "terrorist". (Hint: it's not genetic, it's not anti-semitism, they're not brainwashed, and they certainly don't "hate us for our freedoms").

Arna's Children won the Best Film award at Prague's One World Film Festival in April 2004. Days later, it received the Best First Documentary award at the Canadian International Documentary Festival. The following month, it was named Best Documentary at New York's Tribeca Film Festival. Sadly, by the time Arna's Children received this international recognition, all but one of the movie's leading characters were already dead.

A Uniter, Not A Divider

We are grateful to Sharon for two things -- he united all the Palestinian factions and he took away every option except to resist.

- Comment by a Palestinian human rights lawyer, cited by South African poet and anti-apartheid activist, Breyten Breytenbach, in An Open Letter To General Ariel Sharon

From yesterday's Washington Post:

JERUSALEM -- Three years ago, members of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah political movement created the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to compete with Hamas -- in effect, to see which organization's armed wing could send the most suicide bombers against Israel and win the most support among Palestinians.

Today the former rivals have forged alliances, a shift that is complicating Israeli efforts to thwart major attacks and blurring the ideological lines between nationalist and religious factions, according to Palestinian militants, analysts and senior Israeli military officials...

Since the start of this year, militant groups have asserted joint responsibility for three of the eight major attacks conducted against Israelis. Though the number of attacks is lower in comparison to previous years, Israeli military officials said the greater proportion of combined operations is significant and ominous.

"It's on a deep level now," said a senior Israeli military intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It's deep, and it's going to be deeper in the future."

Cutting Off Your Own Nose

Most of the [Israeli] public is not interested in examining the question of whether there is something illogical about Israeli policies. That Israeli majority is not ready to listen to hints that perhaps the military policies prevent, in the short term, some of the attacks and destroy the infrastructure, but in the long run create hundreds more volunteers for the unofficial Palestinian armies, and increase the danger of terrorism.

-- Amira Hass, Terror As A Natural Phenomenon, Ha'Aretz 15 Jan 2003.

Background to Israel's Last Three Suicide Bombings

1.
12 June 2003: IDF kills cousins Fadi and Salah Jaradat, during incursion into Jenin.
September 2003: IDF refuses four requests from Tayseer Jaradat, father of Fadi, for permission to travel from Jenin to Haifa for medical treatment (advanced liver cancer).
4 October 2003: Hanadi Jaradat, daughter of Tayseer, sister of Fadi and cousin of Salah Jaradat, carries out suicide bombing in Haifa, murdering 19 Israeli diners at Maxim's Restaurant.

2.
15 December 2003: IDF assassinates Fadi Hanani during month-long incursion into Nablus.
25 December 2003: Saed Kamal Hanani, 21, cousin of Fadi Hanani, blows himself up at Geha Junction, near Tel Aviv, killing four Israelis.

3.

3 January 2004: Palestinian mourners carry the body of Amer Arafat, 20, at bottom, and Amjad Bilal Al Masri, 15. Al Masri was shot by an Israeli sniper, during the IDF's month-long incursion into Nablus.

4 January 2004: Family members mourn as they lower into a grave the body of Mohammed al Masri, age 20, who was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier a day earlier while walking in the funeral procession of his cousin, Amjad.

11 January 2004: Israeli police search for the remains of 17-year-old Palestinian suicide bomber Iyad Bilal Masri in the village of Ginsafut near the West Bank town of Qalqiliya. "Al-Masri had been throwing stones at Israeli soldiers since he was 10 years old, but the slaying of his brother [Amjad] and cousin [Mohammed] by troops last week pushed him to take this drastic step, said his father, Bilal al-Masri....The events had a terrible impact on Iyad, who was standing next to Mohammed when he was shot, said the father. 'Mohammed was shot in the head, his brains sprayed all over (Iyad). Later, he found pieces in his hat,' he said." -- Associated Press

Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, 25 June 2002:
It is impossible to eradicate the terrorist infrastructure....The [IDF] operations themselves become the hothouse that produces more and more new suicide bombers. The military actions kindle the frustration, hatred and despair and are the incubator for the terror to come.

Ya think?

The War on Terror Quiz

In August 1943, this man wrote:

Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war. We are very far from any moral hesitations when concerned with the national struggle. First and foremost, terror is for us a part of the political war appropriate for the circumstances of today.

For a bazillion points, can you name the author?

"As much territory as possible, with as few Arabs as possible"

Since 1967, Israel has demolished about 10,000 Palestinian homes in the Occupied Territories. In U.S. news reports, house demolitions are usually reported as harsh – if understandable - reprisals taken against the families of suicide bombers (though whatever their motivation, such reprisals are illegal under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which protects all Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and in all Jerusalem from acts of reprisal by the Occupying Power). However, the mere fact that Israel has demolished 10,000 homes during a conflict in which the Palestinians have carried out 104 suicide bombings tells us that something beyond deterring suicide bombers or punishing their families is going on here.

According to UN figures, cited in Dismantling the Fortresses of Fear by Jeff Halper, former Professor of Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, less than 600 of the 10,000 houses demolished since the occupation began in 1967 involved security suspects. The rest — 94 percent — were simply houses of ordinary people who were in Israel’s way [emphasis mine]. Halper’s Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) puts it simply: Israel’s policy of house demolitions seeks to confine Palestinians to small enclaves, leaving most of the land free for Israeli settlement.

In other words, this what we would call ethnic cleansing, if it were being carried out by any nation on earth other than Israel, or inflicted upon any people other than the Palestinians. It is the same expulsion of one people from their land by another which provoked NATO bombing campaigns when it was perpetrated in Bosnia and Kosovo, but which is protected by the American veto at the Security Council when it is perpetrated by Israel.

In A prison that keeps getting smaller, Gideon Levy reminded Ha’aretz readers two weeks ago (during the High Holidays, which Israeli Jews celebrate with trips throughout Israel and trips abroad), 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. He describes how throughout the Oslo years, which were supposed to see the end of Occupation, Israel systematically shrunk the area in which Palestinian population could live, work and travel:

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.

On the subject of the Wall, Amira Hass reported last week, in an article (IDF Redefines Palestinians West of the Fence) that got no press here in the US, that the IDF had quietly changed the status of the first 12,000 Palestinians trapped on the "wrong" side of the Wall, i.e. between the Wall and the Green Line. Instead of being Palestinian residents of "Judea and Samaria", they now belong to a new category of non-citizen, “long-term residents” of the State of Israel.

The defining feature of the category “long-term residents” – apart from the slew of regulations to keep them effectively living in enclosures - is that they may continue their normal lives in their homes and on their land and travel to their daily jobs only if granted a special permit to do so by the Israeli military administration. Without a permit, they may be legally expelled from their own lands. (This new regulation explicitly does not apply to Israeli settlers living between the Wall and the Green Line, or to any Jew worldwide who is legally entitled to immigrate and settle there). Hass finished on a note of foreboding, pointing out that based on the new directives, thousands of Palestinians are essentially illegally residing in their homes and on their land, "between the obstacle and the State of Israel." And Israeli soldiers have full rights to throw them out without delay.

Yesterday, in a follow-up article (Expulsion, little by little), Hass reported that the slow expulsion of these Palestinians from their lands has already begun:

The fears and suspicions, as usual, came true – and very quickly. Hiding behind security rationales and the seemingly neutral bureaucratic language of military orders is the gateway for expulsion. Not massive expulsion, heaven forbid, not on trucks, and not far. Drop by drop, unseen, not so many that it would be noticed internationally and shock public opinion; with the proper measure so the Israelis can continue saying it's justified for security reasons…

In the first two Palestinian villages (Jabara and Ras a Tira) to come under the “Special Permits” regime, 66 people have been denied the permits that would allow them freedom of movement in and out of their villages. They are now faced with the option of giving up their work in neighboring cities, giving up their right to visit family members in the villages on the other side of the fence, etc., or packing up, abandoning their homes and their land, and heading east to the other side of the Wall to live as refugees in the shrinking enclaves where Palestinians are still allowed to live. As Hass points out, this affects more than those first 66, as [a]ll those who did not get a permit have a family: they'll have to decide whether to adjust to the new lifestyle, in which the father is in exile on the other side of the fence, and the family is only allowed to see him with permission from the army, or to leave the land.

Or to leave the land. That is what the Wall comes down to. If this barrier was really intended to defend Israel, it would be on the border between Israel and the Territories, and probably welcomed by Palestinians as much as Israelis. But this Wall (and the siege, and the closures) are actually about completing the depopulation that was begun in 1948, and have nothing to do with defending Israel within its internationally-recognised borders. As Gideon Levy concludes, they are measures that will bring Israel neither peace nor security, for [i]t has long since been shown that the mass imprisonment, far from preventing terrorism, only encourages it. Levy is right: the illegal measures which Israel inflicts on the Palestinian population with our support have consequences for us all. For as much as the U.S. media tries to present suicide bombers as people motivated by “hate for the Jews” or “jealousy of our freedom” the fact is that Palestinian militants do not need abstract hatreds to motivate them, when they have lived for 37 years under an Israeli military regime that discriminates against them and dispossesses them, and which continues only because we, the U.S., provide the financial support and diplomatic cover that make it possible.

Remember Hanadi Jarahat, who blew herself up at Maxim’s restaurant in Haifa on 4 October 2003, killing twenty people? Much has been made of the fact that she may have been motivated by seeing her brother Fadi and cousin Salah, members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, killed by the IDF on 12 June 2003. Less widely-reported is the fact that Jaharat’s 50-year-old father is suffering from terminal liver cancer. He could have been treated at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, but he discovered just one week before the Maxim's bombing that, as the father of a dead Jihadi, he had been refused the Israeli permit that would have allowed him out of besieged Jenin to receive potentially life-saving treatment. Is it really so hard to understand that when you tell someone that their desperately-ill father can’t go to Haifa for chemo, but must stay in his enclave and die untreated, they might just turn round and tell you, ‘In that case, I’ll go to Haifa. And I’ll die there. And so will you’ ?

Our Role In The Terror

Karen Armstrong writes in today’s Guardian about religious extremism and the role of the West in inspiring it. Although we would like to write off fundamentalism as inexplicable, or arising out of some inherent flaw in Islam, the direct cause is usually a discreet political struggle: sometimes, one that we have created (as in the overthrow of the Shah and the rise of the Ayatollahs), or one that we have allowed to fester beyond the point where a secular, pragmatic solution could be negotiated (eg the Palestinians under the Occupation). In both situations, we end up with a much more intractable problem than that inherent in the original political struggle, because once a political conflict becomes a holy war, the hope of compromise is lost: everyone can compromise their political beliefs, but no-one can compromise the will of God. She also makes the excellent point that The West has contributed to the growth of radical Islam in the region by repeatedly supporting undemocratic regimes, which allow little effective opposition. As a result, the only place where people have been able to express their anger and discontent has been the mosque. Iran is the classic case. And I would add Saudi Arabia to that.

She ends with the eminently sensible, but (in these testosterone-filled times) hopelessly politically incorrect: Terrorism is wicked and abhorrent, but it has not come out of the blue. If we simply write off these movements as irrational and inexplicable, we will feel no need to examine our own policies and behaviour. The shocking nihilism of the suicide killers shows they feel they have nothing to lose. Millenial or fundamentalist extremism has risen in nearly every cultural tradition where there are pronounced inequalities of wealth, power and status. The only way to create a safer world is to ensure that it is more just.

Fiddling While Rome Burns

Tomorrow we will be two years into our War on Terror. Perhaps this second anniversary of 9/11 is a good time to assess how well we did in punishing the perpetrators, identifying the causes of the attack, and hence ensuring that such an outrage would never happen again. So, how did we do? Well, we are embroiled for the foreseeable future in messy wars in two countries, one of which wasn’t even a terrorist hotbed till we got there. We are flat broke. Apart from Tony Blair and Ariel Sharon, we have no friends or allies left except for those we have bought (thank you Eritrea, for your two-man contribution to the occupying coalition in Iraq). Our civil liberties are eroded, and our capacity for civil discourse has been drowned in a sea of flag-waving xenophobia disguised as patriotism. Our army is stretched to the point that it would struggle to defend us against any real threat from the other two members of the Axis of Evil (Remember them? Iran and North Korea? The two that probably really are developing weapons of mass destruction?). And, after all this, we feel no safer.

As a people, we really don’t understand how we got to be so isolated in the world today; we don’t have any real understanding of what the future holds for us beyond perpetual war; but boy do we have a big shiny F***-OFF military machine, and a leadership that isn’t shy about using it. We can’t find bin Laden, we can’t stabilize Afghanistan, and we certainly can’t coordinate an effective international response to terrorism because that would require an honest appraisal of all its causes; but at least we can bomb to smithereens the sanctions-ridden remnants of Iraqi society, and take comfort from that. Bring ‘em on!

There is an undeniable parallel to our situation and that of the current Israeli government which, as former Labor Party leader Amram Mitzna points out (in Separation Now), has adopted assassination as the primary, and only, pillar of its policy toward the Palestinians. Both Israeli and American administrations determinedly deny that there are any legitimate political grievances fuelling the anger and violence directed at us. And both have fallen for the fallacy that somehow it is in our interest to meet violence with violence because we have overwhelming force, this despite the fact that the enemy takes away our military advantage by declining to fight on our terms. (That’s why they’re terrorists, right?). Americans and Israelis alike are governed by leaders who tell us that there really is a military solution to all our woes; we just need to hit the other side hard enough whenever he hits us. Or before he hits us. Or whenever we think he might be thinking about hitting us. Or whenever.

But isn’t this policy of retaliatory violence the very antithesis of leadership? Leadership isn’t about lashing out when you are hurt, or being propelled by your own blind fury into unwinnable wars fought on your enemies’ terms. It is about honestly assessing your own peoples’ best interests and leading your nation in the direction that will safeguard and further those interests, even if acting in your own best interests has the incidental effect of doing good things for the other side too. Mitzna, and his fellow Labor MK Avraham Burg (in A Failed Israeli Society Collapses While Its Leaders Remain Silent) warn that unless Israel’s leaders can embrace this reasoning, and recognize that Israel’s “Jewish democracy” cannot survive without a separate, independent Palestinian state alongside it, they are leading their people to not to Eretz Israel, but to the end of Zionism and to the creation of binational Palestine.

In Separation Now Mitzna warns that, no matter how gratifying it is in the short term to take revenge on those who blow themselves up on crowded Israeli buses, in the long term it is madness to continue fighting to maintain control over territories whose population will soon make Israel’s Jews a minority. He bemoans the fact that Israel no longer has leaders like Ben-Gurion and Rabin, who had the foresight to recognize that the thrill of occupying the Palestinian territories in 1967 would one day be eclipsed by the disaster of occupying the Palestinian people:

Rabin was hardly a member of Peace Now, but he understood what the terrorist organizations also understand and what, unfortunately, the government of Ariel Sharon has yet to understand: that the continued confrontation with the Palestinians and the continued Israeli control of Judea, Samaria [the West Bank] and Gaza means the liquidation of Zionism and the end of the Jewish state.

As the separation of Israelis and Palestinians into two nations is in Israel’s overwhelming national interest, then a responsible Israeli leadership should allow no other goal to take priority over it; not the thirst for revenge, nor the desire to appear tough on terror. So what if Palestinian independence would happen to please the Palestinians too? Israel needs a government that will do it anyway, because safeguarding Israel’s future isn’t a test of cajones, it’s a test of responsible leadership.

Former Speaker of the Knesset Avraham Burg echoes Mitzna’s call for honest leadership in his hard-hitting assessment of the current state of Israel. He too recognizes that changing demographics are finally forcing Israel to face a choice that the leadership has ducked since 1967: Greater Israel and apartheid, or the Two-State solution and democracy. But even more than Mitzna, Burg emphasizes that Israel has to withdraw – completely – from the Territories, not as a favor to the Palestinians, but as a favor to itself. Because as soon as Israel accepted that injustice, callousness, lawlessness and immorality were legitimate tools for ruling over other people, it could not prevent the same vices from seeping back into its own society too. While Israel expends its energies fighting to extend Zionism into the Territories, the Zionist basis of Israel proper is already in collapse at home.

We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed. It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive….

Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger forever, it won't work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism's superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing.

Burg recognizes that the price of pursuing “victory” over the Palestinians is the loss of the essential values that Zionism was meant to be built upon: its democracy, its morality and its very Jewishness. Isn’t that an echo of what we are seeing at home in response to 9/11? We have leaders who will safeguard America by military might, even if to do so they have to destroy the freedoms and civil liberties that the country was supposedly built upon. We don’t need leaders who will one day turn around and explain to us in all seriousness that they had to destroy America in order to save it. We need leaders who have the wisdom and courage to remind us when we are hurt and vengeful that, gratifying as it might be to give the other guy a bloody nose, it’s really not worth shooting ourselves in the head to do it.