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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 12/14/12

The Sea and the River

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Tutmosis, Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon and many others came and passed on -- but none of them left a lasting mark on the country.

LIKE THEIR predecessors coming from the West, the Zionists had a bridgehead mentality from the start, and have it to this day.

Indeed, they had it even before the Zionist movement was officially founded. In his canonical book, Der Judenstaat, Theodor Herzl, the visionary whose picture hangs in the Knesset plenum hall, wrote that the future Jewish State would form a part of the "wall against Asia." It would serve as a "forward position of the culture against the barbarism."

Not just culture, but The Culture. And not just barbarism, but The Barbarism. For a reader in the 1890s, these needed no explanation: Culture was white and European, Barbarism was everything else, whether brown, red, black or yellow.

In today's Israel, five generations later, this mentality has not changed. Ehud Barak coined the phrase which reflects this mentality more clearly than any other: "We are a Villa in the Jungle."

Villa: culture, civilization, order, the West, Europe. Jungle: barbarism, the Arab/Muslim world surrounding us, a place full of wild animals, where anything can happen at any moment.

This phrase is repeated endlessly and accepted by practically everyone. Politicians and army officers may replace it with "the neighborhood" ("Shekhuna"). Daily examples: "In the neighborhood in which we live, we cannot relax for a moment!" Or: "In a neighborhood like ours we need the atom bomb!"

Moshe Dayan, who had a poetic streak, said two generations ago in the most important speech of his life: "We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a house....This is the fate of our generation, the choice of our life -- to be prepared and armed, strong and tough, or otherwise the sword will slip from our fist and our life will be snuffed out." In another speech, a few years later, Dayan clarified that he did not mean just one generation -- but many to come, endlessly -- the typical bridgehead mentality which knows no borders, neither in space nor in time.

(Just a personal remark: 65 years ago, a year before the foundation of Israel, I published a pamphlet which opened with the words: "When our Zionist fathers decided to set up a [national home in this country] they had the choice between two courses: They could appear [as] a bridgehead of the 'white' race and the master of the 'natives' [or] as the heirs of the Semitic political and cultural tradition [leading] the war of liberation of the Semitic peoples against European exploitation...")

The difference between sea-to-river and river-to-sea is not just political, and far from superficial. It goes right to the roots of the conflict.

BACK TO Meshal. His speech was a reiteration of the most extreme Palestinian line. The same words could have been delivered 70 years ago by the then leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. It is the line that has played into the hands of the Zionists and condemned the Palestinian people to disaster, to untold suffering and to its present situation.

Part of the blame must go to the Arabic language. It is a beautiful tongue, and can easily intoxicate its speaker. Modern Arab history is full of wonderful orators, who got so drunk on their own words that they lost contact with reality.

I remember an occasion when the Egyptian president, Gamal Abd al-Nasser, an outstanding rhetorician and the idol of the Arab masses, was making a sensible speech about Egyptian affairs, when somebody in the crowd shouted: "Palestine, oh Gamal!" Nasser forgot what he was talking about and launched into a passionate exposition of the Palestinian cause, heating himself up more and more, until he was obviously in a kind of trance. It was the state of mind which led him into the Israeli trap in 1967. (Israeli politicians since Menachem Begin are, fortunately, very poor speakers, speaking very inferior Hebrew.)

One could say, of course, that Meshal's speech before the masses was just a politician's bid for popularity and does not really count -- what counts is the very different positions he adopted behind the scenes in Egypt and Gaza. That might sound reasonable -- but is not.

First, because speeches influence the speaker. It would be very difficult for him to extract himself now from the verbal trap he set up for himself, even if Arab listeners have learned to take grandiose speeches with a grain of salt.

Second, because extreme Arab speeches immediately become ammunition in the hands of Israeli extremists. They reinforce the general contention, also from Ehud Barak, that "we have no partner for peace." Meshal's mirror image, Avigdor Lieberman, has already used this speech as his main weapon in repulsing the European condemnation of Netanyahu's new destructive settlement project.

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Uri Avnery is a longtime Israeli peace activist. Since 1948 has advocated the setting up of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In 1974, Uri Avnery was the first Israeli to establish contact with PLO leadership. In 1982 he was the first Israeli ever to meet Yassir Arafat, after crossing the lines in besieged Beirut. He served three terms in the (more...)
 

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