A vote for war, against
peace
By Charley Reese
Orlando Sentinel, February 13, 2001
The Israelis have voted for war and against peace. That is the
naked truth of the election of Ariel Sharon as prime minister.
Those who try to pretend otherwise delude themselves that
Sharon, at age 72, will repudiate his whole life, which has been
brutal and bloody. In fact, he already has killed the peace talks
by taking Jerusalem off the table and telling the Palestinians
that any new talks must start at ground zero. In other words,
Sharon considers any agreements reached with the previous prime
ministers null and void.
It's a sad day. Israel stood in the doorway that leads to
peace. All it had to do was return to the long-suffering
Palestinians what rightfully is theirs -- the West Bank, Gaza and
East Jerusalem -- and acknowledge the right of refugees to return
or compensation. Had Israel done that, peace would have
followed.
But the Israelis stepped back from the door and turned to their
dark past. Their lust for land is greater than their desire for
peace. Their faith in the sword is greater than their faith in
justice. They prefer oppression to cooperation.
It won't be immediately obvious, but the Israelis really have
chosen national suicide. You're seeing the beginning of the end of
the Zionist dream. Oh, they can kill thousands of Palestinians,
and probably will. The killing will not yield the Israelis peace.
The French won the military battles in Algeria, but the French
left. We won the military battles in Vietnam, but we left.
In a real sense, the Israelis have created their own
unconquerable enemy. The Israelis have made the lives of
Palestinians so miserable, so impoverished, so hopeless that the
Palestinians literally have nothing left to lose. It is a lot
easier for them to die for freedom and independence than it will
be for well-off Israelis to die to continue the occupation.
"Sharon will pose grave dangers not only for Palestinians, whom
he is likely to brutalize, but also the entire region and possibly
to world peace," said Michael Lerner, rabbi at San Francisco's
Beyt Tikkun synagogue and editor of Tikkun magazine. "The path
Israel is following is no surprise. Countries that seek to
maintain by force the occupation over another people will
eventually drift toward repressive or even fascistic leadership.
The mean-spiritedness in Israel that leads to a Sharon landslide
makes many younger Israelis wish to leave Israel."
The formidable Jewish lobby, which has had a hard enough time
trying to rationalize the brutality of Ehud Barak, really will
have its hands full trying to rationalize the actions of Sharon.
In the 1950s he led a massacre of men, women and children in
Qibya. He was also the architect of expanded Jewish settlements
and the invasion of Lebanon.
The Israelis may, in fact, push their American lobby to such
extremes that a backlash occurs. After all, how many Palestinian
children shot to death or beaten to death can you blame for their
own deaths? How long can you maintain the myth that the people
with 346 dead and 10,000 wounded are causing all the violence and
the side with only 46 dead are the pacifists?
How many times can you get away with crying anti-Semite every
time a church group, a human-rights group or an international
organization criticizes Israel's brutality?
I've always believed that Israel's support in this country is
10 miles long and an eighth of an inch deep. It consists mainly of
the lobby, the rapture cult and those cowards in the Congress. In
the past, nobody had to pay a price for supporting Israel. It was
Israel's critics who had to pay the price.
Sharon, judging on the basis of his past, probably will reverse
that.
Copyright © 2001, Orlando Sentinel
