[BRIEF NOTE] How to Destroy Israel
Aug. 11th, 2004 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldIn today's Jerusalem Post, Ron Breiman--"chairman of Professors for a Strong Israel"--has written an article called "Stop transfer." The transfer that's he's referring to isn't the proposal to remove Arabs from greater Israel, no:
Breiman's central point is at the end of the article:
Now, if Israelis accepted Breiman's thesis that the West Bank and metropolitan Israel are interchangeable and that the Jewish settlements established in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip should not only remain (as a fundamental point of policy) but that they should be expanded, regardless of international opinion, then their country will be doomed.
Consider that If Israel does as Breiman suggests, then the logic for identifying Israel as an apartheid state becomes much stronger: Israel really would be a settler state run purely for the benefit of a minority population of Jews, regardless of the will of a mostly disenfranchised Arab population, with the minority population's settlements continuously spreading and surrounding Arab bantustans. It would be no more racist to oppose Jewish self-determination in that context than it would have been to oppose Afrikaner self-determination in the context of the apartheid regime of the 1980s, for any people's right to self-determination cannot and should not be so blatantly exercised to the exclusion of others. Inasmuch as I've no faith in the ability of a binational Jewish-Palestinian state to survive without falling into a civil war that would make Lebanon's a minor dust-up between drunken friends, this would be a bad solution; inasmuch as there'd be no alternative between that and supporting apartheid, it would be not particularly worse than any other solution.
Here's to hoping that Breiman doesn't get his way.
Unlike Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin, whose failed plans gambled on tranquilizing the public with promises of "peace" and "a new Middle East," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon doesn't even bother to use anesthetic verbiage before laying his patients on the operating table.
From Beilin to Sharon, the common denominator is transfer. Forget the neutral terms "disengagement," or "evacuation" or "dismantlement." We are talking about transfer.
The transfer of Jews from their homes in their own country because they are Jews. If that's not racism, what is?
Breiman's central point is at the end of the article:
Clarify that transfer will destroy Israel as a sovereign state. A state that retreats in the face of terror, that accepts terrorist ultimatums and burrows itself into the ground or, in the words of Hizbullah's Hassan Nasrallah, "behind spider web barriers," will find itself swept out of the Middle East by the fire of terrorism ignited in the wake of the revelation of its weakness.
Clarify that transfer will destroy Israel as Jewish state: He who relinquishes claims to the Temple Mount relinquishes all claim to the land of Israel.
Jerusalem and the Temple Mount are the heart of the Jewish people; Judea and Samaria are its arteries; not Tel Aviv or Herzliya. On the 100th anniversary of Herzl's death it is well to remember that Zionism arose in order to gather the People of Israel into the Land of Israel, before there was a "Green Line, or "occupied territories," or "the occupation."
An Israel that relinquishes the Temple Mount and recognizes it as being "abroad" is not a state and is not Jewish.
Now, if Israelis accepted Breiman's thesis that the West Bank and metropolitan Israel are interchangeable and that the Jewish settlements established in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip should not only remain (as a fundamental point of policy) but that they should be expanded, regardless of international opinion, then their country will be doomed.
Consider that If Israel does as Breiman suggests, then the logic for identifying Israel as an apartheid state becomes much stronger: Israel really would be a settler state run purely for the benefit of a minority population of Jews, regardless of the will of a mostly disenfranchised Arab population, with the minority population's settlements continuously spreading and surrounding Arab bantustans. It would be no more racist to oppose Jewish self-determination in that context than it would have been to oppose Afrikaner self-determination in the context of the apartheid regime of the 1980s, for any people's right to self-determination cannot and should not be so blatantly exercised to the exclusion of others. Inasmuch as I've no faith in the ability of a binational Jewish-Palestinian state to survive without falling into a civil war that would make Lebanon's a minor dust-up between drunken friends, this would be a bad solution; inasmuch as there'd be no alternative between that and supporting apartheid, it would be not particularly worse than any other solution.
Here's to hoping that Breiman doesn't get his way.
