By Shraga Elam
2 May 2014
The US Secretary of State is primarily responsible for
the current crisis between the government of Israel and the leadership of the
Palestinian Authority. If not for the utterly superfluous American pressure,
matters would not have deteriorated to this point. Even a novice in issues
related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could have told the American
Secretary of State that the two sides were quite content with the status quo
and were constantly praying that nobody would make waves.
It is not clear why Kerry applied so much pressure.
After all, the dead end is no coincidence, but a direct result of the
irrelevance of what is called the “two-state vision”. It is hard to understand
the adherence, not only of the US Administration, to that delusional vision,
which apart from being immoral, is not even appealing.
From the beginning, even when the UN passed the
Partition Resolution in 1947, it should have been clear that the idea would be
stillborn. Over the years the situation got no better and to the Soviet Union’s
impassioned support for that deranged idea, by means of which it evidently
hoped to enhance its influence in the Middle East, was added the compulsive
faith of the US. What does the American superpower hope for? To capture the
hearts of the Gulf states rich in oil and money?
There are many reasons why that “vision” cannot work
and certainly cannot last. In broad strokes, the central problem is that the
time has come once and for all to internalize the fact that Jews and Arabs
west of the Jordan River are like Siamese twins who cannot be separated. They
are condemned to live together or die together.
The nationalism, and its relative, the racism, of all
sides (there are probably more than two) can lead only to destruction.
It is not the number of states that counts, but a
serious confrontation of the mutual racism, hate and distrust.
Is it possible?
It is not simple, but the Swiss model, for example,
shows us that hundreds of years ago some Swiss people who were not considered
particularly wise still learned this important lesson. They understood that the
many conflicts would not lead to a good place. For many years afterwards the
conflicts continued. Catholics, for example, were barred from living in the
Canton of Zurich – and that was not so long ago. And that is to say nothing of
the tensions between French-speakers and German-speakers. Nevertheless, that
path is possible and not at all utopian. Hopefully the Middle East in general
and Israel/Palestine in particular could adopt the Swiss situation. The first step towards the
Swiss model is very simple, in theory:
dissolve the Palestinian Authority.
dissolve the Palestinian Authority.
The next step: a struggle for full civil rights for
the Arab residents.
Interestingly, the place where such an idea enjoys
support is none other than the extreme Israeli Right – for example, the group
around Tsvi Misinai.
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* The title of this article in the original Hebrew was
“Kerry ba-layla”, which means “Kerry at night” and except for one extra letter
it is spelt identically to the Hebrew/Aramaic term for “wet dream” – “keri
layla” (literally “night event”) but means also Kerry is a smart aleck.
Translated from Hebrew by George Malent
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