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This Was
The Day
by Uri Avnery
August 18th, 2005 - a milestone in the history of the State of
Israel.
This was the day on which the settlement enterprise in this
country went into reverse for the first time.
True, the settlement activity in the West Bank continues at full
speed. Ariel Sharon intends to give up the small settlements in
the Gaza Strip in order to secure the big settlement blocs in
the West Bank.
But this does not diminish the significance of what has happened:
it has been proven that settlements can be dismantled and must
be dismantled. And important settlements have indeed been
dismantled.
The settlement enterprise, that had always gone forwards, only
forwards, in a hundred overt and covert ways, has been turned
back. For the first time. (Yamit and its settlements were not in
Eretz Israel, and therefore their evacuation in 1982 did not
constitute an ideological break. But this time it happened in "the
Land of our Fathers".)
A historic event. A message for the future.
This was the day on which the
message of the Israeli peace movement finally got through. A
great victory, for all to see.
True, it is not us who did it. It was done by a man far removed
from us. But, as the Hebrew saying goes: "The work of the
righteous is done by others." Others: meaning those who are not
righteous, who may even be wicked.
At the beginning of the settlement activity, during one of my
clashes with Golda Meir in the Knesset, I told her: "Every
settlement is a land-mine on the road to peace. In due course
you will have to remove these mines. And let me tell you, Ma'am,
as a former soldier, that the removal of mines is a very
unpleasant job indeed."
If I am angry, profoundly sad and frustrated today, it is
because of the price we all have paid for this monstrous "enterprise".
The thousands killed because of it, Israelis and Palestinians.
The hundreds of billions of Shekels poured down the drain. The
moral decline of our state, the creeping brutalization, the
postponement of peace for dozens of years. Anger with the
demagogues of all stripes that started and continued this March
of Folly, out of stupidity, blindness, greed, intoxication with
power or sheer cynicism. Anger over the suffering and
destruction wrought on the Palestinians, whose land and water
were stolen, whose houses were destroyed and whose trees were
uprooted - all for the "security" of these settlements.
I have also sympathy for the plight of the inhabitants of Gush
Katif, who were seduced by the settlers' leadership and
successive Israeli governments to build their life there -
seduced either by messianic demagoguery ("It's God's will") or
by economic temptations ("A luxury villa surrounded by lawn,
where else could you dream of this?") Many people from the
remote townships in the Negev, stricken with poverty and
unemployment, succumbed to these temptations. And now it is
finished, the sweet dream has evaporated and they have to start
their life anew - albeit with generous compensation.
The television networks did us a great favor when they reran,
between the scenes of the evacuation, old footage of the
founding of these settlements. We heard again the speeches of
Ariel Sharon, Joseph Burg, Yitzhak Rabin (yes, he too), Hanan
Porat and others - the whole litany of nonsense, deceit and
lies.
During the last few years, the peace camp has been seized by a
fashion for despair, despondency and depression. I keep
repeating: there is no cause for this. In the long run, our
approach is winning. Now it must be emphasized: the Israeli
public would not have supported this operation, and Sharon would
not have been able to carry it out, if we had not prepared
public opinion by voicing ideas that were far removed from the
national consensus and repeating them countless times over the
years.
This was the day when the settlers' ideology collapsed.
If there is a God in heaven, He did not come to their rescue.
The messiah stayed at home. No miracle occurred to save them.
Many of the settlers were so sure that a miracle would indeed
happen at the very last moment, that they did not take the
trouble to pack their belongings. On television one could see
homes where the uneaten meal was still on the table and the
family photos on the wall. Sights I remember well from the 1948
war.
All the boasts and bluster of the pair of settlers' leaders,
Wallerstein and Lieberman (who always remind me of Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern, the two villains in "Hamlet") went up in
smoke. The masses did not stream into the streets all over
Israel and use their bodies to block the forces sent to empty
the settlements. The hundreds of thousands, including the
opponents of the disengagement, remained at home, glued to their
television sets. The mass refusal of soldiers to obey orders,
promised and incited by the rabbis, just did not happen.
At the decisive moment, the reality we always knew about was
exposed for all to see: the messianic-nationalist sect, the
leadership of the settlers, is isolated. In their behavior and
style, they are foreign to the Israeli spirit. The hundreds of
settlers who have lately been seen on television, all the men
wearing yarmulkes, all the women wearing long skirts, with their
interminable dancing and their endlessly repeated ten slogans,
look like the members of a closed sect from another world.
"It looks as if we are not one but two peoples: a people of the
settlers and a people of settler-haters!" moaned one of the
rabbis when his settlement was emptied. That is accurate. In the
confrontation between the lines of soldiers, who were drafted
from all strata of society, and the lines of the settlers, it is
the soldiers who, in this unique situation, represent the people
of Israel, while the settlers embody the negative side of the
Jewish ghetto. The unending bouts of collective weeping, the
meticulously staged scenes designed to evoke images of pogroms
and death marches, the monstrous imitation of the frightened boy
with his arms raised from the famous holocaust photo - all these
were reminiscent of a world that we thought we had shaken off
when we created the State of Israel.
At the moment of truth, the Yesha leaders found that no part of
Israeli society stood up for them, except the gangs of male and
female pupils of the religious seminaries, who they had sent to
Gush Katif. The bedlam they created on the roof of the Kfar
Darom synagogue, when they viciously attacked the soldiers, put
an end to their hopes of winning public support. But even before
that, the settlers had lost the crucial battle for public
opinion when their real purpose was revealed: to impose by force
a faith-based, messianic, racist, violent, xenophobic regime,
with its back to the world at large.
But most importantly, this was the day when a new chance was
born for achieving peace in this tortured land.
A great opportunity. Because the Israeli democracy has won a
resounding victory. Because it has been proven that settlements
can be dismantled without the sky falling. Because the
Palestinians have a leadership that wants peace. Because it has
been proven that even the radical Palestinian organizations hold
their fire when Palestinian public opinion demands it.
But it must be clearly stated: this withdrawal carries with it a
great danger: if we stop in the middle of jumping over it, we
shall fall into the abyss.
If we do not progress rapidly from here to a settlement with the
Palestinian people, Gaza will indeed turn into a platform for
missiles - as Binyamin Netanyahu is prophesying (which may well
be a self-fulfilling prophecy). In the eyes of the Palestinians,
and the entire world, the withdrawal from Gaza is - first of all
- a result of the armed Palestinian resistance. If in the coming
weeks we make no progress towards a negotiated agreement, a
third intifada will surely break out, and the whole country will
go up in flames.
We must immediately start serious negotiations, declaring in
advance that within a specific time-span the occupation will end
with the establishment of the State of Palestine. All the main
elements of the settlement are already known: a solution for
Jerusalem in line with the Clinton proposal ("What is Arab will
belong to Palestine, what is Jewish will belong to Israel"),
withdrawal to the Green Line with an agreed exchange of
territories, a solution of the refugee problem in accord with
Israel.
This was the day that will go down in history as the day on
which a great hope was born.
Not the beginning of the end in the struggle for peace, but
certainly the end of the beginning.
A small step towards peace, a giant step for the State of
Israel.
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