Shimon Peres, Israel’s ninth president, was laid to rest at Mt. Herzl in
Jerusalem on
Friday 30th September 2016. Writing in Israeli newspaper Yedioth Achranot,
David Grossman said: “Peres’s entire being stood facing the future. In a
country that is being sucked ever deeper into a mythological, religious and
tribal narrative, he turned towards the universal, towards science, rationality
and the democracy of open information. He cast himself as an anchor on the seabed
of the future, the distant, invisible, imagined, utopian and optimistic future,
and began tugging himself towards it.” (The article was also featured in the UK’s major anti-Zionist
media outlet, The Guardian).
Shimon Peres was a
contradiction. Secular but respectful of
religious faith he was humble to the detriment of his political ambitions. He was a private individual in a job that
celebrated public participation. His staff made sure that his every move was
posted to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. He relentlessly pursued the
fulfillment of his ideas on economics, science and defense, along the way helping
to build Israel
into a stable and strong country. But he was viewed in Israel as
secretive, and therefore untrustworthy. Ridiculed
at home he was admired abroad; described as an international statesman in the
same class as Nelson Mandela and Queen Elizabeth II. Domestically, he was a serial loser whose
first electoral victory, at the age of 84, occurred when he was elected President
of Israel.
If Shimon Peres was
contentious, what has emerged from his death and funeral is the work that
Israel must urgently undertake to marginalize and exclude the Arab apartheid activists,
their Israeli fellow travelers on the far left and those foreign critics for
whom, we can do no good.
There are those people who
live to remember his failures (and ours) and their hatred is not just our
problem but the world’s. In their
eternal denigration of “our kind” this type of person will forgive every abomination
the anti-Zionist or antisemite commits while rarely, if ever, acknowledging our
shared humanity.
According to the headline in a
Times of Israel article published the day of Shimon Peres’s funeral, Ayman
Odeh, head of the 13-MK (member of the Knesset) anti-Zionist political bloc the
“Joint (Arab) List” extended condolences to the late president’s family but
also made it emphatically clear that his group had ‘no place’ in this ‘day of
national mourning’
Like every nation, the Arab
world has its problems. The first is a
racial ideology that places “the Arab” above all other human beings. Most Arab
countries reflect this prejudice within their national legal system. Not just the Arab nations. Many Muslim countries are in competition with
the Arab world in providing proof of their religious purity. They are disadvantaged in terms of
theological credibility because of their Jonny-come-lately status vis-à-vis
their “post-Arab” adoption of Muslim faith.
The second issue is a
theological conquest narrative ordained by the Prophet that gives each Muslim
the task of not simply defeating the infidel but also humiliating them along
the way. Then the victor refashions
their conquered foes history to claim ownership of any good done by their
dishonored enemy.
For much of the last two and a
half centuries and especially in the 21st Century the Islamist message has been
incongruent with a Western (and now) a secular, pluralistic and
internationalist outlook that continues to spread its gospel across the globe. A modern, Western, democratic and secular orientated
model for human society stands in contradistinction to an Islamist theology. And yet, the multiculturalists choose
inexplicably, to ignore any misbehavior, to excuse every atrocity carried out
in the name of Islam, or worse, to explain away such behavior. Islamism has given the world Wahhabism (18th
Century), Salafism (19th Century), the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda (20th
Century) and now in the 21sth Century, Islamic State. Human misery and death is their shared and
unbroken legacy.
Modern Israel was
founded along Zionist lines of secular, universal, utopian principles meant to
benefit all people. Being secular, Israel’s Jewish
pioneers failed to see and they then failed to acknowledge the religious and
racial dimensions of Arab opposition to Jewish self-determination. They did not appreciate the historical
baggage that the Arab conquest narrative endowed them with. It blinded most Arabs to ever considering an
accommodation with the inferior Jew. That
same Arab blindness rules opposition to the state of Israel more so now than before. This lack of understanding was and remains
Zionism’s failure because it prevents us from confronting it.
Post 1948, some of the early
Arab Israeli leaders not only accommodated but also embraced the nascent state
of Israel. Their children, people such
as Basel Ghattas (Christian) and Haneen Zoabi (Sunni Muslim) went in the
opposite direction.
It was no-one’s fault. Israel was a
wasteland that had been abused and desolated by over a thousand years of willful
neglect. Arab and Bedouin marauders destroyed any possibility for material or
physical progress; the Ottoman Empire in its last few hundred years was
relentlessly corrupt and just let the gangs get on with extorting whatever they
could from whoever they could. “To a
very large extent Palestinian Arab middle and professional classes ‘emigrated’
with most of their property as soon as it was proposed that a Jewish state
should be established in the country.” (“Whose Land” by James Parkes). The
issue here is that a group of people without leadership soon descends into anarchy.
Leaderless, the people will listen with eagerness to any demagogue who will
offer them a way, any way. If they were told to flee by their Arab brethren,
they would do so.
Israel in 1948
had a nation to build, with few resources and always under threat of violence
from its Arab enemies. Israel
had to find a way to feed and protect its people against a bellicose enemy. That enemy talked itself out of any peaceful
debate through its perceived hostility.
The Arab world used triumphal and irredentist rhetoric and religious bigotry to preclude
debate with their Jewish enemy (as Palestinians continue to do today) and it ethnically
cleansed all its Jewish citizens. A
people who, just a few years earlier, had suffered the slaughter of a third of
their number was threatened by the Arab world with “finishing the job.” Consolidation
and protection took precedence over creating an integrated society. Israel’s mutually antagonistic
ethnic groups incrementally grew more distant with each passing decade. The
dominant Ashkenazi Jews dictated government policy while doing nothing to
discourage separate non-inclusive identification. A melting pot takes multiple
generations, a collective will to integrate and it requires a national dialogue
which with one exception (Mizrachi-Sephardi society) did not exist.
Religious groups remained
wholly uninterested in integration and therefore accommodated each other only to
the degree that self-interest dictated their engagement with the state.
It is therefore hardly surprising
that the Joint (Arab) List as referred to earlier is primarily interested in
sowing discord between Israeli Arab and Israeli Jew. A person born in Israel is an Israeli by
nationality, whether they are ethnically Arab, Circassian, Jewish, or anything
else. The politics of division is meant
to create a fractured society that will become unstable and inevitably
ungovernable.
Arab MKs like Ghattas and
Zoabi and religious leaders such as Raed Salah of the Islamic Movement’s
Northern Chapter preach division. They want separate education, cultural
autonomy and administrative independence from the Jewish state. Arabs live
throughout the state. A Jew could only ever aspire to live among the Arabs if
he or she first converts to Islam. Violence is the Arab response to physical
co-existence with Jews. The apartheid
that exists in Israel
is Muslim, it is Arab and it is essentially unchanged from its pre-1948
prejudiced origins. It is the same bigotry that greeted The First Aliyah
(between 1882 and 1903). It is the same
religious hatred that has greeted successive waves of Jewish immigration to the
Holy land for over one thousand years.
In 1948 and beyond, the State
of Israel had neither financial resources nor the concentrated intellectual
focus to address the integration issues of all its citizens. Many of them were
waiting for the state to fail and the victorious Arab armies to destroy the
Jewish Republic. Suspicion, fear and the
politics of sectarian advantage dominated the first phase of development.
While Ashkenazi and Mizrachi
Jews now intermarry at a rate that is greater than 50% there will always be
those people who will want to point out that the cup is almost half empty
rather than greater than half full. Dissatisfaction and discord encourages the
bureaucracy of state to buy off the professional malcontent.
Israel may not be
able to solve the intractable conflict between the Jewish state and Arab
Palestine but it must address the Jews as well as Arabs who sow discord in
society by emphasizing our differences. The MKs who refused to participate in Israel’s day of
national mourning did so but their excuses are mendacious at best. They could
not forgive a Jewish state its existence if it was located on the dwarf-planet
Pluto.
The next phase in the
development of the state must address prejudice and inequality from every
quarter of society and that includes the ultra-orthodox bigots who deny
Mizrachi children places in their schools, as well as the people who fear the
Arab moving in next door. It includes
the racist who chants abuse in football matches and MKs who rejoice at our
enemies’ successes against us.
The MK who urges separation from
Israel
and subsumation into the greater Arab world does not desire peace or justice
but the next phase in an Arab conquest story that should shame them but only
inspires them to greater degrees of prejudice.
The Jew who wants to keep the faithful loyal to a narrowly interpreted
sectarian image of circumscribed piety does not care for the survival of the
state but only for his own narrowly tribalistic and dysfunctional world view
that can only, counter-intuitively inhibit Jewish spiritual growth in the reborn
Jewish state.
The next phase in Israel’s
development must see every effort made to integrate all sections of society
into a Zionist state for all its citizens.
That is what the dreamers saw, on both Left and Right, in the original
Zionist vision. Shimon Peres would smile
at that.
Shanah Tovah to everyone.
Shanah Tovah to everyone.
