Under The Volcano- Haaretz

["Macdonald Stainsby" <mstainsby@xxxxxx>]

Haaretz
June 10, 2001

Under the volcano

        By Gideon Levy

There has never been such unity here. Listen to the Israeli public
discourse and you hear only one voice. From one terrorist attack to the
next, the nails are being driven into the coffin of the concept of
pluralism in Israel; the attack at the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv was the
last nail. The horror of the event sent everyone into a state of paralysis:
children and parents, right and left - everyone agrees with everyone else.
Fear became the teacher and brought about a consensus that would shame no
totalitarian regime. One nation, one stand. Its basic elements: there is no
one to talk to, Arafat is not a partner, we have to do "something," to
deliver a final crushing blow once and for all. We offered them everything
and they chose war, there will not be peace in this generation, we will
live by the sword for all time.

And overlaying it all, an appalling wave of hatred for Arabs has seized
everyone. Who doesn't hate Arabs a little these days? Who still believes
them? Who thinks it's possible to make peace with them?

Where are the days when it used to be said that for every two Israelis
there were three opinions? Now, every three Israelis have barely one
opinion. From being an ultra-involved nation, where every social gathering
and every taxi trip was always accompanied by lively political arguments,
the nation in recent months has become a choir that sings one song, in one
voice. Beyond the monotony, and the danger such a development poses for
democracy, it holds out a more immediate risk. The fact that no one is
asking tough questions, that no one is proposing bold alternatives and that
the public agenda is becoming so uniform, wholly aimed at the next war,
should be cause for great concern. Like a village living below a volcano
and waiting complacently for the next eruption, Israel is watching events
unfold as though watching a natural disaster over which no one has any
control, and muttering its well-worn slogans. So we're headed for another
terrible eruption of bloodletting, that's how it goes.

Above all we are witnessing the evaporation of the left; but there is
hardly anything left of the center, either. "We are all settlers," say
people who not long ago styled themselves leftists and centrists; it is not
only writers' widows, such as Edna Shabtai, who are turning right. The thin
shell of the peace camp broke apart in an instant, after its enlightened
members found out that the Palestinians were not managing their affairs
exactly according to the model the peaceniks had created for them. The
Palestinians resorted to violence and dared to demand the right of return.
The conclusion: the left was wrong. The result: an almost wholesale drift
to the right. The media, the leaders of the peace camp, together with
Labor, the Likud and Rehavam Ze'evi - all are declaiming almost the same
message. Can anyone seriously point today to substantial differences not
only between Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres, but even between Yossi Sarid
and Limor Livnat? The right says, honestly, that it aspires to fighting a
war, while the left says that war is inevitable because of Arafat. That is
a very minor difference - too minor.

The lip service the left is paying in the form of calls for a freeze on
construction in the settlements or for the establishment of a Palestinian
state, is pathetic: too little and too late.

It didn't have to be this way. The voice that has been muted is now more
essential than ever. Israel needs another voice now, not just that of the
brave but minuscule Gush Shalom (the Peace Bloc). Where are the
intellectuals and the statesmen to assert that the Palestinians could never
have accepted what Ehud Barak offered, that the way it was offered outraged
them even more? Who will declare that a just solution to the conflict must
include not only a fair territorial solution but also a just solution for
the refugees, including recognition of their right of return?

Who will speak out in a loud voice to offer a truth different to the one
now sweeping the country from end to end? Who will state that the
occupation is an act of violence, the most terrible of all, that terrorism
is not only suicide bombers but also firing missiles at inhabited homes?
Who will assert the truth: That there are too few differences between a
person who blows himself up outside a discotheque and kills 20 boys and
girls, and a person who frivolously fires shells at a house in which an
infant girl has just finished drinking milk from her mother's breast? That
depriving a whole nation of freedom of movement and placing that nation in
a prison is an act of violence more cruel than any in the past, and stirs a
people to fight using whatever means it has? That the incitement in the
Palestinian media is not that much worse than the incitement on Israeli
radio and television? That the present war is first and foremost a war over
Netzarim and Yitzhar, and that if they or all the settlements did not exist
our situation would be immeasurably better? That the roots of Palestinian
terrorism have to be sought in the Israeli occupation and not in the
Palestinians' genes?

Almost no one is asking these questions. A whole nation is now huddled
around one tribal bonfire to lament its bitter fate, mourn its dead and
ignore the dead of the other side. As usual, it views itself as the victim,
turns the enemy into Satan and waits, inactive and bravely unthinking, for
the calamity that is about to befall it and for which it is in no small
measure to blame.

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Macdonald Stainsby
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