It's Better for Israelis to Have Permanent War than Peace

(News Today) - Seldom in recent times has Israel faced condemnation on the scale which has followed its commando attack on the humanitarian aid convoy to Gaza, in the midst of the Mediterranean.

Whoever started the violence, the Israelis did all the killing.

Here was the latest manifestation of the ruthlessness towards the Palestinians which has long characterised Israeli policy, but is today brutally explicit under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu has dismissed President Obama's demands that Israel should halt Jewish settlement-building on the occupied West Bank of Jordan.

He has sustained a blockade of Gaza, officially intended to prevent the import of weapons but in reality designed to drive its inhabitants to renounce the extremist government of Hamas.

Netanyahu believes the Arab world understands only the language of power and exercise of force. He and his supporters are determined to build the Israel they want - where desirable, on Palestinian land.

It is Israel's tragedy that many of its people have decided that permanent war is preferable to peace on terms their enemies might accept, which would include evacuation of the occupied territories and east Jerusalem.

Most Israelis are simply not frightened enough to feel the need to make big concessions. Their country has become a success story.

The security wall created to divide them from the West Bankers is keeping out suicide bombers. Only a handful of civilians have lately died at the hands of terrorists, while hundreds of Palestinians have perished in Gaza during Israel's punitive assaults.

The Israeli economy has weathered the global recession better than almost any other. The country is rich.

I have always thought Netanyahu would frustrate the Obama administration's efforts to force Israeli concessions. Most Americans, and much of Congress, are instinctively hostile to the Muslim world and sympathetic to Israel, their enemies' enemy.

The Palestinian leadership is a shambles - corrupt, incompetent and often irrational.

As long as Hamas, which won a democratic mandate in Gaza, denies Israel's right to exist, Israeli politicians can turn up their hands and shrug: 'But who could negotiate with violent fanatics?'

In this regard, Iran's president, with his demented denunciations of the Jewish state, is the best friend the Israeli Right-wing could want. Whatever the honourable ambitions of President Obama to deliver justice to the Palestinians, he is stymied by Muslim unreason.

Yet many of us believe Israel's big mistake, even on its own terms , is to keep the Palestinians in impoverished subjection.

The only hope of inducing them to behave reasonably - as today they do not - is to rescue them from despair. If they had something to lose, they would be far less likely to support violence.

It is hard to describe the misery and emptiness of their lives. The only industries among almost four million people are terrorism and the promotion of grievances.

If you are having a gloomy day and wonder what hell is like, imagine Gaza, seven by 27 miles of human misery, breezeblock shanties, skinny donkeys and supine people.

The sterility of a life in which there is no work, no money, nowhere to go defies imagination.

When I last visited Gaza City, I stood in the barren apartment of a woman named Majah Ayas while she showed me a hole in the window blind, through which an Israeli bullet had killed her two-year-old son Amir.

In this sort of war, I said, these terrible accidents happen. ' Don' t look for excuses,' she said fiercely. 'My cousin, too, was killed by the Israelis. He was 27, walking along the street when an Israeli sniper saw him. In this prison we inhabit, the walls are always closing in on us.'

Her brother-in-law, Ibrahim Ayad, is an English teacher whose designer stubble, contempt for reason and angry, glittering eyes add up to the sort of Arab whom Westerners recoil from.

I said that many British people sympathise with the plight of the Palestinians.

'Sympathy?' he cried scornfully. 'You want us to believe there is sympathy for us in Britain - the nation which created Israel!'

I asked whether he approved of suicide bombing. 'I think yes,' he said. 'This is the only way we have. We have only our bodies and we are happy to use our bodies. We'd like death, we'd love death for the sake of our country!'

He shouted hysterically: 'We'd just like to live like any other people in the world. Think of my nephew Amir, who was killed here in his mother's bedroom! Do the Israelis think he was carrying guns?'

Grievances like these are piled high upon each other in Gaza and the West Bank. Every Palestinian family has its own horror story. There is no beauty, no meaningful culture, little human happiness.

When Israelis begin to discuss the Palestinians, they might be speaking of wild beasts. I remember meeting Esther Armon, the elderly widow of an Israeli ambassador.

She is a charming, jolly soul who runs a little art gallery in a pretty hilltop town in the north of the country. You would be delighted to have her as your grandmother.

She reminisced about fighting the British, who ran Palestine before 1948: 'It seemed a pleasure to fight against you rather than the Arabs - your people were human.'

She talked about Muslim ambitions to colonise Europe, and then about the Palestinians: 'You can't make an accommodation with fanatics.'

Yet Esther Armon's views are pretty moderate compared with those of the Russian immigrants who now constitute a formidable political block in Israel. Most support Netanyahu. They, like the extreme religious parties, believe that concessions represent weakness and folly. Most, I suspect, will applaud the commando attack on the aid convoy.

To be fair, Israel's liberals argue that withdrawal from the West Bank is essential to the long-term future of the state.

They fear the consequences of reliance upon military superiority for their survival. Sooner or later, they say, maybe decades from now, if there is no peace deal, the Muslims may be able to challenge Israel's guns.

But most Israelis reject retreat, above all from Jerusalem. They say: 'The Arabs will not give us peace whatever we do, so we might as well keep what we have.'

Every day, every year, cranes and bulldozers labour on Palestinian land, creating facts: countless housing estates occupied by settlers. They do not believe that Barack Obama, the United Nations or the 'world opinion' which they despise will ever summon the will to take the settlements away from them.

They could be right. The Israelis' implacable determination may enable them to defy their country's critics and hold the Palestinians at bay. But the price, if they go on like this, will be to make Israel a pariah state.

Israelis have achieved something remarkable on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. They have created a vibrant and dynamic society in what was a barren wilderness 62 years ago when the state was born.

Their tragedy is that they have done this at the cost of inflicting a historic injustice on the dispossessed Palestinians.

This week's bloody drama at sea struck a heavy blow at Israel's moral standing. With luck - and in the strongest interests of Israel - it will bring down the discredited Netanyahu government.

Even better, it might cause Israelis to think again about where they are going. They cannot forever rely on brute force to impose their will.

When I last rented a car in Jerusalem, on Avis's map there was no trace of any border between the Israeli state and the occupied territories. There was only Israel, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. Such a vision represents a towering insult to the Palestinian people, and a tragic self-delusion for themselves.

It is time for change, in the interests of all those who inhabit this tormented region.

Source : kompas.com

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