If you will it, it is not a dream, Herzl said. But what if you stop dreaming it? A few items, in search of a big idea:
—Fawaz Turki, a Palestinian-American, writing in the Gulf News:
[A] lot of Americans believe that Israel's image as a 'tiny state' threatened at
every turn by its 'savage neighbours' is an imposture, a racially tinged
absurdity, and that Israel's continuing occupation of Arab lands is, at best, a
cruel and cunning disguise for economic and military exploitation.
Netanyahu ought to be equally concerned by signs that the Zionist ideal
is losing its hold within Israel itself. There are reportedly between
700,000 and one million Israeli citizens now living abroad, and
emigration has outpaced immigration since 2007. According to Ian Lustick and John Mueller,
only 69 percent of Israeli Jews say they want to remain in the country,
and a 2007 poll reported that about one-quarter of Israelis are
considering leaving, including almost half of all young people.
–Michael Oren echoes Walt in a package that Commentary runs called "Israel at Risk:"
Recent years have seen the flight of thousands of
secular Jews from [Jerusalem], especially professionals and young couples… If this trend continues, Ben-Gurion’s nightmare will materialize and
Israel will be rendered soulless, a country in which a great many Jews
may not want to live or for which they may not be willing to give their
lives.
–My wife and I have dinner at a Jewish
couple's house. The woman in the couple says: "I just don’t think the
Jews should have their own state." And she’s against going to Israel
for that reason, feels no kinship to it. The dinner table is quiet,
hearing her. Her husband's a Zionist.
–I was interviewed by Al Jazeera during
Gaza. The Norwegian cameraman tells me that a Jewish friend in Washington told
him recently, "I have no use for Israel. I don't need it."
–Former Ambassador Chas Freeman to me, in an interview earlier this year:
I am interested in seeing the survival of a humane and not a
thuggish Jewish state in the Middle East… The question is, in the
long run, will this be a crusader kingdom or not?
–From Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, which includes an essay by Lila Abu-Lughod about her late father Ibrahim's return to Israel/Palestine from the U.S. in the 90s, after years of refusing to go there out of refusal to recognize Israel's presence [I have changed the order of the two paragraphs]:
It was a former student of his, someone who had become a professor of Middle East politics, who had made him rethink his refusal to go back. She often traveled to Israel and the West Bank. He recalled that she had told him once, 'Ibrahim, Palestine is still there.' He was happy, he said, to find this to be true. On his first visit, he had asked some Arab kids on the street [in Jaffa] if they knew where King Faysal Street was. They immediately took him there, though he could see that the street sign said something altogether different. From this, he knew that Palestinian parents were still teaching their children the old names of things even as Palestine was being buried, erased, and rewritten by Israel…
Suddenly, my father said he had spotted the Hasan Bek Mosque where he had made the call to prayer as a boy. From there he had figured out where the coffee shop had been. He remembered this cafe because he used to hang around outside in the evenings, hoping to listen in on the storytellers and reciters of epics, only to be chased away because he didn't have the money for a glass of tea. Bit by bit, circling more widely around the mosque, he began to find his way.
