Yes that's a provocative headline. The latest New York Review of Books includes a wonderful interview from Yedioth Ahronoth in which Ehud Olmert says it's time to give up the land now, and stop these idiotic generals from running our foreign policy anymore. Every prime minister has known this for 20 years, the occupation is destroying Israel, he says. All true, all wise.
This statement is included in Olmert's stirring interview:
of Jerusalem.
Whoever wants to maintain control over the entire city will have to
absorb 270,000 Arabs into the borders of Israel proper. This won't do.
We need to make a decision. This decision is difficult, awful, a
decision that contradicts our natural instincts, our deepest yearnings,
our collective memories, and the prayers of the nation of Israel for
the past two thousand years.
Think about this. This won't do. This is a good thing? We're supposed to applaud the designation of political boundaries based on the exclusion of minorities? But Israeli policy has always been focused on this question: Draw boundaries to keep Arab numbers down, and force 'em out when you can't draw the lines.
Maybe you noticed. In this country, we are getting a black president whose middle name is Hussein, the son of a Muslim, in part because of the small black vote, which went 90 percent for Obama. The Republican Party is being forced to change right now, before our eyes, because they cannot reach a certain 10 percent of the population, blacks. Both parties are reaching out to non-whites as never before. Because it is just demographically true: and demographics in a democracy mean votes. As I have pointed out repeatedly lately, EVEN ISRAELI ARABS ARE DEALT OUT OF THE ISRAELI POLITICAL SYSTEM, because they're never included in the governing coalitions. Even the liberal Jewish parties don't want them. So their voices are never really considered in governance. Maybe that's the problem, not just the borders.
Zionism made that. Collective memories and prayers built that political system. In Brooklyn the other night, at the anti-apartheid event, there was a poster with a picture of South African patriarch H.F. Verwoerd, the prime minister in the 60s, saying that Both South Africa and Israel practice apartheid. I have to believe he was right.
I do think it a great thing the NYRB publishes that piece. The Olmert piece is being published prominently in the NY Review of Books,
translated from Hebrew, for one very good reason: Because NYRB is read by many
older liberal Jews, who include in their families and even in
their own minds, very conservative Zionist ideas about Israel and
Arabs. The NYRB is honorably trying to educate the American Jewish intellectual
community toward a greater understanding. And so this man Olmert, a former Likudnik, is put forward as an intellectual leader. And God bless 'em, this is
their function; and this is the reality of Jewish life.
But once again: the intellectual tail is wagging the intellectual dog. We are brave Americans who have our own wisdom about minority rights. (And NYRB ought to review Walt and Mearsheimer, it's a gross dereliction not to, and reflects the marginalization of non-Jewish voices, licensed by the elites themselves.). I just discovered Italics!!!!
