Tel Aviv has wasted too many chances to reach a lasting peace in the Middle East, says the Israeli novelist David Grossman. Now, he tells his country's prime minister, it's time to make an offer the Palestinians can't refuse.
Tuesday November 7, 2006
This year, it is not easy to look at ourselves. We had a war. Israel flexed its huge military biceps, but at its back its reach proved all too short and brittle. We realised that our military might alone cannot, when push comes to shove, defend us. In particular, we discovered that Israel faces a profound crisis, much more profound than we imagined, in almost every part of our collective lives.
That sentiment lies at the foundation of what I say here. "See, land, that we were most wasteful," the poet Shaul Tchernichowski wrote in 1938. He grieved that in the bosom of the earth, in the land of Israel, we have interred, time after time, young people in the prime of their lives. The death of young people is a horrible, outrageous waste. But no less horrible is the feeling that the state of Israel has, for many years now, criminally wasted not only the lives of its sons and daughters, but also wasted the miracle that occurred here - the great and rare opportunity that history granted it, the opportunity to create an enlightened, properly functioning democratic state that would act in accordance with Jewish and universal values. A country that would be a national home and refuge, but not only a refuge. It would also be a place that gives new meaning to Jewish existence. A country in which an important, essential part of its Jewish identity, of its Jewish ethos, would be full equality and respect for its non-Jewish citizens.
Look what happened. Look what happened to this young, bold country, so full of passion and soul. How, in a process of accelerated senescence, Israel aged through infancy, childhood and youth, into a permanent state of irritability and flaccidity and missed opportunities. How did it happen? When did we lose even the hope that we might some day be able to live different, better lives? More than that, how is it that we continue today to stand aside and watch, mesmerised, as madness and vulgarity, violence and racism take control of our home?
And I ask you, how can it be that a people with our powers of creativity and regeneration, a nation that has known how to pick itself up out of the dust time and again, finds itself today - precisely when it has such great military power - in such a feeble, helpless state? A state in which it is again a victim, but now a victim of itself, of its fears and despair, of its own shortsightedness?
One of the harsh things that this last war sharpened for us was the feeling that in these times there is no king in Israel. That our leadership, both political and military, is hollow. I am not speaking now of the obvious fiascos in the conduct of the war, or of the way the rear was left to its own devices. Nor am I speaking of our current corruption scandals, great and small. My intention is that the people who today lead Israel are unable to connect Israelis with their identity and certainly not with the healthy, sustaining, inspiring parts of Jewish identity. I mean those constitutive parts of identity and memory and values that can give us strength and hope, that can serve as antidotes to the attenuation of mutual responsibility and of our connection to the land, that can grant meaning to our exhausting, desperate struggle for survival.
Today, Israel's leadership fills the husk of its regime primarily with fears and intimidations, with the allure of power and the winks of the backroom deal, with haggling over all that is dear to us. In this sense, they are not real leaders. They are certainly not the leaders that a people in such a complicated, disoriented state need. Sometimes, it seems that the sound box of their thinking, of their historical memory, of their vision, of what really is important to them, fills only the tiny space between two newspaper headlines. Or between two police investigations. Look at those who lead us. Not at all of them, of course, but all too many of them. Look at the way they act - terrified, suspicious, sweaty, legalistic, deceptive. It is ridiculous to even hope that the law will come forth from them, that they can produce a vision, or even an original, truly creative, bold, momentous idea. When was the last time that the prime minister suggested or made a move that could open a single new horizon for Israelis? A better future? When did he take a social, cultural or ethical initiative, rather than just react frantically to the actions of others?
