Dear friends,
I believe that Sarid's recent article, reprinted here, on the death of the
two-state solution deserves closer analysis. Sarid was and is
definitely a prominent ideological figure on the Zionist left. I suggest
attaching importance to Sarid's conclusions
regarding the death of the two-state solution. See some of my first
comments on the article below.
Yossie Sarid -Haaretz July 27, 2012
The Zeolots Have
"Won" Again
"Don't waste your despair prematurely, save it up for when things get worse." That's what people in the know always advised us. It seems the time has come to open the emergency warehouses and start taking it out. And so we begin.
Writing is
particularly hard for me this time. I have a vague but profound feeling that
I'm progressing toward admitting an error, and not a negligible one: How did I
fail to see the future; I can't forgive myself. And I have no breast to beat
except my own.
It is no
coincidence that this confession is being written now, on the eve of the Ninth
of Av. As we do every year, this year too we will hear all the nonsense about
"baseless hatred," which was ostensibly the main reason for the
destruction of the Second Temple. You don't have to be a professional
sermonizer to stuff us with this historical rubbish. Today every brainwashed
layman knows that if those people hadn't eaten each other alive, they
would not have been defeated, and Judea would have survived forever.
Nothing could be further
from the truth: The Great Revolt against Rome had no chance of success in the
first place. But even the slim chance was extinguished when the Sicarii zealots
began to murder the moderates in Jerusalem, until they eliminated the entire
leadership. And the "price tag" advocates were not satisfied until
they had set fire to the grain silos in the city, doomed it to starvation, and
by doing so made defeat inevitable. The victims of the siege therefore had good
reason to hate the Jewish terrorists, and their hatred was not
"baseless"; it was "well-founded" hatred. Even today we
have a duty to hate them in light of our historical and natural right to
self-defense.
All these years I
refused to believe that history repeats itself. I always convinced myself that
what is done can be undone, and that the moment of sobriety, which was being
delayed, would eventually arrive. Now it's too late. The successors have
arrived at a crisis of leadership, and there is no strength for a rebirth.
Perhaps we will try again some day, perhaps the fourth time we will
succeed."
It's enough to keep
track of five houses as they are being moved to see how farce turns into
tragedy. When the sounds of houses being sawed are soon heard, the sounds of a
funeral will be in the air: Farewell to you, our soul, from which we were
unable to exorcise the dybbuk of the settlements.
The person who
prophesied that 25 years ago and knew whereof he spoke was Meron Benvenisti, an
intellectual and scholar, who on the pages of this newspaper explained his
theory of "irreversibility," because what is done cannot be undone.
And I attacked him: "There's no such thing as an irreversible
situation," I wrote at the time, "only death is irreversible. The
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an active volcano, that's why it's absurd to
speak about congealed lava, and why sow despair at the wrong time." You
were more right than I was, Meron, I failed to see and I spoke nonsense. I
didn't properly assess the blindness and the suicidal urge. I pinned false
hopes on common sense, on the will to live, on the ability to stop at any
moment and change direction. I was wrong, I was guilty.
This article will
gladden the hearts of many. Finally we have the privilege of hearing from that Sarid an admission of error and guilt,
blessed be He who has brought us to this time. Finally even he understands that
the settlements are "forever," may they continue to multiply.
I regret having to
spoil the party atmosphere, which is premature and apparently too late as well.
In Basel he established the Jewish state, and in Jerusalem they destroyed it.
In its place there will soon be a binational state, which is either South
Africa or South Africa, because there is no third option. And that South Africa
has long since ceased to exist. Thus, the time of your rejoicing is the time of
your disaster.
**********************************************************
My comments: Sarid has reached the conclusion that the last
existing chances to establish a Jewish state have been totally destroyed
and that Israel has already entered the "South African" stage. Of
course, it will take some time until Sarid's conclusions sink into the mindset of what remains of the
Zionist-left.
It was clear to the founding fathers of the Zionist
project that the return to Zion had to be justified by linking Zionism to one
form or another of the prevailing ideological currents on the
"outside." Without an ideological linkup to socialism (of one sort or
another) or to universal democratic values (genuine liberalism), the Zionist
project would be unable to fight for the souls of Jews in the diaspora. And
what would happen in such a circumstance has happened. Zionism is for
chauvinistic cranks and becomes foreign to anyone who refuses to jettison
universal values in the name of Zionist sovereignty. The ideological basis for
the Zionist left has disappeared leaving many good souls in the air. The
Zionist left has been almost completely marginalized and no longer exists as
any kind of electoral force. It is now being condemned by virtue of the death
of its ideological basis to certain slow death.
Sarid's article admits that he can no longer suggest a practical,
possible alternative to escape the inevitable degeneration of
"victorious" Zionism that lives and breathes in a moral vacuum.
Israel's role in the power struggles in the region as the faithful ally of the
US empire make do live quite well with "pure" Zionism, without
any sort of Zionism that pretends to be an element in a successful synthesis of
Jewish and universal values.
It is sad that Sarid is almost unconsciously placing his last
vestige of hope for the Jews in Palestine in an ephemeral, totally imaginary
"one state solution." Both the one-state and the two-state
solutions are dead and irrelevant to the newer and deeper dynamics of the region.
But, at this moment, Sarid's
honest admission of his errors is an awesome shock to those who still harbored
illusions about reforming this Israel, at this stage of its downward spiral.
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