Another Israel

I dream of another Israel | theage.com.au

As hundreds of Palestinians die under Israeli fire in Gaza, it's time to demand a true peace movement.

WHAT is special about 85-year-olds in Israel? First, we are the generation that founded the state. As such, I feel we bear an additional responsibility for what is happening here. If our state is not what we imagined it should be, it's our duty to act to change it. And here we face a strange paradox. We are partners in a historic success. And we are partners in a dismal failure.

Perhaps only members of my generation can fully grasp the extent of our success in the transformation of the national consciousness. When the situation becomes very bad, when good people are seized by depression and despair, I remind myself — and remind the people who listen to me — where we started.

On the morrow of the 1948 war, when some of us said that there exists a Palestinian people and that we must make peace with them, we were a tiny handful here and in the whole world. We were laughed at. There are no Palestinians, we were told. "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people!" Golda Meir was still asserting much later.

Is there anyone today who denies the existence of the Palestinian people? We argued that in order to achieve peace, a Palestinian state must come into being. They laughed at us: Why? There is Jordan. There is Egypt. There are 22 Arab states. That's enough! But today it is a worldwide consensus: two states for two peoples.

We said that we must talk with the enemy, and the enemy was then the PLO. Four cabinet ministers demanded that I should be put on trial for high treason when I met Yasser Arafat in Beirut during the siege. All four of them later met Arafat, and the state of Israel signed official treaties with the PLO.

True, the treaties were not implemented and did not lead to peace. But the mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, between Israel and the Palestinian people, became a fact. That was a revolution, and it cannot be reversed. Today we are saying: We must talk with Hamas. Hamas is an integral part of the Palestinian reality. And this idea, too, is gaining ground.

I have devoted 60 years to this struggle, and it is still in full swing. But we have defeated the idea of a Greater Israel and put forward the alternative of the two states, which has carried conviction in Israel and throughout the world.

But as big as our victory is our defeat. It is enough to look at the coming election in Israel: the three big parties talk almost the same language, and not one of them puts forward a plan for peace. There are small parties that say good and honest things, but at this juncture we need more than that. What is lacking is a major political force that is ready to come to power in order to make peace.

It is quite clear that the results of this election will be bad, and the only question is whether they will be just bad, or very bad, or even worse.

Why is this happening? There are many reasons, many pretexts. We criticise — rightly — many things: the media, the education system, all our successive governments, the US President, the world. But I miss one criticism: the criticism of ourselves. My father used to tell me: if the situation is bad, the first thing to do is to ask yourself if you are right.

Yes, we have voiced the right ideas. But politics is a matter of power. What have we done to create a progressive political force in Israel? How is it that the left, the camp of peace and progress, has almost been eradicated from the political map? How did the Israeli left lose, in the last generation, all its levers of power?

We in the peace camp include many wonderful men and women who confront the army every week in the fight against the wall, who monitor the checkpoints, who refuse to serve in the occupation army, who fight against the occupation in dozens of ways.

But while we stand and protest, the settlers rush ahead. Sometimes I have the feeling that the dogs bark and the caravan moves on — and I am not content with being the dog. We chase the mosquitoes, but the swamp that produces the mosquitoes gets bigger and bigger. The swamp is political. Only a political force can drain it — a force that can confront the ruling powers, influence the decisions of the government and the Knesset.

That is a historic failure, and we bear responsibility for it. We have to think anew, examine everything we have done up to now and find out where we went wrong. Why did we not succeed in convincing enough of the young, of the oriental Jewish community, of the immigrants from Russia, of the Arab community in Israel, of the moderate religious sector, that it is possible to bring about change, that indeed we can?

Why did we not succeed in touching the heart of the young generation that is disgusted by the politics they know?

What is needed is something completely new: we must prepare the ground for an Israeli Obama, to kindle hope where there was no hope before. To demand a change from the foundations up and believe that it is possible to bring about this change. To ignite the enthusiasm of masses of young people for a message that stirs the heart, a message of ending the occupation, of social justice, of caring for the planet. The longing for a different system — secular, just, decent, seeking peace.

The new message must speak to the emotions and not only to the intellect. It must arouse again the idealism that is hiding in many a heart.

The great obstacle to such an explosion is despair. It is easier to say that everything is lost. That they have stolen our state. But pessimism, as is well known, does not give birth to anything, it just leads to internal or external emigration. I refuse to be pessimistic. In my 85 years, I have seen too many unexpected, surprising, amazing things — both good and bad — for me not to believe in the unexpected. Obama was unexpected. The fall of the Berlin Wall was unexpected, and nobody could have imagined it a moment before it happened.

Even the victory of the Greens in the recent municipal election in Tel Aviv was like that.

I would like the best of the intellectuals and the peace activists, the social activists and the fighters for the environment to gather and start thinking together, in order to bring about the Israeli miracle.

From the heights of my 85 years, I want to call all those for whom our future here is close to the heart — Jews and Arabs, and especially the young — to mobilise for a joint effort to prepare for the big change, for the Other Israel, for a state where it will be fun to live, an Israel we can be proud of.

I believe that this will happen, that we will see it with our own eyes, that we will be partners, that we will be able to say: we have succeeded, we are entrusting the state to good hands.

Uri Avnery is an Israeli peace activist and a former member of the Knesset. In the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, he was a fighter in the Samson's Foxes commando unit. The full text of this article is published at gush-shalom.org