fanatic murdered Yitzhak Rabin, an Ashkenazi par excellence, at a leftist mass meeting.
For the rightists, Greater Israel is vastly more important than peace. Ironically, their leader, Netanyahu, is a typical Ashkenazi son of the upper classes.
How will Israel develop over the next 50 years? Nobody knows. Only one thing is certain: it will remain an interesting country.
October 13, 2007
When I hear mention of the "clash of civilizations" I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.
To laugh, because it is such a silly notion.
To cry, because it is liable to cause untold disasters.
To cry even more, because our leaders are exploiting this slogan as a pretext for sabotaging any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. It is just one more in a long line of pretexts.
Why was the Zionist Movement in need of excuses to justify the way it treated the Palestinian people?
At its birth, it was an idealistic movement. It laid great weight on its moral basis. Not just in order to convince the world, but above all in order to set its own conscience at rest.
From early childhood we learned about the pioneers, many of them sons and daughters of well-to-do and well-educated families, who left behind a comfortable life in Europe in order to start a new life in a faraway and-by the standards of the time-primitive country. Here, in a savage climate they were not used to, often hungry and sick, they performed back-breaking physical labor under a brutal sun.
For that, they needed an absolute belief in the rightness of their cause. Not only did they believe in the need to save the Jews of Europe from persecution and pogroms, but also in the creation of a society so just as never seen before, an egalitarian society that would be a model for the entire world. Leo Tolstoy was no less important for them than Theodor Herzl. The kibbutz and the moshav were symbols of the whole enterprise.16
But this idealistic movement aimed at settling in a country inhabited by another people. How could they bridge this contradiction between sublime ideals and the fact that their realization necessitated the expulsion of the people of the land?
The easiest way was to repress the problem altogether, ignoring its very existence: the land, we told ourselves, was empty, there was no