But this is not the most important point. It is more significant that the prime minister and his small group of generals introduce these two words, and all the people repeat them like a giant flock of parrots, without thinking, without protesting. This is rather frightening in itself, but when these words reflect a disastrous national decision and the public accepts it without question, that is even more frightening.
It is not yet clear whether Sharon has succeeded in scuttling the boat of the peace initiative. Perhaps President Bush will after all show some resolution and save the initiative, in which he has invested his personal prestige. But in the meantime the dance of death continues, and the blood flows-quite literally-in the streets of Israel and Palestine.
May 26, 2007
The bloody battles that have erupted around the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp near Tripoli in Lebanon remind us that the refugee problem has not disappeared.44 On the contrary, 60 years after the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, it is again the center of attention throughout the world.
This is an open wound. Anyone who imagines that a solution to the Israel-Arab conflict is possible without healing this wound is living with delusion.
From Tripoli to Sderot, from Riyadh to Jerusalem, the Palestinian refugee problem continues to cast its shadow across the whole region. This week, the media were again full of photos of Israeli and Palestinian refugees fleeing from their homes and of mothers mourning the deaths of their loved ones in Hebrew and Arabic-as if nothing had changed since 1948.
Ordinary Israelis shrug their shoulders when confronted with the suffering of the Palestinian refugees and dismisses it with five words: "They brought it on themselves."
Learned professors and market vendors repeat that the Palestinians caused their own downfall when, in 1947, they rejected the Partition Plan of the United Nations and started a war to annihilate the Jewish community in the country.
That is a deeply rooted myth, one of the basic myths of Israeli consciousness. But it is far from reflecting what really happened.
First of all, because at that time there did not even exist a Palestinian national leadership which could take a decision.
In the Arab Revolt of 1935 to 1939 ("the troubles" in Israeli