Now Then, What Now?
Little wonder that Israelis recovering from the still-smouldering reminders of the Holocaust feared a repeat. A bare few years from the end of the Second World War and the revelations of Hitler's Final Solution led to the United Nations' agreement on the establishment and legalization of the State of Israel.Finally, a homeland for world Jewry, a respite, a sanctuary, a place of safety, security, where the remnants of European Jews whose lives were somehow spared from Nazi determination to wipe them off the face of the earth could be sustained. Along with their Sephardic brethren thrown out of surrounding Middle East states.
Jews have always been accustomed to living in a state of suspended animation. To being surrounded by hostility. Threatened, liberties never granted. Safety never taken for granted. Land ownership, equality, citizenship, professional and social freedoms denied them within the larger confines of a host country that would always view them with suspicion.
Their reputation always preceded them; a reputation unearned, but their purported inferiority and differences sufficient unto itself. A little-understood but well-scorned group whose values and mores appeared discordant and too 'different' to be anything but threatening to those among whom they lived.
Little wonder that a suspended state of autonomous freedom would be undermined on a broad scale of existential angst with the realization that the combined armies of the Arab world were determined to extinguish their nationhood, to re-enact a grand massacre, a new diaspora of despair. Desperation and determination are invaluable adjuncts to courage and survival.
Shtetl Jews were transformed into 20th-century warriors. While the population wrung its hands in fear of another attempt at obliteration, its young men and its ageing generals and politicians, well-seasoned in the art of survival against impossible odds laid bold plans and brought the intent of a combined army superior in numbers, but deficient in cause, to a complete and utter rout.
The result was the achievement of survival of a people. The result was also a failure of occupation. What to do with this vast army of defeated Palestinians? One result elevated the soul, the other laid the groundwork for an impossible accommodation. Freedom and prosperity for one, a dark future and inexhaustible source of misery for the other.
Somehow, reasonableness and humane accommodation have eluded the two solitudes in the process of an acceptable solution.
If there is hope for the future, it seems a dim one, shrouded in the difficult mantle of hostility, despair and vengeance.
Labels: Heroes and Villains, Middle East, That's Life
posted by Pieface @ Monday, June 11, 2007
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