generalspeaking

Sounds Acceptable, Why Not?

Israelis are going to the polls. Has that country ever enjoyed a majority parliament? Perhaps in its most early of days, when Labour dominated, in the new state heady with the promise of its new beginnings. When idealism, justice and fairness to all meant total dedication to the task at hand; making a success of the new country despite its presence in a sea of hostility. Facing the monumental task of absorbing immigrants and settling them, setting up state security, civil infrastructure, tending to the agrarian needs of the country.

Is there now a more fractionated parliament than the Knesset appearing anywhere else in the world? Oh perhaps Italy, another partially functioning governing body. There is so much religious, secular and factional dissent in the country that it's mind boggling. And as though Jews themselves aren't sufficiently given to argumentation and disagreeing on just about everything, there's also the disaffected Arab, Christian and Druse populations, forever dissenting, grumbling, complaining, asserting, claiming and blaming.

Worse: elected Arab members of the Knesset often enough present as agitators, as devious supporters of unrest and even violence against the sovereign state; as aggrieved Arabs first, Israelis far distant, beyond their claim to Palestinian adherence. It hasn't been unknown for Arab MKs to conspire with terror groups, to be complicit with the violent plans of countries like Syria and Iran, to surrender themselves to jihad while yet representing as an Israeli lawmaker.

Add to that volatile mixture, a one-fifth Israeli population that is not Jewish, and among them a substantial number openly hostile to the state, although they benefit directly by being fully functional and availing citizens of the state. Benefiting by their status well beyond what they could ever expect, existing as citizens of an Arab state. Yet bridling and dissembling at their status; their spirit and allegiance clearly elsewhere.

In which case it makes perfectly good sense to acknowledge once and for all that just as oil and water are not homogeneous, so too does it appear that Arabs and Jews are not capable of co-operating fully with one another for the good of the collective. Each is suspicious of the other; each clings to the notion of separate and dissimilar antecedents, values, customs and traditions. Although their functional needs are the same.

It seems that these differences are irreconcilable. Trust, in large measure, eludes the separate entities. That being so - and painful as it presents to the idealism of the conventional wisdom that in theory people who learn to know one another also learn to live together in peace - perhaps it does make eminent good sense to do as Avigdor Lieberman, Yisrael Beiteinu party leader, suggests.

Separate Jew from Arab, and separate the geographies that each enjoy in majority. Trade Arab and Muslim-dominated areas for Jewish-dominated areas, to bring the Jewish population together, separated from the Arab-Muslim populations, and leave each majority to get on with their aspirations. All those Israeli Arabs who harbour such deep-seated anger and resentment against Israel will then have their own place, their own space, contiguous with and part of the West Bank and Gaza.

Leaving the West Bank settlements to be absorbed, in a geographical trade, with greater Israel. The Israeli Arabs defiantly engaged in flying the flag of Hamas can join Gaza. Mr. Lieberman's additional recommendation, that those Israeli Arabs who wish to remain citizens of the country should be required to swear an oath of loyalty, seems a small price to pay for civil entitlement, given the stresses and the liens against trust.

The simple fact is, Israel is besieged from without, and from within, increasingly. The tensions and the hostility cannot be supported by patience and the trust that matters will improve, for history has demonstrated more than adequately that they will not. A clean separation between those Arabs who wish to disengage their Israeli citizenship and to join their brethren in the West Bank and Gaza presents as a solution.

Of course there is no solution, but further problems, if the matter is forced, rather than impressed reasonably on the consciousness of those involved. And there lies the rub.

Labels: Israel, Traditions, Troublespots

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, February 08, 2009