generalspeaking

That Was Then, This Is Now ...

At its sovereign inception, Israel represented both a haven and an ideal. It was, after all, formulated as an incipient independent state by idealists, intent on providing a safe homeland for Jews who were in desperate need of a respite from hostilities and slaughter, for the 20th Century was no kinder to Jews than previous centuries had been.

The deliberate and successful campaign to convince the world that its Jewish presence was a threat to all others - by a people who represented the absolute lowest order on Earth - led to few nations attempting to champion a disenfranchised and helpless population slated for mass annihilation. The ancient roots of anti-Semitism grew a robust tree of Jew-hatred.

Those nations - with the exception of tiny Denmark - which had benefited from the entrepreneurial presence of their Jewish populations for millennia, turned away from them in their existential need, sometimes unable to cope with their own oppressed status under the Third Reich, often enough because they shared the deadly ideology of Nazi Germany.

The Zionist leaders who laid the groundwork for the formation of a new world state celebrated their success when the General Assembly of the United Nations welcomed a new country into being, under the Partition Plan for Palestine on 29 November, 1947. The Israel that then came into being was that of a social, not a political state.

That social state was dedicated to egalitarianism, to equality among its members, to an in-gathering of Jews from around the world, welcoming them to their re-established homeland. It was a country whose citizens were dedicated to the hard work of establishing themselves as a viable country, far different in character and purpose from those surrounding it in the Middle East.

Israel's Kibbutzum were celebrated globally, the success of its agricultural sector, of the inclusionist politics of its Labour-led governments, admired and seen as a social, if not socialist beacon across continents. Slowly the idealism fled in the face of daunting stringencies and psychological pressures and emotional instabilities brought on by the incessant need to defend itself from military onslaughts.

Aided in no small measure by the propensity of human beings to advantage themselves personally wherever, and whenever they could, materially. Add that to the fractured nature of a nation that had started out completely secular, eventually accommodating its fundamentalist-religious brethren, and the formula for national dysfunction set it. Where one portion of the state remains secular, the other overwhelmingly theocratic.

The two at constant odds with one another; enlightenment and informed intelligence struggling against the mentally-cloistered atmosphere of rigid adherence to a fundamentalist religious belief compelling its followers to eschew education and science, and embrace mysticism and ignorance. The result has been a secular-religious power struggle with a country divided in its loyalties.

Educated secular Jews, like their counterparts everywhere else in the world have a limited number of children, while fundamentalist, Orthodox Jews procreate exponentially. Traditionally, ultra-religious Jewish men were expected to study Torah to the exclusion of physical labour; their child-bearing wives had the responsibility of raising children while earning the family's bread.

Latterly, traditions continue to prevail, but it is the State, through taxes levied on its largely secular, middle-class population that now provides religious communities with home and hearth and hospital care and food, exempting religious males from responsibilities, including military conscription. Worse, the religious feel entitled, entitled to settle themselves wherever they wish, on Biblical-era land.

And the rest of Israel, primarily the growing influence of the hard-right political parties, encouraged them to settle where they wished, on historically Jewish land, though it had been agreed that Palestinian Arabs would occupy that land for an eventual state of their own. Relations between Jews and Arabs have always been, to put it politely, strained. This did nothing to help matters, though even if settlement hadn't occurred, Arabs would have resisted the Jews next door.

The Arab populations of the Middle East would like nothing better than for Israel to suddenly disappear in a poof of magical smoke. Many might wish no real physical harm to Israel and to Jews, just as long as Allah lifts them from occupying 'historical' land consecrated to Islam, and sets them down elsewhere, where they will no longer remain an irritant to their neighbours.

Failing that, of course, the neighbours one doesn't choose, but ends up with, have decided that the land in question was never, historically, inhabited by Jews, only by Arabs, and there is no historical 'right' of return by a population that never was to a land that never was, although there is a current 'right of return' to Islamic land where Muslims were evacuated from so Israel could exist. Undoing the great wrong done to Arab Palestinians is the idea.

The new Israel recognizes its duty to the welfare of ultra-religious communities which give back nothing to the state, and cause it constant grief. The cost of maintaining an army dedicated equally to the protection of West bank settlements surrounded by hostile neighbours, and an army whose purpose is to protect the entire population of the State of Israel from neighbours agitating for its demise beggars the coffers of the state.

The hundreds of thousands of settlement Jews who have now lived for generations in the West Bank will be difficult to remove; they are far more numerous than those who lived in Gaza. Their removal guarantees nothing; no peace necessarily, with the neighbours, since the irritation that is Israel will remain regardless. The logical solution is to have Israel and the PA exchange land where both Jews and Arabs are the majority.

Until and unless the immensely intransigent Palestinian Authority changes its spotlight on the tragedy that befell them with the creation of the State of Israel; recognizes reality, agrees to cease fomenting violence, both of slander and of attacks, and comes to a genuine bargaining-for-peace agreement with Israel, prepared to sacrifice their 'entitlements' as much as Israel, the conditions for peace will remain elusive.

Constituting an immense human tragedy that will continue to prickle and annoy the world no end, with resentment and a stale and aging air of resignation.

Labels: Israel, Middle East, Misadventure, Peace, Political Realities

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, August 13, 2011