Israel/Palestine

These are two impassioned Israeli voices seemingly calling out in the wilderness. The Gideon Levy piece is a must read.

Tell the truth, Shimon
By Gideon Levy

In the 24 years of our acquaintance, four of which I spent working as your aide, this is the third time I have written you an open letter. In 1989, when you were finance minister in the Shamir government and the first intifada was raging, I used these pages to write "A letter to a former boss." Then, I told you that "for the first time in your life, you have nothing left to lose - except the prospect of vanishing into thin air." This was after you kept silent in the face of the IDF's conduct in the intifada, in the face of the continuation of the occupation and Israel's stubborn refusal to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians. At the time, I believed that you thought differently from Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin (known then as the "bone-breaker"), but that you just weren't bold enough to speak up.

Eleven years later, in 2000, I wrote you another open letter. This was after Oslo and the Rabin assassination, and after you again had lost an election - this time, to the office of president. Then, I said: "Many Israelis see you as a different person now. For them, you represent the hope of something else." And now, as I write to you again, I have to say: You no longer represent hope for anything.
(...)

Ask your brother-in-law, Prof. Rafi Walden, the head of surgery at Sheba Medical Center, who sometimes travels to the territories as a volunteer with Physicians for Human Rights, and he'll tell you what you're a partner to. He'll tell you about the women in labor - not just one or two, not just the rare exception - who can't get to the hospital because of the cruelty of the IDF of which you were once so proud, and whose babies die right after they deliver them. He'll tell you about the cancer patients prevented from getting to Jordan for treatment. No, they cannot even go to Jordan - for "security reasons."

He'll tell you about the hospitals in Bethlehem that were shelled by the IDF. He'll tell you about the doctors and nurses who sleep in the hospital because they can't get home. He'll tell you about the dialysis patients forced to spend hours jostled about while traveling makeshift routes three times a week in a desperate attempt to reach the machines that their lives depend on. He'll tell you about the patients denied crucial medical treatment because of the closure and about the ambulances prevented from passing through checkpoints, even when they're carrying critically ill passengers. He'll tell you about the people who have died at the checkpoints and about those who died at home because they didn't dare to approach the checkpoints - which are now made up of menacing tanks in the middle of the road, or mounds of dirt and cement blocks that cannot be budged - even for someone on the brink of death.

You have imprisoned an entire people for over a year with a degree of cruelty unprecedented in the history of the Israeli occupation. Your government is trampling three million people, leaving them with no semblance of normal life. No going to the market, no going to work, no going to school, no visiting a sick uncle. Nothing. No going anywhere, and no coming back from anywhere. No day or night. Danger lurks everywhere, and everywhere there is another checkpoint, choking off life.
(...)

But the only way for you to add one more meaningful accomplishment to your rich biography is not just to get up now and resign from this government, which you may be compelled to do at some point anyway, but to do it while speaking out loud and clear, and telling Israelis all that you think about everything that is happening, especially about the evil we are perpetrating with our own hands. Once more in your life, try to build something new - not an atomic reactor or an aircraft industry, of which we already have more than enough. Now, against all the odds, try to build a radical Israeli peace camp, to make something out of nothing. Is it too farfetched to believe that you still see things differently than the rest of your colleagues in the government? Tell the truth, Shimon.
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A moment before the embrace of death

It is still in our power, but not for much longer, to prevent the Israeli- Palestinian death hug; before we return the Palestine Liberation Organization to the terrorism of the 1970s; before the Palestinians return us to the retaliatory operations of the 1950s; before the entire world gives up on the attempt to help us understand what they have already understood in Ireland, in Cyprus and even in Kashmir; before our children leave us here to our insanity and move to other regions; before we lose any chance of attracting Jewish immigration, even from distressed countries

Again we are living according to a conception. It can be heard from almost all sides: "[Former prime minister Ehud] Barak offered everything, got an intifada and now it's clear that there's nobody to talk to, and nothing to talk about." This conception reached an epitome this week when the new head of Military Intelligence, Aharon Ze'evi, brought sensational "information" to the members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee: Arafat will not agree to peace even in exchange for Jerusalem and the realization of the right of return. The media reported this just as they would have reported intelligence information about an explosive device found in Rafah. Like every conception in the past - regarding Egypt before the Yom Kippur War or the issue of withdrawal from Lebanon - it is mistaken, and we know that this is the case when on all sides, everyone makes identical declarations. There is someone to talk to - even if he is problematic; there is something to talk about - the Clinton plan and the "right of return" will not be a part of any agreement.
(...)

Today it is possible, tomorrow the violence will paralyze all of us. The nuclear threat by the countries on our periphery will change the balance of power, and what is happening in the delivery rooms will change the demographic balance. Before we long for the days of late January 2002, when despite the difficulty and the violence and the pessimism, it is still possible to change direction, we must act. Ramallah is still only a 10- minute drive from Jerusalem.
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