Israeli Reality

Few in Israel seem to remember the old Labour Party Old Guard with Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitshak Rabin, and other Generals like Moshe Dyan.   Many were sabras.  In the 60’s & 70’s  the best of Israel’s generals saw no purpose in taking the Old City, and the Wets Bank.  It would turn the Israeli nation into a camp run by the military to protect it all.  Even the victory of 1967 was seen as short term holding and for peace negotiating leverage.

Today’s Israel’s poor reailty is an amnesia, almost like apartheidist South Africans.  It is assumed that the blacks and coloreds would forget the old pre-1947 circumstance in South Africa.  They did not.

Israeli’s assume that with time, the Palestinians will adjust to a convenient cartographic adjustment, and forget the old land-holds and the old pre-1967 armistice borders.  They will not.

That it is an idea – this waiting and forgetting with time -, can be allayed to the high Soviet police state compliance nature of the Israeli-Soviet immigrants from which the Likud Party makes so many voting gains from fear and a strong recalcitrant state.

In time, the population scenario will win, and the Sabras enlarged will re-emerge as  realists.  But PEACE need not wait until then.

The very idea of Palestine with claimed lands and initially fixed borders – both shown on maps as boundaries and clamed areas, is fertile, very overdue, and must be done.Israel can craft a map with the pre-1967 borders, with un-annexed territory shown, and desired lands for negotiation.  Other bordering nations have done so for centuries.

Both nations territories would overlap and spawn a negotiating table. 

Now! , please?  We Americans don’t forget either.  No American President has ever recognized Israel’s borders enlarged by the 1967 War.  The Americans also keep their Embassy in the pre-1967 section of Israel West Jerusalem.  They will do that as long as the Palestinians will wait.

Salaam Pax & Shalom