« Previous Entry |
Back to Blissful Knowledge
| Next Entry »
January 20, 2003
A MATTER OF TIMING
Yossi Klein HaLevi explains the case against Amram Mitzna:
In the last two years, a new post-ideological majority has emerged that is ready to consider almost any measure to ensure security and also ready, in principle, to make almost any territorial concession for genuine peace. That majority of hard-line pragmatists lives between the insights of the first and second intifadas - that we cannot occupy the Palestinians and we cannot make peace with them.
Most Israelis today would agree that both greater Israel and Oslo were utopian delusions, wishful ideology imposed on reluctant reality. And they sense that the decades-long debate between Left and Right was in fact an argument between two partial truths: The Left understood the danger of occupation, while the Right understood the danger of appeasement.
Mitzna, though, has learned only the truth of the Left. He remains stuck in the first intifada, and hasn't absorbed the lessons of the second. Like all ideologues, he is capable of holding only one insight at a time.
Ironically, Sharon has revealed greater conceptual expansiveness. By conceding the inevitability of a Palestinian state, he has forfeited the dream of restoring the biblical heartland that animated his political career. The centrist majority won't forgive Labor for Oslo until party leaders offer a similarly clear admission: that the gamble of empowering one group of terrorists to control another group of terrorists was a disastrous miscalculation.
However improbably, Sharon managed to refashion himself from the symbol of our divisiveness into the embodiment of the centrist consensus. Sharon exchanged the wholeness of the land for the wholeness of the nation, becoming our most passionate advocate of national unity.
There's more, all of which should be read.
Posted by Dr. Manhattan at 11:26 PM | Permalink
