Word: moralizers
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...have come back to our homeland, and we are not going to leave forever,'' vows Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the former chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces. To such Jews, the West Bank is not ''occupied'' but ''liberated'' territory. ''When you begin to doubt our moral right to Judea and Samaria,'' says Joseph Ben-Shlomo, a leader of the right-wing settlers' movement Gush Emunim, ''you doubt the very justice of Israel's right to be.'' To further intimidate any doubters, Israel has for the past 21 years established what it calls ''facts on the ground,'' settlements that have changed...
...unlikely to give any candidate a mandate. ''I am afraid we are going nowhere,'' says Meron Benvenisti, head of the West Bank Data Base Project. ''More of the same. You will be asking the same question ((about the territories)) on our 50th anniversary.'' Paradoxically, Israel's moral territory has contracted as its physical space has expanded. Israelis must consider the dangers of the authoritarian temptation. Israel cannot be a ''light unto the nations'' if it must exhaust itself daily by beating Arabs into submission. The Israeli Arab writer Attalah Mansour describes the Israelis' predicament with an Oriental image: ''Instead...
...people without land,'' said the hopeful Zionist formula. But Palestine was not a ''land without people,'' and the Jewish state from its birth has lived in a state of war in order to protect the dream from the discrepancy. History, religion, politics, ethics -- everything made sense except geography. The moral and material backing for Israel has always come primarily from the West. But the state itself was built in the overwhelmingly Arab, Islamic Levant. The creation of Israel dispersed another people, the Palestinian Arabs. At the moment of its birth, Israel was fighting for its life. The neighboring Arab states...
...understand everything, to make provision for everything . . . These people are actively, individually engaged in universal history. I don't see how they can bear it.'' Still, as Israel turns 40, it seems unhappy, agitated and exhausting. The idealistic founding energies have matured into certain disillusions of middle age. The moral discrepancy in the original ideal has come home to roost. Israel's political leadership is divided and essentially stagnant, taken by surprise by the Palestinian uprising, paralyzed by the dilemma of the territories. Public opinion is splintered between hard-liners who want to keep all the land and those willing...
...uprising of the Palestinians and the Israeli response have disturbed Israelis and Jews abroad, and the world in general, in a new way. Some of the televised spectacles from the territories (the beating of demonstrators, some acts of sadism, the burying alive, with bulldozers, of Palestinians) undermine the moral edifice of the Chosen. And efforts to keep such deeds from the sight of the world, to confiscate film, to bar journalists from the territories, as if the trouble were merely a hallucination and intercepting the message would annul the problem -- all these seem to smack of manipulation. In the first...