A Very Good Piece
By Uri Avnery
".....The only game in town is the "negotiations" with the Palestinian Authority, which were a farce to start with. Like actors on the stage drinking from empty glasses, all parties pretend that there are negotiations going on. They meet, embrace, smile, pose for photographs, convene joint teams, hold press conferences, make declarations - and nothing, absolutely nothing, really happens.
What is the farce for? Each of the participants has his own reasons.....
BUT ANYONE who believes that the government has no agenda, and that the State of Israel has no agenda, is quite wrong. There certainly is an agenda, but it is hidden. More precisely: it is unconscious......When there is no conscious ideology, there is an unconscious one, which can be much more potent - and much more dangerous......
When two neighboring peoples make peace, they fix, first of all, the border between them.
And that is precisely what the Israeli establishment opposes, because it negates the basic ethos of the Zionist enterprise.
But all these maps were only games. The real Zionist vision does not recognize any maps. It is a vision of a state without borders - a state that expands at all times according to its demographic, military and political power. The Zionist strategy resembles the waters of a river flowing to the sea......
That is the real agenda, unchanging, hidden, conscious and unconscious. It does not need decisions, formulations or maps, because it is encoded in the genes of the movement.....
That is the reason for David Ben-Gurion's refusal to include in the Declaration of Independence of the new State of Israel any mention of borders. He did not intend for a minute to be satisfied with the borders fixed by the United Nations General Assembly resolution of November 29, 1947. All his successors had the same approach. Even the Oslo agreements delineated "zones" but did not fix a border. President Bush accepted this approach when he proposed a "Palestinian state with provisional borders" - a novelty in international law.
In this respect, too, Israel resembles the United States, which was founded along the Eastern seaboard and did not rest until it had reached the Western shores on the other side of the continent.....
The Israeli version of "Manifest Destiny" is Moshe Dayan's slogan "We are fated"......
This is what he told the youth: "We are fated to live in a permanent state of fighting against the Arabs … For the hundred years of the Return to Zion we are working for two things: the building of the land and the building of the people … That is a process of expansion, of more Jews and more settlements … That is a process that has not reached the end. We were born here and found our parents, who had come here before us … It is not your duty to reach the end. Your duty is to add your layer … to expand the settlement to the best of your ability, during your lifetime ... (and) not to say: this is the end, up to here, we have finished."......"
".....The only game in town is the "negotiations" with the Palestinian Authority, which were a farce to start with. Like actors on the stage drinking from empty glasses, all parties pretend that there are negotiations going on. They meet, embrace, smile, pose for photographs, convene joint teams, hold press conferences, make declarations - and nothing, absolutely nothing, really happens.
What is the farce for? Each of the participants has his own reasons.....
BUT ANYONE who believes that the government has no agenda, and that the State of Israel has no agenda, is quite wrong. There certainly is an agenda, but it is hidden. More precisely: it is unconscious......When there is no conscious ideology, there is an unconscious one, which can be much more potent - and much more dangerous......
When two neighboring peoples make peace, they fix, first of all, the border between them.
And that is precisely what the Israeli establishment opposes, because it negates the basic ethos of the Zionist enterprise.
But all these maps were only games. The real Zionist vision does not recognize any maps. It is a vision of a state without borders - a state that expands at all times according to its demographic, military and political power. The Zionist strategy resembles the waters of a river flowing to the sea......
That is the real agenda, unchanging, hidden, conscious and unconscious. It does not need decisions, formulations or maps, because it is encoded in the genes of the movement.....
That is the reason for David Ben-Gurion's refusal to include in the Declaration of Independence of the new State of Israel any mention of borders. He did not intend for a minute to be satisfied with the borders fixed by the United Nations General Assembly resolution of November 29, 1947. All his successors had the same approach. Even the Oslo agreements delineated "zones" but did not fix a border. President Bush accepted this approach when he proposed a "Palestinian state with provisional borders" - a novelty in international law.
In this respect, too, Israel resembles the United States, which was founded along the Eastern seaboard and did not rest until it had reached the Western shores on the other side of the continent.....
The Israeli version of "Manifest Destiny" is Moshe Dayan's slogan "We are fated"......
This is what he told the youth: "We are fated to live in a permanent state of fighting against the Arabs … For the hundred years of the Return to Zion we are working for two things: the building of the land and the building of the people … That is a process of expansion, of more Jews and more settlements … That is a process that has not reached the end. We were born here and found our parents, who had come here before us … It is not your duty to reach the end. Your duty is to add your layer … to expand the settlement to the best of your ability, during your lifetime ... (and) not to say: this is the end, up to here, we have finished."......"
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