Looking at the end of Israel?

....There are few rewards in this life for being farsighted on political questions. The Zionists still have the bit between their teeth on the creation of a permanent Jewish state, even as they face self-destruction....

For the Zionists, this would be a terrible end. But need it be for rank and file Jews who just want to bring up their families and live in an atmosphere emptied of violence? (Read Israeli novelist Shifra Horn’s book “Ode to Joy” if you want to smell the cordite and sense deep in the soul their everyday fear of being blown up.)

But unmistakably this is the direction events and demographics are moving and arguably the best thing that outsiders can now do for Israel is to stop trying to help organise the creation of two states and let the Israelis themselves look the Palestinians in the eye as the demographics bite.

Smell the cordite, folks? Or do you smell something else? While Israel is an unviable state of course, and an artificial creation, it is clear that Transjordan was mentioned from the most ancient times, and has a thriving economy based on export of sand and barchash flies, and import of foreign aid.

And here is another of our nice neighbors to the south, from the land of the pyramids, a regime that is propped up with huge doses of American aid. US tax dollars helped pay to print this encomium to Israel in al Ahram, one of many. This one is by Ayman El-Amir:

Immigration to Israel has become a matter of economic opportunity, not the claimed pseudo-religious Zionist ideology of "return to the Promised Land". The population of Israel is 5.2 million out of a world Jewry population of 13 million, with about five million living in the US. Immigration to Israel is declining; the fertility rate among the Jewish population is 0.5 per cent, far below the population replacement value, while the Palestinian fertility rate is nearly three per cent. Israeli politicians regard this as a bomb ready to explode. Israeli concerns have prompted rising calls to declare Israel an exclusively Jewish state where only Jews are eligible for citizenship. The rest -- that is, the Palestinians who have lived on that land since the time of the Canaanites -- are regarded as a nuisance to be evicted when circumstances are favourable.

Israel's main problem, however, is that unlike the American Indians or indigenous populations in other colonised lands, the Palestinians refuse to disappear or melt away. Despite the brutal occupation, genocide, mass detentions, numberless checkpoints, the economic blockade, daily humiliation and starvation, and the powerful support afforded to Israel by the US administration, Palestinians refuse to be amassed together in a reservation under the title of a Palestinian state. Palestinian elders keep the keys to their original houses, the deeds to their property, and teach their children about the horrors they had to endure at the hands of those they once embraced as neighbours in the historic land of Palestine.

Sixty years after its "independence", Israel has lost its moral compass. Aggression, occupation and expansion have become its most vaunted practices. Hence it has no sense of security. It seeks regional recognition and cooperation but enforces a system of apartheid against the Palestinians. It forces a stop at Yad Vashim on the schedule of every visiting dignitary but kills Palestinian men, women and children, bulldozes their houses and orchards, confiscates their land, pumps out their water, arrests and detains thousands of them indefinitely, violates every human dignity under the sun, and denies the nation it subsumed its legitimate rights. Israel is not planning on any just and lasting settlement with the Palestinians. Like its master, the US, it only believes in the force of arms -- the ability to subjugate by destruction. That is what the Nazis did to the Jews and other minorities in Europe; and that is what the Jews of Israel are doing to the Palestinians. What Israel and the Western alliance call "acts of terrorism" by fundamentalists are the same acts they cheered as heroic by the resistance to Nazi occupation in Europe.

According to our Egyptian friends, we Israelis are just like the Nazis, and the French resistance was in the habit of blowing up pizza parlors and discotheques full of German kids. And the US, our "masters" who pay Mr. El-Amir's salary are just as bad.

As much as we may be for peace, we must recognize that sixty years after the foundation of the state of Israel, even our "peaceful" neighbors are still bent on the obliteration of Israel. Al-Ahram, a moderate journal in a moderate Arab state, insists that we are just as bad as the Nazis, no matter how many Palestinian Arab children are treated in Israeli hospitals and no matter that we returned Sinai and gave up the Gaza strip. We are just like Nazis for our friendly neighbors, and the terrorists who murder our children are precisely like resistance heroes of World War II. Those are the moderates, representing the government views. At least, Mr. El-Amir agrees that Nazis were bad. The opposition media in Egypt insist that it is too bad Hitler didn't finish his work. Not so long ago, the Egyptian television ran the "Knight without a horse" docudrama, that presented the mythical "Elders of Zion" as fact.

Professor Ben-Meir, there are more things in the Middle East then are dreamt of in your philosophy. In NYU, you can afford to create a virtual Middle East and people it with peace loving folks. Cairo is not across the East River, Amman is not in Long Island. The Hezbollah are not in Westchester, and Mr. Hanniyeh is not a Brooklyn gangster. Ending the occupation is an important and desired goal, but neither you, nor your students, should have the illusion that ending the occupation in itself is going to end the violence and hatred of Israel.

Ami Isseroff