I don’t know that Shimon Peres can do much about it one way or the other, but I think there is a good chance that something is going to give in 2011. I can’t see us going another year with the status quo on the peace process and on Iran. President Obama isn’t going to be able to do a whole lot with Congress so he should have a lot more spare time for globetrotting and diplomacy.
At his advanced age and with his vast experience and way of thinking, [President Shimon] Peres identifies himself with the state. And he sees all his enterprises drowning in the sea. In 2011, will Shimon Peres surprise us all – and surprise himself, too – by shedding the suffocating uniform of the figurehead and saying what he thinks publicly, in a clear voice and with a great outcry? Many people are pressing him to take that course, some of them opposition figures with whom he meets frequently…
…If there is a national figure today who is esteemed and to whom the nation will listen, it is Peres. Maybe the way to induce the prime minister to act is through the public. If Peres truly believes, as he says in private conversations, that in 2011 Israel will face the genuine possibility of economic sanctions by the European Union, joining the ranks of countries like North Korea and Iran, will he be able to look in the mirror at the end of the year and tell himself that he did everything he could to avert the disaster?
“What do you want from me, I’m not the prime minister,” he tells people who urge him to burst the boundaries of the presidency. “I prefer to do things quietly, by persuasion and with agreement. I have learned a few things in my life. Sometimes it’s better to work in this way in order not to generate anger and destroy friendships.”
It looks like Netanyahu has failed.
The accepted view across the political spectrum today is that Labor will leave the government in February or March of the new year. The Netanyahu coalition will survive for a few months with the help of the National Union, and then the Knesset will dissolve.
It looks like Peres thinks more than Netanyahu has failed:
People who have spoken with Peres of late are hearing grim and apocalyptic prophecies unlike anything he has ever voiced before. Not only about the peace process but also about the image of the country, which is becoming ever uglier, about the revulsion he feels at the phenomena of xenophobia and persecution of foreigners, and about the damage being done to Israel by the dark letters recently issued by rabbis and their wives.
In any case, I think we should keep our eye on Israel. The next year there could be historic, or apocalyptic. The people who have been running the country are out of ideas. They’ve got nothing left. Maybe they’ll realize that there is no one to turn to anymore and face reality. I hope so, for their sake.
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."the moment of truth is soon upon us, unfortunately.
The fact that many rabbis (most especially those associated with the IDF) are espousing positions advocating hatred and exclusion is a very disturbing indicator of Israel’s future. Whether the untenable status quo can last another year or not, it is only a matter of time before things there go from bad to worse. Within Israel itself, the questions are unavoidable: how bad will things get, how dramatically, how rapidly and how soon. Internationally, however, they are a complete wild card right now. They could do anything or nothing. I suspect, in fact, that they will not upset the apple cart just yet, precisely because they know there is no immediate threat to their state (and also because of the myriad technical challenges associated with attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities).
So really, the question is “Will the situation within Israel disintegrate in 2011?”
I think every year that goes by the chances increase. This is NOT a tenable situation. Too many people hate each other on both sides. Unfortunately, I think whenever things go bad, whether it’s this year or in the years to come, this time there will be full-fledged massacres, perhaps bordering on ethnic cleansing. The moral decay of “ethnic” (in reality, tribal) hatred is too pervasive, especially within the religious leadership of both sides.
The oppression of the Palestinian people does not in itself grant them moral superiority. The far greater military and institutional power of the Israeli state, however, puts the Israeli people in a far greater state of moral peril. I fear for the people living in the Holy Land. It may be impossible for them to avoid either committing or suffering atrocities of historic scope, either side of which is a tragedy.
Maybe the Mayans knew something we don’t.
Do you mean the Orthodox Mayans, the Conservative Mayans, the Reform Mayans, or the secular Mayans?
“It looks like Netanyahu has failed.”
Netanyahu has succeeded in every way imaginable. He has portrayed himself to the US and the world as a peace maker supportive of a Palestinian state, while doing everything in his power to undermine such a state. But if one reads the Likud political platform (Nakamura, Electronic Intifada), there is no place for a Palestine in Israel, which is conceived of as extending from the Jordan River to the sea.
The Greater Israel dream will continue.
Sorry to be so pessimistic but no Israeli government is capable of delivering on Palestine, not even Labor or the left wing Meretz party who might support it.
The news of 2011 will be international recognition of Palestinian autonomy (or will it be a unilateral declaration of independence and sovereignty). And the bigger news will be that Hamas will join in the Palestinian government as a political partner.
The so-called peace process has been strangled by Likud. The likelihood of a one-state solution means the likelihood of an apartheid state, which is acceptable to absolutely no one.
What to watch for. How the Obama administration deals with the coming crisis in US-Israeli relations. And how the domestic politics gets played by AIPAC and other advocates for Likud.
I think you’re probably right on at least the first count, and maybe the second.
Israel has played this deceptive game for the past 19 years beginning with Oslo, and as the territories shrunk and the water dried up, a light apparently went on. Not that the Israelis didn’t get a lot of help with their fake peace efforts from the US, Clinton and Bush II, in particular, to keep the Palestinians in a state of hope. Obama, like Bush II, is not likely to stick his neck out until the end of his second term. And it is for the reason that Obama wants a second term that he will remain fearfully silent next year.
The Palestinians are beginning to look elsewhere, away from the US, to get the help they need, and not too soon.
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Evil things are going on in Israel, and the wall is both a component of the evil and a symptom of it. I think that a lot of it started when the Russian Jews came in 1989. They brought a level of fanaticism that was new and really harder edge even than the Israelis were.
Here’s a couple of articles that provide food for thought as to the direction Israel is moving in and where it is going in the near future. Israel is now so right wing religiously and secularly that a breakthrough is just not forseeable.
MJ Rosenberg: The Atlantic’s Jeff Goldberg Despairs About Israel
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mj-rosenberg/the-atlantics-jeff-goldbe_b_802225.html
and Stephen Zunes: Israel Represses Israelis and Congress Approves
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-zunes/israel-represses-israelis_b_802609.html
I’d like to address this notion that Netanyahoo’s government is somehow more radical or extreme than any other. IIRC, it was the ‘moderate’ Kadima lead government that started the Gaza massacre. It was that same government with a ‘peacenik’ Labor defense minister which escalated a border skirmish into all out war with Lebanon.
And it was this wonderful and peace loving Shimon Perez who as PM in 1996 initiated (yet another) mass attack on Lebanon resulting in the first Qana massacre.
The only difference is that Netanyahoo and Lieberman dispense with the disguise and pretense of moderation, whereas the “left” still tries to put lipstick and perfume on the pig.
The rest of the world prefers the makeup as it’s easier to pretend it isn’t a pig.
I recently finished reading Philip Roth’s 1986 novel The Counterlife. It’s remarkable for its writing and literary boldness. Amid its tangled, shifting personal stories, its heart is the Israel-Palestine issue, with all sides getting space for passionate argument. What’s even more amazing than the level of the writing is how now, a quarter century later, absolutely nothing has changed. The arguments portrayed in the book could be spoken word for word on CNN or some NYT column today — same strategies, same rationalizations, same propaganda, same deadlock, same religious fanatic crap on all sides.
I don’t see what ideas the people running the country ever had. It might be time for the rest of the world to start thinking about allowing this bankrupt state to fend for itself. Maybe that’s the only way reality has a chance to sneak into the game.
Maybe if the people of Israel ever get sick of their apartheid state.
We’ll know when that happens by their electoral performance.
Wake me when we’re there.
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/01/01/gaza.israel.strikes/index.html?eref=edition
Confirming Israelis still love their apartheid system more than anything else.