Once upon a time, there was a lion and three bulls; white, black and red. The lion could not eat any of them as long as they were united. One day, he convinced the red and black bulls that eating the white one rids them of the one with the weird color and allows them more space in the yard. The two bulls agreed.
After eating the white, the lion repeated his trick again and ate the red bull. Shortly afterwards, he came to the black bull and said: “This is it. Your turn.” The red bull looked him in the eye and said: “Now I understand. I was eaten the day the lion ate the white bull.”
This metaphoric story fits exactly the current Israeli Knesset where the ultra-rightwing lion managed to eat his political foes from the Arabs to left and center Israelis. Now, it is getting ready to eat the remainder of the Israeli people. What is happening in Israel should frighten every Israeli. It is the takeover of a country that survived seven decades of wars and conflict, no matter why and against whom it launched those wars, but finally found itself cracking from the inside.
Is Israel being destroyed from the inside?
Democracy on its own cannot stand alone. It is not enough to hold elections to prove your support for democracy. Cases in history, and I am not going to specify, showed how ruthless ultra-nationalist leaders were elected democratically and then carried out atrocities and carnages that changed the course of history. Those shall be damned forever. Others like them should forever be denied entry into any government constellation anywhere, not just in Israel. Enough is enough.
An Israeli friend asked after the elections if I was scared by the sweeping victory of the extremist right. “As a Palestinian,” I answered, “I don’t really care whom the Israelis elect for themselves as much as I hope to see an Israeli Charles De Gaulle or Frederik Willem de Klerk steering the government wheel in Israel. A leader of this kind can come from the left, right or center. Can Israel give birth to a charismatic leader like these two and bring salvation to our conflict-shattered Middle East?
I hear the words of Dorit Beinisch, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court in Israel, and I feel scared. The so-called reforms being deliberated in Israel on the judicial system are not reforms at all. Reforms indicate something good is coming out of them. There is nothing good in a system where warmongers are given the full freedom to act without any legal tool to leash them.
Ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian and Arab territories that Israel conquered in the June 1967 war is not going to be harder for Israel than it was for the French ending their occupation of Algeria or the Whites ending their Apartheid regime in South Africa. In Palestine, there has been a Palestinian leadership that has been consistently committed to the two-state solution as stipulated in the historic Proclamation of Independence that the late Yasser Arafat read out in Algiers in November 1988. Since then, with the exception of the assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and imprisoned Ehud Olmert, Israel never had a leader who was equally committed to peace with the Palestinians or to Rabin’s legacy.
Benjamin Netanyahu has always bragged about his success in destroying the Oslo process. With his new coalition, he has unchained the warmongers to destroy what has remained of Oslo: a besieged Palestinian Authority that strives to survive no matter what while containing the violence as much as possible and alerting the international community that laws are breached daily under occupation and that the world has to honor its obligations under international law.
Ironic is Israel’s response to the Palestinian moves in the international arena. They want us to continue receiving hits on our head day and night, a matter that has been going on non-stop since 1967, and pray to God to perpetuate the Zionist grace that came down on us! This is absurd.
What is good for Israel in the destruction of the PA? What would Israel benefit from uniting all the Arabs in historical Palestine against the emerging Apartheid regime; only to appease the greed of the extreme-right-wing parties?
I don’t want to terrify my Israeli friends but I have to say it. From our perspective, Israel is rushing down the hill to a bottomless abyss. Instigating more and more Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims all over the world is never a recipe for a country like Israel to survive. It only speeds up the trip to collapse. A time bomb is ticking: tick tock, tick tock. The apocalyptic hour is coming faster than anybody expects.
Elias Zananiri is a Palestinian journalist and political analyst