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 Posted by Aron on January 11 2006 (Wednesday) : 12:25 AMA biting commentary by Yitzhak Laor from today's Ha'aretz (see the full piece below): "Sharon's illness is not very different from what happened until now, all through the last year, as memory was gradually erased...We are forced to grant 'forgiveness' for the past in the name of the present, which is supposedly different from the past. It wasn't after the stroke that the Lebanon War turned into a four-letter word; it wasn't after the stroke that Sabra and Chatilla turned into bothersome annoyances. True, Sharon built settlements and now he has dismantled some of them. Yes, he will do the same thing in the West Bank. What's the "same thing"? The wall? The destruction of the livelihood of tens of thousands more Palestinians? Closing them up in ghettoes like the Gaza Ghetto? Nighttime shellings under the cover of Orwellian language, which the media in its entirety helped build?" The Ten Commandments are on the way By Yitzhak Laor Sympathy is awakened in every person at the sight of another person's suffering, unless one's concept about the suffering of others is taken from the legacy of Ariel Sharon. Sympathy is awakened by the diagrams of the brain and the detailed descriptions given by the surgeons on TV. Meanwhile, everyone is jumping aboard the "Altalena": One person weeps on TV remembering the adventure in Qalqilyah, another was with Sharon at Umm Katef, a third at the Suez Canal, and all remained alive, of course, to tell the tale of the glorious victor. Only in Kibiyeh, for some reason, was Sharon on his own, to show you that history has at least one advantage: there are events nobody wants to have participated in, not even in retrospect. [In 1954 in the village of Kibiyeh, 69 Jordanian civilians, many women and children, were blown up in their houses in cold blood by an Israeli commando force led by Arik Sharon --ed.] But nothing of the political farce currently playing began with the hemorrhage. For months, the politicians in Israel, particularly the most senior of them, have behaved as if Sharon was Moses on Sinai about to bring down the Ten Commandments. Now they are hoping that if not the Ten Commandments, at least there are a few scraps of paper on which he wrote the list of Kadima candidates for the Knesset. Tzachi Hanegbi in his place, Gideon Ezra in his, and let's not forget Avi Dichter. In these historic moments watching TV, it is important to take note of the nature of the enthusiasm about Kadima. It's not so much the evacuation of the settlers from Gaza, but the fear of handing the treasury over to the social democrats, which worked as such a success story in this case. Even Shimon Peres agrees. There's nothing like this situation to demonstrate the nature of Israeli democracy. Everything is seemingly determined in live broadcasts from the hospital courtyard. The new Sharon party is based on the memorialization of the moment, a kind of "Israel's eternity can wait." It is forbidden to talk politics, but a duty to approve the budget (and if Sharon was healthy, the budget should have been approved?) All the participants in this tearjerker must preserve the status quo, starting with Ehud Olmert as the leader. That is Sharon's vision, and in Sharon's vision Sharon is the way, or "the legacy." This vision is ridiculous. Even the "change in his position" should be read with a little less enthusiasm. The change matched, and not by accident, what Bush needed in the midst of his Iraqi horror. But the "vision" is now in charge in Israel. In the struggle for the future control over Israel, the past has been erased with the help of the current circus, opposite the TV. That's why the politicians and media invented the people weeping at their TV sets. Luckily we have telephones and e-mails to know that things are not really "just like that." As we said, Sharon's illness is not very different from what happened until now, all through the last year, as memory was gradually erased, for example by scholarly discussions comparing Sharon to Charles de Gaulle. We are forced to grant "forgiveness" for the past in the name of the present, which is supposedly different from the past. It wasn't after the stroke that the Lebanon War turned into a four-letter word; it wasn't after the stroke that Sabra and Chatilla turned into bothersome annoyances. True, Sharon built settlements and now he has dismantled some of them. Yes, he will do the same thing in the West Bank. What's the "same thing"? The wall? The destruction of the livelihood of tens of thousands more Palestinians? Closing them up in ghettoes like the Gaza Ghetto? Nighttime shellings under the cover of Orwellian language, which the media in its entirety helped build? Here, this is the most dangerous element in the Sharon cult of personality: turning the present into a "peace process." Politicians and especially everyone who was afraid of the "agenda," that change that burst into the world when Amir Peretz was elected chairman of the Labor Party, took part in this. In that context, even the discussion of the Sharon legacy has become part of the game. For the sake of that "legacy" people are ready to forget the little ambivalence that Israeli culture has allowed those who made their living from blood. Yitzhak Rabin at least acknowledged that ambivalence. It's enough to read his speech on receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize to understand that even if he didn't have a legacy, he had some sensitive insight into the valley of death through which we walked. Sharon is waved as a single flag: a winner. The Sharon legacy is success. Success at what? At war and business and building an image. Here is the historical moment the Israelis longed for: to look like a success story. < | >
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"Entre los individuos, como entre las naciones, el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz -- Among individuals, as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace" -Benito Juárez
"It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it." -Eleanor Roosevelt "Let them call me a rebel and welcome. I feel no concern from it. But should I suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul" -Thomas Paine | |
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The Ten Commandments are on the way
