“Jurassic Park” is one of Steven Spielberg’s immensely successful kitsch-movies. If hewants to produce a sequel, something like “Jurassic Park II”, he should come to Israel.
In the original film, a group of scientists succeeded in resurrecting the dinosaurs bycloning. They intended to create an amusement park where people could admire the terriblelizards (that, by the way, is the meaning of dinosaur). But the plan misfired when thedinosaurs attacked their creators and devoured them one by one.
Something like this is happening now in Israel. A transient public whim led to theresurrection of two stuffed dinosaurs – Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres. They are now leading usto a war that will eat up many-many human beings. The meal has already started. Daily, peopleare being devoured, most of them Palestinians and some of them Israelis.
(It should be remembered, though, that, contrary to the movie plot, things here happenedquite accidentally. The Likud candidate, Bibi Netanyahu, refused to stand for election forsome negligible reason, clearing the way for Ariel Sharon, who would have had no chanceotherwise. At the time, if the Likud had put forward the horse of Caligula as its candidate, it,too, would have been elected. Ehud Barak had tricked himself to political death, thus makingit possible for Peres to return to the leadership of the Labor Party.)
It has become fashionable to point to the age of these Siamese twins, as if this was the problem.But it is not age that makes a dinosaur. A human being can live a hundred years and still benothing but a very old human being. A dinosaur is a dinosaur because he belongs to apre-historic era. It’s not a matter of age, but of substance.
Sharon and Peres are stuck in the 40’s and 50’s of the last century. Their mental world wasformed then. The notions and myths of those years have set their minds and direct their actionstoday. Sharon has never moved from there, Peres has jumped ahead but returned, at the firstopportunity, to where he came from.
Sharon practically boasts of his dinosaurishness. “There is no new Sharon!” he proudlyproclaimed recently. Soon he will plaster the walls with the 1948 slogan: “The whole country afront-line, the whole people an army.” Shimon Peres will adopt the funeral speech made byMoshe Dayan in 1956 in Nahal-Oz, the very place that has again become a front-line kibbutz:”Who are we that we should argue against their (the Palestinians’) hatred? Before their veryeyes, we turn into our homesteads the land and the villages in which they and their forefathershave lived.”
The dinosaurs multiply quickly. The country is being filled up with bands of little dinosaursthat repeat the slogans of 1936 as if they had been invented just now. They roam the media, thepolitical arena and every site (and web-site). Dozens of years of progress evaporate as ifthey had never been there. There was no Rabin, no Oslo, no New Middle East, no high-tech, nosecular revolution, no nothing. Everything that was created after 1950 is out of bounds.
President Katzav, that profound philosopher who is now the chief thinker of the state,repeats the prophecy of Ben-Gurion that sometimes, in the remote future, “the Arabs willresign themselves to our existence”, and only then peace will come. That’s to say, it will comeby itself. There is no need for us to do anything about it. We have only to wait. We have waited for53 years, we shall wait another 500 years. Why not? What’s so urgent?
Ben-Gurion’s concept brought on us the Sinai war, the Six-day war and the Yom-Kippur war. Eachwar caused the next one, and all of them emanated from the conviction that there is no need tosearch for peace and pursue it. It’s enough for us to stay strong and to hit the Arabs on the head,from time to time, whenever they try to raise it. Back then, Sharon was the military stick andPeres the political stick in the hands of Ben-Gurion.
Since then, the world’s landscape has changed completely. Mountains have become valleys,seas have turned into land. Leaders and powers have changed. Our region, too, has undergonegreat changes. The Arabs don’t want to wait. Chemical and biological weapons are beingproduced in the neighboring countries, together with the missiles to deliver them. Some ofthem are working on the production of nuclear bombs.
In the movie “Jurassic Park”, the problem is solved by nature. The new dinosaurs drop deadbefore they have time to devour the last remaining scientist. They could not face today’schallenges. Our dinosaurs, too, will be swept from the stage, because they cannot deal with areality they don’t understand. In their stead will come (so I hope) a new creature: a modern,sovereign, secular, peace-oriented Israeli, the Israeli of the 21 st century.