Anthony Zinni has made a request to Ariel Sharon: Please, stop enlarging the settlements. Atleast for some time. Do you mind?
Zinni is a general from the Marines, his thinking is straight and logical. It’s difficult forhim to understand why Sharon doesn’t comply. What the hell is it all about? A few housessomewhere. Is it worthwhile killing so many human beings, so many children, Israeli andPalestinian, just for that? What kind of madness is this?
All the more so as the life of the settlers themselves has turned into hell. They cannot moveabout without risking their lives. The settlements have become their prisons. The world getsupset when a suicide bomber blows himself up in Tel-Aviv, but it does not get upset whensettlers get shot. They are seen to be a part of the occupation, and therefore legitimatetargets for the resistance of the occupied people.
A great many settlers – perhaps the majority – would undoubtedly be more than willing to returnto Israel now. Those who were looking for “quality of life” in a picturesque landscape, andfound out that the picturesque landscape produces mostly desperate suicide bombers, are nowdreaming of a quiet home in Ra’anana, the rich people’s suburb near Tel-Aviv. But to whom tosell a villa with red tiles and a nice garden, which can be hit at any moment by a mortar shell?Only the government can buy, and the government does not want to.
It’s easier for industrial enterprises. Their owners were seduced by successivegovernments (including those of Rabin, Peres and especially Barak) to sell their expensiveplots in the cities and get instead, for next to nothing, land in the industrial parks of thesettlements where they could exploit Palestinian slave labor. No minimum wage, no socialbenefits. The owners also got ali kinds of subsidies, tax exemptions etc. Now they steal away,very quietly, one after the other. Suppliers, drivers, professional employees do not come tothese places anymore. In contrast to the Hamas fighters, they do not want to commit suicide.
All this is well known to General Zinni’s advisers. They have good eyes that hover in the skies.Therefore they do not understand, with their simple American mind, why Sharon is soobstinate.
They understand, of course, that there are political pressures. Americans understandpolitical pressures, after all. They, too, have them. Sharon must take account of his extremeright-wing partners, also of the fanatical settlers’ lobby. But this does not explain thefierceness of his opposition. So what’s it all about?
It would be worthwhile for General Zinni (as for his predecessors and successors) to studysome Zionist history. They would discover that the settlements are part of the genetic code ofthe movement from the day it was born, 104 years ago. Indeed, from the moment of its inception,when the Jewish egg met with the nationalist European sperm.
This genetic code tells the movement to settle all parts of the country, to turn all of it into aZionist homestead. It started quietly, “dunam after dunam”. The tempo accelerated duringthe 30s. In the 1948 war, in which the settlements played an important part, Israel conquered78% of the country. After that, some 500 Arab villages were eradicated and settlements wereput up in their place. Just when this job was finished, the war of 1967 broke out, Israelconquered the rest of Palestine and started at once to put up settlements there, too. Whoeverwas in power – Labor or the Likud, Begin or Peres, Nethanyahu or Barak – the settlement activitywent on, without resting for a moment.
The Goyim can say what they want – that the settlements are immoral, an obstacle to peace,illegal, and lately that they are a war crime. But the action goes on. During the year in whichBarak negotiated the “end of the conflict”, settlement activity achieved a pace unequalledin any previous single year.
Sharon is the son of settlers, he grew up in a settlement, settlements are the very essence ofhis life. Throughout his checkered career, whatever his job was at any particular time, hedevoted his energies first and foremost to the setting up of settlements. But even if he hadbeen the son of new immigrants from Morocco – he would still have done the same. Because thesettlement drive is not a personal thing, it is dictated by the collective genetic code.
If there had been no resistance, the settlement drive would have continued until all the WestBank and the Gaza Strip had been covered with settlement up to the last dunam. From there itwould have spilled over into “Eastern Eretz Israel” (as Jordan is called in geographylessons), as well as all the other neighboring countries that are included in God’s generouspromise given in the Bible. The army would have conquered, the settlers would have settled.
That will not happen, because pressure creates counter-pressure. The unstoppable movementmeets an unmovable object: the Palestinian people. The war between the two peoples has nowreached a climax unequalled during the last 104 years (except, perhaps, in 1948). Thecontinuation of the settlement activity may bring disaster upon the whole enterprise.
Classic literature knows the character of the compulsive gambler. He has a successful day, hewins and wins, an immense heap of chips is stacked in front of him. He could get up at any moment,exchange his chips for real money and live on it happily ever after.
He could, but he is not able to. The compulsion does not let him. He goes on gambling, loses andloses, until the last chip is collected by the croupier.
In the classic stories, the gambler gets up, as pale as the wall, struggles to the door, puts arevolver to his temple and shoots himself.
The question is, whether we are condemned to act like him or to say to ourselves: Enough! Wechange our genetic code. It’s time to change the code by implanting a new gene of sane living,free from the old compulsion. Let’s turn the settlements beyond the Green Line over to thePalestinian refugees and bring the settlers safely back home.
That’s the story, general. The problem is ours. But maybe you can help us a little, general,sir.