The News Behind the News

No Bread No Circuses

The time is fast approaching when everybody will say "I told you so."

The Israeli elites, America's liberal Jews and the enlightened classes everywhere will be saying had it not been for the fascist settlers and the Nazi right wing religious fundamentalists all would be well now. Israel didn't make peace fast enough, give away enough and so we are now facing disintegration and defeat. I told you so.

And those who said "it's all wrong, the peace process is an absurdity that will destroy us," they will also say "I told you so" because they demanded that the government build settlements, not give lands away to Arabs and much more. The government, even the rightwing, lost nerve; committed suicide. I told you so.

The destruction of Israel will be "a question," "a debate." But if you're well up on your Zionism you know better. Justice Barak, for example, is a Zionist. When he says that his decisions to make the government give land equally to Arabs and Jews, and to make Jews who kill Arabs for "nationalist crimes" get the same sentencing Arabs get, he is talking pure Zionism. Neither should he have protested his is "not a post-Zionist philosophy." You'll see why in a minute.

As Israel retreated in Lebanon and the West Bank today Mr. Justice Barak's decisions respecting land and equality added their part to a familiar peace-process pattern. Each retreat is accompanied by a stepped up implementation by the State of Zionist equality. Our favorite example at IASPS is an early pacesetter by then minister of environment Mr. Sarid of Meretz. He banned circuses (cruelty to animals) when Mr. Rabin transferred Bethlehem (house of bread) to the Arabs. (No bread, no circuses, you see; an end to Occupation and Jewish nazism/nationalism.)

Mr. Justice Barak, in announcing two radical egalitarian principles as being "Zionism in the fullest sense of the word" may not have been poetic but he was enlightened. The equalization Mr. Barak announced and defends is in truth Zionism in the fullest sense for the reason that he did not overturn Israel's Zionist traditions of land ownership at all but instead wonderfully strengthened them. As for his detractors calling him Post Zionist, meaning against the existence of nations at all (nationalism as fascism) and against Jews (religion as an opiate of the people and nazism), they are as much Post Zionists as he is. No fair.

The State of Israel owns virtually all of the land of Israel; over 90%. It is not held privately. A reform of land policy would have been its privatization --and the right of anyone to buy it, something this Institute has urged as a condition, first of economic reform, and, second, of checking the unlimited power of the State by way of law and of property. In fact had land been private, Arabs could and should have bought it. Moreover there would have been no peace process had this been the case. There are many reasons for this, not least economic growth and the cessation of aid which made exactly this key reform impossible. But one simpler reason why the privatization of land would have short circuited the peace process is that the State could not have so easily pulled people off their land. And there would have been law and a reason to defend it against the State. But this is another subject.

In making Arabs the equal of Jews in buying land as a factor of production owned by the State, Mr. Barak only completed (shalem in Hebrew) the purpose of the State's owning all the land in the first place, namely to politicize it, rendering all people equal. He is simply right. He is the better Zionist than his detractors. When he and others will now turn on these detractors as anti-democratic fascists and so forth they will not say in reply this is only true if you are a Zionist or someone who promotes a certain version of equality which reduces Arabs to Jews, Jews to Arabs and thereby also promotes the withering away of the nation-state by the State to become the state of all of its citizens, thus the vanguard of true freedom or no states at all. Instead they will say that they are Zionists who believe in the Land. (the "Land" you see is owned by the State). The Zionists of the right uphold this as much as Mr Justice Barak and, just as he would not think of ending US aid neither would the "settlers" or the "fundamentalists."

Bread and circuses indeed.