Akiva Eldar is one of Israel’s finest commentators and writes for the Haaretz newspaper.
He was interviewed on last night’s ABC TV Lateline about Israel’s upcoming elections and the country’s move to the far-right. His conclusions when asked his thoughts about the future?
I’m afraid that the next Israeli Government will be under much greater influence of this camp that is sending a very negative message not only to the Israeli Arabs, but to the Jewish community, which is a minority in other countries, including Australia, that will legitimise anti-Semitism on top of a very immoral message to the Arab citizens of Israel…
I believe that if in the next year, actually in the coming year, 2009, we are not going to reach some kind of even if it’s framework, if it’s a declaration of principles, on the basis of a two state solution, we will have to kiss it goodbye…
The Hamas… we used to say that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, maybe that’s part of their tactics, but they won the elections; elections that were approved by Israel and the United States.
So you can’t just crush a political party. You have to offer also an alternative, and Israel doesn’t want to go back to Gaza; Israel doesn’t want to go back paying the wages of teachers and doctors in Gaza.
And according to the international law, Israel is responsible to the wellbeing of 1.5 million people who live in Gaza until somebody else will take over. And I don’t see other countries such as Egypt lining up to do this…
It’s a hard question, you know, I started thinking in Leninist terms, that perhaps we need to… somebody to remind us what happens once the radical right will take over, and the world see.
Maybe we should… it’s time to remove the mask and show the real face of Israel, and the real face is ugly. Perhaps we need some shock treatment before it gets better.
Maybe it has to get worse, and we will not hide behind a kind of negotiations that are actually going nowhere but giving us the credit that we want peace.
So you know, since then I have become older and more sceptical about peace, but, you know, we keep hearing that as long as we need peace for our children, actually, I think that my generation also deserve peace, and I would like to see it in my time.
So, I’m not going to give up, and I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, and this is to try to convince my readers, and the decision makers in Israel that that if the Zionist movement will not be able to offer a quiet democratic and Jewish state, it will be considered a big failure.
Blind supporters of Israel want to ignore the reality of their homeland. Fascism is knocking on the door and they’re still living the Exodus “dream”.