Feb 3 1996 Looking Ahead

Elections this May or October, it doesn't matter. What matters is getting the roads open to Africa, Asia and Europe.

Israel is the California of Europe, peculiarly facing West at the eastern end of the Med. It's possibly the Hong Kong of the next century -- it will be the world's most densely populated country by the year 2020 -- and there's no reason there shouldn't be a road all the way to the Pacific from the Eastern Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, the Negev's time is coming soon, as the interests of the country mature from tribalism and paranoia to internationalism and free trade. The Gaza to West Bank road, connecting the two parts of Palestine will contribute as much to the Israeli economy as to the Palestinian. It will pass across the northern Negev, south of Beersheba, pulling that city southward. Meanwhile, the open border between Eilat and Aqaba, combined with the new road from Mitzpe Rimon to Eilat, will make that southern tip of the Negev bloom with development.

Watch for the Negev in Shimon Peres' speeches, once the campaign officially begins. He'll refer to it, echoing Ben-Gruion, arguing that the Zionism coming to an end on the West Bank and Golan was never part of the plan, and that the Negev is the real physical frontier that needs to be opened in order to avoid becoming a city-state of skyscrapers between Tel Aviv and Haifa.

He envisions clean-industry high-tech development parks and eco-tourism; mineral resourcing and new educational institutions, all within the context of internationally financed regional cooperation for the rapid development of a new Middle East in which the masses move toward a consolidated middle class, with interests in stability and the promise of a better life for the next generation -- rather than hopes only for heavens promised by martydrom.

Bibi, of course meanwhile wonders when he has to tell his voters that he plans to talk to Arafat -- and if says he will, then he'll have to do it before the election in order to generate any credibioity, but by doing so loses at least that quarter of the right-wing constituency driven by racism's ignorance, voters who will not become disenfranchised but certainly put in their place. Over one shoulder he has Benny Begin breathing fire and brimstone at any Israeli who dares try to develop a trusting relationship with ther Arabs -- especially the Palestinians. Over the other he has the nouveau riche of the West Bank settlements who thought they could live forever in a system of apartheid that gave them superior rights (and military protection of those rights) over their neighbors, indeed over their Israeli compatriots who didn't leave the State of Israel for the Land of Israel.

Nobody should underestimate the damage the settlement movement did to the State of Israel during the last 29 years, draining military, political, economic and moral strength from the state in order to satisfy the religious delusions of what is being proven to be an ever shrinking minority of Israelis who believe God, not the IDF, kept Israel safe over the last 50 years.

Moshe and Miriam Levinger seek martydrom, but far more Israelis flock to MacDonalds than to Ma'arat Hamachpela -- and not because of the new security regulations instituted in the bloody wake of their hero Baruch "Barry" Goldstein. The real issues facing us in an era of peace will touch directly on the essential schisms created by the proliferation of knowledge: Western and Eastern; Secular and Religious; Israeli and Jewish.

In the years when Israel was not exactly a pariah state, but clearly marching to its own drummer, American Jews, proud of their buregoning self-reference as a Babylonian-style diaspora, capable of a greatness all its own, believed that it was healthy for foreign Jews (i.e., non-Israeli Jews, particularly Americans) to be participants in a dialogue with the Israeli government, if not in the decision making.

Nowadays, American Jews from the "left" complain that in Israel few seem to care about their Reform or Conservative movements, while the "right" complain that the government is forsaking the most cherished religious ideals. As usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Israel on the verge of peace with its neighbors will soon need to make peace with itself -- not by readopting outdated theologies of fabricated national tribal unity, but by asserting clearly that it does indeed have a meta-historical role to serve as a light unto the nations by proving that it's not only possible to make peace with the enemy, it's possible to make peace with the past.

For the first seventy-five years of the Jewish national liberation movement also known as Zionism, every effort was made by those in positions of national responsibility to avoid letting the rhetoric of religion take over the dispute. In the last 29 years, since the badly named Six Day War (it was really a three-hour air war followed by five and a half days of mopping up), religion, not security, has been the underlying motive in the attempt to hold onto the territories.

But those days are over -- thank God. Israel will soon be able to focus on what it could become, and not what circumstances forced upon it.