Israel, "Palestine" and a Future of the Terrible

The "official" map of Palestine - distributed widely by the Palestine Authority - defines the emergent Arab state to include all of Judea, Samaria (West Bank), Gaza, and the entire State of Israel. A small slice of Jordan is also included on the map, which purposefully excludes any references to Jewish populations. Only Christian and Muslim holy sites are noted in this rare but candid example of cartographic ingenuity.

Israel still refuses to take proper notice. In Jerusalem, despite the new Prime Minister's tough talk about Israeli security, nothing is being done to effectively slow the metamorphosis of Israel into Palestine. Soon the real geography will resemble the map. Soon the PA cartographers will be recognized for providing an indisputably forthright blueprint for a Palestinian Final Solution to the Israel Question.

For Israel, therefore, the time has come to believe in a future of the terrible. Incapable of believing in a future of their most terrible regrets, the People of Israel still cling stubbornly to the quaintly obsolete notion that they must endure. As a result, they will likely continue about their business until the very last moment. Perhaps one should envy this People the dexterity with which it now manages to die.

But there are better forms of dexterity. In Pericles' Funeral Speech, as recorded by Thucydides, Athens' wartime leader comments: "What I fear more than the strategies of our enemies is our own mistakes." Understood in terms of Israel's stubborn march to disappearance, Pericles' wisdom points, above all, to the mistake of underestimating one's own national mortality. Still led by mortality's buffoons - by "pragmatic" politicians who abhor every serious thought - Israel has now come to terms with all who would cause it to perish.

Let us be frank. By his intended further surrender of essential territories, of Israel's honored heritage, of Israel's physical integrity as a state, the new Prime Minister now erects his People's future upon the ruins of wisdom. Proceeding from one forfeiture to the next, Barak's cultivated faith in unwisdom will serve as an ironic pretext for still greater capitulations. Inhabiting his convictions with great intellectual uneasiness, this Prime Minister will "advance" only toward a nadir of the Jewish past, seemingly content that Jewish mortality has been disallowed as a problem.

Israel under Barak will still yearn desperately for utopia, but may forget that utopia (as we learn from Thomas More) means nowhere. Israel's collective penchant for utopia is, in part, a contrived memory projected into the future, an illusion of national immortality that stands in utterly stark contrast to the tormented millennia of Jewish martyrdom. Israel's fate, unless it comes quickly to recognize a possible future of the terrible, is to have no future at all. Where such recognition would remain absent, it would be Israel's fate, even as it aspires to paradise, to collide roughly with the Wailing Wall.

As a "pragmatist," Prime Minister Barak will need to exclaim, publicly, that paradise has been bolted shut. No Israeli can force an entrance there. Existing perilously in a region submerged in conflict, Israel's persisting dreams of a New Middle East are based on a theoretical impossibility. These dreams are an immature counterpoint to Reason, a childlike vision that disqualifies the intellect of all its leading architects.

While it will be easier politically for Ehud Barak to sustain a utopia than an apocalypse, the one leads here to the other. What is most striking about the new Prime Minister's particular narrative for the region - a narrative based upon incomprehensible presumptions of Israel's permanence - is the total absence of perspicacity. All of his characters, like those of Rabin and Peres and Netanyahu before him, are fictive; none is real. His is an earthly vision without any terrestrial reference points. Mr. Barak, a former general, had now better read Tacitus than the pretend scholarship of those drooling academics who - with utter shamelessness - would now be his trusted counsel.

For Israel, for the Jewish State, apocalypse is real. But where it is imagined in timely fashion, it may not actually have to be suffered. Where the People of Israel face up to a possible future of the terrible, they may not have to disappear terribly.

At the moment, frontline Islamic states enjoy a great tactical advantage over Israel. These states understand that a religion that dispenses with The Enemy debilitates itself, atrophies, grows complacent, makes itself unable to compete. This does not mean that Israel under Barak requires its own version of jihad, but it does mean that Israel cannot strive productively toward peace while it is still The Enemy of Islam. One may wish fervently that this were not so, but even the most ardent wishes will not unbolt the doors of paradise.

A dying country compromises with its disease, cherishes the very virus that has produced the infection. So it is with Israel. It is altogether likely that Ehud Barak, exactly in the fashion of his three immediate predecessors, will not understand that the smell of carrion merely fascinates and inflames those enthusiastic gravediggers still called Israel's "partners in peace." When these beneficiaries of his misplaced largesse may soon dance merrily upon tens of thousands of fresh Israeli graves, the blood-dimmed tide of Jews will have been loosed by Jerusalem's latest refusal to terminate Oslo.

Israel is not generally recognized as a dying country, but it is only by recognizing that national death is distinctly possible that it can sidestep death. To accept such recognition, Israelis must first understand that their prime ministers still think as if by accident. Listening to such accidental thought, it is apparent that a single human indigestion is richer in ideas than the new Prime Minister's agenda for survival. The odor of deja vu, of futility, clings to his appeals, to his promises, to his exhortations, to his threats. Barak's "thinkers," like those of Netanyahu and Peres and Rabin, are generally theoreticians for the adolescent and for the senile.

For Israel the time has finally come to believe in a future of the terrible. The People of Israel must be able to believe in a future of their most terrible regrets. With such a belief in the prospect of genocidal war and unconventional terrorism, Israel could abandon its bizarre enchantment with impotence and prepare instead to endure. By acknowledging that endurance is not assured, that nowhere has it been recorded that the Third Temple Commonwealth is necessarily forever, Israel could wisely choose wisdom over unwisdom and life over death.

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