Israel Matzav

A funny take on Jerusalem

“May I just tell you your president is weak, very weak?” Yes, he may, but he doesn’t give us time to agree before he launches into a heavily accented but extremely nuanced tirade on the impossibility of “peace” between the Israelis and the Arabs: “Three years ago I drove a group of Palestinians from Jerusalem to Ramallah, and it took us only fifteen minutes to come to an agreement on a peace plan. Today there is not even the possibility! I don’t understand what you’re doing, you Americans. Once I believed we could live side by side with them in peace. Now, not at all. I used to call Judea and Samaria the West Bank. Now I call it Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel]. This is because of your American weakness. This is terrible. How can you American Jews support this?”

I want to defend some of us, to tell him I still call the West Bank Judea and Samaria and no brief for the other side has yet persuaded me to do otherwise; I want to say the combination of asthenia and intransigence so tragically and dangerously in evidence in our own president and equally so in the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, are only partly to blame; I want to argue that there never has been the possibility of peace since the moment Haj Amin al-Husseini’s Judenreinish Arab Higher Committee of Mandate Palestine, in league with Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, rejected the U.N. Partition Plan that would have given the Arabs of then-Palestine their own state and, in an act suggesting a not altogether complete de-Nazification of the Arabic stage, declared jihad and laid siege to the infant Jewish State.

But I don’t say any of it. I keep my mouth shut. Because chances are, even when you want to agree with an Israeli who’s in a disputative, philosophical mood, he won’t let you.

Labels: Bad Rachel, Jerusalem

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:31 PM