|
|
||
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
Israel and the Palestinians: An unequal
reciprocity of suicides Arafat's suicide bombers aspire to immortal life. They are urged on by the Arafat-appointed clergy's most recent call in the mosques: "Palestinians spearhead Allah's war against the Jews. The dead shall not rise until the Palestinians shall kill all the Jews....All agreements with Israel are provisional." That is why thousands of young Palestinians are willing to become suicides, to become martyrs for whom dying in the act of killing Jews is merely a temporary inconvenience - one that will bring true freedom from death. Citizens of Israel do not share, collectively, the Palestinian commitment to immortality. Unlike their "partners in peace," they are altogether unwilling to become suicides. Yet, it is the Israelis, not the terrorists, who direct themselves toward disappearance as a group. Seeking, sometimes desperately, to stay alive, the citizens of Israel agree to codified "peace" policies that almost compel national suicide. We see, therefore, an ironic mirror image between Israel and Arafat. Yet, Israel, ignoring the reflection, sees only one side of the suicidal reciprocity, the individual self-destruction of Islamic terrorists, while Arafat sees not only the temporary "deaths" of individual Muslims but also the resultant collective disintegration of a despised Jewish state. For Israel, the unacknowledged reciprocity occasions the frightfully unimaginable concessions of a so-called "Peace Process," while for Arafat the acknowledged reciprocity is confirmation that he is embarked upon the only correct course - the theologically-determined course to real and irreversible Islamic victory. For Israel, suicide is something "crazy," something only irrational terrorist enemies would actively choose as a strategy of confrontation. For Arafat, suicide is the very highest form of political engagement, a divinely-mandated method that rewards doubly when the enemy infidel is blind enough to cooperate in his own meaningless dying. For Israel, which does not yet understand that reciprocal suicide is the objective of PLO/Hamas/Islamic Jihad, its own self-inflicted Oslo dismemberment may continue to appear perfectly sensible. For Arafat, who understands that this reciprocal suicide is altogether asymmetrical (i.e., Palestinian suicides that yield individual paths to immortality are exchanged for permanent collective Israeli annihilation), the martyrdom of young Palestinians will be perfectly sensible. For Israel, still unaware that all politics moves in the midst of death, individual enemy suicides will push the Jewish State to effectively renounce its national life. For Arafat, profoundly aware of the connections between death and politics, Israeli complicity in rejecting Jewish national life in the Middle East will elicit more and more individual Muslim suicides until the lethal reciprocity is complete. Camus's meditation on living or not living - on the implications of suicide - has tragic and vital meaning in the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians. In the final analysis, this meaning must extend to associated questions of enduring or not enduring, and to related questions of rebellion. Should Israel now begin to yield not only to the temptation to exist, but also to the corollary obligation to think, it might still have a chance to understand the true messages of suicide. Rejecting the chimera of a "New Middle East," that paradise of debility erected by Rabin and Peres and Netanyahu and Barak, the Jewish State could at last begin to revolt against a suicidal politics that points unswervingly toward oblivion. There are crimes of passion and crimes of
logic, and today, at a moment when many governments are immobilized by
fears of living and dying, Israel is confronted by both kinds of crime.
What is more, Palestinian crimes of terrorism, surrounded by passion and
approved by Arafat, are animated by logic. This logic of suicide is not,
by any means, an oxymoron, as even death that is self-inflicted can play
a survival role of enormous political importance. The point, for Israel,
is to understand this logic while there is still time, to acknowledge
that metaphysical rebellion is an Israeli imperative, and to recognize
that the death of its individual enemies can produce not only the deaths
of individual Israelis, but also its own reciprocally collective death.
Without such an understanding, the People of Israel will celebrate their
anniversaries only to pray for a second Flood.
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
© 2001 Koret Communications Ltd. All rights reserved. Terms of Use. |
