Moshe Dayan's Widow Ruth: Zionist Dream Has Run Its Course
by Rula Jebreal, Newsweek, October 30, 2011
Dayan is rich with memories of the Israel of then and gets furious when I ask her to compare it with the Israel of now: “We built this country inch by inch, and we lost so many lives. We built public and social institutions, schools, factories. What’s going on today is awful. They’re ruining this country. I am a proud Israeli. I’ve lived through every war, endured every moment of suffering, but I never stopped believing in peace. I lost friends and family members. I’m a peacemaker, but the current Israeli government does not know how to make peace. We move from war to war, and this will never stop. I think Zionism has run its course.”
She sighs, and adjusts herself before continuing. “I long for the old Israel, where I traveled alone to Gaza the day after we won the 1956 war. Moshe was already a war hero, known to Israelis and Arabs alike. When I met the Palestinian mayor, I introduced myself as Ruth Dayan. The mayor almost had a heart attack.” She giggles. “His aides fled the scene. He cautiously asked me what my business was, and I replied that I wanted to see their rugs. He was astonished. ‘Rugs?’ he asked me. I was the head of Maskit at the time, a chain of arts-and-crafts stores. We were employing Bulgarian immigrants, and I wanted to include Arabs. I hired Arabs all over the country to make rugs and other merchandise. It was about living together, working together, creating a bridge. Today we use foreign labor to work in Israel because Palestinians are not allowed. And this continuous expansion of the settlements everywhere—I cannot accept it. I cannot tolerate this deterioration in the territories and the roadblocks everywhere. And that horrible wall! It’s not right.”
Read my lips: no new settlements
“And I will set thy bounds from the Red sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river: for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before thee.” - - Exodus 24:31.
“If Israel does not continue the settlement freeze, the peace process will be a waste of time.” - - Mahmoud Abbas.
Yet the moratorium is due to lapse, and construction has resumed in earnest. Cement began to pour into the scarred earth shortly before the deadline passed, in spite of limp calls on the part of the Prime Minister to ‘show restraint’. The future of the peace process – one that looks as promising as any undertaken since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin - now hangs in the balance.
Alarmingly, such a pattern of behaviour is not unique to this particular round of talks. President Carter had hoped to agree a pause in settlement construction on the West Bank during negotiations for the landmark Camp David Accords. Contemporaneous Foreign Office memoranda reveal however that Prime Minister Menachem Begin informed his Likud Party that, just weeks after the agreement of the concord, Israel was to begin immediately “a programme of expansion and consolidation of existing settlements in the West Bank”, including an “additional 500 families” settled at Ariel.
Carter sent private messages to Begin that hit the Israelis “very very hard indeed”, and which were in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski “very very clear”. But Moshe Dayan insisted that “the decision to build additional houses in the settlements was not contrary to the Camp David Agreement”, and as is evident by the sizeable estates which dot the hills west of the Jordan today, construction restarted and still persists.
I have been to Israel, and I have seen the Promised Land. The Jewish people have, in the space of sixty years, managed to construct for themselves the most remarkable and dynamic state, which has embraced not only the free market but liberal and open democratic values. Yet religious extremism, now in governance with Yisrael Beitenu and Shas members of the ruling coalition, blights Israel’s credibility on the international stage as a pluralistic and humanitarian state.
If Israel is to live up to the ideals it seeks to embody, then it can no longer continue with the erection of tenements on the West Bank, this gross injustice toward the Palestinian people. The construction of settlements, on land that the ultra-Orthodox deem part of Eretz Yisrael, is part of a silly, superstitious and ultimately apocalyptically dangerous plot to bring on the Messiah and marginalise or better yet rid the Holy Lands of infidelic influences. Religion is poisoning everything.
The amoral policy also makes the chances of peace in the region all the more slimmer. The Palestinian people require a state, but as settlers colonise more territory recognised to be theirs, dividing and reapportioning the land becomes more and more difficult. The boundaries between the State of Israel and the future Arab state, already blurred and muddled by the Security Barrier, are rendered intangible by settlements built deep into Judea and Samaria.
A recent and noble campaign by Israeli actors, who refused to play in a newly-built state theatre in Ariel on the West Bank, offers hope, that there are in fact dissenting voices within the State brave enough to speak out against the rising tide of Orthodox influence in government. Israeli novelists Amos Oz and David Grossman have risen in solidarity, alongside American artists such as Julianne Moore and Stephen Sondheim.
For the sake of peace as a Friend I too appeal, that the moratorium must hold, and this policy must cease. Read my lips, Mr. Netanyahu: no new settlements on Palestinian land.
