No one will deny that Israel is in a pretty screwed-up situation. There no need to even explain and justify. Israel is screwed-up, full stop. A country doesn’t become screwed-up out of a desire to be screwed-up. It simply happens. Out of negligence, recklessness, malice, stupidity or just a collection of mistakes.
Being an indefatigable Israeli patriot, I am convinced that Israel fell into its screwed-upedness solely due to a particularly packed series of innocent mistakes and not, God forbid, due to negligence, stupidity or malice. By way, of proof, following are 10 mistakes, out of a very long list:
• We erred when we didn’t stick a sock into the shofar that Rabbi Shlomo Goren blew at the Western Wall in 1967. We’ve been stuck ever since with what he stuck us with that day.
• We erred when we didn’t eject Moshe Levinger and his confederates from the Park Hotel in Hebron and put them on a bus back home before they held their Passover seder in 1968.
• We erred when we failed to adopt the wisdom of our sages and did not prohibit, as they did, climbing on the mount of the mosques in Jerusalem.
• We erred when we did not pass laws protecting our democracy.
• We erred when we did not prosecute every racist, every anti-democrat and every fascist.
• We erred when we founded the malignant, superfluous, evil and criminal “settlement enterprise.”
• We erred when we were sure that because of Hitler, everything is permitted to us.
• We erred when we thought that an army that for 55 years was employed as an occupation police force would remain an army.
• We erred when we thought that if savages slaughtered over 1,000 of our innocent civilians, it gave us license to put many thousands of innocent civilians out of their misery. (We never “slaughter.”)
And that’s just one minyan of mistakes; there are more. Lots more. But only three of the rest hold the only chance of a return to sanity:
• We erred when we didn’t withdraw in time from all the territories we accidentally conquered in 1967. The time has come to do so; to pull out of all of these territories, with or without an agreement. Simply to get out. We’ll tell the settlers: If you want, leave; if you don’t want, stay. And Jerusalem? It might finally get the vital, wonderful internationalization that the United Nations had planned for it, in the resolution calling for the establishment of the state.
• We erred when we forgot to separate religion and state. The time has come to do so. A few wise voting decisions in the Knesset and we can eliminate the arrangement by which there are religious, Haredi and Haredi Zionist parties. And also the cultivation of ignorance and idleness with taxpayers’ money.
• We erred when we failed to establish a constitution. The time has come to do so. To start, it’s enough to define the state as a substantive democracy, together with the inclusion of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
And that’s it. That’s everything: withdrawal from the territories, a wall of separation between religion and state, a constitution. At once, the road to the normalization of the state will open. How hard can it be?
And if it doesn’t happen, what will happen? Well, then we’ll remain what we are: a screwed-up state that has been taken hostage by a gang of religious fanatics who insist on keeping a divine promise that even God no longer remembers whether, when and why he even gave it.
And from this black pit no protest, no victory, no unity and no special cabinet will rescue us. We’ll just go on slaughtering and being slaughtered, corrupting and being corrupted. And so forth, to the final disintegration.