Op-ed column, Dagens Nyheter, April 29, 2004.

 Israel’s Politics of Suicide

WHEN I LIVED in Israel for a few years in the early sixties, all the schoolchildren made a pilgrimage to Masada, the impenetrable fortress in the desert west of the Dead Sea where, in 73 AD, a thousand Jewish men, women and children chose to commit collective suicide rather than be defeated and captured by their Roman besiegers. The contemporary historian Flavius Josephus characterized the inhabitants of this last remaining pocket of resistance in the Jewish uprising against the Romans as a sect of religious and political fanatics (Zealots) – the temple had already been destroyed, Jerusalem already conquered and the war already lost – but nonetheless depicts their fate with empathy and compassion.

Masada has remained a highly official but deeply ambiguous symbol of the State of Israel. On the one hand, it is the place where thousands of Israeli recruits annually swear allegiance to the nation under the battle cry "Masada shall never fall again". On the other hand, the place that more than any other symbolizes the disastrous consequences of a survival strategy based on isolation, barricading and intransigence.

For a time, the soldiering ceremony at Masada seemed compatible with a strategy based on compromise, reconciliation and peace, but in recent years it has become increasingly clear that the strategy adopted by Masada's present-day leaders is the same strategy that led to siege, defeat and destruction almost two thousand years ago.

In all likelihood, today's Masada will last much longer because it is much better equipped, much more heavily fortified and currently supported by the most powerful military force of our time, but with each passing day, the State of Israel, by its actions and statements, is undermining the political and territorial conditions for a long-term compromise with its Arab neighbors and thus the conditions for its survival as a Jewish state, because the Arab neighbors cannot be kept away by an ever-higher and more massive wall or destroyed by ever more arbitrary acts of armed violence and territorial colonization.

In short, time is running out for every alternative to the suicidal strategy of Massada. For Ariel Sharon and his extreme nationalist allies in the current Israeli government, there has unfortunately never been any other strategy. In their world, Israel has always been and will always be surrounded by eternal enemies and can therefore only survive by being more powerful than them, which Israel can only be by remaining a Jewish garrison state fortified to the teeth, the bigger the better. In this paranoid strategy, every concession is a sign of weakness, every compromise a step towards defeat, every invitation for peace a preparation for betrayal. The only peace this government accepts is the peace of the powerful with the powerless, and the only human motivation it recognizes is fear. The fear of the occupiers, the fear of the occupied, the fear of the Jews.

The more fear that can be produced, the greater the support for Masada’s current commanders. Palestinian acts of terror and anti-Semitic propaganda play right into their hands, of course, and they consequently devote themselves to stimulating both. The former through an occupation that systematically produces humiliation, hatred and hopelessness which is a reliable breeding ground for desperate violence. The latter by systematically undermining the line between criticism of Israel and hatred of Jews.

While it is true that Jew-hatred in the world is on the rise, it is also true that the leaders of Masada are not opposed to it and do not hesitate to fuel it. Their goal now, as in the past, is to scare all the world's Jews into going to Israel where their national and religious destiny will finally be realized.

THIS, unfortunately, also happens to be a goal shared to the letter by the influential revivalist Christian right in the United States, who believe that the return of Jews to the Holy Land foreshadows the final battle of Armageddon and the return of Jesus, and who therefore support Israel's most extreme politicians and most fanatical settlers as the quickest and most effective way to accelerate God's plan. It is to this end that Ulf Ekman of the Swedish evangelical congregation Word of Life, closely associated with the revivalist Christian right in the United States, has built up a large operation in Israel from which he runs, among other things, Operation Jabotinsky (after the founder of the party now led by Ariel Sharon) with the aim of transferring as many Jews as possible from Russia to Israel.

With George W. Bush, this revivalist Christian right has apparently got its first president in the White House and, little by little, a Middle East policy that plays alarmingly well into the hands of both Mississippi and Massada fanatics.

Anyone looking for rational motives behind this policy is, of course, looking in vain. Ariel Sharon is driven by the belief in eternal victory and George W. Bush by the belief in the final battle, both of which must be characterized as deeply irrational motivations. With President Bush's recognition of Israel's occupation policy, the territorial conditions for the two-state solution, which could have formed a bridge of reconciliation between the Jewish inhabitants of Massada and the Arab world that inevitably encroaches on them, are rapidly being destroyed.

Fifteen years from now, the Palestinians will be the majority in the territory that Israel dominates and occupies. Israel's ruling extremists may plan to expel as many of them as possible and confine the rest to walled, Bantustan-like areas, but the society they create will increasingly resemble an isolated fortress in the desert, held together by fear, built on walls and ruled by fanatics.

You don't have to read Flavius Josephus to realize that this is the path to collective suicide.