Sunday, September 15, 2013

Asking Forgiveness from the Wrong Side



by Dror Eydar


During these High Holy Days we were treated to yet another article poking us in our collective chests, chiding us that "we have sinned, we have transgressed." Under the headline "Time for forgiveness" in Yediot Ahronoth, former Director of the Department for Special Tasks in the State Attorney’s Office Talia Sasson explains how Yom Kippur connects secular people to their Judaism; we must ask for forgiveness she writes. The reason we must ask for forgiveness quickly becomes apparent. Care to gander a guess? Bingo -- it is because of the "occupation." 

Here are the golden words of the killer of Jewish outposts in the land of our forefathers: "Forty-six years we have controlled a foreign people. Its lands we have taken. Its water we have drunk. We have built our homes on Its land and Its basic rights we have violated. When I think of this I am overcome with disgrace. Yes. You and I who have come to terms with it, who have made it happen, who have spoken highly only of our own rights." She adds that the Israel Defense Forces is immoral due to the occupation and that our democracy is not really democratic because of, yes, the "occupation." Truly model atonement. 

Twenty years have passed since the Oslo Accords; 20 years since the euphoria that flooded our minds thanks to those same old blowhards; since the voice of anyone who criticized the deal and shed a light on its pitfalls was silenced; 20 years since the throngs clamored after the false Messiah of peace. Here is a real reason to atone.

After decades in which we were used as lab rats in Talia Sasson and her friends' diplomatic and military experiments, the time has come for forgiveness to be asked from Israel's citizens. Forgiveness must be asked for slandering us throughout the world; forgiveness from the land of Israel for slandering it and for not remembering the sins of the spies who "scorned the desirable land;" forgiveness from the pioneers of our times, the settlers, who stay close to the good land and cling to it for all of us; forgiveness for the destruction of Jewish communities.

Mrs. Sasson, ask forgiveness for the lies that you and your friends still tell: The lands of which people did we take? From whose water have we drunk? Whose rights have we violated? 

"We have never taken land away from other nations or confiscated anything that belonged to other people. On the contrary, we have simply taken back property that we inherited from our ancestors, land that had been unjustly taken away from us by our enemies at one time or another. We are now only making use of this opportunity to recover our ancestral heritage" (I Maccabees 15:33-34). This is what Simon the Maccabee wrote to King Antiochus almost 2,200 years ago. This simple truth has not changed. 

Who are we controlling, really? Since the Oslo Accords the vast majority of Palestinians is not under our control and has almost complete autonomy. The Palestinians have a few parliaments (in Gaza, Ramallah, and even in Jordan), they have government ministries and receive enormous funds from the world (much of which is pocketed by their leaders and terrorist groups) and an independent education system which teaches its children that no such thing as a state named Israel exists in this area, that the Jews essentially have no historic or religious connection to this land, that there were never any Jews in Jerusalem and that a Temple never stood on the Mount. They have a police and security forces. They of course are dependent on us and the IDF to protect them from a Hamas takeover, which Palestinian documents exposed by WikiLeaks and broadcast by Al-Jazeera prove. There is a problem with border crossings and checkpoints -- but these are emergency measures for defense against terrorists who seek to kill us and them. In peace time these checkpoints will be removed. 

The irony is that Sasson began her article by reminiscing about her grandmother who immigrated in 1920 as a fervent Zionist who helped build a kibbutz in the Jerusalem foothills. From the perspective of Sasson's dear Palestinians, her grandmother also took land that did not belong to her and drank their waters. Here is the distance between the Zionist dream fulfilled merely three generations ago, and the Talia Sassons of the world, who have mortgaged their energies, wisdom and sense of justice for the good of a collective which for 100 years has wanted nothing to do with us, is not willing to accept us being here or share our land with us (yes, our land!), and which invests the very fiber of its being in destroying the Jewish people and their only country. 

But in the kingdom of blindness nothing has changed. The peace is the same peace and the justice is the same justice -- for the Palestinians. With the force of a thousand hammers the storm raging around us is pounding at Talia Sasson and her friends' shuttered windows, yet they refuse to look it in the eye. All they see is the "occupation." Indeed, their consciousness has been occupied. The time has come to rescue the captive national consciousness and return it the fundamental truths of Zionism. 

At the end of her article, I read that Talia Sasson is now the co-chairwoman of the New Israel Fund International Council, and then I understood. Sasson concludes her article with a request: "Perhaps we will now think of forgiveness. Perhaps this time." One can only hope.


Dror Eydar

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5715

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

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