[Mb-civic] What Israel must do - Chaim Yavin - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

What Israel must do

By Chaim Yavin  |  September 24, 2005

JUST BEFORE the Israeli exit from Gaza, a television station in Israel 
aired my series ''The Land of the Settlers," a personal documentary 
about the West Bank and Gaza, the result of two and a half years of 
research and interviews with hundreds of settlers and Palestinians. The 
message of the series was: If we want peace, we have to dismantle the 
settlements.

It created an uproar. The settlers demanded my resignation, while others 
said the series was an eye-opener. For most TV viewers in Israel I have 
been for years the objective anchorman and documentarist, and now people 
were asking, ''Whatever happened to this guy? Where is his objectivity?

I myself am a settler. I was born in Germany one year before Hitler came 
to power. When my father saw the Nazi gangs beating the Jews, he decided 
to immigrate to Palestine. His family tried to dissuade him, arguing 
that in the Germany of Goethe and Bach nothing could happen to the Jews. 
My father landed in Palestine, while the rest of his family went to 
Auschwitz.

One cannot understand the settlements issue without understanding the 
Israeli Shoa complex. I grew up in Israel, and survived five major wars. 
One of the worst, for me, was the Six-Day War. In the months preceding 
it, Israel lived through a nightmare, in total panic. We were sure of a 
second Shoa.

Then there came the huge victory. I was a radio reporter on my way to 
the front, when I heard a colleague on the wireless: ''I'm touching the 
stones of the Kotel!" We burst into tears. Out of the fear of 
annihilation came redemption: We had returned to the Wailing Wall, to 
Shiloh, to Hebron. We were all settlers, believing that the 
''Palestinian problem" would somehow disappear.

It didn't. On the contrary, it paved the way for Messianic Zionism, 
meaning the Land of Israel was given to us by God rather than being a 
refuge for the Jewish people and a normal state among states. Today, as 
a result, we have 250,000 settlers on the West Bank, more terrorism, and 
a question mark on Israel's future as a Jewish and democratic state.

In the struggle against suicide terrorism, Israeli soldiers have caused 
suffering to innocent children, pregnant women, and sick people. While 
the battle against terror is essential, it creates an unbearable 
situation for the Palestinian people, who live under military rule, 
surrounded by fences and roadblocks. Israel's enemies compare the 
situation in the occupied territories to the Apartheid regime in South 
Africa, a comparison that is malicious and totally unjustified: We are 
not colonialists. We have a justified claim to this land. But we cannot 
fulfill our prayers. For we cannot be oppressors.

Israelis have begun to understand this. We must evacuate the occupied 
territories or else continue to live in an endless state of war and 
bloodshed. No state, let alone Israel -- a democracy -- can exist like 
that forever.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/24/what_israel_must_do/
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