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Yehoshua: «Bibi, genio manipolatore non è Trump, è Berlusconi»

IL grande scrittore: alla pace non credo più, la morte è un dono di Aldo Cazzullo, inviato a Tel Aviv 10 Aprile 2019

Abraham Yehoshua, 82 anni, coscienza critica di Israele, scrittore amato in tutto il mondo, vive al ventunesimo piano di una torre che domina Tel Aviv. «Così posso tenere sott’occhio tutti i miei sette nipoti. La più grande, Tamar, è già nell’esercito. Sono fiero di lei».

Yehoshua, lei è considerato un pacifista.
«Io sono un ex parà. Ho fatto la guerra del Sinai nel 1956. Comandava Moshe Dayan».

L’ha conosciuto?
«Diventammo amici. Era lui il vero premier, Golda Meir lo subiva. Impose la pace con l’Egitto. Era un uomo con una formidabile carica erotica. Animato dalla libido. Grande guerriero, con un lato romantico: cultore della letteratura, dell’archeologia. Le donne lo adoravano. La benda nera sull’occhio poi le faceva impazzire. Mai visto un amatore così».

Anche lei è considerato un fascinoso.
«All’università di Gerusalemme incontrai la mia Rivka e dopo sei mesi la sposai. Lei aveva 19 anni, io 23. Siamo stati insieme per 56 anni, fino alla sua morte. La amo ancora, tantissimo».

Perché ha vinto di nuovo Netanyahu?
«A me non piace. Però non posso negare che abbia grandi qualità».

Ad esempio?
«È intelligentissimo. Un genio della comunicazione. E purtroppo anche uno straordinario manipolatore. Ha un figlio di 26 anni che passa le giornate sui social a seminare zizzania».

E poi?
«È un leader internazionale. Noi siamo un piccolo Paese da otto milioni di abitanti, e Netanyahu è sempre in tv a conversare in russo con Putin, abbracciare Trump, stringere la mano a Modi, ridere con Xi-Jinping. Sono cose che fanno un certo effetto. E poi l’economia va bene».

Perché allora Netanyahu non le piace?
«Non gli perdonerò mai quello che ha fatto agli arabi israeliani. Ha trasmesso l’idea che solo un ebreo può essere un vero israeliano; cosa che ai religiosi piace moltissimo. L’ha detto pure in questa campagna elettorale: “La sinistra tresca con gli arabi…”. Vagli a rispondere che “la sinistra” oggi in Israele è un partito guidato da tre ex capi dell’esercito».

Lei crede ancora nella pace?
«No. Credo nella partnership: vivere insieme, sotto lo stesso tetto, sotto un unico cielo. Per decenni mi sono battuto, accanto al mio fraterno amico Amos Oz, per un’idea affascinante: due popoli, due Stati. Ora non ci credo più. Penso che saremo uno Stato solo, ma non uno Stato ebraico: aperto ai palestinesi, compresi quelli della Cisgiordania. Ho litigato con Amos per questo».

Vi vedevate spesso?
«Ogni settimana a cena. Lui mi rimproverava: con la tua idea finiremo per avere un premier arabo!».

Pare la trama di «Sottomissione» di Houellebecq: i musulmani al potere.
«Un giudice non ebreo ha condannato un ex capo di Stato a sette anni di carcere. Abbiamo generali drusi. Ci sono ospedali diretti da arabi. E l’ospedale è la chiave dell’integrazione».

Perché?
«Perché in ospedale siamo nudi. È il luogo della sofferenza e dell’intimità. Già oggi medici arabi curano malati ebrei, e medici ebrei curano malati arabi».

Sì, ma in concreto Netanyahu cosa dovrebbe fare? Negoziare?
«Negoziare non serve a niente. Dovrebbe concedere in modo unilaterale prima la residenza, poi la cittadinanza israeliana ai palestinesi dei Territori. Non ci sarà mai una pace con trattati, firme, bandiere. Ci può essere convivenza. Basta con l’apartheid. Dobbiamo mescolarci».

L’obiettivo appare lontanissimo. Perché?
«Perché Israele ha il problema opposto al resto del mondo: un eccesso di memoria. Altrove ne avete poca. Noi ne abbiamo troppa. I palestinesi passano la vita a recriminare sulla Nakba, la catastrofe, la cacciata dalla loro terra. Sognano la Eawda, il ritorno. Custodiscono le chiavi della casa del bisnonno. Chiavi che non aprono più nessuna porta. Al posto della casa del bisnonno c’è un grattacielo o un negozio della Apple. Basta!».

E gli ebrei?
«È tutto un amarcord. Le guerre. I kibbutz. Le baracche in cui furono stipati i coloni. E poi, ovviamente, la Shoah».

Nel suo ultimo romanzo, «Il tunnel», pubblicato in Italia da Einaudi, il protagonista perde la memoria e si tatua sul braccio i numeri dell’antifurto della macchina. Non è una dissacrazione?
«Certo che lo è. Dobbiamo diminuire l’intensità della memoria. Che non significa dimenticare; significa guardare le cose che abbiamo intorno. Uscire dalla trappola dell’identità».

L’identità ebraica è molto forte.
«Non esiste un’identità ebraica. Ne esistono molte. Gli askenaziti e i sefarditi, i religiosi e i laici, gli ortodossi e gli ultraortodossi…».

Lei è sefardita?
«La famiglia di mia madre viene dal Marocco: Mogador, sulla costa. Quella di mio padre da Salonicco. Ma anche l’identità sefardita è frammentata in dodici tribù…».

Perché la sinistra, che governò Israele per i primi trent’anni della sua storia, non esiste più?
«La sinistra è in crisi dappertutto, perché ha perso il popolo. È percepita come un’élite globale di artisti, scrittori, professori che si conoscono tra loro, si fidanzano, si invitano l’un l’altro a convegni dove esprimono giudizi sprezzanti sul resto dell’umanità».

È una percezione o una verità?
«Un po’ è vero. In Israele la situazione è aggravata dal fatto che la sinistra non è riuscita a fare la pace. Anche a causa del suicidio dei palestinesi».

Suicidio?
«Quando nel 1977 Sadat a sorpresa venne a Gerusalemme, chiese ad Arafat di accompagnarlo. Arafat rifiutò, e da allora ha perso tutte le occasioni. Ora i palestinesi sono drammaticamente isolati. Potevano far fiorire Gaza; ne hanno fatto un base di attacchi terroristici. Il mondo arabo non è mai stato così debole. Guerre civili. Dittature. Povertà. E gli arabi israeliani non votano. Avrebbero potuto sconfiggere Netanyahu. Sono il 24% della popolazione, ed eleggono il 4% dei parlamentari».

Netanyahu appare imbattibile. A chi assomiglia?
«Non a Trump. Considero Trump un incidente della storia. Figlio dell’impazzimento di una notte. Netanyahu mi ricorda semmai Berlusconi».

Berlusconi aveva le tv.
«Più ancora: Berlusconi, con i suoi limiti, sentiva il suo Paese. Adesso vi va peggio, con Salvini e i 5 Stelle».

Anche lei ha troppa memoria? Ricorda la fondazione di Israele?
«Avevo undici anni e mezzo. Rimanemmo chiusi in casa per due mesi. Assediati. Gli inglesi combattevano accanto agli arabi, una loro bomba centrò la nostra casa, mio padre rimase ferito. Atrocità da entrambe le parti. Se ci avessero presi, nel migliore dei casi ci avrebbero tagliato la gola».

Come vinceste?
«Eravamo meglio organizzati. E avevamo più fiducia in noi stessi. Ma ora basta con il passato».

Parliamo del futuro.
«Quale futuro? Ho perso mia moglie, ho perso Amos. Non mi resta che morire anch’io».

Cosa c’è dopo?
«Nulla. Per fortuna. La morte è molto importante. Un dono che facciamo ai nostri nipoti: lasciare loro spazio».

Israel Is on the Brink of Disaster. Trump Just Made Things Worse.

Israel’s right-wing leaders are reading signals from Washington as a green light.

By Michael J. Koplow   25/03/2019

Dr. Koplow is an advocate for a viable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

On April 9, Israelis will go to the polls to choose their next government. The campaign has largely been a referendum on whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should remain Israel’s leader in light of his expected indictment in three corruption cases for bribery and breach of trust. With those scandals front and center, policy disagreements have largely been ignored, leaving Israeli voters at risk of unwittingly bringing an avoidable disaster on themselves by annexing territory in the West Bank.

President Trump just raised that risk.

How so? On Twitter on Thursday, he wrote that “it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!” It is the latest, and most important, signal from Washington that Mr. Trump is ready to acknowledge Israeli control of the Golan Heights.

But those signals are also being read by the Israeli right wing as an encouragement to pursue annexation of territory in the West Bank — a far more dangerous step that would present Israel with an unparalleled existential threat to its Jewish and democratic character.

To be sure, there is a big difference between the two territories, both of which came under Israeli control in the 1967 war. The sparsely populated Golan Heights, seized from Syria and annexed by Israel in 1981 in defiance of international criticism, were being used by Syria to bombard Israel’s Galilee region below.The West Bank, on the other hand, is densely populated and its future has been the most intractable issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1967. Annexing it would foreclose independence for a Palestinian nation, and risk inflaming the entire Middle East.

That threat is not beyond the horizon any more. The young, charismatic New Right party leaders Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, both ministers in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition government, lead the annexation movement, and their zeal has seeped into Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party as well. Of the 29 Likud legislators running for re-election, 28 are on record as supporting annexation of at least a part of the West Bank, as is the Likud Central Committee.

Most significantly, the speaker of the Knesset, Yuli Edelstein, who is No. 2 on Likud’s electoral slate behind Mr. Netanyahu, said on Sunday that a description of the Golan Heights as “Israeli-controlled” in the recent annual report of the United States State Department — a shift from previous reports that called it “Israeli-occupied” — represented an important first step toward recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank.

Reaching that goal, however, would create challenges as harrowing as any Israel has faced since its war of independence. As cataloged by the Israeli group Commanders for Israel’s Security, annexation would cost billions of dollars annually, would create virtually indefensible borders because of the spider web of Israeli-governed territory within the larger West Bank that most supporters of this plan want to annex, provide ammunition to the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and destroy Israel’s foreign relations with a host of countries.

It would also ensure that the partisan split emerging in the United States over Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians becomes a chasm. It might even open a rift between Mr. Netanyahu and his stalwart ally President Trump, who thinks himself able to devise an ultimate deal between Israelis and Palestinians, by making any such deal impossible.

Most important, annexing the West Bank — whether just the 60 percent of it that Israel controls now, or its entirety — would bring the collapse of security coordination between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and likely cause the demise of the authority, forcing Israel to take over all of the West Bank, like it or not. Israel would then have to grant citizenship to the 2.5 million Palestinians living there, giving itself the choice of no longer functioning as a Jewish state, or destroy its democracy by denying the Palestinians political equality. If anything can truly threaten Israel, the region’s pre-eminent military and economic powerhouse, it is that.

While Mr. Netanyahu himself has been the sole Likud leader not explicitly supporting annexation in the West Bank, his political predicament might well pull him into the annexationist camp. His legal problems create a strong incentive to form a government that will pass a law barring the indictment of a sitting prime minister.

Voter surveys suggest the election next month will result in an almost even split between the Netanyahu-led bloc of Likud and its allied parties, and an opposition bloc led by Benny Gantz. That means Mr. Netanyahu will remain in power at the whim of his preferred right-wing coalition partners, whose leverage over a prime minister seeking to stay out of jail will be enormous. And the item at the top of their wish list is extending Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank.

Most worrisome, Israelis have been barely paying attention. As the Israeli journalist Aluf Benn points out, this is a campaign that won’t turn on any issues but on Mr. Netanyahu himself. And to the extent that Israelis are paying attention to policy, they are concerned about terrorism and the cost of living, with only 9 percent listing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as their top concern and just 2 percent listing the future of the West Bank. Even though only 15 percent of Jewish Israelis support annexing the West Bank, a core of right-wing activists are poised to overrun the preferences of a much larger but less ideologically dedicated majority.

Should Mr. Netanyahu emerge victorious once again, the prospects of Israel taking this path are alarmingly high. The pro-annexationists have never put forth a detailed proposal of what annexation will entail.

Israeli voters may be about to rush headlong into quicksand that they don’t even realize exists.

Michael J. Koplow is the policy director of the Israel Policy Forum in Washington.

Trump Has Liberated Israel

By Shmuel Rosner 22/03/2019

President’s announcement on the Golan Heights will finally free us from the “land for peace” formula that none of us believe in anyway.

TEL AVIV — On Thursday evening here in Israel, after President Trump announced that “it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights” and our prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, thanked the president for his “historic” decision, I wanted to talk to someone I trusted on the issue, someone with perspective. So I contacted Zvi Hauser.

Mr. Hauser was a cabinet secretary under Mr. Netanyahu and is running for the Knesset on behalf of the Kahol Lavan Party, which wants to unseat the prime minister in the April 9 general election. He is also a longtime proponent of America’s recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

With less than three weeks until Election Day, Mr. Hauser keeps his priorities straight. He knows that Mr. Netanyahu will get credit from the public for the United States’ recognition of Israel’s control of the Golan — something many Israelis have wanted for a long time. He understands that the president intervened to boost Mr. Netanyahu’s chances in a tight race. Still, Mr. Hauser was happy. He called the move “a turning point in the annals of the Middle East” and said he wanted to “thank President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu.”

Mr. Hauser was not alone among Mr. Netanyahu’s rivals in praising Mr. Trump’s decision. Across the Israeli political spectrum (with some obvious exceptions), politicians are supportive of America recognizing Israel’s control of the Golan Heights.

Indeed, Mr. Trump’s statement on Thursday was a major development. It is the final nail in the coffin of the 1967 line — the armistice line that separated Israel from its neighbors before the Six Days War. More than 50 years since this line was crossed by the Israeli military, we can finally kiss it goodbye.

The part of the Golan Heights controlled by Israel is a 500-square-mile territory wedged between northeast Israel and southwest Syria. Syria ruled this area until 1967. Then Israel occupied it. Since then, there have been about 50 years of negotiations, with Syria demanding the territory back and Israel demanding a peace agreement.

Many Israelis, though, knew that it never should — or would — be returned to Syria. The area was too important strategically and historically. In 1981, the Knesset passed a law essentially annexing the territory. And yet, negotiations continued, with successive prime ministers making overtures to the Syrians, until the Syrian civil war — and the takeover of much of Syria by Iran and its proxies — put an end to the charade.

Israel had no choice but to give up on the idea of withdrawing from the Golan Heights. But this reality involves a complete overhaul of the way the international community thinks not just about the Golan Heights but also about all the lands Israel occupied in 1967. The “land for peace” formulation for the past five decades has been a basis of all peace processes between Israel and Egypt, Syria and the Palestinians. Mr. Trump seems to have accepted the position of Israel’s government and given up on the idea that Israel has to withdraw to a decades-old line to get peace.

Withdrawal worked for Israel once, in 1979, when it signed a peace agreement with Egypt and left the Sinai Peninsula, which was also occupied in 1967. But that set a problematic precedent. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt insisted that Israel hand back the entire peninsula to the last inch. Israel decided that the reward was worth the price, as a major Arab country agreed to break with other Arab states and accept Israel’s legitimacy. But there was a hidden, unanticipated cost: Israel’s adversaries, in future negotiations, would demand the same kind of compensation. The 1967 line — what Israel controlled before the war — became the starting point for all Arab countries, including Syria. It became a sacred formula, worshiped by the international community.

What Mr. Trump is doing extends far beyond the ability of Israel to control the Golan Heights, to settle it and invest in it. The American president is setting the clock back to before the peace deal with Egypt, to a time when Israel could argue that the reward for peace is peace — not land.

Syria, of course, is unlikely to accept this. At least not in the short term. But maybe someday, a Syrian leader will come along who doesn’t entertain the thought that Israel might agree to return to the pre-1967 line and who will accept a different formula for achieving peace.

In the meantime, the Golan Heights news is another clarifying moment in Israel’s election. Yes, there is a fierce fight between Mr. Netanyahu and his opponents. Yes, the stakes seem at times high. But Israelis agree on much more than many outside observers imagine. And one of the things they largely agree on is that the 1967 line is no longer relevant.

Mr. Hauser started fighting for recognition of Israel’s sovereignty in the territory when he was an ally of Mr. Netanyahu. Now he is fighting for the same thing as the prime minister’s opponent. There is nothing unnatural or strange about this. On days like these, he told me, “politics is dwarfed amid the call of history.”

Shmuel Rosner is the political editor at The Jewish Journal, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and a contributing opinion writer. @rosnersdomain

 

Israel’s Election Shows How Dead the Two-State Solution Really Is

Even the center-left candidate isn’t talking about a viable Palestinian state.

By Shmuel Rosner

Contributing Opinion Writer

• Feb. 27, 2019

TEL AVIV — His slogan contends that “there is no more left or right.” The list of candidates he’s running with includes a hawkish former Likud defense minister and a hawkish former Likud government secretary. In his first speech as a candidate, he vowed to keep the Jordan Valley “our eastern security border” and to “maintain security in the entire land of Israel,” by which he means the West Bank. A campaign video credits him with sending parts of Gaza “back to the Stone Age.”

Despite all this, Gen. Benny Gantz, a former Israeli Army chief of staff and a newly minted politician, is the candidate of Israel’s left of center for the April 9 general election. He is the candidate of what used to be called the “peace camp.”

And it turns out that his party has a good chance of winning. Last week, Mr. Gantz and Yair Lapid, who for the last seven years led the Yesh Atid party, announced that they are joining forces in a new party of parties they call Kahol Lavan, or Blue and White, the colors of Israel’s flag. Mr. Gantz and Mr. Lapid will, if they win, take turns serving as prime minister, beginning with two and a half years of Mr. Gantz. Polls predict a close race, with Kahol Lavan surging in recent days.

But the real lesson here isn’t just that tactical alliances are the best way to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after 10 consecutive years in office. What this election is showing is that no party with even half a chance of winning power in Israel still supports the commonly understood version of a two-state solution. Paying lip service and using the term “two-state solution”? Maybe. But supporting two states — in the full meaning of the term state? Not so much.That’s not to say no one still believes in a fully independent Palestinian state. Dovish members of the shrinking Labor Party and the left-wing Meretz Party still believe in the evacuation of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and seem to be in favor of a Palestinian state with more control of its own borders. The Arab parties, too, want a fully independent Palestine. But Labor and Meretz are unlikely to win more than a few seats in the Knesset, and no Israeli party with the realistic ambition to be the ruling party is likely to cooperate with the Arab parties.

Kahol Lavan has not yet announced a platform, but here is what we can guess about its positions: It will demand that Jerusalem stay united under Israel’s jurisdiction; it would keep the main settlement blocs in place; it will oppose a unilateral evacuation of settlements; it will want Israel’s eastern border, in the Jordan Valley, to remain under Israel’s control. And most important, it will likely demand that the Israeli Army has the right to operate in all of the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan When the Palestinians envision their future, they envision a real state. When Israel’s center-left envisions the future, it envisions an entity in which the Palestinians have autonomy and one in which they can exercise their national self-determination, with the following caveat: Israel retains the right to operate militarily in this area and Israel controls all of its borders.

In fact, what Mr. Gantz and the center-left now offer the Palestinians is very similar to what they might get from Mr. Netanyahu who once called it a “state minus.” Even Naftali Bennett, the leader of the even more right-wing party, New Right once agreed to “autonomy plus,” a formulation that is different more in tone than in substance.

Of course, there still might be a real difference between the center-left and the right. Maybe Mr. Gantz seriously means what he says, while Mr. Netanyahu is just playing for time. Or maybe Mr. Gantz will change his tune once he is elected and decide to withdraw unilaterally from the West Bank, or accept a different deal from the one he is now supporting, as has happened with previous prime ministers.

Either way, though, the party’s stated positions tell us plenty about Israel’s state of mind.

Israel’s trust-the-Palestinians camp lost the argument after the 2000 Camp David summit failed and was followed by a bloody Palestinian uprising, the second Intifada. Israel’s unilateral-withdrawal camp lost the argument following the 2005 “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip, which resulted in nearly constant conflict on the Israel-Gaza border. Even many Israelis who believe that the Palestinians deserve a state find it difficult to believe that Palestinian leaders and institutions can be trusted with one.

Israel’s current election cycle is quite revealing in this sense. The main parties, Likud and Kahol Lavan, both speak about security much more than about peace. Both are attacked from the right because of the likelihood that they will accept the “deal of the century” — President Trump’s peace plan, which is slated to be revealed immediately after the election. Both are attacked from the left for offering essentially the same platform — Mr. Netanyahu’s — when it comes to peace with the Palestinians.

So, this is it. The two-state solution is acceptable to most Israelis, including center-right, center and center-left Israeli voters, only if the Palestinians do not really get what they consider a state. This probably means, that it cannot be a solution. Not for a very long time.

Shmuel Rosner is the political editor at The Jewish Journal, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and a contributing opinion writer. @rosnersdomain