No subject

no agenda" is the refrain, "Their only concern is their own survival".
(The word "agenda", with its English pronunciation, is now fashionable
in Israeli political circles, pushing aside a perfectly adequate Hebrew
word.)

It is hard not to blame the government. Ehud Olmert speechifies
endlessly, at least one speech per day, today at an industrialists'
convention, tomorrow at a kindergarten, saying absolutely nothing. There
is no national agenda, nor an economic agenda, nor a social agenda, nor
a cultural agenda. Nothing.

When he came to power, he presented something that sounded like an
agenda: "Hitkansut", an untranslatable word that can be rendered as
"contracting", "converging", "ingathering". That was supposed to be a
historic operation: Israel would give up a large part of the occupied
territories, dismantle the settlements east of the "Separation" Wall and
annex the settlements between the Green Line and the Wall.

Now, two years and one war later, nothing of this remains, even the word
has been forgotten. The only game in town is the "negotiations" with the
Palestinian Authority, which were a farce to start with. Like actors on
the stage drinking from empty glasses, all parties pretend that there
are negotiations going on. They meet, embrace, smile, pose for
photographs, convene joint teams, hold press conferences, make
declarations - and nothing, absolutely nothing, really happens.

What is the farce for? Each of the participants has his own reasons:
Olmert needs an agenda to fill the void. George Bush, a lame duck who
leaves behind him nothing but ruins in every field, wants to present at
least one achievement, fictitious as it may be. Poor Mahmoud Abbas,
whose continued existence depends on his ability to show some political
achievement for his people, clings to this illusion with all his
remaining strength. And so the farce goes on.

But anyone who believes that the government has no agenda, and that the
State of Israel has no agenda, is quite wrong. There certainly is an
agenda, but it is hidden. More precisely: it is unconscious.

People say that ideology is dead. That, too, is a mistake. There is no
society without an ideology, and there is no human being without an
ideology. When there is no new ideology, the old ideology continues to
operate. When there is no conscious ideology, there is an unconscious
one, which can be much more potent - and much more dangerous.

Why? A conscious ideology can be analyzed, criticized, opposed. It is
much more difficult to fight against an unconscious one, which directs
the agenda without giving itself away.

That's why it is so important to locate, uncover and analyze it.

If you ask Olmert, he will strenuously deny that he has no agenda. He
has a perfect agenda: to make peace (which is nowadays called "permanent
status"). And not just any peace, but a peace based on "Two States for
Two Peoples". Without such a peace, Olmert has pronounced, "the State is
finished".

In that case, why is there no negotiation, only a farcical pretense? Why
does the massive building activity go on, even in the settlements east
of the Wall, well within the area that government spokespersons propose
for the Palestinian state? Why does the government carry out dozens of
military and civilian actions daily that push peace even further away?

According to the government itself, and contrary to what it said at the
beginning, it has no intention of achieving peace in 2008. At most,
perhaps, maybe, there will be a "shelf agreement". That is an original
Israeli invention, meaning an agreement that would be put on the shelf
"until conditions are ripe". In other words, meaningless negotiations
for a meaningless agreement. Now they say that there is no chance even
for that, not in 2008, not in the foreseeable future.

There is no escape from the inevitable conclusion: the government is not
working for peace. It does not want peace. And, also, that there is no
effective parliamentary opposition pressing for peace, nor any pressure
from the media.

What does all this mean? That there is no agenda? No, it means that
behind the fictitious agenda, which appears in the media, there hides
another agenda that does not meet the eye.

The hidden agenda is opposed to peace. Why?

Conventional wisdom has it that the government does not pursue peace
because it is afraid of the settlers and their supporters. The peace
that is being talked about - the peace of Two States for Two Peoples -
demands the dismantling of dozens of settlements, including those which
harbor the political and ideological leadership of the whole movement.
That would mean a declaration of war on all the 250 thousand settlers,
apart from those who will leave voluntarily for generous compensation.
The current argument is that the government is too weak for such a
confrontation.

According to the fashionable formula, "both governments, the Israeli and
the Palestinian, are too weak to make peace. Everything must be
postponed until strong leaderships emerge on both sides." Some people
add the Bush administration to the count - a lame duck president cannot
impose peace.

But the settlements are only a symptom, not the heart of the problem.
Otherwise, why doesn't the government freeze them, at least, as it has
undertaken again and again? If the settlements are the main obstacle to
peace, why are they being enlarged even now, and why are new settlements
still being set up, disguised as new "neighborhoods" of existing
settlements?

Clearly, the settlements, too, are in reality only a pretext. Something
more profound is causing the government - and the entire political
system - to reject peace.

That is the hidden agenda.

What is the heart of peace? A border.

When two neighboring peoples make peace, they fix, first of all, the
border between them.

And that is precisely what the Israeli establishment opposes, because it
negates the basic ethos of the Zionist enterprise.

True, at different points in time the Zionist movement has drawn up
maps. After World War I, it submitted to the peace conference the map of
a Jewish state extending from the Litani River in Lebanon to El-Arish in
the Sinai desert. The map of Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, which became the
Irgun emblem, copied the borders of the original British Mandate on both
sides of the Jordan. Israel Eldad, one of the Stern Group leaders,
distributed for many years a map of the Israeli Empire that reached from
the Mediterranean to the Euphrates and included all of Jordan and
Lebanon, with great chunks of Syria and Egypt thrown in. His son, the
extreme right-wing Member of the Knesset Arieh Eldad, has not given up
this map. And after the Six Day War, the map favored by the right-wing
covered all the conquests, including the Golan Heights and the entire
Sinai peninsula.

But all these maps were only games. The real Zionist vision does not
recognize any maps. It is a vision of a state without borders - a state
that expands at all times according to its demographic, military and
political power. The Zionist strategy resembles the waters of a river
flowing to the sea. The river snakes through the landscape, goes around
obstacles, turns left and right, flowing sometimes on the surface and
sometimes underground, and on its way takes in more springs. In the end
it reaches its destination.

That is the real agenda, unchanging, hidden, conscious and unconscious.
It does not need decisions, formulations or maps, because it is encoded
in the genes of the movement. This explains, among other things, the
phenomenon described in the report of senior prosecution lawyer Talia
Sasson on the settlements: that all the organs of the establishment, the
government and the military, without any official coordination but with
miraculously effective cooperation, acted to set up the "illegal"
settlements. Every one of the thousands of officials and officers who
spent decades involved in this enterprise knew exactly what to do, even
without receiving any instructions.

That is the reason for David Ben-Gurion's refusal to include in the
Declaration of Independence of the new State of Israel any mention of
borders. He did not intend for a minute to be satisfied with the borders
fixed by the United Nations General Assembly resolution of November 29
1947. All his successors had the same approach. Even the Oslo agreements
delineated "zones" but did not fix a border. President Bush accepted
this approach when he proposed a "Palestinian state with provisional
borders" - a novelty in international law.

In this respect, too, Israel resembles the United States, which was
founded along the Eastern seaboard and did not rest until it had reached
the Western shores on the other side of the continent. The incessant
stream of mass immigration from Europe flowed on westwards, breaching
all borders and violating all agreements, exterminating the Native
Americans, starting a war against Mexico, conquering Texas, invading
Central America and Cuba. The slogan that drove them on and justified
all their actions was coined in 1845 by John O'Sullivan: "Manifest Destiny".

The Israeli version of "Manifest Destiny" is Moshe Dayan's slogan "We
are fated". Dayan, a typical representative of the second generation,
made two important speeches in his life. The first and better known was
delivered in 1956 at the grave of Roy Rutenberg of Nahal Oz, a kibbutz
facing Gaza: "Before their [the Palestinians in Gaza] very eyes we turn
into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their
forefathers have lived ... This is the fate of our generation, the
choice of our life - to be prepared and armed, strong and tough - or
otherwise, the sword will slip from our fist, and our life will be
snuffed out".

He did not mean only his own generation. The second, lesser known speech
is more important. It was delivered in August 1968, after the occupation
of the Golan Heights, before a rally of young Kibbutzniks. When I asked
him about it in the Knesset, he inserted the entire speech into the
Knesset record, a very unusual procedure in our parliament.

This is what he told the youth: "We are fated to live in a permanent
state of fighting against the Arabs ... For the hundred years of the
Return to Zion we are working for two things: the building of the land
and the building of the people ... That is a process of expansion, of
more Jews and more settlements ... That is a process that has not
reached the end. We were born here and found our parents, who had come
here before us ... It is not your duty to reach the end. Your duty is to
add your layer ... to expand the settlement to the best of your ability,
during your lifetime ... (and) not to say: this is the end, up to here,
we have finished".

Dayan, who was well versed in the ancient texts, probably had in mind
the phrase in the Chapter of the Fathers (a part of the Mishnah, which
was finished 1800 years ago and formed the basis of the Talmud): "It is
not up to you to finish the work, and you are not free to stop doing it".

That is the hidden agenda. We must haul it up from the depths of our
unconscious minds to the realm of consciousness in order to face it, to
reveal the terrible danger inherent in it, the danger of an eternal war
which may in the fullness of time lead this state to disaster.

Approaching the sixtieth anniversary of the state, we must draw a line
under this chapter of our history, exorcise the dybbuk and say clearly:
yes, we have ended the chapter of expansion and settlement.

This will enable us to change the course of the river. To put an end to
the occupation. To dismantle the settlements. To make peace. To effect a
reconciliation with the neighboring people. To turn Israel into a
peaceful, democratic, secular and liberal state, that can devote all its
resources to the creation of a flourishing, modern society.

And first of all: to agree on a border.

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