Israel's Lost 40 Years

The number 40 is important to Jewish thought. Moses was 40 days and nights on Mt. Sinai and the Jews wandered 40 years in the wilderness, yes and Jesus spent 40 days and nights in the wilderness.
Meir Shalev, an Israeli born in 1948 in the midst of that war that created Israel and divided the land, setting up the issues faced today. He was 19 of course in 1967 and served in the Israel Defense Force during that war. Today he is a columnist for an Israeli paper, and he writes of these past 40 years in an LA Times op-ed piece as being lost years.
He writes:

Forty years have passed, and Israel has indeed choked. The country is busy dealing with one matter: the occupation — the territories, the Palestinians, terror, holy sites, the establishment and evacuation of settlements. Forty years have passed, and Israel has neglected everything that the Israel of 1948 wished to occupy itself with: education, research, welfare, health.

It is 40 years of becoming something it never intended to be -- an occupier. He's not afraid to use the word apartheid to speak of what is happening in his own backyard. Jimmy Carter was condemned for using the word, but here we have an Israeli who is intimately connected with the ebb and flow of Israeli history, who chooses to affirm the word.
His is a an essay of lament and yet it is a prophetic word, a word of wisdom to those who would listen.
He writes:

I was born during the War of Independence, which was foisted on us by our neighbors who refused to accept the partition of Palestine and thereby brought defeat and disaster upon themselves. I fought in the Six-Day War, which led Israelis to err in a similar fashion. Extremism, fanaticism, stupidity, being drunk with power, the bad mixture of politics and religion — all these have caused us to make unwise decisions.

The settlements continue to grow and expand; terror is getting stronger, hatreds deepening. But the principle introduced 60 years ago is as right now as it was then: partition. Two nations, two states. Israel must give up the land it took over in 1967. The Palestinians must relinquish lands they lost in 1948. But neither side has leaders with the courage and the ability and the preeminence to make big decisions.

In another year both Israel and I will turn 60. Neither of us is young anymore, but I am pleased to report that I look far better. Israel cannot hear anymore, doesn't see well, can't really grasp matters or understand clearly. Worst of all, Israel refuses to undergo the operation that would return it to good health.

This is a word from within that we who live on the outside should consider carefully, especially on an eve of another election cycle here in our own country. May the candidates for office here, be listening to such voices. And may both Israeli and Palestinian start looking forward rather than backward and be willing to take sacrificial steps that in the end offer peace.
This is a word that needs sharing on the 40th Anniversary of a day that changed everything.

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