Opinion | We've Obsessed Over Our Past With No Clear Future in Sight

Abbas shakes Netanyahu's hand at Shimon Peres' funeral, in 2016.Credit: HANDOUT/ Reuters

It’s no longer just an op-ed here and an op-ed there, but a much wider phenomenon. One cannot ignore that for some time an entire discussion has been taking place, in Haaretz and elsewhere, concerning the events of 1948. This includes the events at Tantura, the surrender of combatants in the battle for Kibbutz Nitzanim, other war crimes committed during Israel’s War of Independence (Adam Raz, Haaretz Hebrew edition Feb. 4) or the growing use of the word Nakba in public discourse.

 
Last week, Moran Sharir wondered “Why now?” His answer: Benjamin Netanyahu. Now that he’s no longer prime minister, “one can take a break from current events and return to addressing the historical frame story,” he wrote. According to Sharir, “Many people feel that a clear danger was removed seven months ago. Now we can reduce our mental state of emergency and start digging into the deeper wounds of our existence here” (Haaretz Hebrew, Feb.1).

 
I agree that the reason is the end of Netanyahu’s rule, but in my eyes the introspection is not the result of a political relaxation, but rather the opposite: a total collapse of the time elevator. Netanyahu left Israel without a future. During the years of his rule, he presented himself as an alternative to the future. What will happen? Netanyahu. What will happen with the Palestinian problem? What if we stop the peace negotiations? If we throw the two-state solution onto the dust heap of history? If we put all our eggs in the Republican Party basket and undermine a Democratic president? If we encourage the U.S. to withdraw from the nuclear accord with Iran? If we pass the nation-state law and continue inciting against our Arab citizens?

To all these questions there was a single answer: There will be Netanyahu. Netanyahu is Donald Trump’s friend. Netanyahu controls Congress, he’s a genius; everyone quakes in their boots in fear of him. He has Vladimir Putin in his pocket; Europe is a dying continent. Don’t worry, we have Bibi.

 
In everything relating to Israel’s core problems, no infrastructure was built for the future. Nada. Zilch. Netanyahu carried on his shoulders the illusion of the future of the state, without placing foundations in the ground of reality. Now that he’s gone, the future collapsed and we simply fell in time to the ground floor, to 1948. Without a future, we fell into the past. More precisely, because under Netanyahu we refused to genuinely address 1967, we fell back into a deliberation over 1948. We thought we outsmarted history and could be temporary occupiers forever, and now we realize that we may be temporary sovereigns forever. You cannot fool the gods of history.

Uri Misgav was wrong, however, in trying to argue Israel’s justness in 1948 (Haaretz, Dec. 15). In a sense, as soon as you’re drawn into this debate, you’ve lost. The answer lies in the future, not the past. After a decade of diplomatic intransigence under Netanyahu, Israel trampled the Green Line even without annexing the territories, as the right wing wants. Without a horizon of dividing the land, all that remains is to see both sides of the Green Line as part of one political entity. How ironic that the only way to disprove Israel’s designation as an apartheid state is to insist that there is an occupation, since without “occupation” there is “apartheid.”

 
The thing is, everyone tells the story backward, inferring the beginning from the end. But the only way to repair the story is by changing the end, not the beginning. To drive history forward, toward a just solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thus, the only question now is whether the current government wants and is capable of advancing Israel and the Palestinians toward resolving the conflict. If not, then this government, which imposed on itself total diplomatic paralysis with regard to the conflict, will go down in history as another stage in Israel’s collapse into the question of the legitimizing its existence.