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Burg Blames Israel For Palestinian Ordeal, Sees Its Collapse

"We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East, " said Burg

OCCUPIED JERISALEM, September 16 (IslamOnline.net) - Heaping blame on Israel for the sufferings and humiliation of the Palestinian people, the former Israeli Knesset speaker maintained that "countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun."

Suffering from hatred, anger and "infrastructures" of injustice sparked by Israeli aggressions, Palestinians are forced to blow themselves up against Israeli targets, Avraham Burg wrote in an article published by the Guardian newspaper Monday, September 16.

"Traveling on the fast highway that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied," he said.

"Having ceased to care about those children, who are washed in hatred, Israel should not be surprised when they blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism," said Burg, a speaker of the Israeli legislature in 1999-2003 and a former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel.

He echoed a largely-held belief in the Arab world that Palestinian attacks against Israeli attacks stem from incessant aggressions by Israeli occupation forces, building of settlements on Palestinian lands, house demolition and massive detentions.

"They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated. We could kill a thousand ringleaders a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below - from the wells of hatred and anger, from the "infrastructures" of injustice and moral corruption," said the ex-top Israeli lawmaker.

Israeli Chief-of-Staff Moshe Yaalon admitted on July 4 that Israeli forces committed blunders against Palestinians during the three-year Intifada.

No Illusions

Burg asserted that Sharon should level with the Israeli people and clarify all options on the table, making clear that "the time for illusions is over. The time for decisions has arrived."

Sharon said say that Jews could not live on Palestinian territories alone, simply because "Arabs, too, have dreams and needs."

"We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew."

The former Knesset speaker told Israelis that if they want "greater Israel" then they must "abandon democracy (and)…institute an efficient system of racial separation here, with prison camps and detention villages."

"Do you want a Jewish majority? No problem. Either put the Arabs on railway cars, buses, camels and donkeys and expel them en masse - or separate ourselves from them absolutely, without tricks and gimmicks."

Making clear where the peace key is, Burg underlined Israel "must remove all the settlements - all of them - and draw an internationally recognized border between the Jewish national home and the Palestinian national home."

Sharon "should present the choices forthrightly: Jewish racism or democracy. Settlements, or hope for both peoples. False visions of barbed wire and suicide bombers, or a recognized international border between two states and a shared capital in Jerusalem," he said.

Dying Society

"The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice. As such, the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep," Burg contended.

He warned that "there is a real chance that ours will be the last Zionist generation. There may yet be a Jewish state here, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly."

The former lawmaker asserted that: "The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or anti-missile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed."

Burg asserted that the "2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies.

"A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun."

Citing humiliating conditions imposed by Israel on the Palestinians, Burg believed, expected that "a structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself.

"Note this moment well: Zionism's superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing."

Silence

The ex-top Israeli lawmaker lashed out at the Israeli opposition which, he maintained, "does not exist."

"In a nation of chatterboxes, everyone has suddenly fallen dumb, because there's nothing left to say. We live in a thunderously failed reality."

According to Burg: "Anyone who declines to present a clear-cut position - black or white - is collaborating in the decline. It is not a matter of Labor versus Likud or right versus left, but of right versus wrong, acceptable versus unacceptable. The law-abiding versus the lawbreakers. What's needed is not a political replacement for the Sharon government but a vision of hope, an alternative to the destruction of Zionism and its values by the deaf, dumb and callous."


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