'One Racist Nation'

A Powerful piece by Gideon Levy arguing that racism is behind the unilateral 'peace' moves of the Israeli establishment.

...'' One does not have to be Avigdor Lieberman to be a racist. The "peace" proposed by Ehud Olmert is no less racist. Lieberman wants to distance them from our borders, Olmert and his ilk want to distance them from out consciousness. Nobody is speaking about peace with them, nobody really wants it. Only one ambition unites everyone - to get rid of them, one way or another. Transfer or wall, "disengagement" or "convergence" - the point is that they should get out of our sight. The only game in town, the 'unilateral arrangement," is not only based on the lie that there is no partner, is not only based exclusively on our "needs" because of a sense of superiority, but also leads to a dangerous pattern of behavior that totally ignores the existence of the other nation. ''

...''This gloomy chapter in the history of Israel began at Camp David, when Ehud Barak succeeded in planting the untruth that there is nobody to talk to on the Palestinian side, that we offered them the sky and they responded with violence. Then came the major terror attacks and Israeli society withdrew into a sickness of apathy never before known to it. While it used to demonstrate complete indifference toward Palestinian suffering, that apathy spread and intensified to include weak Israelis - Arabs, the poor, the ailing. From that aspect the current election campaign, more boring than ever, seems almost like an expression of the state of public caring. Nothing can awaken the Israelis from their coma - not the imprisonment of the nation next door, not the killing and destruction that we sow in their society and not the suffering of the weak among us. ''