The day after

Reducing Israel to '67 borders will finish off any chance we have for peace

Naomi Ragen|Published: 03.26.06 , 23:12

Here we are, a week before perhaps one of the most fateful and important elections in the history of the Jewish State, an election that will decide whether we uproot and destroy and give in to the decades of brainwashing from our enemies, or if we will stubbornly resist and continue to thrive.

You wouldn’t know it.

Driving from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, only a few scattered election posters remind you, each one interchangeable except for the big, equally untrustworthy face that stares out of each, offering promises we all know will not be kept.

For some reason I found myself in the Ramat Aviv mall, as I waited for my husband to finish an errand. I wandered to and fro, staring at 3,000 shekel gold lamé handbags; spiked-heeled shoes and belts studded with rhinestones. In the restaurants, placid older men and women with carefully dyed hair drank lattés. I envisioned them getting up late on election day, and then going to vote for the party they hoped would preserve this, their way of life.

The day after the vote is counted, if the people from Ramat Aviv and Herzliya and Kfar Saba, safe in their high-priced apartments and golden malls, succeed in voting in Kadima and Labor and Meretz, there will be a great upheaval in the State of Israel. But like some underground explosion, no one will notice.

'We didn't expect this'

The disappointed voters of the Likud and Yisrael Be’tanu and the National Religious Party and Baruch Marzel will, of course, gnash their teeth, and bemoan the terrible future that awaits the country and its clueless voters.

And the winners will rejoice and flaunt their victory until reality intrudes and both groups realize that like it or not, Hamas and Iran are real problems, no matter who is in charge, and that they are going to be the real agenda of Israel’s elected government and it's opposition, not minimum wage laws, or legalizing marijuana or even pushing settlers into homelessness and unemployment.

The merchandise manufactured by Yossi Beilin - that is, reducing Israel to the '67 borders as a solution to all her problems-- and which is currently the only thing being sold by Kadima, and Meretz and Labor, will finally succeed in finishing off any chance we have to live in peace. And the day after the last settler is kicked out of his home and our enemies come to us with a long list of new territorial demands, the people will look up from their lattes in surprise and say: Really! We didn't expect this.

Too late

And then, like the day after the building of the Golden Calf - which had also seemed to many like such a good idea at the time, a wonderful solution that had been tried and found perfectly viable elsewhere - Israelis will look up and say: What have we gotten ourselves into? What are we going to do now?

Then there will be another war, a harder war, the same war we are being told will not come if we give up and give in. The government will fall; new elections will be held. And all those who wanted to preserve the malls, and the handbags and the lattes will find that they do, after all, agree somewhat with those who voted Likud, Yisrael Beitanu, NRP, and yes, even Baruch Marzel.

But by then, of course, it might be too late. Because, as all children know, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”