A Good Comment

Here's a selection of Eyal Megged's thinking:-

That's when I got it: the settlers are our scapegoat. They're our expiation. Their hidden role in the eyes of part of Israeli society is to atone for a sin, the repressed sin that we refused to deal with. The "peace now" establishment coming from the kibbutzim that coveted Arab lands in the years following the War of Independence, whose origins are in the philosophers who fell all over themselves appropriating and fixing up abandoned Arab houses, happily grabbed at the opportunity to cleanse their consciences following the Six-Day War.

From herein declare: those who coveted and stole, those who murdered and inherited, are the settlers of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the religious right, Gush Emunim; it is they who must be expelled from the land so that salvation may arrive.

This, then, is the deceit behind the "peace now"-like lie. A self-delusion that may work with part of the Israeli public, but under no circumstances with the Palestinians. They don't buy this lie. They know exactly who settled on their ruins and their lands, and who settled on rocks in empty land. The proof is that they fix their gaze not on the Qatif bloc but on Ashkelon; not on Efrat but on Katamon; not on Betar Elit but on Malcha.

From their standpoint, if someone should be uprooted it is we who live safely within the "legal" green line, on the ruins of their national memory. From their standpoint it is we who are first in line. Because as we have seen, the original sin is not in the "territories", but here: in Lachish, Jaffa, Haifa, the Galilee, and the Sharon region.

Gideon Sammet once attacked Megged, writing:

It's no longer a matter of the debilitation of the left in Israel. The latest trend in a politics stricken by terror attacks is to say that there is no difference, in fact, between right and left. What we see developing is something of a "left-right," which is no longer a defined political stance, but rather a kind of vague consciousness that is trying to blur the differences between two historic movements whose struggle is almost 80 years old.

Among those spurring on this trend are cultural heroes such as novelist A.B. Yehoshua and secondary, hazy figures like author Eyal Megged, whose father, Aharon, can be credited with being one of the veteran and more articulate explicators of the leftright.

Interesting to see how each fights it out.