18/7/15
HAIFA — Political imagining of the future is often a thinly disguised exercise in reflection upon the present. What else can it be? But before I share my ideas of the sort of Israel, or rather the sorts of Israel, that might emerge from today’s intricate matrix, let me dwell on the future’s most obvious quality: unimaginability. As a writer and a historian, I know that storylines do not develop the way we expect, neither in life nor in fiction. There are too many unforeseen factors, overlooked seeds, unintended consequences. There is too much serendipity.
A decade from now we may be living in a bee-less, honey-less, nutrient-impoverished world. Or in a world helplessly watching its adolescents become monkish addicts to online gaming. Or in a world where the rich will buy technology enabling them and their genetically upgraded children to outlive the poor of their own country by four whole decades. Wars could be fought about on-screen icons or stolen intellectual property.
The Middle East would share such global diseases alongside, or instead of, its current regional plights. Its countries may face a food deficiency far graver than the already hard-hitting water shortage, making today’s acute poverty in Egypt even more disastrous. Rising sea levels may equally threaten Alexandria, Tel Aviv and Beirut. Perhaps, as unintended consequences go, environmental disaster rather than military intervention would forcibly curb the energy-flow of militant Islam.
Or, by another scenario, young Israelis and Saudis and Iranians will co-inhabit an internet universe where online game pals matter far more than their Jewish mama or Muslim papa banging on the door. Israel’s high-tech breakthroughs could make Israeli newborns, or some Israeli newborns, immensely healthier or prettier or smarter than their peers across the region. All or any of these factors, and others yet unfathomed, would recalibrate our historical route and make a mockery of yesteryear’s stale predictions.
So yes: I can offer you a couple of future Israels, potentially stemming within ten years from today’s complex topography. But these predictions are really about 2015, and the way we stand now.
In the first of these futures I shall no longer be living in Israel, because Israel shall no longer exist. Israel will have been wiped out by two or three Iranian mid-range missiles capped with nuclear heads. This scenario may become less likely following this week’s nuclear deal with Iran, but I will disbelieve anyone who tells me its likelihood is null. Actually, one missile might be enough, if it destroys Tel Aviv prior to the forthcoming relocation of Israel Defense Forces headquarters to the Negev desert. The rest of the tiny country will collapse like a beheaded body, with or without Hamas, Hezbollah or ISIS stepping in.
Bereft of its last liberal friends in the world, propped up only by the vestiges of Washington uber-Republicans or seeking dubious new supporters in the east, this Israel will become a tragedy as well as a travesty.
Just because I deeply dislike my prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who stakes his political career solely on the Iranian threat and deploys it to justify his deep-set animosity to peacemaking and territorial compromise, does not mean that his focal nightmare is not one of our possible futures.
The second sort of future Israel is a country I shall probably not inhabit either. Democratically conquered by an irreversible majority for nationalists and populists, leaning on the demographic growth of zealotry, pitching Jewish violence against Palestinian violence in a permanent danse macabre, Jerusalem will eventually defeat Tel Aviv. The liberals will pack their belongings; the high-tech nation will shut its laptops and relocate to Silicon Valley or perhaps Bangalore. The artists and intellectuals will be silenced, or desperately seek posts abroad. Some will end up playing their violins, real or symbolic, in the streets of the world’s cities, like the Jewish émigrés of old. But numerous moderate Israelis will simply have nowhere to go. The world is not waiting for Tel Aviv’s harrowed refugees with a gleaming stack of resident visas.
Led by Likud or by the extreme-right, this Israel will keep sending its youngsters, fresh from their Auschwitz-tour, clad in national flags and murmuring the mystical slogans of Jewish eternity, into the sinister and civilian-filled battlefields of Gaza, southern Lebanon, perhaps ISIS-controlled Syria and Jordan. Bereft of its last liberal friends in the world, propped up only by the vestiges of Washington uber-Republicans or seeking dubious new supporters in the east, this Israel will become a tragedy as well as a travesty. Its impressive financial stability will finally give way, not only due to the escalating toll of war and dearth of global friends, but also because most of the million-or-so Israelis responsible for our economic miracle are neither nationalists nor mystics. Pragmatic and heartbroken, they will leave if they can. Jerusalem will not only kill off Tel Aviv, but Israel’s “Silicon Wadi” as well.
Why do I tend to believe that the second scenario will not happen? Perhaps because of inborn optimism, inherited from my early-Zionist ancestors who gambled against history and won. But it is more likely due to my faith in Jewish habits of controversy and in human dynamics of self-amendment.
Israeli society itself, though, is my main pointer for a cautiously optimistic outlook.
In my third scenario, Israel’s current tide of righteous belligerency will wane within one or two Knesset terms. Likud and its partners will lose their grip, which currently holds less than half of Israeli voters. Alienating the international community and barring moderate Palestinians (as well as marginalizing moderate Israelis) cannot work in the long run, nor even in the medium run. If the Middle East continues to totter in the clutches of Islamic fanatics, Israel will need to recruit Arab partners to battle extremism, rather than use radical Islam as an alibi for blocking Palestine’s future. Nor can Netanyahu’s open Obama-bashing prevail into the next U.S. administration, which now seems unlikely to consist of right-wingers eager to bear-hug Israel against its own best interests.
Israeli society itself, though, is my main pointer for a cautiously optimistic outlook. We are too contentious, too prone to hurl truth in the face of power, too verbally aggressive to take extremism lying down. The peace-seeking, justice-pursuing part of Israel’s public sphere is vast, and far from placid. Our economic energies run parallel to our political restlessness; given an opportune moment, creative solutions must emerge.
Like three cherries in a slot machine, we need a Palestinian government strong and serious enough to sign a peace deal, an international community willing to engage with both sides on an equally tough footing, and a skillful and charismatic Israeli leader. We have already had two cherries in the slots, more than once, but so far we never had three. Why not in the coming decade? Israel’s public opinion is capable of rationality. Given the right amount of trust and hope, our stormy civil society will argue its way into a historical turning point.
The Israel of 2025 may not be a land of milk and honey. Perhaps, god forbid, bees will be extinct and honey gone. On the other hand, if it is allowed to flourish further, Tel Aviv might flex its high-tech muscles and help battle the man-made calamities inflicted on nature, agricultural and human prosperity.
But war is the greatest and most ancient man-made calamity, and therefore politics is the key. It always was. If we pull off that trickiest of feats, a democratic resolution of the longest war in living memory, beset by the bitterest civil controversy in living memory, then Israelis and Palestinians may still be able to shed some light unto the nations before the decade is over.
Fania Oz-Salzberger, an Israeli writer and history professor at the University of Haifa’s Faculty of Law, recently co-authored “Jews and Words” (Yale University Press, 2014) with her father, novelist Amos Oz.
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