"Without Borders" Analyzes Israel

This is from an episode of “Without Borders” ("بلا حدود"---Al-Jazeera political talk-show)…
The show is about Israel after sixty years, and about how the analyst on the show doesn't think it will last another sixty, but rather much less than that. They (the host and the guest) begin by stating a lot of well-known facts, about well-known issues. The demographic struggle in Israel, the loosening of immigration restrictions in order to encourage Jewish-associated population growth, even if that “Jewishness” is almost non-existent (case and point: that neo-nazi attack by Russian youths a little while back in Israel).
They mention public discontent with current conditions in Israel and state that Yediot Aharonot ( Israeli newspaper:ידיעות אחרונות ) has a poll with results showing 52% of Israelis are prepared to leave Israel (I looked on Yediot for the statistic, but I think it was from an older article and I couldn’t find it).
They discuss the Russian sector’s lack of genuine integration into Israel, and the social threat that it creates. All these are legitimate points that any political analyst, Israeli, Arab or otherwise cannot avoid pointing out. But the problem is that the guests on this talk-show are discussing Israel like it is a gladiator in the Roman Coliseum…already a dead man, with the only question being a matter of when and by whom. It makes me sick. With all the Arab world’s internal problems there is this fierce obsession…by the intelligentsia no less!..of trying to prove that the “end of Israel” is inevitable. We’re talking about very smart men here…analysts and free political thinkers from all over the Arab world, and I think their efforts are misappropriated.
One also gets the sense that these men, particularly the ones on this particular show, are convinced that it is Israelis who have given up on Israel. Since they are intellectuals, not men on the streets with grudges and guns, they have white-gloved conclusions…that Israel will destroy itself. I think that their wishful thinking is causing them to underestimate the Israelis as a people. They have all the expert facts, but they’re careful to only draw the conclusions that they want. A biased conclusion can only produce a biased projection.

Like I said, despite this, they make some really legitimate points.

The guest on the show proposes that Israel’s secularism is strongly linked to the "draft evasion" issue (Israelis who find ways to avoid doing mandatory military service). Also he says that people of the secular mentality “sit in a coffee shop drinking espresso” instead of talking about what’s really important in life. He calls it a “culture of the self”.
Now, (and this is just me talking here) this is not a hard line of thinking to follow because the same can be said about western culture. There is a huge gap between those who serve and those who are being served…the culture praises individualism, claiming that it inspires creativity and independence (which is often true) but failing to realize that individualism is often just a code-word for selfishness. I think self-centeredness in our society cripples us. Which is odd, because I’m coming from a politically capitalist, but personally communal, background. (Does that not makes sense? Essentially, I think that one who has more should give to one who has less, but that it should not be mandated by law because systematic charity cuts out the heart of the whole idea. I think that shunning the concept of "community" is foolish.)

Anyways…the guest (Abd Al-Wahab Al-Masiri) makes another legitimate point about Israel. He says that by getting beyond the stage of mere survival, and to the stage of cultural and artistic development…younger Israelis (and he especially mentions those of the artistic and philosophic world) lose the sense of sacrifice. Now of course, there are many people who have sensed sacrifices, but just like in the west…they either question whether it was worth it, or are faced with a society that is disassociated with that sacrifice and they are left to bear their sacrifice in the face of those who demean it.
Let’s be honest…selflessness is called naiveté by most.
And sadly, many people can’t tell the difference between devotion and fanaticism, so they lump them together and conclude that nothing is worth fighting for, or caring about…even if it is the very ground under your feet, which you need in order to remain standing at all.

(I had to stop watching the program and pick it back up later, because I kept stopping to write comments and it was taking forever)

Recapping…the guest on the show, Al-Masiri makes another point, which is worrisome in its accuracy, about the high rate of draft evasion in Israel (typically for “psychological reasons” since those are easiest to fake). For anyone who is not familiar with the system, Israel has a permanent nation-wide draft, which exempts certain parties (yeshiva students, Arab-Israelis, the medically and psychologically incapable among them). Males typically serve three years, females typically serve two.
The speaker says that draft evasion is a symptom of the previously mentioned detachment from the concept of community and sacrifice.
Here’s an interesting one: the analyst (who is introduced with the title of “A thinker, and historian specializing in the Zionist movement”, and his dialect is distinctly Egyptian) speaks of the “fall of unilateral Zionism”. He says that in “western political thought” the ‘post’ in “post-Zionism”,(or any such phrase, like post-modernism) means “the end of”, but that they fear to actually use the word “end” because of the implications regarding the Zionist movement.
Now, 27 minutes into the show, he (Al-Masiri) is quoting Ben-Gurion (after having cited multiple sources, which have grim predictions about Israel’s future). He quotes Ben-Gurion as saying, in the 1930’s, “We are not faced with terrorist operations but with a people defending its rights”
The host of the show, Ahmed Mansur, then quotes an “Akiva Eldar” (cited as a famous analyst in the Israeli press. He is, in fact, the diplomatic affairs analyst for Ha’aretz newspaper) as saying “I have inherited from my father a miracle nation, but I shall leave to my children a great question mark”
Al-Masiri then says that the country used to place the group above the individual but, he says, as in many Arab countries, the free market and capitalism places “profit” above it all, and therefore the number of millionaires in Israel increases, and so does the number of those in poverty (which is cited as having reached 25%). It is going to take me forever to get through this episode.

(finally getting back to the episode a day or two later)

Okay…so the rest of that “Without borders” discussion.
The show started taking call-ins…with questions such as “What is the weakness of their (Israel’s) citizens?”. Another question was whether Hitler served the Jewish people inadvertently. In response to the caller the guest speaker (Al-Masiri) says “If Hertzl was the Marx of the Zionist movement, then Hitler was the Lenin” and cites the rise in Jewish population under British mandated Palestine during the rise of the third Reich. He says [hitler] "served" not the Jews, but Zionism. Perhaps he’s trying to make the point that the Holocaust influenced people’s disposition towards the concept of a Jewish state, but the way he asks the question brushes over the horror of the actual event as if he were trying to say that the killer and the killed, the criminal and the victim, were in cahoots.
It is very disheartening to hear these call-ins (coming from Jordan, Egypt and Germany) and I would think “hey, these are decent people…they obviously care about politics. They want peace, right? They want what’s best for the Arab people. Surely they’re not among those who think that hating Israel is the only ticket you need to buy into the Arab world, right?” WRONG. Even if they felt Israel had the right to exist, they wouldn’t dare say so…it would isolate them. Even if they wanted peace and normalization with Israel, would they dare express that fact?
However, following that, an Italian-Arab calls in and asks “So who will fall first…Israel or the Arab system?” That question shows more introspection than the others. The caller seemed to understand that regardless of how one feels about the presence of Israel, some self-examination in the Arab world is obviously required. But the guest speaker ignores the question, brushing it off saying “You can’t compare the two. Israel is a settler nation…and has to be studied as a settler nation. Arab nations, even with their corruption, are stable (or “firmly established”) nations and one should not compare between the two”
The speaker says there are two factors that “contribute to the continuation of Israel” which are “the unrestrained support of America” and the “unrestrained absence of the Arabs” (by which I think he means, Arabs not trying hard enough to get rid of Israel??? Or Arab nations being preoccupied with their own internal conflicts, corruption and dictatorships…what? Does he think that internal problems should be ignored in order to satisfy a vendetta? And not because they gave a damn about the Palestinians but because, at the time, they wanted the land for themselves and felt Israel to be a proxy for a western threat?)

I put this next part down word for word because it’s somewhat appalling, as I see it. It begs the question as to what is the prevalence and sincerity of the following opinions.

(Caller: Muhamad Ibrahim from Saudi Arabia): “My question is, how can we, as Arab people and Muslims, how can we speed up the fall of Israel? What is our role? What should we do? Thank you.

(Host: Ahmed Mansur): An important question. How can we, as Arab people, speed up the end and the dissasembling of Israel?

(Guest speaker: ‘Abd Al-Wahab Al-Masiri): It’s the opposition movements in the Arab world that have started to rise up, with the understanding that they can conduct many activities…such as activating the sector outside [of the] government positions who are afraid of the United States”
(he means working around the system because the people in charge, in his opinion, pander to the U.S.)
“…[putting] pressure on countries and [elected officials] to help the resistance and the people of Gaza. I mean, there are a lot of problems and I propose to hold a conference of specialists to study this situation how the people and the average citizens of the population can contribute and overcome those hasty and fearful ruling [elected officials].

Later,
The host asks “What are the challenges that Israel will face in the coming phase?”

The guest responds “They are the same challenges that we have already mentioned, the elements of the crisis, which are the demographic crisis, the crisis with the settlements, corruption, absence of leadership, the ‘crisis of meaning’, draft evasion...everything we have mentioned is escalating”.

Here, ladies and gentleman, on a very popular, widely broadcast Arab talk-show, was an entire episode on the analysis of “how and when” a nation will fall, and most worrisome, advice on how to aid in that fall. Not “how we can neutralize issues”, or “how we can come to a just and peaceful agreement”, but “how can we bring this nation down to where it no longer exists”.
How come this doesn’t bother anyone? Because they either do not care…or they simply don’t know.