Alon Idan writes regularly for the Israeli publication Haaretz, which is outspokenly opposed to the government of Israel. In this article, he speaks bluntly about the inevitability of a Palestinian state.

Here’s a simple fact: There will be a Palestinian state.

The reason: There are many Palestinians.

Location of the Palestinian state: Palestine.

Everything we Israelis experience right now, this whole “situation,” the lingering despair of “now what?,” this dead end we’re caught in, the helplessness, this immense human tragedy – this entire situation is nothing but the outcome of our sheer stupidity. Yes, we are unfortunately terribly stupid. Smart, but also really dumb.

We are infantile, soon to be 76 years old but still just babies. Where’s the breast? Where’s the milk bottle? Mama, I’m hungry!

I say we are dumb because we refuse to accept the obvious. We refuse to see what the whole world sees. We continue to act like children who close their eyes and believe that if they don’t see anything, reality doesn’t exist. We’re in the infantile stage. We are infantile, soon to be 76 years old but still just babies. What’s ridiculous is that we’re sure we’re really smart.

But only a fool doesn’t understand that eventually there will be a Palestinian state.

Only a fool doesn’t understand that a Palestinian state will be established because there are Palestinians.

Only someone infantile doesn’t understand that there will be a Palestinian state in Palestine. Here, right next to us, five minutes away from the city of Kfar Saba.

An old baby

When you think of the so-called Israeli right you realize that it represents nothing more than the infantile side of us all. It’s the omnipotent side – the part of us that thinks we’re all-powerful and if we only imagine a certain reality, it will indeed be realized. 

When a toddler behaves like this, the parents give him or her a pacifier and try to calm things down. When an adult behaves like this, it’s called psychosis.

National Missions Minister Orit Strock is infantile and suffering from psychosis. Orit Strock is a baby. A baby who has been living for many years now. An old baby.

On Wednesday, Strock said that we shouldn’t stop the war “to save 22 people or 33 people.” It’s madness and a disconnect from reality.

From a theoretical, almost philosophical perspective, we should have felt sorry for her. We might have tried to trace back to the roots and branches out of which such rotten leaves grew and such bleak words sprang. We could have also tried to understand what happened – how a person becomes less of a person; what makes one’s heart harden and one’s soul darken; how sadness stiffens into a rage and how compassion turns into anger.

But we’re not in a theoretical or a philosophical world. We’re in reality, in actual being. We’re in life, death, pain and blood; we’re in longing, in the urge to save others, and every word is a word, every letter is a letter and every syllable has its own weight, significance and meaning.

Strock said “22 or 33.” The difference between 22 and 33 is 11. And in this case, 11 means 11 hostages held in Gaza. 

That’s 11 people. 11 lives. Every “1” was once a baby who had chicken pox and woke up in the middle of the night. Every “1” is “Did you see? She’s walking!” and “Did you hear? She said dada,” and then she had a fever, and you got the nebulizer and then ran with her to the emergency room, and the fear you felt, and “I hope it will be all right.”

The wisdom of the fools

On March 26, 2018, during a meeting of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, the deputy head of Israel’s Civil Administration, Col. Uri Mendes, provided the following figure to the lawmakers: about 5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This number didn’t include the residents of East Jerusalem and the Israeli Arabs who – according to the Central Bureau of Statistics – numbered 1.8 million. According to the bureau, about 6.5 million Jews lived in Israel at that time. These figures show that more Arabs than Jews lived between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Following the presentation of this data, an uproar broke out among right-wingers. They listened to the bits of reality presented to them at the Knesset and began to employ the foolish sages’ favorite weapon: an infantilization of reality. Lawmaker Moti Yogev of Habayit Hayehudi claimed that Mendes was inflating the numbers since – according to Yogev – in 2016 “about 80,000 births and 8,000 deaths were reported, which is a life expectancy that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.”

This is what the wisdom of the fools looks like. They go into the forest of numbers and find undocumented trees or over-documented bushes, then declare: “There is no forest!” Like in “The Naked Gun,” when Leslie Nielsen stands with the whole city burning behind him and tells the people, “Nothing to see here!” The same goes for the infantile right: It looks at millions of Palestinians and says: “Go home, there’s nothing to see here, there are no Palestinians.”

Stupidity has a price. An expensive one. Dead people, wounded, mutilated, kidnapped. And then there’s a sense of futility, of existential anxiety and clinical depression. Then come brutalization, madness, ranting, bragging and crashing.

There will be a Palestinian state. It’s not up to us and it’s not about us. It’s about reality. The only question is whether we’ll enter reality or continue to live in fantasy; if we’ll come to our senses at the last moment, or if we’ll continue being so utterly stupid.