Two events, which on the surface are completely unrelated, have wondrously come together.
The first looked like a watershed event, all the world’s leaders honored it with their presence. The second seemed unimportant, out of the limelight, almost unknown.
The first event was the funeral of Shimon Peres. Nobody missed it. Our entire country came to a standstill. The second event was the distribution of the Zehut platform to our party members, which took place last week in Tel Aviv. This event didn’t make any headlines and only those who attended even knew about it.
With my morning coffee, I watched, as usual, the first rays of sun rising over the mountains of the Shomron. I was trying to explain to myself why the funeral of Shimon Peres had turned into such a mega event. And then I realized. The two events – Peres’s funeral and the distribution of Zehut’s platform – were connected. Death and birth, literally in the same time frame.
With all due respect to the deceased, the steady stream of heads of state who arrived in Israel to attend Peres’s funeral was not commensurate with the man himself. An entire country does not close down for no good reason and the leaders of the world do not trouble themselves to fly to Israel just to attend the funeral of a public figure – as respected and famous as he may be.
Shimon Peres symbolized something. The man created a language and mentality that have determined the mindset and behavior of the State of Israel and, in great measure, the entire Western world for the last 25 years.
Peres accomplished much in his life. But without the Oslo Accords, there would have been no difference between the honor given him upon his passing and the honor merited by any other deceased Israeli public figure of similar stature.
Nothing of what we witnessed would have taken place without the Oslo Accords. Oslo is the heritage of Shimon Peres.
Peres’s words from the Knesset podium prior to the ratification of the Oslo Accords still echo in my ears. He turned to opposition head Binyamin Netanyahu and asked him:
“And what is your alternative?”
Netanyahu (and the entire Right) did not have an answer.
This lack of an alternative enshrined Oslo as the only language and mentality in Israel.
Even when Oslo exploded in our faces again and again and again, bombarding us with shocking images and news that we could have never dreamt up – buses blowing up, restaurants collapsing upon their customers, thousands of fatalities, tens of thousands of wounded, a deterioration of Israel’s international standing and right to exist as a Jewish state, an insufferable economic price and internal despair of any hope for change; even when our streets became filled with security guards, fences, and cement blocks; even after all the dead-end “rounds” of fighting and the scores of fatalities in every “round,” the inner goal of which were to prevent Israel’s victory and perpetuate Oslo; even after missiles rained down on Israel’s cities after Oslo’s architects promised that they never would – after all of this, Oslo has remained the only language that we speak. Simply because the Right has never proposed a different language.
Upon Shimon Peres’s passing, the heart of an entire world that does not know any other language – a world that lives and breathes Oslo-ese – skipped a beat. And exactly at the same time, on a narrow street in Tel Aviv, the new language – offered by Zehut – was revealed.
Rest in peace, Shimon. There is now an answer to your question.
The Nation of Israel has an alternative.