My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

“Therein lies the problem,” I say. “Both you and the peace movement were always against. Against Meir, against Begin, against occupation. But though you were right to be angry, your failing was that you were always about negation. Protests. Demonstrations. Unlike the old Laborites, you never built anything. You never put up a home or planted a tree. And you never accepted the heavy responsibility of dealing with the complexity of Israeli reality. Emotionally, you remained stuck in the adolescent protest stage of the 1960s and 1970s. The naysaying character of the peace culture made it sterile and eventually unattractive. Politically and emotionally it was unproductive and barren, even corrosive. There was not enough love, not enough compassion. And there was too much judgment. That’s why you couldn’t fill the vacuum left by the fading Labor culture. After you performed the grand acts of patricide and matricide, you didn’t succeed in becoming fathers and mothers yourselves. You did not nurture, you did not inspire, you did not lead. You didn’t offer the nation a mature political choice. At the end of the day, your generation achieved only a fraction of what the founders had. It was on your watch, not theirs, that Israel became a rudderless nation, lost at sea with no captain and no compass and no sense of direction.”

Explains right and left in israel to this day.