Tomorrow Is Yesterday

return to a life that is no longer there. Tomorrow is yesterday because yesterday—before the pretense that history matters little and before sanitized negotiations between two unequal parties mediated by a powerful third that sides with the stronger of them—is where Israelis and Palestinians seek refuge. They seek refuge in the wish that the other side will vanish. They seek refuge in violence: Palestinians in a raw expression of pent-up rage and desire for vengeance; Israelis in the unleashing of prodigious force, modern technology at the service of age-old ferociousness. Israelis return to a time of triumphalism, when they conquer and crush but cannot prevail, because Palestinians will not surrender; Palestinians to a time of survival, when they endure and persist but face loss, chaos, and wandering. Both head back to a time when they could not discern a shared future. Despair has sprung from illusions and lies; hope can come from discarding deceit and facing truth.

Ref. 78A4-A

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things…; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else. —FERNANDO PESSOA, THE BOOK OF DISQUIET

Ref. B806-B

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone. —JORGE LUIS BORGES

Ref. 3936-C

What remains is a naked contest that originated long ago and stubbornly refuses to go. To focus on the here and now—on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition partners, their suspicions and zealotry; on Hamas and its armed wing’s leadership, their brutality and readiness to gamble with people’s lives—may be comforting. It is misleading. It is to opt for the ephemeral over the enduring. Netanyahu’s quest for political survival and alliance with extremists are not irrelevant, but neither are they the point. When he claimed that his stance on the war was shared by most Israelis, he was unquestionably correct. Israel’s military campaign was overseen not by Netanyahu alone but by a war cabinet that included several personalities the outside world deemed “moderate”; a vast majority of Israelis believed it reflected the appropriate amount of force or not enough.

Ref. AA70-D

It is convenient to personalize this affair, to turn it into the story of a single individual and his loathsome partners. Netanyahu is the ideal offender, one whose ouster would set things right. He makes it so much easier to exonerate successive Israeli governments that sought to liquidate the Palestinian cause, eliminate its leaders, and deepen their dominion; to absolve his political rivals who seldom challenged those actions; and to clear the United States, which most of the time obediently abetted them throughout. He makes it easier to look away.

Ref. B254-E

What was striking about this concentrated fire against Netanyahu was how much it revealed about those who mobilized against him. The nostalgia was not just for a pre-Netanyahu Israel, but for a pre-Netanyahu Netanyahu: The prime minister, as then–US Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer put it, was a man who had “lost his way,” the implication being that he had once possessed it. Critics could fault Netanyahu without taking on Israel’s reality; yearn for a romanticized past without confronting its harsh truth; feel good because they deplored one form of depravity even as they were unconcerned about others. They could break with a man without breaking with long-held beliefs, and without asking more probing questions: what it said about Israel that most of its citizens felt so little empathy for Palestinians and could support a policy of indiscriminate killing and deliberate starvation; what it said about its leadership that they would adopt military tactics based on the principle that nothing is as effective as striking hard apart from striking harder; what it said about its political class that it has founded and entrenched systemic discrimination credible groups describe as apartheid; what it said about a world that, by its actions and inaction, mightily contributed to it all?

Ref. 6697-F

is the story of how illusions repeatedly clouded judgments; of how outsiders sought to shove aside the past, culture, and beliefs, to belittle the part played in politics by intangibles—humiliation, anger, dignity. It is the story of how logic, rationality, and the most meticulously prepared peace plan were no match for the raw power of history and emotions. The world would be much tidier and less complicated if it all began in the here and now, if the promise of future comfort could eclipse memories of past loss, if words meant what they said, if things were what they seemed to be. Tough luck. For so many of the conflict’s protagonists, tomorrow does not lie in the future. It is yesterday.

Ref. D22B-G

Barak was one of Israel’s most decorated soldiers, known for having orchestrated the assassination of several top-ranking Palestinians. He had opposed the Oslo Accords on grounds that they provided insufficient security guarantees. Some might have seen these attributes as warning signs; to Americans already giddy at Netanyahu’s defeat, Barak’s background was reason for extra excitement. Who better than a stone-cold killer to sell a future, inevitably controversial deal to a skeptical Israeli public?

Ref. 5272-H