Good Article by Gershom Gorenberg

Ehud Olmert, Marwan Barghouti, and Zeno's Paradox Updated
The following statement was not shouted by a long-time Peace Now activist into a megaphone at a demonstration outside the Israeli prime minister's house:

You have to understand that a very large population of Palestinians lives here...

Take a 50-year-old man who lives here. A man who has spent most of his life -- 40 years, since he was a 10-year-old child -- under the watch of the Israeli soldier. The same soldier who carries a rifle, for all the most justified reasons in the world. But this is that man's narrative. Take those who were stripped at the checkpoints only because there might be terrorists among them. Take those who stand for hours at the checkpoints for fear that a booby-trapped car could pass through...

No, those words were Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's. He was speaking to brigade commanders in the West Bank, telling them to show "understanding" and to "act wisely" in the time before Israel withdraws, so that they do not leave damage that "casts a shadow over our lives" for generations. So Ha'aretz reported on the weekend. I admit I checked to make sure I was reading correctly, and then checked to see if I'd forgotten the date and this was an April 1 spoof.

It wasn't. That was really Ehud Olmert, whose father was in the rightwing Irgun underground and afterward represented the hard right in the Knesset, Ehud Olmert who went into politics around the time he started shaving and who represented parties irrevocably and eternally dedicated to Israeli rule of the Whole Land of Israel -- until just over four years ago, when he called off eternity and declared he was in favor of giving up most of the West Bank, as long as Israel could do it unilaterally, imposing whatever borders it chose on the Palestinians. Even knowing he'd made that shift -- more dramatic than Milton Friedman accepting socialism -- and that he has since accepted the need to negotiate with the Palestinians, I didn't expect to hear him talking like a fiery Machsom Watch grandmother about the suffering of Palestinians at roadblocks.

In his talk to the brigade commanders, Olmert said, "I am a Jew who was raised all his life to believe that this is the Land of Israel" -- meaning, really this is our homeland and it all belongs to us "and I haven't changed my mind." Except, as much as it hurts him, he knows we're going to leave. And in the meantime, the brass should look at Palestinians as people.

Now, don't start shouting at me -- you there, the divestment activist in Ann Arbor with the angry twist of muscle near your mouth who knows that there is a good side and a bad one in every conflict, the bad one defined by having more power, and who is about to click on "comment" to tell me about Olmert's crimes. I can outdo you at listing what Olmert has done wrong, down to the latest approval for new settlement construction. I know how weak Olmert can be. I once described him as "Willy Loman with a vision: a glad-handing hack politician who was ambushed one day by a truth" -- the truth being that Israel's rule of the West Bank will lead it first to "apartheid" (his word) and afterward to the end of the Jewish state.

I still assert we can learn two outrageously hopeful lessons from Olmert's comments about the roadblocks: First, people are not stones, and politics isn't geology. People can change, and accept difficult truths. Second, in doing so, they often hold onto the previous truth. Someone can believe that the whole land belongs to his side, and be willing to split it. The discovery that we have been made to live with such dissonance is reason to shout hallelujah.