Sitting in the Knesset when Ariel Sharon presented his plan for disengaging from Gaza, Yuli Tamir was shocked.
The Labor Knesset member was not shocked by the approval the prime minister received at the September meeting but at the language he used.
“He did not use the usual language, that this is our land, and how we must not give it up, or talk about the terrorists and how we must go after them,” Tamir said during an interview in San Francisco last week.
Rather, the prime minister said, “We cannot continue to control another people, and that many of the settlers in the West Bank are messianic,” said Tamir. “He was using the terminology of the left, and Sharon is no peacenik.”
During her Bay Area visit, sponsored by the Israel Center of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, the professor of philosophy gave numerous addresses, including the Rabin Memorial Lecture, talks at Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley. She also met with student activists who attended an Israel Center-sponsored Shabbaton specifically for them.
While some on the left have said that Sharon’s plan for withdrawal from Gaza does not go far enough, and may in fact be his way to expand settlements in the West Bank, Tamir said that whatever his intentions are, they are less important than the fact that he took this historic step.
“If we start the disengagement, it will create a precedent, regardless of Sharon’s intentions,” said the one-time minister of immigrant absorption. “Evacuating settlers will create a situation where further evacuations are possible.”
Tamir addressed a broad range of issues on her visit, including the then-dying Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and the re-election of President Bush.
As for Arafat, she said he had become a symbol of mythological proportions, and expressed the hope that the majority of Israelis would be ready to negotiate with almost anyone else.
Regarding Bush, Tamir said that at Stanford, she was accused of being both too pro-Bush and too anti-Bush. She called the newly re-elected president’s leadership a “mixed blessing.”
While it is true that as a left-leaning legislator, she thought the American president should have been more engaged in the peace process, she also said Israelis were more than relieved to have Saddam Hussein out of power. The big fear in Israel was not only unconventional arms, but the belief that Iraq could invade Israel by first invading Jordan, she said.
While Tamir spent much of her time here discussing political issues, she had another agenda to discuss, and it was one that many students found surprising: the large number of Israelis living below the poverty line.
“Many more Israelis than ever before are worrying now about the future and their ability to earn a living and support their children,” she said. “Every fifth Israeli is now poor. There are 1.5 million Israelis now living below the poverty line, but that’s misleading because the line is drawn in such a way that even those above it are often too poor to feed their families.”
For a country that historically has prided itself on taking care of its citizens, she said, the “We are one” slogans of old are now ringing false.
“We cannot have sequential politics,” she said, explaining that for so long, everything else was supposed to be solved after peace comes.
“Peace is not going to happen tomorrow. It will take a few years to negotiate, and more to implement. These people cannot wait. We must revive the welfare state.”