Fateful Triangle

Israel and Palestine: Historical Backgrounds224for the religious values of the people. “Begin is our father, and ‘PeaceNow’ is our enemy.” The Likud “lifted up the weak, for whom theAlignment (Ma’arach) showed no concern.” The opinions she recordsverbatim are forceful, and have an ominous ring. 85The contempt of Europe-based Labor Zionism for the Oriental Jewsand their “Arab culture” is notorious. It may reflect the widely-expressedfear of “Levantinization” in what the settlers anticipated would be amodern European society, as well as the felt need to denigrate Arabsociety and culture in general as a justification for taking back “the Landof Israel” from its temporary occupiers and the parallel need to demonstratethat the Oriental Jews were rescued by Zionism from a miserableexistence. Whatever the causes of these attitudes towards the “humandust,” as they were sometimes called, a serious price is now being paidby the Labor Alignment.The development towns were generally established in remote areas,often along the border, where they were not only neglected but alsosubject to vicious (and, furthermore, tactically idiotic) terrorist attacks bythe PLO, particularly in the early 1970s. Michael Elkins described onesuch “frontline settlement.” Avivim, after a particularly brutal attack on aschool bus in which 12 children were killed (20 Lebanese civilians werekilled in retaliatory shelling of the Lebanese town of Bint Jubeil, whichappears to have been selected at random). He describes the “rubblestrewnroad that is Avivim’s main street” where he talked with “aragged. pinched-faced kid,” and the “jerry-built shacks thrown togetherin 1963 when the Jewish Agency—following Israel’s policy of populatingits borders—settled about 60 families of unskilled immigrants from theAtlas Mountains of Morocco in this inhospitable place” where thesettlers live “out of sight and out of mind of most Israelis.” One “typical”story of suffering was told by a settler who said: “We starve here, we getsick here. I don’t want to stay here—nobody wants to stay. It is an awfulClassics in Politics: The Fateful TriangleNoam Chomsky