A Quote from Abba Eban

 15 November 2020

Quote from Abba Eban’s Personal Witness: Israel Through My Eyes

1992, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York

Chapter 30, p 650

The idea that national freedom is indispensable for Bosnia Herzegovina while military rule is reasonable for the Palestinian people defies all logic. Sin 1967 the issue has always been how to reconcile Israeli security with Palestinian freedom. This cannot be achieved without an integrative process in the relations between the peoples that inhabit the Land of Israel.

This issue is particularly acute in the mood and atmosphere of the 1990s. It is extraordinary that any large body of Israelis would not take heed of what the Hebrew phrase calls “the spirit that hovers over the generation.” The Europeans call it “zeitgeist” or “l’esprit du siecle.” The central theme of the last decade of this century is not nuclear war, but the structure of states and the inter play of nationalities. When Jefferson announced that “governments derive their just posers from the consent of the governed,” he was expressing a moral vision, not a living reality. The world of Jefferson was a hierarchic world. Consent of the governed was a very rare commodity.

Two centuries later, Jefferson’s dictum is the theme and spirit of the age. The world is closing its mind to coercive jurisdictions. Power retreats before freedom. Rulers yield to their erstwhile subjects. It has happened in Moscow and Warsaw, in Budapest and Sofia, in Bucharest and Tirana, in Prague and Vilnius and Riga and Estonia. Even in Croatia and Slovenia. Yes, and above all, in South Africa. How will Israel claim to be the “only democracy in the Middle East” if it remains one of the diminishing number of states in which 1.8 million people under the jurisdiction cannot vote or be elected, have no control over the government that rules their lives, cannot mover freely, cannot manufacture anything that might compete with Israeli produce, are not allowed to sleep at night inside the country where they to to work at reduced wages, and are subject to penalties, curfews, detention and other rigors that would not be applicable to them if they were Jews or even Arab citizens of Israel?

To be or not to be is not Israel’s question. How and what to be is the question. The existence of statehood was never the whole of the Zionist ambition. The nature and quality of the new society occupied the minds of our founders more obsessively than its constitutional forms. There is no other state anywhere whose structure is marked by such sharp discontinuity as that which describes the relations between the area of Israeli democracy and the areas under military rule. How can a society aspire to any degree of social harmony if it rules over an alien nation more than a third of its own size without a single mutual bond of flag, tongue, faith, historic experience, national solidarity, common allegiance or juridical and civic equality?

A Letter to Mitzi

 11 November 2020

Dear Mitzi

I was just thinking about you and I wondered about this: When you jumped from that building, on the way down, did you say "OH NO, I changed my mind" or did you say "OH YES, I'll be free at last"? As I'm sure many of your friends do, I often think about what I could have done to help you. I never answered your last letter because I thought it so strange and I didn't know how to respond. I kept thinking that when we next met - in Korea or maybe in California - we would talk it out, and I would either come to understand your position or you would change your thoughts on our relationship. But I never got the chance to see you again, and instead, I only see you falling from that tall building and lying broken on the ground. Oh, your poor family: How they must suffer. And the poor Koreans. Of course, Koreans are accustomed to suicides by young people, but I'm sure their feelings were different in your case because you were a foreigner and foreigners are so hard to understand. I was always sure we'd meet again and you'd explain your last letter to me. I thought we'd meet at KAIST and go to a little restaurant in Ea-eun-dong and talk and talk earnestly for ever so long. Then everything would have been OK forever. But instead forever is different. I wish you hadn't killed yourself. Or I wish at least you'd have had a peaceful death of just going to sleep instead of that violent death of falling from that tall building and lying broken on that ground. 

Oh Mitzi, Only One Mitzi

Love

Juli

U.S. Presidential Election 2020

9 November 2020 

The 2020 U.S. presidential election was the most stressful election, possibly the most stressful event, of my life. The 2016 election was stressful but not terribly stressful because until the results were in, I was confident that this the United States could not possibly elect Donald Trump President. I was wrong, and the depth of my disappointment was commensurate with the height of my misguided optimism. This time I could hold no such optimism so my hope created the most stress of my life. As I tried to visualize another four years of Trump, the view was fogged over: I couldn't imagine it. What would it mean for this country's life, for the world's order? It was too great a horror. 

Election Day brought equal measures of hope and horror. And it went on for the next four days, but with Hope increasing each day. I obsessively grabbed my phone to check whether Nevada or Georgia was called. I woke multiple times in the night to check. I couldn't accomplish anything. Isn't such a stressful situation a good time to do manual tasks? I couldn't do anything. Except watch TV shows, primarily The West Wing. Thanks god for binge watching of TV series without commercials. 

Saturday, November 7, Curry and I were out walking her 'business' walk. Of course, I'd already checked the election results innumerable times. We were walking down the sidewalk on Rogers Way somewhere in front of apartments 7, 8, and 9. My phone buzzed a Breaking News alert. YES! They'd called not only Nevada but also Georgia. Done Deal. The relief was indeed in proportion to the stress at some level, but at another level, it was disbelief. I didn't jump up and down and shout, though I did hear commotion somewhere on other blocks. A terrible darkness was lifted from me, from the country, from the world.