A Dream That Ends When Realized

For the Palestinians, it is another stage in the realization of a dream. The Israelis also have good reason to be pleased.

Up until the Oslo agreement, many Palestinians lived an illusion about the heroic future that awaited them or in fantasies about the glorious past of which they had been robbed. Until Oslo, they lived in a kind of suspended animation, outside the normal developmental process of a nation and society. The moment they won sovereignty, even if partial, over a place of their own, they also began to return to the normal process of time. Real time.

Israel also had good reason to rejoice that the Palestinian dream had become real, had become concrete and realistic. When a dream is realized, one also, in a certain sense, gives it up.

What was until only a decade ago a fantasy about returning to the orange groves of Jaffa and to the “mansions” of Lydda is slowly, before our eyes, turning into a reality composed of interests and counter-interests, of practical negotiations between a multitude of clashing forces, of trivial human ego conflicts, and of all the complexity and profound common sense of the game of realpolitik. One may presume that Palestinian nationalist fervor, which was for years directed against Israel, will from here on out be directed more and more into internal Palestinian channels. It will go into the day-by-day effort of building a new society and identity after decades of successive occupations and of the repression of thought and the sense of self-worth.

For years, the Palestinian dream was Israel’s nightmare, and vice-versa. One of the most difficult concessions in the struggle between the two peoples was thus the willingness to step back from those dreams. Even today, not all Israelis and Palestinians are willing to wake up and see what is happening; they will try to persist in violence, seeking a total victory. It is not easy to surrender one’s fantasies and exchange them for a difficult, imperfect reality that can never offer what the fantasies did. In the real world, the childish desire for all our wishes to be answered is never fulfilled.

The realization of the Palestinian dream, that is, its metamorphosis into a reality that is concrete, even a bit ponderous, is one more stage in establishing a boundary that has always been so lacking in relations between the two peoples. For there to be an international border, it is first necessary to define the boundaries of dreams and fantasies. On Saturday, another border post was placed along that very long road to our awakening.

This piece was translated from Hebrew by Haim Watzman.