leadership vacuum

David Grossman addressed a crowd that had gathered on November 4, 2006. November 4 is the date that Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. It is important to note, if you read through the entire speech (and please, please do so), that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was in the crowd.

And these are some of the reasons that, in an amazingly short time, Israel has degenerated into heartlessness, real cruelty toward the weak, the poor, and the suffering. Israel displays indifference to the hungry, the elderly, the sick, and the handicapped, equanimity in the face of, for example, trafficking in women, or the exploitation of foreign workers in conditions of slave labor, and in the face of profound, institutionalized racism toward its Arab minority. When all this happens as if it were perfectly natural, without outrage and without protest, I begin to fear that even if peace comes tomorrow, even if we eventually return to some sort of normality, it may be too late to heal us completely.

This diary is not intended as a criticism of Israel. It is intended as an appreciation of a beautiful speech that is itself a reflection of what happens to a country, to a people, who are continually at war.

In that respect, I read it as an opportunity to ask what will become of us, of Americans, if we continue on this path that we have set out upon, or, if you prefer, that has been laid out for us by this administration.