| To people dancing through the night in Tel Aviv nightclubs, this may sound unnecessarily pessimistic and I hope it is. But radicals can take over a society remarkably quickly if there is not the will to stand up to them. I personally watched how the nationalist radicals in Serbia transformed it in 10 years from an open, westernised, relaxed society into a paranoid, xenophobic nightmare dedicated to ethnic expansion. The same could happen to Israel. The settlers are growing in number and growing in confidence and Haaretz regularly publishes articles about how settler ideology is beginning to dominate swathes of the IDF. Lose the army to radicals and you`ve lost the state. Peres is right when he said evacuating the settlements could cause civil war. However, that civil war is unlikely to happen, simply because the IDF, government and secular Israel have no appetite for confronting the settlers. Ten years might be pessimistic. There again, it could happen sooner than that. |
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