Invest inside 1967 borders, not in settlements

[Jefferson23]

Defensible borders cannot be determined solely by the width of the country or the rocket range of the enemy; they are determined by internal consensus and international status, by the number of libraries and packed theaters.

By Akiva Eldar

Last Thursday, we went to the wedding of a family member in Kiryat Shmona that was also, in effect, her going-away party from her hometown. Several years ago, we attended the wedding of the bride's oldest brother, and he, too, began his family life far from the Galilee panhandle. More than 80 percent of his former high school classmates either moved southward or to one of the kibbutzim in the area.

Every time he visited his parents, he would be told of another childhood friend who had left the city, about a community center that had gone bankrupt, about a library that had been shut down or a center for the blind that had closed its doors.

The fate of Kiryat Shmona's cultural center is also up in the air. Unfortunately for the northern city, it hasn't received the same publicity as the cultural center in Ariel; no artists are boycotting it and no ministers are fighting for it.

The anniversary of the important military victory of the Six-Day War is the Naksa Day, the Day of Defeat, for pragmatic Zionism. Pragmatism has given way to the protest Zionism that has tainted the pioneering ethos of acquiring "another dunam, another goat." That ethos now has a racist, separatist and provocative slant thanks to the settlements, whose expansion is meant to prove that they are an "inseparable part of the State of Israel."

in full: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/invest-inside-1967-borders-not-in-settlements-1.366214