Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, and leader of the Israeli Labor Party, spoke at the Freeman Center for Jewish Life Friday.
In a speech interspersed with political jokes, Hebrew phrases and comparisons of the Israeli situation to falafel balls and pita bread, Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, and leader of the Israeli Labor Party, spoke to a packed room in the Freeman Center for Jewish Life Friday.
Burg began his lecture—an element of the Joint Israel Initiative’s teach-in held this weekend as an opposing voice to the Palestinian Solidarity Movement conference—by explaining his philosophy not only for the weekend, but also for the duration of any persecution.
After drawing Biblical allusions to Noah and the criticism he has received, Burg told the assembled crowd not to give in. “Never shut up and never be silent in front of evilness. The whole notion of this weekend is to never be silent,” he said.
The crux of Burg’s speech began as an anecdote about buying five-shekel falafel from a street vendor in Jerusalem. “Every Israeli, every Jew around the world, would like to have three falafel balls in his historical pita,” he said. “But it’s too small and one has to be removed.”
Each of these metaphorical falafel balls is an ideal that Israel ultimately wants, but only two balls can fit at a time and one must be sacrificed. The tenets of the “Jerusalem falafel philosophy” are the upholding of the greater land of Israel as a unified state and the Promised Land, the maintenance of a Jewish majority in Israel and a democracy with the agreement to disagree.
“With great pain, like an amputation of the leg to save the body, I give up the land in order to preserve the democracy and the Jewish nature in the only state I love,” Burg said.
Burg outlined the last decade of the country’s turbulent conflict-ridden history, including the first Palestinian uprising followed several years later by a “euphoric Palestinian-Israeli atmosphere.” He put Israel’s history into the context of the world’s history, deeming the 1990s an unbelievable decade with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ending of South African apartheid.
Within the past few years however, terrorism has regained momentum all over the globe, including in Israel, retracting the short-lived euphoria and posing the question of “What happens next?”
“It is not only our pendulum, which moves. The whole world’s pendulum is moving,” Burg said.
He also explained that people are always looking for someone to blame to make their idealized notions of black and white and good and evil seem more realistic, and they have unjustly narrowed down their opinions of “the others” into simple stereotypes.
“Everyone needs someone negative on their side to reflect how positive he is,” Burg said. “From our point of view, all Palestinians are suicide bombers, and from their point of view, all Israelis are settlers and targeted assassins.”
Burg elucidated Israel’s political struggles by redefining modern society’s clash of civilizations as being not as much a cultural inconsistency, but a clash between the democratic and the theocratic civilizations. “Michael Jordan is more known in Israel than the river Jordan,” he said, illustrating the cultural diversity within the country. But this, he said, is less a problem than the lack of cooperation between the democratic factions of the world.
Audience members appreciated Burg’s diplomatic delivery and ability to still maintain his position. “I thought he did a good job of being careful not to antagonize either side. He was really respectful and inspiring,” junior Anne Lieberman said.
Burg was able to deliver his presentation without any disruptions. He had issued a warning to the audience at the start of his talk to refrain from protesting, although heightened security measures had already been implemented.
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