Immediately after Oslo, the Palestinian Authority’s “cultural” organs started celebrating “Canaanite festivals.” They were designed to underscore the PA’s newly invented claim that the Palestinian Arabs — whose ancestors conquered Palestine in the seventh century, about 2000 years after the Jewish tribes settled the Holy Land — were actually descendants of the Canaanites, and therefore the land’s “original” inhabitants, possessing a prior claim to it.

Innocently, Israelis dismissed these claims as yet another harmless Arab fantasy. But recently, as widening Western circles subjected to Arab propaganda started questioning Israel’s rights to the land, and suggesting that it was stolen from the Arabs and should be returned to them, Israelis finally realized that the web of historical fabrications, distortions, and outright lies (like the insistence that the Temple Mount was never a Jewish place of worship) spun by the PA and its Western sympathizers is a serious challenge to Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist.

Superficially, the division of Jerusalem may seem justified, on practical as well as moral grounds. After all, good fences make good neighbors, etc.; but, to reconcile conflicting claims, why not perform a Solomon-like division of what is in dispute.

The proponents of division mostly argue practicality: since the two communities cannot live together, they should separate. In real life, however, cutting a city in half is easier said than done, and having two sovereigns govern different parts may prove not only an impossible task, but also a dangerous one, leading to total chaos.

When our distinguished poet Haim Gouri agonizes over a possible threat to Israel’s very survival as a Jewish state posed by the “collapse” of our “ethos of standing up firm”, we should listen to his ruminations with alarm; for their insights, of course, but also because they reveal a continued part-blindness of the generation that created his “collapsed world”, that discourages a process of healing.

Adaptation to gentile rule enabled Jews to preserve their nationhood without a land for a long while. But with the advent of populist democracies, politically powerless Jews became so tempting a target that disaster was inevitable. Although Zionism “tried to develop a ‘new Jew’,”Harvard Prof. Ruth Weiss argued last week (in the second annual Bernstein Memorial Lecture), there were still left in Israel vestiges of the ‘old Jew’ ” who was habitually politically accommodating ”. It prevents Israel, she believes, from trying “to convince its neighbors and the world that it expects their accommodation to the needs of the Jews.”