One morning a few weeks ago, as Ephraim Kishon remembers for good, I found myself in a hall full of space at the Weizmann Institute of Science in the streets. Before arriving at the lecture hall, I was slightly confused by the complex of large buildings and lush lawns, and passed through Meir Weissgell's statement, one of the founding fathers of the Institute, which in 1949 stated that "streets were at that time a small, parochial, unimportant town, Almost on the edge of the desert, thousands of words from the centers of scientific thought. "

Wow, what a way the research labs have gone since those days, during which Michael Sela invented the Copaxone drug for MS, which has saved many lives around the world. Alongside him, Ada Yonat, who was born in Tel Aviv and was educated in a "new high school" under the management of Toni Hella, and won the Nobel Prize. "The Institute" is undoubtedly one of the important cultural grandeur establishments set by world Jewry, especially Jewish communities in the US, together with Israeli society. But back to reality, a stone was thrown over my heart when I found parking easily.

Many good people gathered to taste some of the great handfuls that were generously distributed at the entrance to the hall, to share up-to-date gossip, and also to listen to the words of Prof. Shlomo Avineri about Benjamin Ze'ev Herzl, the father of the Jewish National Movement. How Herzl became a journalist and writer and entrepreneur and founded the Constituent Assembly of the Jewish People, the Zionist Congress in 1897. A statesman with a spirit of prophecy surrounded him, who at the end of Congress declared "I founded the Jewish state in Basel."

I thought to myself that this constituent assembly was for the "defeated Congress," Jews who felt that after a century of partnership under the auspices of the principles of the French Revolution - equality, liberty and fraternity - they had come to realize that Europe was vomiting them and no longer wanted them. Herzl's prophetic spirit rolled and kinked and led 50 years later, in 1947, to the United Nations and USSR rally that a Jewish state should be established for the Jewish people in Israel.

As requested, Avineri compared the action of the rejected and defeated Jews, the Zionists, who slowly established the science city on the streets, still in its infancy, and the operation of the Palestinian national movement. Here the word "tragedy" echoed like a hammer hitting the anvil. Alongside the "tragedy", the word "which" was present. If the Palestinians led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, who combined his hands with Hitler and Goebbels, would accept the 1947 Partition Plan, then they would have had a state for many decades; If Yasser Arafat had boarded the plane with Anwar Sadat in 1977 and arrived with him in Israel, what a wonderful peace we could have with them; If, in 2001, the Palestinians had accepted Ehud Barak's generous suggestions, sending Yossi Beilin to represent them at meetings at the Taba Hotel, and not adopting the bomb blasts on Jewish homies, we would certainly have flourished in the Middle East.

So, as Avinari sought to sum up the stalemate from his personal point of view, he explained that whenever he met a Palestinian intellectual or politician, he asked two intertwined questions that could only be answered with "yes" or "no": the first, Do you think the State of Israel is a Jewish state? And the second, and is it legitimate? For decades, when the professor met with senior Palestinian officials, he never heard, even from one, the word "yes." They are their own. True to their ways. A way of refusing to acknowledge the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish state and its legitimacy. Their right. They struggle solely for that.

When I left the Rorberg Institute of Science and Lights, where research labs and start-ups usually search for the much-awaited exit, back and forth, I felt somewhat confused. Do you think any of the Gantz, Lapid, Ya'alon and Ashkenazi cockpit asked Shlomo Avinari's questions to the Knesset members of the UN, TAD, BLD and Hadash parties that came together under the "joint list"?

Dr. Uri Cohen is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at Tel Aviv University