Your Special Report on the future of Israel gave a good overview of what has happened there, but failed to convince me that peace is possible. I do not see any sign of a solution. Could Yasir Arafat and Ariel Sharon talk and achieve a lasting settlement? On both sides there are powerful militants ready to oppose and destroy any peace initiative–they seem to view all such initiatives by their governments as cowardly. And could Arafat and Sharon defy and contain these elements? Both are well aware of what happened to Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin. It seems we will continue to see Palestinian kamikaze-type bombing and Israeli tanks shooting all over. Naomi Haga Osaka, Japan
Thank you for your careful coverage of the Israeli response to the Palestinian suicide massacres. Regretfully, when the United States declared war on terrorism, it lost the moral high ground on the Israeli question and on any chance of being an honest broker. America must realize its moral compromise over Palestine and hand brokerage over to a third party, for Israel has now applied the same misuse of language and righteous outrage to condemn an entirely understandable rage from a severely abused and desperate people. Stephen Liddle Auckland, New Zealand
My 14-year-old son recently went to visit a friend from his class. He visited him at his funeral. The boy’s blown-up body, together with the mutilated bodies of his father and 16-year-old brother, were escorted to their graves while the boy’s wounded mother was escorted in a wheelchair. Their crime? They were having lunch in a restaurant and had the misfortune of being there when a “martyr” executed his successful military mission by blowing up the restaurant and killing 15 people, including two whole families, eight children, two elderly people, three women and three men. The terror attacks in Israel have brought more than 400 victims to the grave since September 2000. Relative to population, this would be roughly the equivalent of 16,000 deaths of American citizens in the United States. After losing about 3,000 people on September 11, the United States initiated a global war on terror. Why should Israel not be allowed to retaliate? Arnon Katz Haifa, Israel
Your article on the future of Israel is very interesting. It’s sad that the leadership of Israel does not see the way out of its situation. The answer is so simple: remove the Israeli settlements and get out of the occupied territories. Rafiq A. Tschannen Pristina, Kosovo
After September 11, Americans asked, “Why do they hate us?” We Americans have only to look at the double standard of our foreign policy in the Middle East. What do you suppose our response would have been if it had been Arab tanks destroying Israeli buildings? I thought that the tragedy of September 11 had taught Americans a lesson about diplomacy, but I guess it has not. Belinda Winslow Santiago, Chile
Have Ariel Sharon’s policies brought the security he promised to Israel? Has Arafat achieved something by launching an intifada during a peace process? Lasting peace can be achieved only by new leaders ready to make radical compromises. Israel should hand over all the settlements in the West Bank and allow a geographically viable Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital. The settlements do not give Israel any security; they just give its citizens permanent insecurity. But Israel cannot allow the right of return of all Palestinian refugees and remain viable, so this must be the trade-off. Rich countries should buy out the right of return of refugees, and the money should be used to create an economically sustainable Palestine whose citizens would have something to lose. Important members of the Arab world should give Israel diplomatic recognition, and its security should be further guaranteed by making it a member of NATO. The exchange would then be settlements, East Jerusalem and money for no right of return, Arab recognition and more security. The Golan Heights could compromise Israel’s security, so peace with Syria must come initially with an international buffer zone along that border. Now, who will show the courage to mark their places in history? Tony Pupkewitz Cape Town, South Africa
Late last year Arab voices around the world were heard in unison strongly condemning the United States for bombing Afghans during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and demanding that the United States suspend attacks immediately. This recent Passover, a weeklong holiday commemorating the freedom of the Jews, the world witnessed the most extensive bombings in Israel’s history, which killed at least 42 Israelis. I see reason for some nations to start practicing what they preach. Benjamin Raymond Perth, Australia
I applaud you for writing such a thought-provoking issue on the future of Israel. It pains me to think that my American tax dollars and support go to a government that practices mass humiliation and terror in its occupation of Palestine, and misinformation in its practice of apartheid. It is not Yasir Arafat who must “perform” but the occupation that must stop. How can taking children to school be almost unbearable for Israelis? How about illegal settlements on Palestinian land that have Spanish-style villas protected by walls, razor wire and high-tech weaponry overlooking the squalor of refugee camps? Palestinians have no hope. It’s plain and simple. Steven W. Koinis Athens, Greece
Israel will survive because it is the only country in the Middle East that is unequivocally committed to the principles of democracy, and the only country in the region with a free press where differing and opposing opinions can be openly expressed. Israel is committed to reaching a negotiated settlement with all its Arab neighbors and consistently eschews terrorism as a method for resolving differences between peoples and groups. Israel will survive because of the resolve of its people, its commitment to peace and its connection to 3,500 years of Jewish history. Daniel Gottlieb Raananna, Israel
The famous Jewish slogan “never again” should actually read “Never again–to us.” Israel’s mistreatment and oppression of Palestinians, in many ways, parallels the mistreatment of Jews in wartime Europe. It seems as though many in Israel have learned all the wrong lessons from their previous generation’s experience during World War II. Kevin Stewart Greenfield, Canada
If America’s new antiterrorism policy means that even those groups that are fighting for freedom from oppression are going to be labeled terrorists, then this is developing into a highly contentious situation. Here in the European Union we are continually amazed by America’s approach to the Middle East conflict. The Israelis, led by their war-crimes-suspect prime minister, are repeatedly invading Palestinian territory and killing innocent civilians. This is not usually criticized by America because such actions are committed by a national army. But when the Palestinians strike back, Israel and America accuse them of terrorism, overlooking the fact that four Palestinians are killed for every one Israeli. America has also expressed outrage at the alleged supply of arms to Palestinian militants by Iran. But who supplied the high-tech weaponry with which the Israelis have gunned down stone-throwing boys and innocent civilians? Israel is fighting a cowardly war. Quentin Poulsen Jaen, Spain
The Israelis’ and the Palestinians’ only possibility for any viable future is to focus on the future. Sadly, both sides desperately lack leaders who are bold enough to leave the past behind and grasp the future with the type of vision and inspiration that can propel both nations to social, economic and cultural prosperity. Both parties must be prepared for significant concessions and compromise when it comes to dialogue on future coexistence. As we have seen in the past, and as vividly evidenced by current events in the region, attempts to negotiate on the basis of historic claims leads nowhere in terms of long-term conflict resolution. I call on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to take your responsibilities seriously and to have the courage and valor to close the book on the past, solve the dire problems of the present and build the foundation for a prolific future. Your nations are fading away emotionally, spiritually and physically, and only your leadership can save them. Netalie Nadivi Raananna, Israel
“Build a Wall to the Sky…” is yet another fine article on the Middle East (Special Report, April 1). Israel must make peace for its own sake. However, putting up a wall is not the best approach. The best approach is to make friends of your enemies. Then you have nothing to fear from them. Putting up a wall, obviously, divides people. It keeps the hatred alive for another day. Jawwad Qureshi London, England
More than ever before you should be reporting on Ariel Sharon’s past as a war criminal. Sharon has been responsible for crimes and genocide in the past, and the charges that are being brought against him are not being reported on. There is too much happening now that is similar to the acts of genocide and the massacres committed in 1982 for which Sharon was found responsible. Ibrahim Koshy Jiddah, Saudi Arabia
When Michael Hirsh says that Arafat “lack[ed] the boldness of an Anwar Sadat” at the first Camp David summit, he is not comparing like with like (“Blowing the Best Chance,” Special Report, April 1). Sadat did not realize that his peace deal with Israel would lead to his assassination because he underestimated the strength of the opposition to his policies. The 1987 intifada began without Arafat, and it is said that intifada 2000 would have as well. But Arafat also lives under the threat of Israel’s “targeted killings,” something Sadat never faced. Sadat won back from Israel all that Egypt had lost. Arafat was being offered less than 22 percent of the Palestine that the Palestinians lost. Arafat’s politics–if he has any–may stink, but his physical boldness cannot be questioned. Mark Elf Dagenham, England
Your article claims that a new wave of anti-Semitism has washed over Europe. Is this an oblique reference to the EU’s position as a neutral arbiter ready to condemn Palestinian terror as much as it condemns the use of excessive force against innocent Palestinians? To condemn Israel is not to condemn the Jewish people. To raise the evil of anti-Semitism in order to rebut criticism is a strategy that should have no place among free-thinking people. Jeremy Sheahan Cork, Ireland
It appears that modern Israel suffers from the paradox of the Holocaust. Let there be no mistake: if not for the Holocaust, the Jewish people would never have been granted a state. Yet for exactly the same reason (the Holocaust) the world does not dare impose a solution upon Israel. Will the United States and Europe stand by and watch as Israelis and Palestinians bleed each other to death? As a supporter of the left-wing peace camps, I am convinced that the occupation of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip is the reason for the past and present terrorism that has besieged Israel. Even if through some miracle the left wing could win a majority in the next election, I do not believe there is an Israeli leader alive today who has the courage to confront the settlers and withdraw from the occupied territories. Like loving parents who sometimes punish their child for his own good, someone somewhere needs to love us so much to do what has to be done for our own good. Joyce Rosenberg-Nahum Jerusalem, Israel
title: “How Will Israel Survive " ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-08” author: “Lonnie Gay”
This year, at this moment, the ritual has special meaning, and these nights will be different from all others because so many Jews believe the future of Israel, or its children, or their place in the Middle East and in the world, is threatened now as it has not been for generations. Will the Jewish state survive? At what cost? With what identity? Can it ever know peace?
“I’m in such despair because I fear it is too late,” says historian Amos Elon. “And I have only told you half of what I fear.” Is it too late for any solution at all? Who knows how to ask that question? Who knows how to give the answer? Yet it lingers in the air of Israel today as palpably as the smell of explosives and burned flesh after a bus is blown to bits. And it is hard to remember now that in the decade of the 1990s, peace seemed to be an assured, almost inevitable future.
To many Israelis today, dreams of peace seem thin and irrelevant. The narrative is a nightmare for both the Israelis and the Palestinians, their intimate enemies, who know their deepest fears, and who strike out furiously to assuage their own. Nor is the trauma of Israel and Palestine limited to the sacred precincts of the Holy Land. Broadcast around the world, the crisis has helped to spawn a “new anti-Semitism” in Europe, while in the Muslim world a tepid sympathy for Palestinians emerges as incandescent hatred of Jews. Even in the United States, Israel’s closest ally, faith in Israel’s survival is weak. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, a mere 34 percent of adults surveyed thought Israel would remain a Jewish state 50 years from now. Some 23 percent thought Israel would become a mixed state, where Palestinians have a major share of power, and 18 percent thought it would no longer exist.
“Yes, I am afraid,” says 14-year-old Hadas Harpak, an Israeli from Jerusalem. “If I’m out somewhere and I hear a balloon pop, I jump.” He thinks a lot about what it will take to have a future here. He likes to think that territory could still be traded for peace, or a ceasefire implemented, at least. “But frankly,” says the teenager, “I don’t see things changing. Maybe we’re going to learn to get along with all the violence. It will become part of us.”
Already the fact of the violence permeates daily life, not least because the targets chosen by suicide bombers have been so utterly ordinary: symbols not of power or military might but of mundane routine. A commuter bus. A pizzeria. A shopping mall. A disco where kids like Hadas might go to try to forget the war. The bitter message of the bombers could be that as long as the aberration of occupation continues in the territories, there can no longer be a normal life inside sovereign Israel. But it might also be that no sovereign Israel should exist at all. And these kids, the third or fourth generation to be born and raised on this land, aren’t going anywhere. “I’d rather live in a place where buses don’t blow up,” Hadas says simply, “but all my friends are here, and I wouldn’t want to leave them behind.”
There was another time when Israelis accepted battle as an inevitable fact of their lives. The war for independence in 1948 was infinitely more ferocious than anything the country has experienced since. Of about 600,000 Israelis, 6,000 died, or around one in every 100. By comparison, says historian Benny Morris, some 350 Israelis have been killed in the violence of the past 18 months, far fewer than the 600 who die every year in traffic accidents. In 1967, as Egypt rattled its sabers, rolled its tanks, blockaded Israeli shipping and threatened the elimination of the Jewish state, Amos Elon remembers people “stoically waiting for war as if for the impending visit of a tedious, meddling mother-in-law. Some said, fatalistically, that maybe the price for Israel’s existence was a periodic bloodletting, as regular as income tax.” And today some Israelis are saying that once again. But the nature of the times, and of war itself, has changed.
While Israel’s military machine is more powerful than ever, its people are more vulnerable than they have been since the 1950s. Its nuclear capability is worthless against next-door neighbors. Even its Merkava battle tanks, which it claimed were the best in the world, have been blown up twice and their crews killed in recent Palestinian ambushes. Terrorist attacks on Israel have always been a threat to the population, but not a threat to the existence of the state. Today, Israelis wonder: is that still true? They talk about a “balance of terror,” in which they feel every bit as much at risk as the Palestinians whose lands they occupy, and possibly more so. Many Palestinians are convinced they’ve got nothing left to lose in the growing confrontation. Many Israelis appear to be adopting the same attitude.
Worst of all, the very idea of peace has been destroyed for much of the Israeli population. Benny Morris, whose histories forced many Israelis to come to grips with the ugly realities of their wars on the Arabs and their occupation of Arab land, blames Yasir Arafat nonetheless for “making Israelis lose faith in the future of peace.” Now, Morris suspects, “Arafat wants to get a West Bank state despite Israel, and then continue the struggle for Jaffa and Haifa and all the rest of the country.”
How is it that this little country of 6 million people has come to demand so much of the world’s attention? How does it inspire so much love among some people, so much hate among others? Some look for answers in the holy Scriptures–in the Torah, the Bible, the Qur’an. Others try to discover the dynamic in the texts of the British Empire’s secret accords, in the history of the Holocaust and its aftermath, in the demagoguery of Arab-nationalist politics. But there are also other narratives, evil-minded mythologies that feed hatred and create foundations of prejudice so persistent and pervasive that they are almost impossible to eradicate. “And we are hearing again all of this filth,” says Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Melchior, “all of this poison which led to so many disasters of the past.”
A Specter of A New Anti-Semitism
A columnist in the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh took it on herself this month to explain the rituals of Purim and Passover. The first holiday (which took place in February) commemorates the story of Esther’s saving the Jews of Persia from extermination. It’s a rollicking, hard-drinking, happy time for most celebrants. Some call it the Jewish Mardi Gras. Passover is more somber, as Jews commemorate the night that the Tenth Plague was sent by God to smite the firstborn children of Egypt but passed over the homes of Jews and allowed Moses to lead them to freedom. Each part of the ritual meal is full of symbolism. But that is not what the columnist, a medical doctor at King Faisal University Hospital, told her readers.
For the Purim pastries, she said, “the Jewish people must obtain human blood.” And for Passover, there are some special requirements: “the blood of Christian and Muslim children under the age of 10 must be used.” And so, in almost clinical detail, Dr. Umayma Ahmad al-Jalahma recounted a hideous libel that dates back to the Crusades. “A needle-studded barrel is used,” she told us. “The victim suffers dreadful torment–torment that affords the Jewish vampires great delight… " You get the idea.
The column appeared in the government-sanctioned newspaper shortly before Vice President Dick Cheney arrived in Saudi Arabia for talks. Since the Saudis are proposing a plan for peace with Israel, the screed was, to say the least, an embarrassment. “That column was 100 percent wrong,” Al-Riyadh’s editor Turki al-Sudairi told NEWSWEEK. And yet–the shadow of a doubt was allowed to linger. “Jews everywhere in the world are one thing,” he wrote in his official retraction, “while Jews belonging to the Zionist movement that acts to annihilate the Palestinians are something else, and completely different.” In the face of such monstrous mythologies, that distinction is without a difference. The Saudi diatribe is hardly an isolated incident. In recent years, and with a quickening tempo, the Egyptian press has led the way toward conspiratorial madness. (And Egypt, one must recall, has a peace treaty with Israel.) Papers have featured stories denying the Holocaust, accepting as fact the sinister fiction called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and even repeating a Nazi-authored “prophecy” attributed falsely to Benjamin Franklin that Jews would take over America if allowed to immigrate.
As if the old libels were not enough, September 11 has given us a new one. Throughout the Muslim world, the story is repeated that Israel is the hidden hand behind the attacks on America. In Pakistan a few days after September 11, Gen. Rashid Qureshi, the public-relations chief for President Pervez Musharraf, told NEWSWEEK that the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were so well coordinated, so brilliantly executed, that it was inconceivable an Arab organization could have carried them out. “Who else [but Israel] could have done it?” he asked. He’s since moderated his views. But in September Qureshi repeated the story he’d heard, along with everyone else in Pakistan, that Jewish employees in the Trade Center had mysteriously skipped work on the morning of the 11th.
Many see the rise in Western Europe of what they call the “new anti-Semitism” as even more worrisome. Since serious Israeli-Palestinian fighting began in the fall of 2000, there has been a spike in harassment and vandalism targeting Jews, especially in France. Much of that is in poor communities where immigrant Muslims and immigrant Jews from North Africa live side by side. Unemployment and frustrations are high. Arab satellite stations, as well as European news networks, broadcast a steady stream of reports on Palestinians under fire, their homes destroyed, their lands reoccupied, their children killed. There is also, in many parts of Europe, a residue of the old racist attitudes that spawned the Fascist and Nazi policies of the 1930s. One of the presidential candidates in France’s upcoming elections, Jean-Marie Le Pen, skirts the limits of the law baiting both Arabs and Jews. He’s expected to garner 10 percent of the vote.
“For the first time I’m getting reports from young Jews about anti-Semitism at work,” Britain’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, told NEWSWEEK. It’s gotten worse since September 11. “I’ve been getting hate mail, powerful letters,” says Sacks, “one even calling me a neo-Nazi. Never been called that before. Many of the letters were responding to events in Israel.”
This hijacking of the language of the Holocaust, Sacks believes, is the most worrisome part of the new anti-Semitism: “There’s this new trend to take all the language of the Holocaust and say that now Jews are not victims but perpetrators.” Such rhetoric is so strident, however, that it hardly makes headlines anymore. A more telling remark was one from France’s ambassador in London, Daniel Bernard, at a dinner party last December. In what he thought was a private conversation, he reportedly called Israel “that s—ty little country,” and asked, “Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of these people?”
Jews can rarely be certain of others’ real attitudes, or what they might be prepared to say or do under certain circumstances–a situation that has developed often, and all too tragically, throughout history. “A lot of Jews are great friends of mine,” the Rev. Billy Graham told the then President Richard Nixon on a recently released White House tape. “They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know that I am friendly to Israel and so forth. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country.” Nixon replies, “You must never let them know.” Graham has since apologized.
Facing the Tensions Deep Within
Buried inside the pages of the leading daily Ha’aretz last week, after all the chronicles of rising violence and faltering diplomacy, was an article about the matzo police. In the midst of all that’s happening, roving bands of rabbis patrol restaurants looking for the illegal sale of leavened bread during Passover, when only unleavened matzo is supposed to be eaten. This is not the kind of thing that Israel’s secular Jews take kindly to. In other times, a cultural showdown might be in the offing.
Israelis have long joked (or half joked) that the surest way to destroy the country is for the Arabs to give it peace. Then the tensions within Israeli society would pull it apart. The war has relegated many of these intramural conflicts to the back pages, but they don’t go away. Religious and secular Jews have been clashing over the rhythms of daily life since even before the country was founded. So have Sephardim and Ashkenazim–Jews who trace their roots to Arab countries and those who hail from Europe. And if they ever resolve those tensions, there’s also the painful matter of a large Arab underclass inside Israel, a group that increasingly identifies with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and has been radicalized by the latest fighting. “In 54 years, Israel hasn’t had the chance to find out if this society can stick together–if it has enough common interests to survive, if it is cohesive enough to overcome the internal differences,” says journalist Daniel Ben-Simon, who covers Israel’s social tensions.
When the country seemed to be driving headlong toward peace in the mid-1990s, extremism surfaced with a vengeance. An American-Israeli settler in Hebron murdered 29 unarmed Arabs one morning as they prayed, before he himself was beaten to death. Then his settler neighbors built a monument to commemorate his deed. The following year, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, leading the country toward an agreement with the Palestinians, was savagely vilified by the right before he was finally murdered by a young Jewish zealot. Rabin’s widow, Leah, traced the causes of her husband’s assassination to hatreds between rival currents of Zionism that date back to the 1930s. The current fighting with the Palestinians has obscured these internal fault lines. But they continue to conjure fundamental questions about the viability of the Zionist enterprise.
Even the definition of Jew is hotly contested in this Jewish state. Liberals tend to be inclusive–they’re open to more expansive definitions of the faith. But Orthodox Jews, who have always wielded considerable political power in Israel, view Judaism more as an exclusive club with stringent entry qualifications. They do not even want to recognize conversions to Judaism sanctioned by Conservative or Reform rabbis, and are balking at a court order to do so. Caught in the middle are people who embraced Judaism only to be told by the state they are not full-fledged members of the tribe. The same Orthodoxy has a monopoly on weddings and funerals. And because a majority of Israelis don’t identify with the Orthodoxy’s strict interpretation of religious law, submitting to its decrees deepens the rift between Jew and Jew.
But what if you’re not Jewish at all? A million Arabs live within sovereign Israel. Can the Israeli flag, with its Jewish Star of David, embrace this community? Nominally, at least, Israeli Arabs are full-fledged citizens. But for decades they’ve been relegated to secondary status. Their communities get less funding, their schools lag behind those in the Jewish sector. Nearly all Israeli Arabs have relatives among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. When Israel killed scores of Palestinians in the first week of the uprising 18 months ago, Israeli Arabs took to the streets in solidarity protests. For the first time in decades, troops fired at Israeli Arab protesters, killing 13. The episode shocked the country and inspired a season of soul-searching. At least a dozen Israeli officials stand to be implicated in the killings by a commission of inquiry.
For many Israelis, the Arab community represents a demographic time bomb. Amounting to 20 percent of the population today, Arabs in Israel have a much higher birthrate than Jews. Analysts who chart the growth of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza predict that Arabs will outnumber Jews in the area west of the Jordan River by 2010. What does the Jewish state become when Jews are the minority? Israeli doves advocate parting with the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the only way to preserve both the Jewish identity and the democratic values of the state. “Only this way can we ensure a Jewish majority in Israel,” says Yossi Beilin, who helped craft Israeli-Palestinian peace deals. Hard-liners, on the other hand, profess not to worry about the demographic challenge. “As far as Arabs are concerned, if you don’t give them the right to vote, you don’t have a demographic problem,” says retired general Effi Eitam, who’s emerging as a rising star in the right-wing firmament. He has no problem denying even a Palestinian majority its civil rights. He says they could accept municipal autonomy or, if that’s not enough, create their own state in neighboring Jordan and Egyptian Sinai.
As recently as two years ago, amazingly, a national poll showed that a majority of Israelis saw the secular-religious divide as the biggest threat to Israel’s well-being. Only some 20 percent of those surveyed thought the Arab-Israeli conflict posed the most serious challenge. Ben-Simon, the journalist, says this was a sign that Israel was maturing into a state of normalcy: “We were on the threshold of a civil revolution.” But then fighting erupted in the West Bank and Gaza, plunging Israelis back into the neurosis of war. “We missed our chance to deal with these issues because the external threat came back,” said Ben-Simon.
Pondering Life on a Knife Edge
It’s no longer a miracle that Jewish society exists here,” said historian Tom Segev as he talked with a reporter at his house in Jerusalem last week. “It’s a fact of life.” He remembers that, for years, when El Al planes landed at Ben-Gurion Airport, passengers applauded. “It was an expression of astonishment. Everything was temporary in this country. Nobody believed things would actually work. People felt they were living on borrowed time.” Now the nation has evolved from a collective society with its sense of identity rooted in a history of persecution to an almost Americanized culture of individualism. Israelis today care about day-to-day living, making money, building good homes in a modern state with a prosperous economy. But the terrorism thwarts all that, said Segev. “It pushes us back into tribal closeness.”
The sound of a bomb going off a few blocks away interrupted Segev’s train of thought. He threw on a jacket and rushed out, passing the disoriented survivors of the shock wave. “I am afraid,” he said over the ambulances’ shrill refrain, “afraid of Israelis who say now that we need a war to end this stalemate. I’m afraid that they mean that behind that curtain of war, we can do all kinds of things to the Palestinians that we can’t do now.”
Words long banished from Israel’s political vocabulary have become common political parlance. The most dangerous concept, openly advocated by a former cabinet minister in the coalition government, Benny Elon, is “transfer.” Such policies are tantamount to an ethnic cleansing of the occupied areas, but the debate reflects the public’s anxiety. “You have fascist movements in Israel that can talk about transfer now,” says Rabbi Michael Melchior, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, “because people just want any solution.” Indeed, the latest polls show 46 percent of Israelis would countenance such a policy, and perhaps that’s not surprising when two thirds of Palestinians say they support suicide bombings inside Israel. Historian Benny Morris says “transfer probably could only occur in a Middle East war, with missiles flying and bioweapons, and all that happening, when anything goes.” In other words, as part of an apocalypse.
“Israel can survive,” says journalist and social critic Ari Shavit, “but that is not a foregone conclusion. The answer depends on whether we can face the question of survival, and whether we have the courage to ask it.” Maybe it’s time to find new narratives, he suggests, new ways of understanding the facts that created this situation and the possibilities that exist in the future. The idea came to him when he happened on the scene of a bloody suicide attack at the Moment cafe a few weeks ago. The coffee house had been, for Shavit, a kind of sanctuary of civilization and normality. Now he saw a horrific scene. Bodies were torn apart. There was “an apocalyptic smell,” and disfigured people whispered questions: “Am I dying?” “Twenty minutes after I saw the bodies, I understood what this narrative is about,” he said. “It’s about the freedom to have my croissant and coffee in the morning. And the right to drink a beer at night. It’s about a quiet heroism in trying to live a Jewish life, flirting, taking your kids to school in an almost unbearable situation under the threat of death-wishing fundamentalism.”
In time, the generation that follows Shavit will fashion yet more narratives. But for now, the children of Israel might well ask what sort of country will be left to them. Of course the children’s views are as divided as their parents’. Some would expel all Palestinians. Some would trade land for peace. Many fear, as one eighth grader told the newspaper Haaretz last week, “I will see my grandchildren talking about how to solve this country’s security problem.” But there’s also an awareness that Palestinians, too, long for quiet chats in friendly cafes; that it’s natural they should want to live their own lives without being humilitated at Israeli checkpoints and without waking each day in the shadow of Israeli settlements.
Perhaps the grown-ups know better. Perhaps not. Like many other disillusioned Israeli liberals, former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami thinks it will take some deus ex machina–in fact, the United States–to deliver Israel and Palestine from this bloody impasse. “I really believe that at the end of the day the only solution can be an imposed solution from the outside,” he told NEWSWEEK. Yet what Israeli government would ask the United States to restrain it in the face of terror? Not Ariel Sharon’s certainly, and not any other. As the carnage continues, as the forlorn desire for peace grows alongside apocalyptic visions of absolute solutions, Israel needs more help than it has ever needed. It needs moral support. It also needs firm guidance. But like the fourth son in the rituals of Passover, it does not even know how to ask.
