This week the Republican Party announced its first primary-season attack ad to be shown in Iowa. Without ever even mentioning the word “Democrat,” it takes on the Democratic presidential candidates in this fashion:
“The commercial shows Bush addressing Congress about the possibility of a weapon of mass destruction being used against the United States. ‘Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?’ Bush asks. A superimposed message says: ‘Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists.'”
In doing so, as in much else, the President’s men have adopted a Sharonista approach to the world. Just last week, as Sara Lipton indicates in her remarkable account below of “normal” life in Tel Aviv, four former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, gave a joint interview and delivered an unprecedented denunciation of the policies of the Sharon government. The official response was: ” creating the image that ‘Israel is falling apart at the seams’ could prompt Palestinian organizations to ‘intensify terrorist activity.'” Playing the terrorist card against the critics you just can’t seem to go wrong. For a while anyway.
It’s hard even to imagine an American equivalent to the joint Shin Bet interview, although it’s an obvious case of “retirement syndrome” — you know, some general runs our nuclear air fleet for years and then, on leaving the service, comes out against nuclear war and America’s nuclear policies. Still, what more powerful indication could there be of the depths that Sharonista policy has reached than the opposition of these men.
By the way, I found coverage of the joint interview in our two major papers interesting. If you’re curious, it’s worth a comparison. The New York Times tucked the story, reported by Greg Myre, away on its inside pages. Myre’s report began (Israeli Ex-Security Chiefs Denounce Sharon’s Hard Line):
“In a joint interview published Friday, four former heads of the Shin Bet security service delivered a blistering collective criticism of Israel’s tough military policies toward the Palestinians, saying Israel urgently needed a political solution to the Middle East conflict.
“‘We are taking sure, steady steps to a place where the state of Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for the Jewish people,’ said Ami Ayalon, the Shin Bet chief from 1996 to 2000.”
In doing so, as in much else, the President’s men have adopted a Sharonista approach to the world. Just last week, as Sara Lipton indicates in her remarkable account below of “normal” life in Tel Aviv, four former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, gave a joint interview and delivered an unprecedented denunciation of the policies of the Sharon government. The official response was: ” creating the image that ‘Israel is falling apart at the seams’ could prompt Palestinian organizations to ‘intensify terrorist activity.'” Playing the terrorist card against the critics you just can’t seem to go wrong. For a while anyway.
It’s hard even to imagine an American equivalent to the joint Shin Bet interview, although it’s an obvious case of “retirement syndrome” — you know, some general runs our nuclear air fleet for years and then, on leaving the service, comes out against nuclear war and America’s nuclear policies. Still, what more powerful indication could there be of the depths that Sharonista policy has reached than the opposition of these men.
By the way, I found coverage of the joint interview in our two major papers interesting. If you’re curious, it’s worth a comparison. The New York Times tucked the story, reported by Greg Myre, away on its inside pages. Myre’s report began (Israeli Ex-Security Chiefs Denounce Sharon’s Hard Line):
“In a joint interview published Friday, four former heads of the Shin Bet security service delivered a blistering collective criticism of Israel’s tough military policies toward the Palestinians, saying Israel urgently needed a political solution to the Middle East conflict.
“‘We are taking sure, steady steps to a place where the state of Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for the Jewish people,’ said Ami Ayalon, the Shin Bet chief from 1996 to 2000.”
The Washington Post put the piece on its front page and Molly Moore began her version this way (Ex-Security Chiefs Turn on Sharon):
“Four former chiefs of Israel’s powerful domestic security service said in an interview published Friday that the government’s actions and policies during the three-year-old Palestinian uprising have gravely damaged the country and its people.
“The four, who variously headed the Shin Bet security agency from 1980 to 2000 under governments that spanned the political spectrum, said that Israel must end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, that the government should recognize that no peace agreement can be reached without the involvement of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, and that it must stop what one called the immoral treatment of Palestinians.
“‘We must once and for all admit that there is another side, that it has feelings and that it is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully,’ said Avraham Shalom, who headed the security service from 1980 until 1986. ‘Yes, there is no other word for it: disgracefully. . . . We have turned into a people of petty fighters using the wrong tools.'”
If you compare the first quote chosen for each piece, you can instantly sense the difference between a powerful front page account and a passing inside political report. The Times carefully left out the emotion and the “moral” tone of the Shin Bet directors devastating comments. The Post piece emphasizes that tone throughout. Read them for yourself and make of the differences what you will, if anything at all. If you’re curious, you can check out the initial report of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz as well.
In her piece below, Lipton refers as well to a strong statement, originally delivered anonymously by Lieutenant-General Moshe Ya’alon. (He was quickly identified in the press.). He suggested that, given the policies of the government, the country was on the verge of a catastrophe. As Chris McGreal of the Guardian wrote:
“Israel’s army chief has exposed deep divisions between the military and Ariel Sharon by branding the government’s hardline treatment of Palestinian civilians counter-productive and saying that the policy intensifies hatred and strengthens the ‘terror organisations.'”
Given that the “principles” of the recent off-the-books “Geneva Accords” peace agreement (informally drafted by the ex-Israeli minister Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo, a former senior figure in the Palestinian Authority) were backed by 53% of Israelis and 55.6% of Palestinians questioned in a recent poll, there is perhaps just the faintest sliver of hope that sooner or later the “exhaustion” of Israeli society which Lipton lays out so vividly will slowly give way to something else (Eric Silver, More than half back two-state Israel plan, the Independent).
But who knows. Perhaps the more compelling, if quieter, news is to be found in a recent piece by Justin Huggler of the Independent, who writes of a startling set of figures just released, based on informal estimates by Israeli embassies abroad (Israelis leave their land):
“New figures from the Immigration and Absorption Ministry stunned the establishment. Those figures show 760,000 Israeli citizens now live abroad [F]or a country of just 6,600,000, it is a large number. But the big surprise was the growth in the number of Israelis living abroad: in 2000, it was 550,000. That increase has undoubtedly been fuelled by the suicide bombings and other attacks by Palestinian militants over the past three years, and by the severe recession into which the Israeli economy has been plunged.
“The results of a [another] recent study by Israeli academics unnerved even the right-wing supporters of Mr Sharon. The study found that by the year 2020, in just 17 years, Palestinians will be the majority in the whole area of Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. That raises the possibility of the Israeli right’s worst nightmare: that Palestinians might stop demanding a state of their own and start asking for the vote.”
With all this in mind, consider an American’s account of “normal” family life in Tel Aviv in November, 2003. Tom
A State of Exhaustion By Sara Lipton
Israel is in its third year of the uprising/war known as the Second Intifada, and suicide bombs have replaced stone throwing as the resistance tactic of choice. Family and friends thought we were crazy to consider going there for our academic sabbaticals. Still, we were eager to get away from office memos and departmental politics, ready for a break from Bush-speak, and in need of a decent library. On previous sabbaticals in Israel we’d found good books, good conversation, and good friends; and though we’d lived only steps away from the Old City in Jerusalem during the first “Intifada,” we never felt in any personal danger. We knew full well how misleading the impressions given by TV news can be, and were curious to see how the country had changed in the ten years since we’d last lived there.
One change became clear before we even got there. “You have to go to Tel Aviv this time,” our Israeli friends said. “Between the terrorists and the ultra-orthodox, Jerusalem isn’t livable anymore. In Tel Aviv you can lead normal lives.” So we found our twelve-year old daughter a highly-recommended public school, bought an airline carrier for our dog, and off we went to Tel Aviv.
They were right: life in Tel Aviv is normal. Bizarrely, disorientingly normal. When I buy a loaf of bread or a newspaper, the salesperson says chirpily, “Yom Tov!” — the Hebrew equivalent of “Have a nice day!” In the three years-plus that I lived here in the 80’s and early 90’s, I never heard a single “Have a nice day!” I don’t even remember being smiled at by the once-notoriously surly salespeople.
Ten years ago, the main Israeli television channel seemed to broadcast Zionist History Quiz Shows two nights out of every three. (“In what year did Ze’ev Jabotinsky found the Jewish Legion? For ten points!”). Now, it features sitcoms about wacky goings-on in a rural guest house, soap operas about love affairs in urban apartment buildings, and a travelogue by a young Israeli extreme-sports enthusiast (“Next week: Eran goes bungie-jumping in Thailand!”). My daughter’s favorite movies are all playing in English; her favorite flavor of ice-cream (Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk) is readily available; and her favorite sneakers (Nike) are on sale at the local mall. (Ten years ago, there were no malls.) Her only real trauma — once she got used to the noise level in her classroom: Israelis of all ages still love to talk — has been finding out to her shock and disgust that eleven- and twelve- year-olds wear skirts and make-up to birthday parties.
Ten years ago, the entire country went rigid with suspicion in the presence of a notorious “Hefetz Chashood” — any abandoned package. Heaven help the poor student who forgot her backpack on a bus; before she knew it, the bus would be emptied of passengers and the bag would be surrounded by police and emergency workers. Now, I see pedestrians walk past old suitcases heaped up on the sidewalk, or bulging shopping bags languishing in garbage cans, without a second glance. Terrorists don’t leave their bombs behind anymore.
But the strangest thing of all about this once passionately, obsessively political country is that no one seems to want to talk about politics. The Prime Minister may be indicted — indicted! — for bribery, and I’ve neither held, nor overheard a single conversation about it. In the three months that we’ve been here, a Palestinian government has toppled, the U.N. has debated a handful of resolutions against Israel, the Prime Minister of Malaysia has resurrected a hundred-year-old slander against the Jews, and Israelis apparently have nothing to say. They still meet in cafes; they still have large, warm, food-filled Shabbat get-togethers; they still talk incessantly; but it’s about kids, soccer, weather, real-estate prices. The old, engaged, news-absorbed intensity is missing.
On the one hand, I can see that there may be little to say: the left-leaning Tel Aviv intellectuals and professionals with whom we hang out tend to agree with each other, and have never had any illusions about the Sharon government’s integrity or the U.N,’s impatience with Sharon’s policies. But in the past, having nothing to disagree about never kept our friends from talking, arguing, debating late into the night. No, the quiet isn’t a result of consensus. As a friend suggested last week, it’s sheer exhaustion. Israelis are tired. They’re tired of bad news, tired of bad governments, tired of failed hopes. And mostly, I think, they’re tired from the effort it takes to lead such “normal” lives.
Comforting mantras and spurious rules
In the past three months I’ve gotten at least a small dose of what Israeli families have had to adjust to. We’re not crazy: my husband and I promised our families when we decided to come that we wouldn’t take any buses, that we’d stay away from danger spots, and that if things seemed to get out of control, we’d come right home. But how do you decide what’s a “danger spot”? Do you tell your daughter not only not to take the bus, but to skirt bus stops by ten feet? Or maybe twenty feet? Do you tell her to move away from the sidewalk if a bus happens to get stuck in traffic near her? Just wondering about such things makes me feel a bit like that poor friend-of-a-friend I’ve been told about who’s so afraid of public places that he huddles in terror in his Haifa apartment surviving on take-out.
It’s crazy to stop living your life, we all agree. So like most other residents of Israel, we quickly began to recite comforting mantras and to formulate spurious rules, just to convince ourselves that life can be counted upon. “They’ve never attacked North Tel Aviv; this neighborhood is safe.” “Lightning never strikes twice in the same place; Hillel Café is probably the best place to go.” “The mall entrances are well-guarded; it’s safe to shop there.”
The October attack on the Maxim Restaurant in Haifa was deeply, shockingly disturbing, not only because of the dreadful toll it took in lives, Arab and Jewish, but because it broke all the rules. In spite of one March 2003 attack on a bus, Haifa, a socialist-leaning town with better Arab-Jewish relations than elsewhere in the country, was thought to be relatively safe. Certainly, no one ever imagined that an attacker would target a restaurant of joint Jewish-Arab ownership. So the country paused in horror for a day, two days.
I was in the Tel Aviv museum gift shop with my daughter when it happened and somehow, instantly, everyone knew. The woman at the cash register cried silently. Visitors — my daughter and I included — rushed home to turn on the news. And then, like most other people, we began to make up new rules to replace the ones that had been shattered. “Everyone knew Maxim was always crowded on Shabbat; better to stick to emptier restaurants.” The armed guard hired by Maxim’s owners was inside the restaurant when the bomber arrived: “better make sure the guards are outside.” Fortified with new wisdom, people prepared for night life to go on.
My daughter doesn’t feel frightened because her friends are not frightened. There’s very little street crime here, and from an early age children learn to negotiate the city streets without their parents. The “situation” — the euphemism of choice used when security considerations must be addressed — has not changed that. Some parents still allow their kids to take buses; those who are forbidden to do so take such precautions in stride and share taxis.
Every child in Israel over the age of about five — our daughter included — has a cell phone. No one in my hearing has ever articulated precisely why, but I suspect it’s for the same reason that we’ve come up with: “Just in case.” We never say, in case of what, because no parent in their right mind ever wants to use the words “suicide bomber” in the same sentence with their child’s name. How exactly giving her a cell phone will protect her when I’m not there — how would I protect her even if I were? — I can’t explain to myself. I suppose to some extent I’ve absorbed what I’ve come to think of as the Israeli ontology: “I talk, therefore I am.” As long as my daughter can call me and I can call her, I can “calmly” go about my daily routine. I write my book, I visit my friends, and I think much less about politics and war than I ever could have imagined.
The collateral damage of everyday life
Sometimes all this normalcy seems just too perverse, an accessory to bankrupt policies and untenable positions, and I want to stand up and scream, “Why do you put up with this?!? Why don’t you rise up in rage?!?” But I look at my friends and I think I understand. Israelis’ lives are like an exhausting, draining, all-consuming balancing act, and the last thing someone walking a tightrope wants to do is look right or left, much less start jostling the wire. Even fervent supporters of the peace process seem reluctant to rouse themselves. They are afraid of having their hearts broken yet again, I think, or of causing the tensions simmering within Israeli society to explode into a full-blown firestorm.
No one here, not my left-wing friends, not the thousands of immigrant and working-class Israelis now sinking beneath the poverty line of a shattered economy, not the increasingly militant settlers in the occupied territories — no one — likes the current government, or believes for a second that Sharon will succeed in reducing attacks or bringing peace. But most people are even more frightened of the alternatives. Some are afraid that a move toward peace will cause the Israeli right to launch a civil war; others that the more militant Palestinians will never accept peace, and will use any relaxation of Israeli defenses to launch yet deadlier strikes. Many people are still convinced, even after fifty years, that the very existence of Israel is tenuous. But most people are just afraid, vaguely and in a general way, of “change” — very few changes of late have been for the good, and the misery you can’t yet imagine is assumed to be worse than any pain you might already feel.
So is there no hope? For years, many of us have been saying that “things have to get worse before they get better.” Well, “worse” has come with a vengeance, and peace looks farther off than ever. Like many people, I yearn for some grand and dramatic gesture, a scene equivalent in stirring majesty to Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem. But I no longer believe in it.
Leaders of vision are in as short supply here as elsewhere. Most Israelis consider Shimon Peres, the dovish head of the Labor Party (who is esteemed as a prophet of peace in the States), to be uninspiring and unreliable. Ehud Barak, the militaristic former head of Labor, has a new girlfriend and no political skills. And it’s become clear to me that no Israeli of any ideological stripe will ever trust Arafat. On the other hand, I’m not sure we need the grand gesture. I’ve begun to think that the current stand-off is more likely to end with a whimper, a mixture of sheer fatigue and hard-headed calculation, than with the bang of moral vision.
Just recently, four former directors of the Shin Bet (roughly, the Israeli equivalent of the FBI and the NSA combined), men not known for sentimentality or tenderness, warned that the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and severe restrictions on Palestinian movements and freedoms were threatening the security of the nation. The week before a high-ranking military officer said much the same thing. So far, such remarks barely amount to a faint whisper here; there’s been no general outcry against the occupation as a result, and many people think such criticism is irresponsible. But grim words from security professionals carry far more weight in this battered society than the sermonizing of peace activists. Criticisms of the occupation based on self-interest will surely sway more people than the “peace camp’s” traditional appeals to morality or conscience.
Even more persuasive is the “collateral damage” wreaked by the occupation to quality of life. People don’t like to talk about “the security situation” (the word “war” is rarely breathed). But they are starting to talk about “crime.” Newspapers write about rising rates of street violence and thefts left uninvestigated because the police are so busy looking for terrorists. Parents are beginning to wonder about leaving their kids alone. The school day is getting shorter and shorter, and “supplemental education fees” are going up and up. My good friend stays in a job she hates because she’s worried she’ll never find another one. And people are doing the math: money spent on the occupation is money taken away from schools, hospitals, jobs.
So yes, there’s some hope. IF the whispers begin gradually to build into a chorus, and IF citizens keeping adding up the numbers, and IF the opposition can find a leader with some credibility and charisma, and IF Palestinian policy can be wrested from the hands of Arafat….then, perhaps, a final settlement will be reached.
Those are a lot of IFS, though, and at the moment peace feels far away indeed. The brief truce of this past summer is long gone, and there seems little chance that the present Palestinian government will be able to talk Hamas and Islamic Jihad into another one. Or that a truce will hold, even if it can be reached. Still, in spite of everything, my family and I are happy to be here. Fall in Tel Aviv is like a perfect New York summer. Our friends are warm and welcoming, my daughter is rapidly soaking up a new language, and this is a lively, stimulating, and — yes — safe city. But every once in a while, I do find myself wondering who’s crazier: that poor friend-of-a-friend paralyzed with terror in his apartment, or the group of friends we meet at a local hummus joint after our kids’ youth group every Tuesday night.
Sara Lipton teaches medieval history at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. She is the author of Images of Intolerance, a study of the representation of Jews in medieval Christian manuscripts. She’s twice previously lived in Israel, from 1987-89 and 1991-92
Copyright C2003 Sara Lipton