One of the main thrills of visiting Israel these days is the opportunity to experience the country for oneself. The Jewish state may be the most scrutinized place on the globe, but lately it has also been among the most misrepresented. Anyone seeing the country through the lens of the TV networks, even a network as favorably disposed to it as Fox News Channel, would expect to find a war-torn, corpse-strewn landscape, the survivors of the general carnage frantically scurrying about to escape the next round of predators. (Other networks carrying images of the same carnage tend to hold Israel responsible for it.) If, only recently, Americans stocking up on bottled water and duct tape could be portrayed in the thrall of an unreasoning panic, one can just imagine the hysteria that must be gripping Israel, chief target of all the maniacs in the Middle East.
But the city of Tel Aviv rising up from the Mediterranean looked exceptionally bright in the sunshine as my plane came in in mid-January, and the winter’s abundant rainfall had clearly brought the browns and greens of the countryside into bold relief. Once we glided through customs, the competitive hustle for luggage seemed, if anything, less fierce than usual. The only immediate hint that “the situation” had been taking its toll was a sign showing the exchange rate at 4.8 shekels to the dollar—a drop of almost 10 percent since my visit the previous June. (“The situation” is local shorthand for the wave of Palestinian terrorism directed against Israel since September 2000.)
During my first week in the country—I would spend a month in all—I met a real-life casualty of American reporting. Yoni, a gaunt twenty-four-year-old hairdresser at my neighborhood beauty salon in Jerusalem, was telling me about his obligatory trip overseas after he’d finished his stint in the army. His plan had been to spend a few weeks in New York, then take in a bit of New England. “Suddenly, one night,” he said, insistent on practicing his English, “I was watching the news, and it showed Gilo under attack. That’s where I live, where my family lives. It looked like war. So I changed my ticket and came home.”
Yoni’s neighborhood in southern Jerusalem is home to some 40,000 Israelis. Several months into the intifada, Palestinian militias had shelled it repeatedly from the adjacent Arab village of Beit Jala. But the moment he arrived back in Gilo he realized that the “war” being shown in New York was no more or less serious than other, similar incidents being reported nightly on Israeli television. Within a couple of weeks, the terrorist militias had been cleared out of Beit Jala by the Israeli army. Nonetheless, Yoni seemed not unhappy to be back; in a tight economy, he felt lucky to have work, and given “the situation,” he would just as soon be home.
During my stay, I saw reports about Americans who had come to learn from Israel’s experience with terrorism. Teams of American policemen were studying preventive measures and emergency procedures. On one news segment, American journalists underwent a form of basic training in case they got clearance to accompany U.S. soldiers into Iraq. One of the trainees—a little sheepishly, I thought—said to his Israeli interviewer, “You don’t need this kind of preparation; you’ve all been through the army yourselves.”
From watching television it occurred to me that we Americans might also learn something about how to cover threat and grief. The thousands of armed attacks in Israel since September 2000 have resulted in some 730 dead and over 5,000 injured—3,595 of them civilians. Israeli broadcasters report in detail on both thwarted and executed acts of terrorism, stating the precise numbers of dead and wounded and whether the perpetrators were killed, captured, or at large. To ensure trust, they keep the reports factual and their voices steady, playing down the disruptions to everyday life. At army funerals, soldiers lost in the line of duty are shown being eulogized formally and individually, then laid to rest by their families, friends, and comrades under identical tombstones. There is no inflated flirtation with the national peril, no dramatization of an incident to justify its inclusion as “news.” Had Yoni been watching the shelling of Gilo on Israeli television, he would have been induced, like his fellow citizens, to carry on as usual.
So it was not so strange that while in Israel I felt exceptionally secure. In whatever concerns standing up to evil, the Jews have long had much to teach the rest of the world, but never quite as much as Israel does now. Back home in Cambridge, my city council was preening itself on having declared ours a “city of peace.” Among the Harvard faculty, the only concern for America I had heard expressed since 9/11 was over the possibility that the Patriot Act might encroach on the freedoms and privacy enjoyed by members of the university community. I pray that my life will never depend on the intervention of these moral eunuchs, who have extended a canopy of olive branches over whichever anti-American tyrant chooses to tear the world apart.
It is hard to describe the grit of Israeli teenagers who turn themselves into soldiers for the two to five years when—like most of their counterparts in America—they would much rather be doing almost anything else. But let no one dare tell an Israeli that he is brave. That is like instructing him that he must show courage if he intends to survive. For most of them, it is, rather, a matter of not yet having known the luxury of weakness. The curious effect is to breed not grimness but a peculiarly local brand of optimism: if Israelis used to say, “it will be all right,” the Hebrew phrase now in currency is the more cautious “slowly, slowly.”
_____________
I arrived in Israel two weeks before the national election on January 28. To get myself oriented, I watched the party commercials that ran before and after the evening news. The parade of self-advertisement, intended to guarantee equitable exposure, seemed better designed to produce equal indifference. But it did let me check out the field.
I learned that there were 27 parties in contention; despite many attempts to raise the bar, any candidate able to muster around 50,000 votes still can get himself elected to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. The list included a Green party (ecological), a Green Leaf party (for the legalization of marijuana), a Communist party, and a party for Men’s Rights. I counted three explicitly religious parties, several parties targeting the more than 600,000 recent immigrant-voters from the former Soviet Union, and three explicitly Arab parties. Commercials for two of those three reveled in images of Palestinian rioters. In a region of the world without a single Arab democracy, some Arab politicians in Israel complain that they do not have democracy enough: that is, the Jewish state still prevents them from bringing it down.
The pundits were calling this election the most useless in Israel’s history. As they were quick to point out, the coalition government of Ariel Sharon had collapsed for no good reason, compelling Israelis to go to the polls for the fifth time in a decade. As if to underscore the point, the hottest campaign issue appeared to be not the face-off between the two main parties, Likud and Labor, but the rise of the wildcard party Shinui led by a former journalist, Yosef “Tommy” Lapid. Shinui (Hebrew for “change”) was campaigning against neither Left nor Right but against the Orthodox Sephardi party Shas, which had formed the third largest component in the previous government. Shinui, in turn, was being targeted by Meretz, the left-of-Labor party headed by Yossi Sarid that was on the brink of losing its constituency to this much less ideologically rigid protest group.
As for the two major parties, only one of them, to judge from the ads, seemed to be actively contending for power. By rights, Sharon ought to have been the one on the ropes. He was threatened with scandal: according to a leaked justice-ministry document, the police were investigating Sharon and his sons in connection with a $1.5 million loan from a South African businessman, presumably to cover payback of illegal campaign funds from an earlier election. The economy was bleeding, unemployment was rising, daily news reports featured soup kitchens and factory shut-downs. Despite very tight security, the local death toll had kept rising, and the fact that most of the casualties were now soldiers rather than civilians brought little comfort to a nation of citizen-soldiers.
But there was Likud, running its campaign on a message of strength—we have strength in unity, and we will achieve unity through strength. Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon’s chief internal rival, stood dutifully beside him in TV spots of Likud stalwarts as a kaleidoscope of faces representing a cross-section of the Israeli public delivered the identical message: the nation wants Sharon. By contrast, the campaign strategy of Amram Mitzna, Labor’s new leader, seemed to be based on soliciting the votes of Belgian jurists or New York Times editorialists, rather than of Israelis in their current mood. “We will not enter a coalition government,” Mitzna proclaimed. “It’s either us, or them.” By “them” he meant Likud, not the terrorists.
The more Mitzna blustered in defiance, the more Sharon played the conciliatory elder statesman, proclaiming his, and the citizenry’s, “disappointment” with Labor’s insistence on placing partisan politics above the public good. As the campaign progressed, the same sense of disappointment came to be voiced openly by members of Mitzna’s own party, who were afraid of losing their seats as they watched Labor plummet in the polls. Indeed, the only real challenge to Sharon was being mounted on the Right, from the National Union party, which opposed any concessions to the Palestinians on the grounds that they remained dedicated to Israel’s destruction.
Watching this campaign unfold reinforced my own strong preference for a two-party system, where you learn to vote for the lesser of evils. When special-interest groups are needed in order to form a coalition, they tend either to hold government hostage to their demands or to bring it down altogether. Following my own logic, I felt sure most people would vote either Likud or Labor, thus working to ensure the country’s political stability. Instead, everyone I knew seemed to be acting out some private pique. One Israeli of my acquaintance, hitherto a staunch Laborite, was so angry at his party for undermining its own candidate that he had decided to “punish” it by voting Meretz. Another, a hawk if there ever was one, was so enraged by the military deferments claimed by Orthodox yeshiva students that he was voting Shinui. A third, who had always gone with the National Religious party (“Both the Army and Faith”) was sufficiently unhappy with its current leader as to throw his support to Natan Sharansky’s party of immigrant rights. Sharansky was also endorsed by the Jerusalem Post, in general a supporter of Sharon.
My bafflement increased in conversation with strangers. At an adjoining table at a café in downtown Jerusalem sat two young men in Orthodox garb discussing business. One of them took a call on his cell phone, leaving his companion to fall prey to my curiosity. “Excuse me,” I said, “and please don’t feel obliged to answer, but would you consider telling me how you intend to vote?” The young man, unruffled, named two Orthodox parties, saying he had not yet made up his mind between them. There was a pause, and I assumed the conversation was over, when he asked, “Do you have a suggestion?” My secular Israeli cousins, to whom I related this incident, were more surprised that a “black hat” would consult me on his vote than by the political waywardness of their fellow citizens at such a critical moment in their nation’s history.
But when the results were in, it was clear I had been speaking to the wrong people. The election was indeed one of the most decisive in Israel’s history. If Sharon were to prove sufficiently skillful, it might also turn out to be one of its most significant. Fully 70 of the 120 seats in the Knesset went to parties of the Right. Likud doubled its own seats from 19 to 38, while Labor dropped from 25 seats to 19 and Meretz fell even more precipitously from ten seats to six. The relatively low voter turnout—68 percent—may be attributed to the discontent of Left-leaning voters who could no longer support their accustomed parties but could not yet bring themselves to vote for the alternative. They voted neither “us” nor “them.”
_____________
What had happened? Evidently, ignoring every other issue, the Israeli public had conceived of this election as a referendum on the Oslo accords of 1993, and had charged the political parties most implicated in that debacle with belated responsibility for its outcome. Without drawing attention to the fact, voters had found a way of finally repudiating the legacy of Yitzhak Rabin.
Although it is now forgotten, the late prime minister had been on his way to defeat at the polls when he was fatally shot by the far-Right fanatic Yigal Amir in 1995. The killer, by reinforcing the image of a uniformly extremist internal opposition, effectively precluded further criticism of the policies that many Israelis were beginning to think had put the nation at risk. The assassination did more than take the life of an elected leader, which was crime enough; by creating a martyr to “peace,” it also prevented the public from rendering its own verdict on his leadership.
For all these years, leftists had tried to use Rabin’s assassination as a means of blocking any confrontation, by themselves as well as by others, with their own failed policies. Now the voters had decided to do the job for them. In retrospect, the most telling feature of the election was the total absence of the “peace” slogan. A decade ago, urged on by the Clinton administration, Israel’s leaders had taken a desperate, death-defying “risk for peace”; so high a price had been paid for that reckless act that, even if no one was now inclined to scold them for it, neither was anyone about to let the charade continue. Like addicts recovering from a near-fatal overdose, Israelis had become disinclined to indulge false hopes. Now it remained for Sharon to form a workable coalition and try to vindicate the public’s common sense.
_____________
The election results, then, were a sign neither of delusion nor of despair but instead of that same persistent species of Israeli optimism—in a setting where optimism had no right to exist. When I was in the country, there were indisputably more Israeli families in mourning than even the previous year. Diners were paying an additional two shekels per meal for the armed guards at the entrance to every restaurant. The U.S. State Department’s warnings against travel to the Middle East had dried up tourism and crippled related sectors of the economy.
During my stay, I read in the New Yorker one of those gloomy obituary pieces for the city of Jerusalem that have become a sub-genre of the local literature. In it, Ari Shavit, a native Jerusalemite and one of Israel’s leading journalists, wove two motifs into a narrative of civic decline: the beautiful people had fled, abandoning the city to the Arabs on the one hand and the “ultra-Orthodox” on the other, while suicide bombings and other brutalities had succeeded in destroying the spirit of those few, like him, who still remained.
My own, contrasting impression of Jerusalem was formed by Jews with no intention of leaving. I was living in my brother’s newly purchased apartment near the Jerusalem Theater. Where Shavit identified himself as the sole remaining Jerusalemite out of the twenty children and grandchildren his grandparents had after they arrived in the late 1920’s, I could not help noting that no fewer than ten direct descendants of my grandparents, not one of whom had ever left Poland, were now living or getting a toehold in the city. Nor were they alone. My seatmate on the flight to Israel was a forty-something New Jerseyite who had moved to Jerusalem seven years ago. He told me he had been looking for a higher standard of living. I corrected him: “Surely you mean a better quality of life.” “That, too,” he conceded, going on to explain that even though some of his American friends earned as much as $200,000 a year, they had to shell out $15,000 per child for Jewish schooling, whereas for him, educating his four children cost a mere 5,000 shekels (just over $1,000) a year. I suppose he might qualify as “ultra-Orthodox” among some of Shavit’s refugee friends in Tel Aviv, but based on the way he dressed and the name of his children’s school, I would call him a moderately observant Jew.
Shavit is right about one thing: it is a strain to try to live normally when you know that your neighbors are hunting you for sport. Late one afternoon, my niece’s twelve-year-old son accompanied me to Emek Refaim, the hip Jerusalem street where we were to pick up his sister from ballet class. He arranged our meeting with her by calling her cell phone on his; both phones were a recent gift from their father and, it struck me, a luxury for two young children. Ben set me straight. “It’s a good thing I have one, because when there was a terrorist attack near my school I could call my mother and father right away to tell them I was O.K.” Another six years and he would be making the same call from his army base, reassuring himself by reassuring others.
But let me return to why so many Jews do enjoy living in Israel these days and especially in its capital Jerusalem. Every Friday evening I was invited to the home of someone who observed the commandment of hospitality, either as a religious imperative, or as a Zionist imperative, or out of local habit. Occasional cars would still move through the darkened streets, but not enough of them to keep pedestrians on the sidewalks. On the way to dinner I met people returning from synagogue—these come in as many varieties as orchids—and on my way back home I would see clusters of teenagers everywhere, in front of schools, in the entranceway of homes, trekking up and down the hilly streets.
I would tell my hosts what a delight it was to stroll in Jerusalem on the Sabbath. They would say, you haven’t known delight until you do the same thing on Yom Kippur. Of course, the Day of Reckoning, Yom Kippur, is not intended to delight: what they meant was that if Judaism is a sustaining way of life, it is a privilege to live it among those whom it sustains. The late professor Khone Shmeruk, who lived in Jerusalem as a thoroughgoing secularist, once told me that on the Sabbath he wrote in longhand because he did not want the noise of his typewriter to disturb his neighbors’ rest. This second-hand Sabbath is the reverse of second-hand smoke: passively curative.
Sabbath rest must be especially precious in a society that is forever fixing itself in ways large and small. Some recent Jerusalem initiatives: my cousin’s husband, deciding that the country was lacking in laughter, designed a private comedy show to entertain his friends and neighbors. A foundation, declaring a general insufficiency of civility, invited the young volunteer workers of all the political parties—each group in its distinctive T-shirts—to a giant pre-election party. A woman who had intuited the existence of Israelis more devoted to the country’s well-being than to their separate ideological convictions founded a new journal to tease this latent consensus into being. A non-observant professor of law and an Orthodox rabbi teamed up to draft a novel approach to resolving the tug-of-war between secularism and religion. An educator established an experimental two-track school where children from self-styled observant and self-styled secular homes could take most of their classes together. In short, “abandoned” Jerusalem has been a hub of creative exertion, though it may not suit the bias of journalists to say so.
_____________
One Friday noon, as the city was beginning to close down, I met the writer Aharon Appelfeld for lunch at the faculty club of the Hebrew University. The sun-filled room, its doors open to the garden, was a far remove from our common birthplace, the city of Czernowitz, once Romania, currently Ukraine. Between the two of us, my childhood had been the more fortunate by far; I was brought by my parents to North America, while Appelfeld survived World War II in Europe before arriving alone as a fourteen-year-old in Palestine. In our different ways, though, we had both been introduced to a vital Yiddish culture, only to see both culture and language slip away before our eyes into the cemeteries and the archives.
It was this loss that we talked about. Appelfeld felt it more keenly than I. He missed the Yiddish writers whom he had met when he came to Israel, and he thought the Jewishness of the country less robust than it had once been. But that is probably what those writers had felt, too, as had their predecessors before them. That very morning, before meeting Appelfeld, I had been reading a letter by the Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein in which he begged off attending one more meeting of Yiddish writers. This old Jew, another old Jew . . . a few gray heads planning and utopianizing. Glatstein believed that the light was going out in God’s tent.
The impression of declining vitality may be indigenous to the Jewish tradition, according to which there has been a falling-off in every generation since Moses. In that sense, I guess I buck the tradition. I could not have wanted for any more intense experience than talking with Aharon Appelfeld about the Yiddish writers we both knew, then going our different ways to greet the Sabbath in Jerusalem.
The very next night, I attended a bar-mitzvah party on the outskirts of the city. It felt, in many respects, very much like a similar celebration I had recently attended back in Boston. The budding young adults clustered around the DJ at one end of the hall, while the adult adults tried to escape his noise at the other. Those guests who happened to be parents of the bar-mitzvah boy’s classmates looked past you in conversation to see whether their offspring were socializing. So far, so familiar. What made this celebration special were the words that the mother of the bar-mitzvah boy addressed to her son.
“You probably know already,” she said, “that it is hard to be a Jew. It is harder still to be a Jew in Israel.” (As this was not a family that observed the Jewish religious commandments, she was referring to the political, not the religious, obligations of Jewishness.) “But hard does not necessarily mean bad. Many good things come through difficulties met and overcome. For example, raising you was sometimes hard, but well worth the effort.” There was more along the same lines, more beautifully put than my awkward paraphrase, and then: “May you learn to appreciate the hard-won pleasures of being a Jew.”
I had no idea how others received her message, but in me it reinforced exactly that strange sense of optimism I had felt since arriving in the country—the sense of being among people who faced the truth and were not prey to self-pity.
_____________
The Peace Index Project at Tel Aviv University surveys the adult Israeli public periodically to ascertain how many of them at any given moment believe the Palestinians are ready for peaceful accommodation. Keeping in mind that Israel has no incentive to go to war, and also that, for many citizens, peace with the Arabs is a lodestar, the messiah for whom they thirst, this is like asking shipwrecks on a desert island whether they think they will ever be rescued. Nevertheless, when asked in a recent poll if they agreed with the following: “Most of the Palestinians have not come to terms with the existence of the state of Israel and would destroy it if they could,” 70.6 percent agreed, 18.2 percent disagreed, and only 2.5 percent claimed not to know.
These figures correspond almost exactly to those in a poll of Americans conducted in early February that showed 71 percent opposed to giving the Palestinians a state under present conditions. If accurate, the twin findings would suggest that most Americans agree with most Israelis that there is no point in helping to establish a new terrorist state when you are at war with terrorism.
As it happened, once Israel’s post-election horse trading was over, and after I had returned to Boston, Sharon put together a coalition that reflected this same sober approach to the security threat. Although his intention had been to form a powerful national-unity government, with Labor joining Likud at the center, Labor refused the offer. Thus, the government that emerged, formed with Shinui, the National Union, and the National Religious party, inadvertently gave the country a more accurate representation of what the majority had voted for. The presence in it of both Shinui and the Orthodox National Religious party may yet help to bridge the internal secular-religious rift, while the fact that all the members of the new coalition, including Shinui, have called for meaningful changes in the so-called “road map” for negotiations suggests that the new government would also oppose the creation of a Palestinian state without indisputable evidence of a change of leadership, and of heart, on the other side.
Some might argue that this outcome is a cause not for optimism at all but, being so hawkish, for still more pessimism—indeed, that it shuts off the possibility of any more gradual movement toward a peaceful solution of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. But the dovish “optimist” should ask why, in the search for nonviolent solutions, so many Palestinians have promoted a cult of murder instead of competing with Israelis in the arts of peaceful governance and civic progress. The same goes for the Arab states. Will any of them send a $25,000 bonus to the Palestinian who opens a new Arab school in Gaza dedicated to reconciliation with the Jews as they do to the families of Palestinians who blow up Israeli schoolchildren? What kind of optimism rewards thugs, or reposes trust in their good intentions?
The choice of Israel as scapegoat and target of the longest war in modern history has put more intense pressure on that country than any democracy has ever had to bear. Imagine Winston Churchill having to screw British courage to the sticking point not once but over and over again, decade after decade, from 1939 until today. It would have become intolerable. But Israel cannot get out of harm’s way. Its citizens have had no choice but to become democracy’s fighting front line. Short of joining their ranks, anyone curious to see optimism in action could do much worse than catch the next flight to Tel Aviv.
_____________
