Presidents, Ambassadors & Astronauts - the Israel that could be...

It hasn’t been a great month for Israelis. The Chief of Staff resigned, the State Prosecutor opened a probe into allegations against the PM, and the President is about to be indicted for rape. In an amazing speech, Katsav compared himself to Albert Dreyfus subsequently blaming the ‘elites’ – the courts, the police and the media for carrying out a witch hunt, and concluding that this signaled the end of Zionism. Writing from the World Economic Forum at Davos, Sever Plocker questioned whether things could be any worse explaining that “Israel is no longer viewed as a thriving, high tech superpower or even as a brutal occupation power…but as a declining and dysfunctional country…a country of rapists and corruption at high levels, a country that is falling into moral decline.”

Katsav is not the only one discussing the end of the Zionist dream. Even without Ahmadinejad’s threats (predictions?) that Israel is a 'rotten dried tree' that will be blown away, more and more Israelis have begun to speak about the end of life the way we know it. Historian Benny Morris recently published a chilling article discussing the inevitability of a future nuclear Holocaust while Deputy Defense Minister Efraim Sneh claimed that Iran attaining nuclear capability could kill the Zionist dream without even pushing a button. And ignoring the wealth of Zionist thinkers from Jabotinsky to Magnes that promoted Israeli Arabs living alongside Jews, Esterina Tartman from Yisrael Beitenu described the appointment of Israel's first Muslim Minister as the beginning of assimilation and the end of Zionism.

It’s hardly surprising that at such a time the Israeli ‘Patriotism Survey’ reflected an unprecedented decline in the public’s confidence in government institutions. But what is interesting is that at the same time, the Survey showed an increased emotional affinity for the State. Despite the gloomy predictions and lack of faith in Israel’s leadership, a whopping 87% of Israelis will encourage their children to stay here.

I remember watching the first series of ‘The Ambassador’ - an Israeli reality TV show based on PR - when the future winner Eytan Schwartz refused to justify soldiers at a checkpoint forcing a Palestinian to play them the violin. The show being about explaining Israel’s actions, the judges were dumfounded – how can an ‘Ambassador’ refuse to defend the actions of his state? Eytan answered that the Israel he defends is not necessarily the Israel that is, but the Israel that is supposed to be, the Israel described in the Declaration of Independence…and if it doesn’t live up to these (lofty) standards, the patriotic thing to do is not to defend or explain Israel but to speak out.

Last weekend Rachel and I celebrated our engagement in Jerusalem. And against the background of disillusionment and insecurity many people feel, I actually believe that getting married and looking to buy a house represents a kind of ideological statement - the putting down of roots, a show of faith in our people’s future here, a clear statement of where we intend to live our lives. And I actually think there’s something very Jewish about that – that when times seem bad, when the future’s uncertain, that’s when Jews not only express their faith that a better society is possible but their belief that they will be around to be a part of it.

The first of February marks the Yahrzeit of an Israeli who encapsulated all the best this country has to offer. The child of Holocaust survivors, a scientist who excited and united the whole nation with his mission, a pilot who helped stop Iraq going nuclear, a secular Israeli who wanted to keep Kosher and Shabbat in space, Ilan Ramon’s shuttle burnt up on its re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere four years ago this week. And as the President waits for an Emil Zola who probably won't arrive, normal patriotic Israelis who love this country are trying to follow in the footsteps of a real Israeli hero and ambassador, pledging their future here and demonstrating their belief in the idea that the Israel that currently is, isn’t necessarily the Israel that could be… and planning on being around long enough to try and facilitate that much needed change.

Brothers in Arms?

I never thought I'd see the day when Bibi Netanyahu supports peace talks whilst long time dove Shimon Peres is against. Truth is, discussions over peace with Syria aren’t that simple – things rarely are in the Middle East; but Bashar Assad's offer to start negotiations without preconditions has got everyone arguing and throwing in their two pennies. I don’t see why I should be any different.

There are clear strategic reasons for ignoring Bashar's pleas – Syria's regime is in trouble and its Alawite minority rule looks increasingly threatened in the face of international isolation. And as Head of Mossad Meir Dagan said recently, initiating dialogue with Syria would not only be a stab in the back of the moderate Arab States, but to our friends the U.S aswell.

There are also strong emotional attachments to the Golan. As Arik Bachar wrote last week in Yediot Acharonot, the public loves the area so much that the chance a referendum on giving back the Heights would pass is currently about as high as the Teheran Conference concluding that the Shoah actually happened.

And why shouldn’t Israelis love the Golan - its beautiful, peaceful, quiet. It's populated by good ideological people. There aren’t any demographic issues like in the territories; very few Arabs, no Intifada; no rocks or Kassams are being fired…

All in all, it’s a bit like the Sinai was in 1971, two years before the Yom Kippur War.

And that’s what worries me…Because if we aren’t prepared to discuss the future of a place when (or specifically because) its quiet, we may well be forced to discuss its future when its not. How can we convince our neighbours that Israelis don’t just understand force when we reject negotiations during peacetime?

And what will we say to the next Commission of Inquiry that assesses why we lost hundreds of soldiers in what may well be an unnecessary conflict with Syria?

Zionism and Looking on the Bright Side

A conversation with a colleague’s father last week got me thinking. A businessman based in Israel but who travels abroad, he told me that his impression is many Israelis feel very negatively about the future. To be honest, when you spend all day cooped up with other analysts ‘thinking’ about future political trends, it’s very difficult to have your finger on the pulse of the average Israeli. But deep down, I think he’s right – since last summer’s war, there has been a loss of confidence in the government and state institutions. And many people are increasingly anxious and depressed about the future.

Before I made Aliya friends from the Embassy gave me a book called the Xenophobes guide to Israelis; It’s the type of book that prepares you for dealing with Israelis, you know, “every Israeli you meet has, by his own repute, spent his army years in a top combat unit (when in fact he was a cook in a base situated 100 metres from his home). Israelis will say they run an ‘intimate boutique’ (underwear store) ‘manage a transportation business’ (drive a taxi) or ‘own a new executive automobile (a 1979 Volvo, recently acquired, hence ‘new’ to the owner)”

Curiously enough, there does seem to be an Israeli characteristic of exaggeration. Pre-election people felt Bibi was a loser who destroyed the country’s poor; 3 months later he was the most popular leader in Israel. 6 months ago, a civilian was the ideal candidate for Defence Minister; now we are lining up ex generals to replace him. In the first days of the second Lebanon war we kicked arse, yet a fortnight later we suffered a humiliating defeat. As former Defence Minister Moshe Arens recently wrote “What is it about Israelis? Are they just plain fickle or do they have a problem making up their minds? Like a pendulum, their opinions and moods swing back and forth.”

2 weeks ago was the 29th November. And in addition to being a Jerusalem road where Olmert used to live, the date signifies the UN 1947 partition plan for Mandatory Palestine. Despite their reservations, the Ben Gurion led Yishuv accepted the plan. It wasn’t ideal by any means, wasn’t what the Jews had dreamed of. It didn’t even include Jerusalem as part of the proposed State. But in many ways, I think the acceptance of the partition plan is what Zionism is about – being satisfied with something less than our dreams – and making reasoned decisions of what is achievable at any particular time given the circumstances.

For Israeli’s it seems, our country is either the best or the worst, either the most moral army in the world or an evil occupier; a tourist's dream or a constant target of terrorism. But its the in-between, that grey area, the part where subtleties exist, where real life plays out. And if we are constantly oscillating between extremes how will we be able to make rational choices about our future?

In a post war column in the New York Times, Tom Friedman wrote that “Listening to the post-Lebanon-war debate in Israel leaves me wanting to say just one thing to Israelis: Get a grip on! Israel is behaving like it lost the Lebanon war and now needs to tear itself apart, limb by limb, with investigations and new elections… As [Nasrallah] put it in an interview on Lebanon's NTV, ''If I had known on July 11 that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.'' Even he doesn't think he won.”

The economy is also testifying to peoples’ faith in the future. Israel is one of Donald Trump's favorite places in the world and the Tel Aviv Stock market has jumped 22% since the end of the war. Despite interest rates going down, the Shekel is up against the dollar. And businessmen don’t invest because they have romantic ideas about an ancient people reborn in their historic homeland – they do it because they want to make money. They do it because they believe Israel is stable and has a strong future.

We live in a great country, in historic times. And of course we have problems, and unless we are careful and wise, the geo strategic balance of power may turn against us. We may well be left to confront Iran alone and the Palestinians are not turning into members of Chovavei Tzion any time soon. But classical Zionism is about seeing the grey and embracing the incompleteness of having a State in real life rather than in our utopian dreams, about taming our tendencies to exaggerate.

It’s about trying, in these very difficult and challenging times, to get a grip on and be thankful for what we have.


footnote - a week after this post, I read the following article by Yair Lapid sarcastically discussing the Israeli love of polls and superficiality of public opinion. "Not once in four years, not because you learned the material, not because you gathered all the information. Now, right now, vote now, with one click, without hesitating, because the lines are going to close very shortly. Trust yourselves, go with your gut feelings, instinct replaced intellect long ago. Only you understand the question of who is best suited to be defense minister, finance minister, justice minister. Only you know who is best suited to lead his soldiers into Bint Jbeil."

The only parade in the village

Much has been written this past week about the Gay Pride parade that is due to take place tomorrow in Jerusalem. Yet in many ways the argument is over more than just whether members of the ‘homeo lesbit community’ as they are called here, have a right to walk through parts of Jerusalem – it touches on what it means to live in a Jewish and Democratic State not governed by Halacha.

Every democracy has to be based on some sort of compromise between universalism and particularism, between the freedom to do how we please on the one hand and the importance of not harming or offending others on the other - or in Israel's case between the values of equality and traditional Jewish custom. And it leads to legitimate questions over the location of the event, whether we should use our understanding of the Torah as an objective moral compass, or whether it’s consistent that a fuss is made over an annual gay parade whilst weekly public Shabbat desecration at Teddy Stadium is ignored.

Last week someone graffitied a shul in Tel Aviv with the words ‘if we don’t march in Jerusalem, you wont walk in Tel Aviv.’ And whilst vandalising any place of worship is completely unacceptable, it raised an interesting point; because if being outwardly gay in the holy city of Jerusalem is offensive, maybe being openly religious in the secular and hedonistic city of Tel Aviv is equally unacceptable. And if a parade in November in Jerusalem can cause tyre burning and kabbalistic curses, what might Simchat Torah in Tel Aviv lead to…

But one thing is certain – the moment any event is cancelled due to fear of aggression and threats, we find ourselves on an extremely slippery slope. Because what message does it give to people unhappy with the decision making structure of the State? And if a parade can be cancelled by violence, then so can any other controversial policy – whether that’s throwing away Ethiopian (and British) blood, discrimination against Israeli Arabs or evacuation of settlements and outposts. Because the moment people think change can be affected better by crisis than by compromise, by demonisation rather than by dialogue, Israel is in danger of becoming a country that is a lot more dangerous to live in.

And regardless of one’s sexual or religious orientation, that’s not good news for anybody.

The Mamluks, Crusaders and our Future Here

I generally received positive feedback from my conversations with two Lebanese about the conflict over the summer. Yet where people disagreed was when I expressed the fear that my grandchildren would not live in Israel because Israel might not exist. Not optimistic I know, but many Israelis have a deep seated fear that our presence here isn’t as permanent as we may like. In England, the question is often whether our grandchildren will be Jewish. In Israel perhaps it should be whether our grandchildren will be Israeli – and whether in 50 years time there will still be a state to live in.

Last week I visited an exhibition at Migdal David, David’s Citadel called Soundscapes, a musical production integrating an archeological site, music, design and technology. The walls were alight with color, and the views were beautiful. Surrounding us was the city of Jerusalem - on the one hand, Israel indivisible eternal capital, on the other, a place captured and lost by vast empires and powerful armies. The Muslims and the Ottomans ruled here for 400 years each. The Romans, Byzantines, Mamluks and Crusaders all ruled for over a century. Even the ill fated Hasmonean dynasty was around for longer than modern day Israel. So what gives present day Jerusalmites the confidence that we will always be a free people in our own land?

In the aftermath of this summer's war, the discussion of our future here seems to have been increasingly discussed. Nobel prize winner Professor Yisrael Auman, a vocal critic of Disengagement, recently claimed that unless Israelis wake up from their slumber the State won't survive another 50 years. ‘Fatigue, in the State of Israel's situation, will lead to death, as occurs with mountain climbing. If a mountain climber is caught on the side of a mountain and it starts to snow, if he falls asleep, he will die. He must remain alert…We are too sensitive to our losses, and also to the losses of the other side...In the Yom Kippur War, 3,000 soldiers were killed. It sounds terrible, but that's small change.’ In a similar vein to Aumann, Effi Eitam leader of the National Union created waves when he discussed how Israel should respond to future attacks on our civilian population questioning whether as a country we are cruel enough to really hit back at our enemies civilian centers if they threaten ours.

At around the same time, the weekend supplement carried an interesting but somber article about Dr Yitzchak Yifat, the main protagonist in one of the most emotive photographs for Jews in the last century – the picture of the paratroopers at the Western Wall in 1967. Dr Yifat, who despite being in his 60’s still comes regularly for reserve duty is particularly pessimistic about the future of the country and for years has been campaigning for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Talking about what he saw as a debacle in Lebanon, Yifat stated, ‘the one thing that will fix this country is to take a bulldozer and completely turn it over; everything here is built on crookedness and needs to be rebuilt anew.’

I drove past a sign today proclaiming that ‘Jerusalem is not Sodom’ the biblical city that was destroyed due to its lack of social justice and perversity. The message was intended as a demonstration against the upcoming Gay Pride event in the capital; But reading today’s headline in Yediot Acharonot entitled ‘Protest, Gays acting like beasts’ it made me wonder about the future of this city and its inhabitants - and whether we can actually be so dogmatically certain about what this land wants from us, and what type of behavior typifies Sodom in the 21st century.

Our prophets warned us that the land doesn’t tolerate injustice, that we will be spat out if we fail to create a society that is befitting of the name…but who is our modern day prophet – Yisrael or Yitzchak, the professor or the doctor, the nobel or the poster boy? Are we too sensitive, or not sensitive enough? Was disengagement a step in the right direction or the beginning of the end? Should we be more parochial or universal, more western or Jewish, promote or oppose Gay Pride in Jerusalem; Should we spend more time negotiating peace or preparing for war?

And the question that lingers, like the various calls to prayer in our capital, is what if, what if we get it wrong, what if we make the wrong choice?

Jerusalem or Tel Aviv?

In light of my move this week from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv to start work at Reut, a non partisan, non profit political think tank, I thought that this short contrast of the two cities by Amos Oz would be relevant...

Over the hills, far away, the city of Tel Aviv was also an exciting place from which came the newspapers, rumors of theaters, opera, ballet and cabaret, as well as modern art, party politics, echoes of stormy debates and indistinct snatches of gossip. There were great sportsmen in Tel Aviv. And there was the sea, full of bronzed Jews who could swim. Who in Jerusalem could swim? Who had ever heard of swimming Jews? These were different genes, a mutation. Like the wondrous birth of a butterfly out of a worm.

There was a special magic in the very name Tel Aviv. As soon as I heard the word ‘Telaviv’ I conjured up in my minds eye a picture of guy in a dark blue singlet, bronzed and broad shouldered , a poet worker revolutionary. A guy made without fear, the type they called a Herveman, with a cap worn at a careless yet provocative angle on his curly hair, smoking Matusians, someone who was at home in the world, all day long he worked on the land, or with sand and mortar in the evening he played the violin, at night he danced with girls or sang them soulful songs amid the sand dunes by the light of the full moon, and on the early hours he took a handgun and a sten out of its hiding place and stole away into the darkness to guard the houses and fields.

In Jerusalem people always walked rather like mourners at a funeral, or latecomers at a concert. First they put down the tip of their shoe and tested the ground. Then once they had lowered their foot they were in no hurry to move it; we had waited two thousand years to gain a foothold in Jerusalem, and were unwilling to give it up. If we picked up our foot someone else might come along and snatch our little strip of land! On the other hand, once you have lifted your foot, do not be in a hurry to put it down again; who can tell what menacing nest of vipers you might step on. For thousands of years we have paid with our blood for our impetuousness, time and again we have fallen into the hands of our enemies because we put our feet down without looking where we were putting them. That is, more or less, the way people walked in Jerusalem. But Tel Aviv – wow! The whole city was one big grasshopper. The people leaped by, so did the houses, the streets, the squares, the sea breeze, the sand the avenues, and even the clouds in the sky.

Amos Oz - A Tale of Love and Darkness p7

Emek - Good for Coffee, Bad for Sheruts

Living in Emek Refaim is great. The cafés, restaurants, bars, shuls, friends - all accessible and within a short walk. It’s often buzzing with people and is a fantastic location in Jerusalem…that is until you need to catch a Nesher Sherut back from the airport.

The idea behind a Sherut is a good one – lots of people want to go to the same city, so take them in one minibus and it will be collectively cheaper and better for everyone…that’s the idea anyway.

In practice things were slightly different. First up was being bumped off the first waiting Sherut despite being told there was space for two. Then came the trek to Jerusalem in rush hour…and two hours later, after two stop offs in Har Nof, Ein Karem, back to the central bus station to drop off a non Jewish well meaning Irish women, the town centre for this old Israeli shvitzer (you know, grey chest hair coming out of the shirt) who boasted about how much money he made in New York, and a part of Katamon for a nice French girl, we finally arrived back in Emek Refaim where the driver tried to short change me.

We had been chatting for a few minutes so I was surprised he would try and rip me off –

‘I thought you would be happy to mevater al zeh’, to give up on the change, he said.

So basically you never give people the correct change unless they specifically ask for it?’

‘Of course - why not!’ he replied smiling, giving me my correct change.

Welcome back to Israel - not always an easy country to live in, sometimes quite unforgiving and Middle Eastern. Returning after time abroad sometimes feels like being thrown into a cold shower and getting a slap across the face. Sometimes it’s just relentless in terms of the noise, the behavior, the culture, where to succeed you need to be constantly aware and not mevater on any of your rights;

But its feels strangely good to be back…