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Passengers wait for departures in the new terminal at Ben Gurion International airport near Tel Aviv. (AP)
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| By Associated Press January 15, 2006 |
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To land at Israel's new airport is to witness this country's great leap forward, but also to sense the daunting challenges it faces, whether or not Prime Minister Ariel Sharon recovers from his devastating stroke.
The US$1 billion terminal that opened 14 months ago is a cavernous complex of glass, marble and shopping malls, a kosher McDonald's and 24 boarding gates to a world that has opened wide for Israel since the end of the Cold War - no longer just familiar destinations like London or New York, but Beijing, St. Petersburg, Baku, Addis Ababa, Amman, Bangkok.
Yet, the new Ben Gurion International Airport represents more than just an impressive gateway. It also plunges the visitor into the physical heart of the Israeli debate about land and borders.
The airport sprawls across Israel's narrow waist, close enough to the West Bank - which could in the future be under Palestinian control - to be in range of the kind of homemade rockets that Palestinian extremists are already firing into Israel from the Gaza Strip.
Israelis didn't used to give much thought to the real meaning of phrases such as "withdrawal from the West Bank" as long as they were abstractions. But they have taken on flesh and blood since Sharon pulled Israel out of Gaza four months ago and began sending out signals suggesting large-scale pullbacks in the West Bank could follow.
Now comes the stroke that Israelis fear has ended Sharon's political life, at the very moment when they are having to weigh the riskiest gamble of their 57-year history as a state.
These are strange days in Israel. The shock over Sharon's stroke was so intense that crime fell by half over the following four days, police said. Suddenly everyone in the Jewish state is a doctor, hotly debating whether their 77-year-old leader got the right treatment.
The public offers all sorts of ideas for waking the fallen leader from his coma: Have him sniff his favorite food. Play him tapes of battlefield exchanges from the Yom Kippur War, the ex-general's finest hour.
As the fright over Sharon's stroke eases, though, life is returning to normal. Crime is back on front pages. The stock market panic has subsided. On a late-night radio program, participants dare to poke gentle fun at Hadassah Hospital's medical bulletins.
The government, headed by Sharon's deputy, 60-year-old Ehud Olmert, continues to function. On Sunday it will take its first big decision - whether to allow Jerusalem Arabs to vote in the Palestinian parliamentary elections Jan. 25.
For a visitor returning after a long absence, the biggest surprise comes from something that was germinating even before Sharon came to power in 2001 and has now reached full flower - a revolution in public attitudes toward the West Bank.
For the better part of three decades under the rule of the right-wing Likud Party, the imperative was to hold on to the West Bank as a biblical birthright and security buffer, and fill it with Jewish settlements.
Now the prospect of quitting the main mass of the West Bank has become a part of daily discourse. The desire to be rid of a hostile, occupied Arab people and preserve Israel's Jewish majority has overtaken the attachment to the West Bank.
"The penny has dropped," said Uri Dromi of the Israel Democracy Institute. "Demography trumps everything."
Israel's new borders are already being outlined by the Gaza withdrawal and the security barrier of walls and fences going up along - and sometimes beyond - the West Bank border.
The end result, according to scenarios painted by a range of analysts, would be a pullback from about 80 percent of the West Bank, leaving Israel in control of some settlement blocks and strategically sensitive fringes of the territory, such as the approaches to the airport.
It isn't simple, though. Palestinians say the barrier is a pretext for grabbing their land, and the Israeli Supreme Court has blocked plans to protect the airport by running the wall deep into the West Bank at that point.
A discussion on TV's Channel 1 showed how far things have come. The argument among the panel of doves, hawks, professors, generals and settlers wasn't about whether to withdraw - but when.
The vast majority of the 243,000 settlers moved there for tax breaks and cheap government-subsidized mortgages, rather than out of Zionist and religious zeal.
"If you give people proper compensation, over 80 percent in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) will want to leave tomorrow - plain and simple," said panelist Benny Raz, a settler. No one challenged him.
When the time comes, though, resistance from some of the more nationalist settlements is likely. Settler leader Pinhas Wallerstein says he is confident the broad mass of settlers will mount a resistance campaign similar to the one seen during the Gaza pullback.
But the uprooting of the 8,500 Gaza settlers, while emotionally painful, went much faster and less violently than expected.
Another surprise is Kadima (Forward), the centrist party that Sharon formed in November after bolting Likud. Stacked with heavyweight defectors from both Likud and the moderate Labor Party, Kadima has defied expectations it would fade without Sharon and is holding a crushing lead in opinion polls.
Israel's parliamentary elections are still 2½ months away, and Israeli centrist parties have a record of failure. But many analysts say Kadima is different.
Sever Plotzker, a veteran socio-economic thinker, wrote in Yediot Ahronot, the country's best-selling newspaper, that Kadima offers voters a big tent to supplant the old, ideology-bound parties.
In his view, the new party appeals to a prosperous middle class that over the past decade has become a critical force, one that has saved Israel from "degenerating into political and cultural chaos" during the Palestinian uprising and campaign of suicide bombings.
The middle class wanted "a new party befitting the new Israeli age," and Sharon delivered it, Plotzker said.
Among its recruits are high-profile politicians like Tzahi Hanegbi, a former Likud Cabinet minister and son of Geula Cohen, a right-wing ideological firebrand.
While Cohen accepts her son's defection with wry resignation, she finds it "astounding and maddening" that the fire has gone out of her cherished settlement movement.
She believes those "who see a moderate partner in the moderate Palestinians are living in illusions," and is convinced the Arabs will wage another war on Israel. If the Palestinians want a state, they should establish it in neighboring Jordan rather than Gaza and the West Bank, she argues.
That used to be Sharon's view, but political science professor Moshe Amirav said it no longer has much appeal to voters.
Kadima, he said, responds to a feeling spreading in Israel that finds failure in the two competing approaches of yesteryear - the right's belief that it could hold Arab territories forever and the left's faith in trading land for peace.
Amirav said Sharon discarded both concepts and offered "land for nothing" - in other words, Israel would set its borders without negotiating with the Palestinians.
Amnon Abramovitz, a commentator on TV's Channel 2, agrees.
"The public wants to end the occupation," he said. "It doesn't trust the Arabs ... and doesn't see a mass of moderate Palestinians with an effective leadership that can reach an agreement."
This sentiment preceded Sharon and will outlive him, Abramovitz said.
Yaron Ezrahi, a political science professor at Hebrew University, said Sharon - once widely viewed as a trigger-happy hothead - realized Israel could not sustain the occupation and the settlements without losing international support and damaging the military's morale in making it crack down harshly on the uprising.
"So in Gaza he became the captain who made a dramatic turn in order to save the Titanic," Ezrahi said.
Like the glass that is smashed at Jewish weddings to acknowledge there is no joy without sorrow, the relief felt over the Gaza withdrawal is tempered by the chaos and violence that have engulfed that territory since Israel left and by the rockets being fired by Palestinian militants toward the city of Ashkelon and other nearby Israeli towns. Three suicide bombers from the West Bank have killed 13 Israelis over the past three months.
And there are new threats in Israeli minds - al-Qaida's claim to be taking its war to Israel, and Iran with its nuclear program and a president who declares Israel should be "wiped from the map."
Oz Almog, a Haifa University sociology professor, sees the new airport as a metaphor for Israel's two minds.
Its size and glitz represent a vigorous, forward-rushing society, hard-wired for the information age, where shopping malls spring up on former Arab-Israeli battlefields and high-tech wizards offer the world innovations in everything from voicemail and instant messaging to swallowable, tumor-detecting microcameras.
A million Israelis - one-seventh of the population - will use the new airport annually, Almog said, but they cannot escape the fact that "we live in a very fragile reality."
"You can break a whole window at the airport with just one stone. That's the reality of the Middle East," he said.
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