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By Kenneth Lasson
January 24, 2007
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Sadly, these days in the Holy Land, the old aphorism about ten Jews having eleven opinions does not hold true. Most Israelis are united in feeling that the country is mired in the uncertain mud of Middle East geopolitics, led by a government that is either incompetent or consummately confused, faced with a volatile reality where reasonable expectations for a hopeful future, in short supply to begin with, are diminishing.
For the everyday people from Tsefat to Bethlehem, from Haifa to Tel Aviv, from Jerusalem to Eilat, it has been a winter of great discontent. Talk to secular Israelis or haredim, to young or old, to taxi drivers or academics, and all will tell you that prospects for peace, particularly after the Palestinians chose to be led by Hamas and the Hizbullah fomented war from Lebanon, have become increasingly dim.
The streetwise Israelis may appreciate the apparent support of the Bush administration, but they are unclear of the extent to which their leaders' war policy was dictated by the State Department. They are even more dismayed by former President Jimmy Carter's new book defining Israel as an apartheid state.
Even those with a religious orientation, whose mantra has long been that only the imponderable machinations of a Divine hand could explain what goes on in this tiny but eternally contested corner of the world, have become increasingly disillusioned.
The Israeli wife of a prominent Canadian lawyer, pondering what she sees as a loss of core values, says that "we do not deserve this country." She points to a recent survey showing that the average Israeli student cannot list the five books of the Torah, and a report that fifteen members of the Knesset, asked to describe their views of Israel's place in the world, could not do so.
A middle-aged man from Nof Ayalon, a rural religious yishuv near Modiin, says that "G-d is showing us how foolish we are."
Though observant Jews are dismayed as anyone else about the participation of the Neturei Karta in the recent conference of Holocaust deniers in Iran, no one seems to know how to deal with them.
Americans with an abiding interest in the vitality of Israel are equally pessimistic. The successful owner of an international telecommunications firm, who made aliyah more than twenty years ago, characterizes the current government as totally inept. He is seconded by an electrical engineering professor from San Diego who consults extensively throughout the Jewish State.
Nowhere have recent events more portended a cloudy future than for those living in Haifa, the beautiful northern port city whose long tradition of placid coexistence between Arabs and Jews was shattered this past summer by four thousand Ketyusha rockets.
A Jewish surgeon at the city's Rambam Hospital, who worked feverishly through July and August to save the lives of both Arab civilians and Israeli soldiers, describes an anger still broiling from the pit of his stomach at the way the war was prosecuted by the government.
"It was senseless bloodshed," he says, even as he wonders at the miraculous fact that the ceaseless bombardment did such relatively little damage.
Neither he nor his Moslem colleagues talk about politics in the operating room, but all of them saw the impossible dramas being played out in healing the wounds of people "who might stab you in the back the day they get out of the hospital."
A similar anger is felt by a university administrator who finds it difficult to discuss what went on last summer when her campus, home to the highest number of Arab students in Israel, had to shut its doors in the face of the military's inability to stop the relentless rocket attacks perpetrated in the name of Allah.
An American couple who has lived for over thirty years in Haifa sees the country's struggles from different angles of the same prism. He is a psychoanalyst who finds it difficult telling people how to deal with terrorism. She is a high-school English teacher who bemoans the shambles she sees in the nation's public-school system. Both say that the worst part of the summer was the sound of the sirens, coming every few minutes -- thirty-seconds in advance of the bombs.
A professor at Haifa University decries the blatant double-standard utilized to justify academic boycotts against Israeli scholars. The perpetrators are largely left-wing intellectuals from Britain and Europe with supporters from elsewhere around the globe. "Before you can be a liberal," she quotes her grandmother as having said, "you have to be a mentsch."
The dean of the Haifa faculty of law talks about the tragic irony of Israel's sense of morality. It was a fundamental Jewish value that dictated against expelling the Arabs during the War of Independence in 1948, instead allowing most of them to stay. But over time that decision forced us to become occupiers.
"And now we are stuck."
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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