By Avi Davis
July 8, 2002
Ben-Gurion Airport these days is eerily quiet, looking and feeling much like the arrival terminal at one of the South American airports I visited in the 1980s. Although not exactly under either curfew or martial law like that city, the similarities are unnerving. Here, for instance, the taxi drivers loll around the taxi ranks playing backgammon and smoking leisurely when once they frenetically competed to win business. The drive into the city takes hours as cars are checked and rechecked in anticipation of a terrorist bombing warned to take place in the coming days. A pall of gloom hangs over Jerusalem as the city braces for the next the next wave of carnage. It doesn't have to wait long. On the morning of June 18, a suicide bomber detonates his charge on a bus in the north of the city, killing 20. The next day a bus stop in the suburb of French Hill is hit, resulting in another seven deaths - among them the elderly and the young.
For many Jerusalemites their city and home has begun to resemble a death trap. A simple excursion to the supermarket now involves a stressful decision as to which shopping hours to avoid. Parents send their children to school on buses uncertain that they will return. Taxi drivers refuse to drive behind any large vehicle, particularly a bus, and will take passengers on the most circuitous of routes in order to avoid them. The center of the city, usually so heavily trafficked, is barren of night shoppers and evening strollers - the blood of more than forty civilians now freely associated with its famous pedestrian mall. The mere act of living or following a normal pattern of life is loaded with the menace of an untimely death.
How a population adapts to such abnormality is a test of its character as a people. During the London Blitz it is said that after bombing raids that brought devastation to the city, thousands of Londoners would gather in courtyards of bombed out buildings to clear away the rubble and set up tables for card games. The people of Stalingrad, under siege for nearly three years by the occupying Nazi army and reduced to eating weeds, developed the habit of planting flowers in the casings of spent shells. At Gamla, a northern Judean city besieged by the Romans in 66-67 A.D, archeologists have uncovered pottery shards indicating that philosophical debate and learning proceeded furiously even in a situation of enormous privation.
Israelis are confronted with the same daily challenges as those besieged people. While not barricaded behind walls or bombarded from the air, the Israelis face a parallel existential threat of extinction. There is no doubt that the organizers of Palestinian terror understand this. They fully appreciate that suicide bombs cannot win battles; but operate as a psychological weapon of enormous power. It instills in the threatened population the message that no matter where you go, nor what you do, you will not be safe. Better, the suicide bomber argues, to surrender than endure such uncertainty.
New skills and attitudes are needed to confront such psychological warfare and through their indomitability, the Israelis may be providing the world with an important lesson in survival. There is enthusiastic compliance with tightened security measures. Senses are sharpened for anything out of the ordinary - a man or woman walking oddly, a package or bag left unattended, a car parked where it should not be. The social network survives and dramatic performances, garden parties and social events continue. But a more fundamental social transformation is taking place that has gone largely unnoticed - and that is the acceptance among ordinary Israelis of the vital need for a Jewish state.
In Jerusalem in the same week in which the two suicide bombings occurred, the 34th World Zionist Congress convened. This is the same forum that in 1897 gave birth to Zionism as a political movement, a force decisive in winning independence for the Jewish state fifty years later. For the half century before the creation of the State of Israel, it operated as a repository for the hopes and dreams of the Jewish people. Since then it has rapidly declined as a political movement, to the extent that members of the Government Press Office, where I went to obtain my press pass, did not even know it was taking place.
But this year's Congress marked a watershed. For 15 years the concept of a distinctively Jewish state has been under assault from mostly left wing ideologues who have argued that Zionism is outmoded and has achieved its aim. Their movement has become known as post-Zionism. Rather than remaining a distinctively Jewish state, post-Zionism advocates an Israel that should become a state of all its citizens, discarding its distinctive Jewish character and embracing multi-culturalism.
This Congress was expected to be a victory for post-Zionism but the reverse actually occurred. In motion after motion the post-Zionists were defeated, the Congress reaffirming the centrality of Jewish identity to the State of Israel and its indivisible connection to the Jewish nation.
The meaning of this endorsement could not come at a more significant moment. The ideological underpinnings of a state are as vital to its survival as its measures for security. Without believing that the Jewish State has a purpose and a destiny, no measures for individual or national protection will be effective. Ultimately, a state will rise or fall, based on the belief of its people that the state is not only viable but essential to national continuity. The Russians proved this at Stalingrad and the British in London. The Jewish people are now proving it in Jerusalem. They are proving it in the face of a civilian death toll and level of tragedy unknown to its history.
Welcome, then, to the land of life. For if anything is clear, it is the millions of living Jews who will ultimately define the nature and the purpose of the Jewish state. And with such commitment they will also avenge those of their brethren who have been so cruelly murdered.
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