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Published: June 12th 2007
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A few local
CouchSurfers have organized a barbeque on the outskirts of the city, on a gentle, pine-studded hill that feels a world removed from Jerusalem’s solemn ramparts, from the clamor of the
shouk and the crowded lanes of the Old City. There are a few dozen of us gathered - Israelis and globe-trotters and globe-trotting Israelis - and we go through the motions familiar to these sorts of gatherings: routes taken and planned, couches surfed, border officials duped and dodgy trains ridden. There’s comfort in these odd get-togethers, in the assurance that while the faces and cast of characters change, the stories stay more or less the same.
We’re grilling kosher hot dogs and dipping into what’s been dubbed “the best
hummus in Israel” when we cautiously turn the talk to politics. It’s the first chance I’ve had to see the full spectrum of Israeli public opinion sitting around the same picnic table. Avi - a soft-spoken student with a flair for the philosophical - shows sympathy for the Palestinians; David - sharp and cynical, his eyes twinkling with mischief - ardently defends the extreme security measures of the state. When someone mentions the suffering in Gaza
and the West Bank, he grimaces and snuffs,
“Yeah, it’s terrible. It’s worse than Auschwitz.”
It’s a loaded statement: provocative and insensitive and almost entirely missing the point. But he’s launched himself into the debate the way Star Jones might launch herself into a ham sandwich, and it’s clear that in a group of left-leaners - Israelis and otherwise - David’s taken up the cause of the right, even if he’s flying the flag on his own.
He’s also proving himself to be a semantic assassin. When I ask about the wall dividing Jerusalem from the West Bank, he’s quick to point out that “it’s not a wall, it’s a fence.” Only small parts of it, after all, are an actual wall. Later he’ll grow flustered when someone criticizes the Israeli “bombing” of Jenin, in the West Bank.
“It wasn’t bombing,” he says. “There were no airplanes, there were no bombs. It was only tanks; they were shelling. There’s a big difference.”
It’s the sort of argument you’re not likely to find outside of Israel or a war-crimes trial in the Hague. Though the difference between a fence and a wall, a
bomb and a shell, is undoubtedly more than just splitting hairs, you get the feeling it’s the sort of distinction that carries different implications depending on which side of the shell or fence you’re sitting on. Some of the group are getting agitated; things are growing tense and threatening to derail an otherwise pleasant day. And while I suggest “shelled the shit out of” as a worthy compromise - drawing some grudging acquiescence all around - there’s an acknowledgment that we’re better off turning the talk back to less treacherous terrain, whether it’s the beaches of Malaysia, the mountains of Rajasthan, or the waistline of the still-comatose Ariel Sharon.
But it’s hard to brush aside the implications behind all the rhetoric; they are, after all, at the very root of modern Israel’s conundrum. This is a country whose leading English-language daily,
Haaretz, has full sections of its newspaper devoted to “Diplomacy” and “Defense.” It’s a country that’s watched anxiously as an Iranian president intent on wiping it off the map pursues a nuclear bomb. It’s seen Islamic groups who refuse to recognize its right to exist gaining popular support - and political legitimacy - in both Lebanon (Hizbollah) and
Gaza (Hamas). And it’s dealt with the existential dilemma of what it means to be a modern Jewish state - a dilemma that frames every debate from the rise of secularism versus religious Orthodoxy, to whether a nation itself built by refugees should open its doors to refugees fleeing genocide in Sudan, to how the demographic shift of the next century - which could see Israel’s Jews becoming a minority in their own country - will change the political and ideological landscape.
For the past two weeks, while the country’s celebrated the 40th anniversary of its victory in the Six-Day War, these are the questions being asked on the Op-Ed pages of
Haaretz and
The Jerusalem Post. Israel’s identity crisis is acute, and adding to its list of anxieties is the sense that its young are too fed up with “Defense” and too cynical about “Diplomacy” to look with hope toward the future. About the only thing everyone can agree on - Jews and Arabs, young and old - is that things are going nowhere fast. And here, in Jerusalem, where a hypothetical wall between the Arab East and Jewish West is as tangible as the “separation fence” itself, all the
strains of the Middle East are tugging on a daily basis.
And the city’s wounds are endless. Walking along Jaffa St. with Avi and David - good friends in spite of their political differences - they point out site after site scarred during the last
intifada: a Sbarro’s pizzeria packed with families and gangly teens; a bus route - No. 6 - that was bombed three times in the same
week; a plaza where a young Jewish girl was torn apart by an explosion, and where a small concrete fountain now gurgles in the shade. On almost every street there’s some grim recollection of that bloody period, and it’s not hard to see why David would feel inclined to point out,
“Since they built the fence, there hasn’t been a single bombing in Jerusalem. Not one.”
Yet even he admits that the fence is just a Band-Aid on a very big wound, and that the security it offers comes at the cost of more hopeless, desperate Palestinians. But the alternatives seem equally unpalatable. He recites a favorite mantra of the right: that where Israel’s given ground, it’s only been bitten in the end. The
pull-out from Lebanon in 2000, which led to Hizbollah’s subsequent arms build-up and, eventually, last year’s war; the withdrawal from Gaza, which has brought a rain of Qassam missiles down on Sderot in the south, along with the power grab that has Israeli pundits labeling the Gaza Strip “Hamastan.” It’s a very different argument from the one I’ve heard for the past few months - in the cafés of Cairo, in the bombed-out villages of southern Lebanon - but among these young Israelis, it seems to ring with the same truth. So what can Israel - what can
anyone do?
It’s not surprising what the inherited wisdom is in the Middle East: that you sit and sigh and wring your hands, waiting for the next bomb to blow.
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