The twilight period

Friday, October 03, 2003

The ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are known as the Days of Awe, the ‘Terrible Days’ in which a person must look deep into their soul to root out their faults so that by Yom Kippur one is pure enough to seek God’s forgiveness after having sought forgiveness from mortals. But the ten days this year feel more like a twilight period, seemingly full of action, but in reality all prelude to something else.

There are the negotiations for the release of hundreds of Palestinians, dozens of Lebanese and a handful of Jordanians in Israeli prisoners in exchange for the bodies of three dead Israeli soldiers and businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum, said to be in terrible physical condition after three years in Hezbollah custody.

Those negotiations, which were secret until early September, include the tragedy of the family of Ron Arad, which is doing everything it can to force the government to make the missing navigator part of the deal when the government seems to be certain that the Hezbollah has no knowledge of what happened to Arad after he ended up in Iranian hands.

The Iranians have been strangely silent in recent weeks – after years of denying they knew anything about what happened to Arad – and that might be a result of German promises to release Iranians jailed for terrorism, in exchange for Arad or even just information about Arad.

The negotiations, combined with the Israeli threat to expel Arafat, and the fact that the Hamas and Islamic Jihad leadership in Gaza has gone completely underground, has resulted in an odd quiet. IDF troops continue making arrests of wanted men in the West Bank –killing those who resist – and the Shin Bet and police say there are about 40 ongoing terror ‘alerts.’

But it’s been more than two weeks since the last bombings inside Israel, and aside from occasional ambushes in the West Bank, for Israelis, at least, the two weeks of relative quiet have enabled attention to be paid elsewhere.

So, Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s determination to break the back of the unions, and to blame the economic recession on the unemployed and ‘people who eat for free and live on handouts,’ combines with nearly daily news about how government cutbacks are hurting the poor, the ailing, and the aged, creating a sense of permanent economic crisis that doesn’t seem to heading to any resolution and only looks like it is going to get worse.

Netanyahu was to meet today with Histadrut chief Amir Peretz (who is in negotiations to rejoin the Labor Party, where he is expected to run for the leadership). Presumably, either right before or right after Yom Kippur on Monday, they will come up with a formula to end a longshoreman’s strike that cost the economy at least $100 million this week, and a public sector strike that among other things, created havoc at Ben Gurion Airport as customs men either checked every bag or let everyone through without checking anything.

Still, no matter how much the Israeli public prefers not to think about relations with the Palestinians, the twilight includes the weekly promise by ‘associates of Ahmed Qurei’’ that ‘next week he’ll form a government,’ and the twilight period includes a rapidly diminishing American interest in trying to do more than lightly tongue-lash either side over obvious violations of the roadmap. This week it was the Israeli government, which issued tenders for another 600 housing units to expand the settlements, and decided to build a fence that despite President Bush’s explicit objections will indeed meander in and out of the West Bank, swallowing up tens of thousands of dunam of Palestinian land.

The government’s decision to postpone the actual construction of those parts of the fence to be built deep inside the West Bank is similar to its decision to ‘remove’ Arafat. In both cases, the decision was more talk than deed but gave the impression of a done deed that the international community opposes, further isolating the country.

The twilight also includes waiting for the next police or prosecution moved in the saga of Ariel Sharon’s sons’ mystery financial dealings with overseas (illegal) contributors to Sharon’s 1999 Likud election campaign.

So, the mood going into Yom Kippur, when the country shuts down for 24 hours of soul searching – though on Yom Kippur eve in Tel Aviv, the streets fill with tens of thousands of secular children on bicycles taking advantage of the 24 hours of no motorized traffic on the roads – is suitable for soul searching, while few of those who probably need it the most seem likely to actually do any. Peace, in any case, is not around the corner, nor does it seem to even be on a distant horizon.

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