Monday-Friday mid-day reports from Israel by Robert Rosenberg
Images by Silvia Rosenberg (unless otherwise noted)
Last stretch before the Hezbollah deal
Friday, November 07, 2003
Maybe the land belongs to the bloody cows, acrylic on paper, 70x50 painting by Silvia Rosenberg
With the Shabbat weekend to consider their positions, nearly half the ministers still were saying today that they did not know how they would vote when the prime minister brings the matter of the prisoner exchange with the Hezbollah to the government on Sunday.
The pressure on them is heading toward a climax. This morning, Yedioth Ahronoth, which has the largest circulation of all the press turned almost its entire front page into a facsimile of a letter to Ariel Sharon written by 18-year-old Yuval Arad, the daughter of missing aviator Ron Arad, complaining that because of Sharon she might miss a chance to finally meet her father. And the mid-day Israel Radio news magazine, just before the weekend, carried Yuval Arad’s own voice, via phone, reading out the entire letter.
From the other side, the relatives of the three soldiers – presumed dead by the army – and Elhanan Tannebaum’s children were applying full press of their own on the ministers to persuade them to vote in favor of the deal. The decision is being presented as the greatest moral quandary the ministers have ever faced, an issue requiring the Wisdom of Solomon.
That makes good copy in the press, but the reality is different: The only way to get information about what happened to Arad is to open some form of dialogue with Iran, something neither Tehran nor Jerusalem appear very interested in undertaking. And judging from past deals Israel has struck with terror organizations to free hostages, or simply return a soldier’s dead body, the currently debated deal is a bargain. The only rational argument against the deal is that made by ideologues against any negotiations of any kind with kidnappers and hostage-takers on the assumption it ‘rewards terror.’
Not that the deal is definite. The Lebanese press was being quoted here as quoting ‘sources’ in the Hezbollah expects to win the release of Samir Kuntar, who landed by sea at the Nahariya coastline and was convicted in 1979 of the murder of Smadar Haran’s husband and two children, while the woman hid with her baby in a closet, suffocating her youngest child to death to keep it quiet. That incident was seared into Israeli consciousness enough that within a few hours of the Lebanese newspaper reports, ‘sources’ in the Prime Minister’s Office were denying the murderer would be released.
However, despite all the public expressions of anguish, the prisoner exchange deal, while still not certain, appears to be a done deal. And another apparently done deal is the compromise that Labor Court Judge Steve Adler managed to hammer out between the Histadrut’s Amir Peretz and the Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu during nine hours of negotiations that ended this morning with both sides accepting Adler’s ground rules for the continuation of the talks. The Histadrut has lifted the threat of a strike, the Finance Ministry will negotiate with the Histadrut over the pension reforms.
In Gaza, as of noon, there were reports of a 10-year-old boy being killed by IDF troops, as well as three armed men in separate clashes, while a key IDF checkpoint outside Ramallah was lifted. It has become evident that Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz has either taken to heart his chief of staff’s comments last week that Israel better do something to ease the pressure on the Palestinians lets a new wave of even worse violence break out or Mofaz has decided that he needs to spruce up the image of his policies in the territories before his upcoming trip to Washington. While the U.S. administration seems to have nothing but admiration for the Israeli determination to fight terrorism, there are doubts about some policies that Mofaz is directly responsible for: the settlement expansion under the guise of ‘illegal outposts’ that he has yet to remove; the collective punishment of severe restrictions on Palestinian travel; the separation fence, which is being built inside the Palestinian areas. Mofaz even met with Palestinian Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, who is George Bush’s favorite Palestinian, because he does not want his trip to Washington to be focused on American demands on easing conditions for the Palestinians.
Fayyad meanwhile is refusing to take part in sessions of the emergency government, a not very subtle hint to Arafat to allow Ahmed Qurei’ form his government without obstruction. The Palestinian Legislative Council is supposed to meet this coming week to confirm a government, but Qurei still hasn’t overcome the issue of who will be his interior minister, because Arafat refuses to give the interior minister authority over all security services, and nobody that Qurei’ wants for the job is ready to take it if they don’t have that authority.
In short, paralysis, freeze, the trudging in place continues on all fronts.
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There have been very few people in the last decade -- and perhaps longer -- who
managed to be heroic for all or almost all Israelis, religious, secular, Right,
Left, Jewish, Arab, Sephardi, Ashkenazi, new immigrant or fifth generation.
Too many issues divide too many people here. But Ilan Ramon, the somewhat baby-faced
air force colonel selected as the first Israeli to go into space on board the
American shuttle craft, was one of those heroes whose deed fired the imagination
of Israelis across every spectrum. Even the most cynical and skeptical had to admire
not only his ascension to that vaunted gallery of people who had the 'right stuff' to
go into space, but the grace with which he did so, the alomost childlike joy he
so generously gave of himself during those live broadcasts from space on board the shuttle,
and the faith in science and humanity that he expressed during his broadcasts.
And then the shuttle crashed, and with it, another hero was gone.
So much hope was pinned on Ramon's trip and in a way, the shuttle disaster tragedy
was more than the loss of an Israeli hero, but like the Rabin assassination,
the loss of the hope for heroes. Get the book. It's short, concise, informative and moving. (RBR)
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