Shades of normalcy on the Jewish New Year

Thursday, September 16, 2004

But the signs of normalcy - or at least the desire for it - seemed to dominate. There was the football game last night, Bayer Munchen defeated Maccabi Tel Aviv 1-0 at Ramat Gan's national stadium. The mere fact that the German champions came to Israel for the Champions League match was a sign of normalcy - for the last two years, the European Football League made Israeli teams play in Cyprus for their home games, because of security concerns about terror in Israel. But a real sign of normalcy was the fact the game was played on Rosh Hashanah evening, ostensibly a holy night. Some 35,000 spectators filled the stadium (which can hold about 55,000) and many a festive family dinner was cut short at 9:45 last night, when the game began.

Woman Crucified # 13 by Silvia Rosenberg, mixed media on recycled paper, 20x30 cm.

op singer Madonna also flew into the country on her private jet, part of a group of some 2,000 people gathering for a conference on pop kabbala. The rabbis of Israel aren't particularly pleased of course, saying that kabbala is something reserved for only the best scholars, only after they reach the age of 40, and only for men. But the pop singer's interest in Jewish mysticism has enthralled the press, and the holiday papers gave almost as much space to the celebrities at the conference -- and the basics of kabbala - as it did to the security alert.

On the eve of the holiday, the Central Bureau of Statistics said there are 6.8 million Israelis, more or less 80 percent Jewish and 20 percent non-Jewish. About half a million of them went overseas (not counting Sinai, where another 150,000 were traveling) this holiday week. Judging from the traffic reports this morning, another quarter million households were on the move, on the roads, heading for beaches, parks, and nature reserves. That, too, was a sign of welcome normalcy.

But Israel is hardly normal. The political system seems paralyzed, with the obvious will of a solid majority of Israelis frustrated by a small minority, the settlers; meanwhile, fear of Palestinian terrorism, ostensibly mitigated in recent months by a combination of the separation fence, nightly Israel Defense Forces raids to capture wanted men (and occasional women) identified by the Shin Bet as activist gunmen or planners of attacks on Israelis, creates a psychological block that prevents demonstrations of grass roots pressure on Sharon to ignore the settlers and their supporters.

Instead, the public opinion polls are all that he has to go by that he is on the right track: Polls, in Maariv, Haaretz, and Israel Radio, were consistent, even as they slightly differed on the emphasis. Typically, Maariv's poll showed , 69 percent of the public says the prime minister should bring his disengagement plan to a national referendum, 82 percent said they would vote if it went to such a poll, and 58 percent said they would vote in favor of disengagement. 58 percent also thought that it would be illegitimate for settlers to physically resist evacuation, and 53 percent say that while there is the potential for violence, it won't deteriorate into civil war - 25 percent are worried that there might be civil war. The poll shows that new elections today would yield more or less the same Knesset. The Likud would lose two seats - to the National Union, which would gain another seat from the loss of a seat from the NRP; Shinui would lose two seats, to Meretz. The Arab parties would pick up two seats, with one possibly coming from Shinui. Labor would remain the same. But the number that perhaps means the most was this: 49 percent said that the overall state of the nation is worse this New Year's than last year.

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