Synagogues and political wills, Friday, September 09, 2005

Former minister Arye Deri, the exiled wunderkind of Sephardi-Haredi politics, made a rare public appearance on TV to argue that it would be better that Jews, not Muslims, destroy the synagogues, which were the main community buildings in almost all the 21 settlements of Gaza. Deri, who is Haredi, not nationalist, warned that the aftermath of scenes of Muslims destroying synagogues might be ‘our youth doing things, heaven forbid, to mosques, and then where would we be?’

It’s an odd dispute going on inside Israel, particularly because success as a religion that survived all these years has always been its abstraction of holiness, so that no building, except the Holy of Holies of the Temple (long ago demolished by the Romans) could be considered holy, divine, or sacred.

But that tragedy – the tragedy that Jews who consider themselves deeply religious would attach spiritual value to stones and rocks – is not the only tragedy represented by the synagogues, as of today, the last standing vestiges of the short-lived, 35-year misguided policy of Israeli settlement in the Land of the Philistines. Just as tragic is that any plan to have the Palestinians protect the buildings as houses of worship was doomed. Animosity in Israel towards the Palestinians runs very high, particularly in religious circles, so it was out of the question to even propose the buildings be used by the Palestinians for community buildings, let alone mosques. No less tragically – but with much more dire consequences – is the answer the Palestinian Authority gave when asked both formally and informally if it was prepared to protect the houses of worship. The PA said it could not guarantee that the buildings would not go unscathed. It simply does not have the political will to do so.

In any case, theoretically, the troops in Gaza, already living in APCs and tanks as if they had just invaded, could be out by Monday morning and on Wednesday, as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon delivers a prime time (in Israel) victory speech to the United Nations General Assembly, he’ll be able to announce to a mostly fawning audience that the Israeli occupation of Gaza is over. His speech will no doubt call on the PA to prove its political will by once and for all applying the ‘One PA, one law, one gun’ policy that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been touting since before he replaced Yasser Arafat as the Palestinian leader last winter.

Ten years ago, Yitzhak Rabin made no less an historic visit to the UN – perhaps more historic, since while Sharon has ‘only’ ended 38 years of occupation in Gaza, Rabin’s recognition of the PLO and of the Palestinian issue (just as Arafat’s recognition of Israel as the Jews’ state) put an end to nearly half a century of refusal by both societies to face the facts of each other’s existence as human beings. A few weeks after Rabin’s return, he – and the Oslo process – were shot dead and the humanizing process that had begun so gingerly between him and Arafat gave way to ever increasing mutual frustration and bitterness that eventually broke out as the second intifada.

Nobody – at least nobody in Israel – is expecting Sharon, of all people, to leverage the successful evacuation of Gaza into a new process of Israelis and Palestinians humanizing each other again. On the other hand, Sharon has made two towering careers, in the military and in politics, out of doing what was unexpected. Like the disengagement, for example. He doesn’t have to discover in Mahmoud Abbas a long lost brother – but within days of beating back the Netanyahu challenge in the Likud upon his return from New York, Sharon will be meeting with Abbas, to find out if, as Abbas has long promised, once the occupation is over in Gaza, the PA will indeed finally assert its political will and authority as a government that does not allow armed militia to rule the streets.

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