A slight sense of normalcy, Tuesday, October 04, 2005

The two day Rosh Hashanah holiday that began last night and continues through tomorrow filled hundreds of pages of newspaper, but little had to do with the big issues of the day – the relations with the Palestinians, the strife inside the Likud, the question of new elections.

Sure, the headlines reported that Prime Minister Sharon and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas spoke on the phone and promised to meet right after the holiday – it’s not clear which holiday they meant: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur next week, or Sukkot the following, or perhaps Ramadan. The important date on the calendar, in any case, is October 20th, when Abbas meets President Bush in the Oval Office.

So, what filled the papers this holiday week? There’s the odd case of the Zim shipping line’s denial that one of its ships ran over a Japanese fishing trawler, killing seven – and then 24 hours later admitting the Israel-flag ship was to blame and that Zim would compensate the Japanese. There was the government decision to ban any force-feeding of geese, something that had turned Israel into an international power when it came to foie gras. There’s the marriage of two pop stars, a lengthy profile of the chief of staff and his wife (not a political-military piece, but a personal human interest story).

Indeed, the most surprising story is the one that does not appear. Traditionally, going back to the days of Ben Gurion, the prime minister gives an interview to one or all of the major papers for the New Year. Sharon broke that tradition this year, citing his busy schedule for the last few weeks as he first collected accolades at the UN and then fought back rebels in his Likud party. It can’t be that he is afraid of revealing something in an interview – he has always been a master at using a reporter’s question to get across whatever message Sharon had to get across, irrespective of the question. More likely, he simply decided he had nothing to say this holiday week to the public – that he had said it all, at the UN, in the speech he never got to deliver to the Likud, in the way he has since the Likud vote that rebuffed a challenge by Binyamin Netanyahu to the Sharon leadership, kept silent about the very challenge, thus belittling it and its significance.

So, while he didn’t speak to the press, one of his stalwarts did – Shaul Mofaz, who told Israel Radio this morning that ‘U.S. pressure might topple the Assad regime.’ But even that bit of vicarious saber rattling did little to disrupt the holiday spirit. True, thousands of Israelis canceled trips to Sinai because of a terror warning, but thousands others went ahead with the trip. There were 40,000 Israelis, mostly religious but some pop star celebrity tyupes as well, praying at the graveside of Rabbi Nahman of Breslau in Uman in the Ukraine. There were car accidents that already killed two – and there was one case of a Palestinian woman stabbing a woman soldier at a Nablus checkpoint. The Palesinian woman was shot in the legs and arrested, the soldier was recuperating for wounds to her face. It’s about as normal as things can get in Israel nowadays

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