Soul searching and breast beating, Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Every year, by Yom Kippur eve, a Jew is supposed to ask forgiveness from all those people he or she offended or might have offended over the previous year, so that during Yom Kippur, the focus of prayer is on begging forgiveness from the Almighty for sins against Him.

In political Israel, that breast beating often includes beating on the breast of the person whose forgiveness is sought. As Gideon Samet, in today’s Haaretz points out, the most succinct example of it was Golda Meir’s oft-quoted complaint that she would ‘never forgive the Palestinians for making us kill them.’ Perhaps that kind of soul searching is something that cannot be avoided in politics, especially when cynicism replaces ideology, and there must be a constant appeal to the baser instincts of the lowest common denominator, where the mass of votes reside.

Considering that barely two months ago, Israel thought it was on the verge of civil war, only to discover that not only it wasn’t but that it easily handled what was supposed to be the worst national trauma since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, one might have expected the Yom Kippur eve papers to be full of breast-beating this morning, whether of the sort intended by the Biblical commandment to fast once a year to atone for the sins of the year, or the Golda sort of expressions of regret.

The hard Right – and particularly the religious Right -- certainly had some soul searching to do. Some of its leaders announced without hesitation that God would prevent the disengagement – and their followers believed them. Others essentially renounced civic behavior, placing their personal interpretations of Bible above the rule of law. Many cynically – though no doubt believing that they were only expressing their understanding of reality – compared the soldiers and police who had to be sent to remove settlers from their homes in Gaza to Nazis.

The Left also has some soul searching to do: why has it failed to convince the public that the way to end terror, for example, is not by terrorizing the Palestinians; why has it failed to produce a charismatic leader capable of attracting the poor – who still tend to vote for the Likud and parties on the Right – and why it can’t build a solid base in the vast Israeli middle class.

The Center – to which Sharon pulled 60 percent of the electorate with his withdrawals from Gaza and the northern West Bank – also has some soul searching to do, most particularly, why it took so long to understand that there was no point to the settlements of Gaza and most if not all the settlements in the West Bank; that indeed, the settlements would become not merely a security burden, but a moral one as well, for Israeli society if it wishes to be considered an upstanding member of the family of democratic nations.

But there’s no real sign of any of that breast beating. On the Right, their soul searching now seems to be all about how to prevent the next withdrawal, in other words, on the tactical and strategic mistakes they made trying to prevent the disengagement, while on the Left, the Labor Party still counts on octogenarian Shimon Peres as its consensus leader. No new leadership can emerge there until his shadow is gone.

And in the Center, assuming he is the Center now, there is still no sign in Ariel Sharon that he is ready to turn the breakthrough evacuation of Gaza into a breakthrough in the entire Israeli attitude toward the Palestinians, from a patronizing sense that the Israelis know best what is best for the Palestinians, to a recognition that Palestinian society is in the midst of an extraordinary experiment in democracy-building that could yet serve as a model for many Arab countries. The mere fact that the Hamas wants to take part in the parliamentary elections slated for the end of January 2006, is a breakthrough for that nascent democracy.

The mere fact that the Fateh movement is holding primaries to choose its slate of candidates for parliament is unprecedented for that once revolutionary movement that needs these post-Arafat elections to make the final move to a state-building mode. Expectations on the Palestinian side – and all the polls show it – are that once elected to parliament, Hamas will have to give up its weaponry and that if the primaries work as expected in Fateh, old-timers and Arafat cronies will be swept out and the secular movement will be able to present an attractive list of candidates for election.

Sharon – indeed almost all of Israeli society – shows very little interest in the developments on the Palestinian side, and when he does, he wears his suspicions on his sleeve. It’s partially due to exhaustion after four years of warring: the indifference and lack of interest is also due to the fundamental lack of trust Israelis now have for all things Palestinian. But it is also the colonialists’ inherent ignorance about the ‘natives’ or as the army in the West Bank refers to them, the ‘locals.’ It’s a dangerous ignorance, for it assumes it knows all that it needs to know about them, in Israel’s case, that being knowing all about their ‘terrorist networks and infrastructures’ while knowing little or nothing about what it means to live under occupation.

True, Israelis have heard Sharon say the occupation is bad for Israel. But they haven’t heard him say that it’s time to bury the hatchet with the Palestinians. He speaks of giant strides toward peace, but so far, at least is tightfisted and stingy in response to every request made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

On the other hand, maybe things aren’t so bad. Saeb Erekat is saying that never have the two sides been so close to agreement; the echo of yesterday’s statement by the Palestinian minister of prisoner affairs about Israel being ready to reconsider the entire definition of Palestinian prisoners as POWs came this morning in news reports the defense establishment is pushing for extensive prisoner releases.

But the routine of the occupation continues. Since New Year’s last week, West Bankers have been under ‘closure’ to prevent terrorists from reaching Israeli towns; and the lead story on the news this morning has been the arrest of a Hamas man wanted for the last decade by the Israeli security services for his role in several attacks that killed eight Israelis and the arrest of a 14-year-old suspected of planning a suicide bombing. Vengeance is still a dominant impulse, despite the Biblical injunction that vengeance belongs to God.

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