Yom Kippur 5766, Thursday, October 13, 2005

If it wasn't Yom Kippur today, the radio stations and newspapers would be full of reactions to CNN's interview with Syrian President Bashar Assad and the mysterious death of Ghazi Kenaan a few hours after Assad announced to the world that any Syrian caught involved in the assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri would be considered a traitor. Speculation would be rife about whether he committed suicide because it's about to come out that during his 20 years as the Syrian strongman of Lebanon he was on the take from every possible source, from Rafik Hariri to the hashish dealers of the Bekaa, or was it because he was involved in the assassination of Hariri.

But the Israeli speculation and reporting on Assad's denials and Kenaan's death will only come tonight because today is Yom Kippur, so not only are there no newspapers, no radio broadcasts and no TV shows, there's not even any traffic on the streets of Tel Aviv or anywhere else in Jewish Israel today.

It's a remarkable phenomenon, made all the more so by the fact that while 70 percent of Israelis tell pollsters that they'll fast on the most holy day of the year, the days leading up to Yom Kippur are the best sales days for bicycles in Israel, because on the day without motor vehicles on the roads, tens of thousands of Israeli children throughout the country, brought up essentially secular, take to the streets on bikes, rollerblades and skateboards. It can be a strange sight – families walking together to synagogues while kids on bikes race past.

Still, it is also Yom Kippur, since 1973 not only the Day of Atonement, but the anniversary of a war that was an astounding military victory for the IDF, beating back a surprise attack on two fronts (Egypt and Syria). Nonetheless, is recorded in Israeli cultural history as a devastating defeat of all the optimism that had imbued Israeli society until then. True, much of that optimism was beefed up with inflated self-appreciation and a kind of imperial euphoria in the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, but the inherent optimism of Israel existed before the '67 war, with a can do approach to nation building that in the 1950s was a model for dozens of newborn African and Asian countries that looked to Israel's experience for inspiration and lessons.

Since 1973, that 'can doism' has been tinged with a sense of existential frailty, derived from the shock of being surprised on the battlefield that Yom Kippur – and the deaths of the 2,700 soldiers killed during the three weeks of battle that early winter still echoes through society. A latent sense of impending doom has been beneath the surface ever since, so much so that when the second intifada broke out, the conventional wisdom in Israel quickly became the intifada was a carefully plotted longstanding scheme on the part of Yasser Arafat and his henchmen to destroy the state of Israel. Five years later, with more than 1,000 Israelis killed and more than 3,000 Palestinians killed, that suspicion of the Palestinians has become deeply rooted in Israeli political culture – but as the withdrawal from Gaza seems to have proved, no less rooted is a public mood in favor of striking a deal with the Palestinians. At least that's what the polls show – and they show a similar mood on the Palestinian side, a desire for construction of Palestine instead of destruction of Israel.

That mood – and the successful Israeli withdrawal from Gaza combined with a sharp decline in the number of terror incidents inside Israel since the death of Arafat, the rise of Mahmoud Abbas, and the construction of at least part of the 'separation fence' that appears likely to become the eastern border of Israel – has brought with it a cautious optimism to Israel.

A common New Year's greetings this year was not merely 'may this coming year be better than the outgoing one,' but 'this year will be better than the last one.' That sense of determination that things are on the right course – at least as far as the majority of Israelis are concerned, say the polls -- is the mood in Israel this Yom Kippur. It's supposed to be a somber day, but this year – at least as of noon – there was something bright about the feeling that could not be attributed to only the blue skies and the warm Mediterranean sun. It may not be the resurrection of the hopefulness for peace that briefly shone between the signing of mutual recognition on the White House lawn and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995, but it may be a start toward something more realistic and longer lasting.

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