fugitive peace

For a glimpse of the huge gap between how the world sees Israel’s offensive in Gaza and how Israelis see it, I recommend first Ethan Bronner’s piece today in the New York Times, and then this email that I received and translated from the Hebrew (the emphases are mine). It represents a centre-right viewpoint — which could be said to be the mainstream these days, since Likud is set to win the next election — and makes very clear what this sector of Israeli society thinks of the casualties being inflicted on the Palestinians. (The email’s author says that it was submitted to Ynet, an Israeli news website, but rejected).

[…] There are new images on the screen.
Muhammad from Gaza and Ibrahim from Gaza and also a pediatrician from Shifa Hospital [in Gaza].
Worried interviewers summon up all their motherly feelings in the course of an interview:
Oshrat Kotler [a TV anchor], with a look of pain and a tear welling up in the corner of her eye:
“Muhammad, how are things with you? Is everything all right? How’s the family? What do you do when the power goes out? How are the children coping? What do you tell your kids? Ah… the Israelis are bombing because Hamas is firing missiles at them… and Hamas is firing missiles at the Israelis because the Israelis closed the crossings…”
“Muhammad, we’ll be coming back to you later in the programme, to ask you how you and the family are doing.”
“Muhammad… we hope you get through this.”
And Micky Chaimovitch [another news anchor], in a heart-rending interview with Ibrahim that keeps getting cut off […]
“Ibrahim, how do you feel over there… in the dark… with the bombing… what do you do when they’re bombing? Do you have shelters? Do you have food?”
If it wasn’t real, it would be funny.
We got out of Gaza, we put a border fence between us and them, we’re at war with them, with the people sitting behind that fence. Maybe someone can put a stop to these stupid interviews?
Why do we have to keep humanising them?
I don’t understand these constant attempts to show the other side of the story.
Sometimes you wonder whether these are really Israeli TV stations.
Our suffering is what’s supposed to interest us. We’re not talking about preparatory peace talks where we’re supposed to recognise the other side, to see that they’re just like us.
This attention paid to the suffering of the other side reduces the level of identification with your own people.
A picture of a girl crying in Gaza that’s always flashing on the home page of Ynet [an Israeli news website] instead of a picture of soldiers in combat/a destroyed house/children in Sderot suffering from panic/empty southern restaurants/lines of cars making their way northwards makes one wonder a great deal about whoever put the picture on Ynet’s front page.
We’re at war, our goal is to stop the missile fire, to destroy Hamas’s capabilities.
Of course not all the Gazans are bad people and Hamasniks, but at the moment this really shouldn’t interest us. We’re fighting for our existence.
We have wonderful soldiers who are fighting in Gaza and trying to undo a little of the disaster of the disengagement (by the way, has there yet been one politician who has admitted that the disengagement was a fatal mistake?)
We have a home front that stands with them and is wishing for the victory of the Israel Defence Forces.
So please, stop imitating al-Jazeera and al-Manar.
No more Gazan interviewees on the Israeli state networks, no more pictures on the internet that provoke sympathy but not our sympathy.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s the Colosseum was a legendary Tel Aviv nightclub. Its only concession to Rome’s Colosseum was that it was round; other than that it looked like a 1970s airport lounge plonked down on a concrete promenade overlooking the beach. I dimly remember trying to get in there once, as a teenager on a visit to Israel, and standing no chance against the tides of other teenagers who were trying to do the same thing and were older, more beautiful and much better practiced with their elbows.

Then it fell into disrepair and stood empty and tattered next to the field of giant concrete mushrooms that are also a Tel Aviv landmark and whose purpose has always remained mysterious. Now at last it’s been bought up by an entrepreneur and revamped.

And vamped is the really the operative word.

A friend took me to the first of a series of preview nights a couple of days ago. After passing through a squadron of black-clad security guards, greeters and hostesses, we were shown into a space that reminded me of the black ship in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where “when you try an’ operate one of these weird black controls which are labelled in black on a black background, a small black light lights up black to tell you you’ve done it.”

The furniture was black. The fittings were black. The floors and ceilings were black. The bars and the walls behind the bars were faced in so much black marble that it was a wonder the whole construction didn’t just sink through the promenade into the sand. About the only thing that wasn’t black was the house cocktail, which was a watermelon mojito (I recommend sticking to the regular kind) and the bottles on the bar. The picture I took above, with my mobile phone, doesn’t really do it justice, but it didn’t look all that different in real life.

I haven’t seen this level of post-gothic excess since I left Russia, and there they stopped building these kinds of things years ago – the place has gone all designery and minimalist. In Israel they seem to be just catching up.

Membership will cost 500 shekels a month, which amounts to a little under $2,000 a year. Private members’ clubs have never really worked in Israel before, so some of my friends were a little sceptical that this one would. But maybe there is now a class of nouveau-riche wanna-be oligarchs who want to shell out for exclusivity, obsequious (ie, un-Israeli) service and a colour scheme that makes anything you wear look good.

Home after a long day in Ramallah interviewing Fatah people about whether their party can ever get it together. It’s like listening to Marxist student politics (which, after all, is what Fatah started out as). Long rants about local committees, district committees, regional committees, ad hoc committees, sub-committees; the central committee, the higher committee, the revolutionary council; protocols, rules and constitutions; agendas both hidden and explicit; struggle, unity, fawda (chaos) and fitna (strife); the cadres, the party, the movement, and the national interest, which someone is always either pursuing or undermining, and often both at once.

During a break in the schedule I paid my first visit to Yasser Arafat’s new mausoleum, completed last autumn (above). It’s an austere, brilliant pearl incongruously plopped in the middle of the ramshackle Muqata complex, the presidential headquarters: a cube-shaped mausoleum at the end of a long plaza, with mosque off to one side. The whole thing is dressed in pale Jerusalem stone, which makes it impossible to look at in sunlight without getting an instant headache.

Inside we are spared a Lenin-like mummy and squadrons of goose-stepping troops. Instead a single soldier standing astride two rifles – presumably one for him and one for Abu Ammar, should he ever be resurrected – guards the tomb itself, which is inscribed with Abu Ammar’s dates of birth and “martyrdom”. [Update June 18th: a reader writes: "There are normally two guards (in equally ill-fitting suits) standing over Arafat’s grave. You must have caught one on a pee-break." ] In Palestine a martyr is anyone whose death, even if it was by natural causes, is linked with the struggle, though in Arafat’s case maybe it’s a nod to the popular conspiracy theory that the Mossad had him infected with HIV.

This evening I got back to Jerusalem, went to dinner, and came home to find that someone had, with a cardboard head and pair of arms, transformed the letterbox outside my building into a robot.

In Jerusalem any odd behaviour can usually be explained by a nearby festival belonging to one or another religion. But I’ve run through all the possible Christian, Jewish and Muslim dates and come up with nothing.

I haven’t been posting for a while, and I’ve drawn up a backlog of things to write about, so over the next few days I’ll be putting them up as I write them.

Today’s local moment: I was driving through a roundabout (US: traffic circle) in East Jerusalem when I very nearly crashed into a police car that had decided to take a short cut by going around it the wrong way.

In Britain a cop would only do this with in an emergency, with his sirens blaring, and still stop to make sure there was nothing he might crash in to. This being an Israeli cop, he didn’t seem to be on any urgent mission; he just didn’t feel like standing behind all the other cars.

In Britain a policeman could get fired for such an offence. Israeli police seem to think it’s their prerogative. In fact, even here it’s somewhat eccentric behaviour, but they allow themselves more licence in Arab areas than they would elsewhere.

In Britain I would have tried to get the car’s licence number to file a complaint, but I wouldn’t dare raise my voice. This being an Israeli cop, I stuck my head out of the window and roared at him, “What are you, insane?” He barely glanced at me, as if to say, “Yeah, and so what?” And we both drove on our separate ways.

In Britain I would have told my friends about it. Here, who cares?

I’m sitting in Ben-Gurion airport waiting for a flight. In the long hallway that leads down to the duty-free shops there’s an exhibition of almost every one of the Israeli independence day posters dating back to 1949.

I haven’t found images online for now, but they’re an interesting potted history of the mood and ethos of the state. Some of the early posters are very socialist-realist in their design, especially the first one. Many over the next 20 years are rather folkloric, drawing on traditional Jewish motifs or handicraft-style patterns, and quite a lot of images of people: kibbutzniks and women in headscarves feature prominently.

In 1968, the first independence day after the 1967 war, the image is predictably of a united Jerusalem. In the years that follow the posters reflect self-confidence in times of peace or jingoism and embattlement in times of war. There’s a tribute to “heroism” in the form of what might be a war memorial and might be a tree in 1983, after the Lebanon invasion started. In the 1990s there are several optimistic and forward-looking posters talking about equality and social justice (“Different but Equal” is the title of one of them).

That all-embracing vision disappears after the start of the second intifada. One is a tribute to the army; the next is a tribute to sporting heroes; two years later there’s one about developing the Negev and the Galilee, two areas mostly inhabited by Arab-Israelis (so “developing” them, ie, putting more Jews there, has all sorts of political connotations). Last year’s again celebrates the Jerusalem’s “unification” (though the city in practice remains more divided than ever) 40 years on. There’s a return to almost socialist, and strongly nationalist emblems in some of these posters.

Finally, this year’s poster is about children, which to me reads as a sort of desperate plea. When you’re celebrating your 60th anniversary and the thing you’re proudest of is your children, it sends a message that you find little to celebrate in the present and can only hope that the future, your children’s future, will be better.

What do you do when your country has an image problem? Meet MC Carolina, aka Carolifa because of her hair, which looks vaguely like what Hebrew-speakers mistakenly call a lifa (they mean loofah, which happens to be an Arabic word). She’s a member of the trio The Nechama Girls, one of Israel’s biggest bands. I saw her last night at a concert arranged by Oleh Records, a non-profit label that promotes Israeli musicians abroad in an attempt to get the world to see Israelis as something other than military occupiers. Takes a little more than crazy hair and good music to do that, but we had fun all the same…

… is here, in 13,000 words, more or less.

A small but important lesson about opinion polls.

Three weeks ago Ha’aretz‘s pollster, Camil Fuchs, published a poll showing that 64% of Israelis favour holding talks with Hamas in order to get a ceasefire and release Gilad Shalit, the captured soldier. Today the Tami Steinmetz Centre has issued the latest monthly Peace Index. It says that only 25% of Israelis and just 17% of Israeli Jews favour negotiating with Hamas.

Puzzled? So was I. I reported on the Ha’aretz poll a couple of weeks ago as evidence that Israeli opinion is shifting towards talks with Hamas. So I called Ephraim Yaar of the Steinmetz Centre for an explanation, and it turns out to be simple.

The Ha’aretz poll asked people if they supported talks with Hamas: yes or no. The Steinmetz poll asked them the best way for Israel to deal with the Qassam rockets from Gaza: (1) talks with Hamas; (2) a relatively restrained military response (though Israel’s idea of “restrained”, I should point out, still means several Palestinians killed every week); (3) a bigger but still limited response (ie, like the ground incursion that killed 110 people or so earlier this month); (4) a massive ground operation to reoccupy Gaza; (5) another option of your choice; (6) don’t know.

When you put the question like this, more Israeli Jews support reoccupying Gaza than talking to Hamas (see the table below).

So which poll is “right”? What does the Israeli public actually think about talks with Hamas?

I asked Fuchs. “When you include other options, you’re cognitively giving legitimacy to them,” he says. “What you’re doing is hinting to the person that there are other people who prefer these options.” When there’s only one option on the table, on the other hand, you’re asking them to choose between doing that and doing nothing.

In short, what the two polls taken together say is that if the people could run the government, and had a range of options for dealing with Gaza, more of them would go with a military option. However, if the government says it’s going to talk to Hamas, 64% of the public would support it (though Fuchs thinks the number now would be a little lower than three weeks ago).

Question 1: Should Israel conduct talks with Hamas towards a ceasefire and the release of Gilad Shalit?

Source: Ha’aretz/Dialog

Question 2: What is the best way for Israel to prevent rocket fire on the south?

Source: Tami Steinmetz Centre

“Hello? Is that Gideon Lichfield?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Good morning. This is Helena Bonham-Carter.”

Well, not Helena, as it soon became clear, but her mother, Elena, who had got my number from a mutual acquaintance and wanted to know whether Jerusalem was safe to visit after last week’s attack at a yeshiva that killed eight people. For a moment I weighed up whether the blood of the mother of one of the world’s most famous actresses would be on my hands. Then I shrugged and said, “of course it’s safe.”

She and assorted relatives showed up this week for a ceremony at Yad Vashem in honour of her father, Eduardo Propper de Callejón, a Spanish diplomat stationed in Paris who issued an estimated 1,500 Spanish visas in the summer of 1940 to help French Jews escape the approaching Nazis. Having disobeyed foreign ministry instructions, he was demoted and lived out the rest of his career in minor posts, dying in 1972. However, the visa registry from his time in Paris went missing and people whom he had saved proved hard to trace. Not until last year did his children manage to gather enough evidence to satisfy the examiners of Yad Vashem that he merited “Righteous Among the Nations” status.

It was a sweet ceremony in the gardens of Yad Vashem, attended by a flush of aristocratic-looking, besuited Spaniards and various branches of the Propper family (which now lives in five countries, including Israel). It was marred only by the hopeless inability of Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev, to pronounce the honoured man’s name; he stumbled and hesitated and finally came out not with “Ca-ye-khon” but “Cal-khe-yon”. This, coming after his speech about the 22,000-odd other “righteous gentiles” honoured at Yad Vashem, left the distinct impression that he was simply too busy to devote time to any of them.

I feel sorry for the poor Winograd commission that investigated the second Lebanon war. They’re nice, serious, committed people who tried to give Israel the definitive, all-encompassing recipe for how to make sure it doesn’t screw up a war ever again. It took them:

• 16 months
• Over 270 witnesses and interviewees
  
• 629 pages, including appendices
• 21 pages for the table of contents alone
• 223 instances of the word “fail”, “failure”, “failed” etc
• 286 instances of the word “flaw” or “flawed”
• 14 key recommendations for reform of the army and executive branch

But the press and public are calling the report a sell-out. Why? Because the only thing they want to know is: whose fault was it that so many soldiers died in Lebanon for nothing? Or more specifically, will the person whose fault everyone believes it was, Ehud Olmert, now at last quit? And since he has no intention of doing so, it’s Winograd’s fault for not giving him the push.

There is a Russian saying: kto vinovat i shto dyelat’? — “Who is to blame and what is to be done?” Israelis, being impatient people, only want to know who’s to blame; to hell with what’s to be done, because in a few months time the government will change again and nobody will do it anyway. Which is why, as I wrote in this week’s piece on it, the Winograd report will probably sink into obscurity like all its worthy predecessors.