a yom kippur reflection: our second most dangerous challenge

by dr. eran lerman, director ajc israel/middle east office
weekly briefing
september 18, 2007

We did not lack for bad news in Israel these last few days: Eight Israelis, including two young couples on honeymoons, perished in a plane crash near a popular Thai resort. A soldier died in a gun battle with terrorists near Nablus - reminding us of the cost of the IDF’s silent triumph: for more than a year, not a single terrorist attack was successfully launched from the West Bank. (We should be under no illusions: If the fence and the roadblocks were taken down, and the daily vigilance of the intelligence community and the nightly raids of the IDF abolished, we would quickly be back to the dark days of 2002, when dozens died in our streets every month.) Dozens of other soldiers were wounded when a Qassam rocket salvo hit an army camp in Zikim, not far from the Gaza border - and there are now fears that the Palestinians would soon be using new rockets with a 15-km. range, putting the city of Ashkelon within range. The likelihood of a major confrontation in Gaza still looms large on our near horizon.

Meanwhile, the talks between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas may have lost some of their momentum. A decisive breakthrough on the permanent status issues - Jerusalem, the borders, the so-called “right of return” - is not in the cards for the November summit. The Saudis have already said they will not come to Washington, and in Israel, the fine political balance (despite signs of Olmert’s relative rise in the approval polls) limits the capacity of any government to take far-reaching and problematic decisions. There are good signs of progress on practical aspects of daily life: Even in Gaza, Hamas has relented and allowed supplies to come in through the Kerem Shalom terminal, which they earlier resisted for symbolic reasons. But the basic existential conflict with the Palestinians - the terror groups, on the one hand, and the political aspirations for the demise of the Zionist experiment, on the other - is still with us.

Still, if asked, most Israelis would have offered a different take on where the true dangers for our future lie. The deadly prospect of a nuclear bomb in the hands of a radical enemy - how close is Iran; and how close was Syria? - continues to trouble our sleep. True, something of great importance - yet to be divulged in detail - was done on September 6 to set back the threat. A message was sent as to our resolve, our capacity, and the reactions of the world (and in particular, the nonreaction of the Arab world - if this term still has any meaning at all). The French foreign minister, warning Iran that its present course could lead to war, added his own weight to the message in recent days. And yet the sheer millennial fantasies of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (coming soon to a theater near you - i.e., the UN General Assembly in New York) and the faction he represents in Tehran; the utter irresponsibility of certain European business interests; the antagonistic reactions of Russia and China to any effort to curb Iran - all of these mean that the next few months will be crucial, and 5768, in which we shall celebrate our sixtieth anniversary, may well be one of the most decisive years in our people’s long history.

This does not sum up the list, however. Iran may be a vivid presence on our strategic horizon, but there is only a limited circle of people “in the know” and with the capacity to do something about it. In the minds of many Israelis, as we search our souls at this time of reckoning, another set of questions requires close attention, closer to each of our homes and deep in the heart of our collective endeavor. Are we in danger of losing not only our strategic safety but our internal cohesion? Is there still a “we” that we as Israelis - and the Jewish People - can speak of with certainty? In the present climate of self-doubt (which the haters at home and abroad are quick to seize upon and amplify as a sign of systemic failure, and of the evil nature of the Zionist idea from its inception), events and portents from the fraying far edges of the social fabric, such as the arrest last week of a group of violent Israeli neo-Nazis (!) in Petah Tikvah, can assume a symbolic meaning well beyond their actual significance. For years, in the former Soviet Union - even when it was still under the Red flag - there was a subculture, among rebellious youth in particular, of eulogizing the fascists as a counterweight to the crushing boredom and repression of the existing order. Strong elements of this perverted view still linger, particularly in the Ukraine, and given that many of the recent olim to Israel come from mixed families who lived among non-Jewish neighbors, the poison has seeped into our own borders and captured the minds of a misguided few.

The reactions to this discovery, however, were in some respects as troubling as the idea itself: They showed a readiness to carve up Israeli society by its sectarian divisions, to speak disparagingly of “those Russians” (quickly forgetting that among the heroes of the IDF two weeks ago were a remarkable number of olim, not all of them halakhically Jewish), and to sharpen the sense of “us” - the strong but threatened middle class that sustains the economic miracle of the Tel Aviv “bubble.” Outside, and in varying degrees alienated from it, are the large minority segments: the “Russian” immigration of the last fifteen years, important segments of which still live in linguistically self-contained enclaves; the haredi communities with their problematic attitude toward the society in which they live, recently manifest in their internal dispute over shmitta (the sabbatical year, when the land is to lie fallow, according to halakha) and how to make the necessary accommodation to enable Jewish agriculture to survive in the Land of Israel; the Arabs, locked in internal tensions and often led by a politically radicalized, anti-Zionist intellectual elite; the Ethiopians, whose integration into Israeli life has often been a traumatic process; and still, after fifty years, the legacy of what used to be called “the Second Israel,” the children and grandchildren of those who came in the 1950s from Iraq, Yemen, North Africa, and other parts of the Muslim world and often found themselves on the geographical or economic periphery of a society that lived by different rules than they and had a well-established power structure. Add to this, in the wake of the 2005 Disengagement, the profound and bitter alienation of many among the modern nationalist Orthodox community, and you face a landscape of social and ideological fissures.

Back in the early years, the powerful ethos of nation-building, the centrally guided “project” led by titans of David Ben-Gurion’s caliber, was enough to offer a sense of common purpose to such disparate social forces. But in today’s culture of a highly privatized (and, it should be said, highly successful) postmodern economy, what is there - in a “me” generation - to sustain this vital spirit? Did we not see, during last year’s war, or more recently as Sderot repeatedly came under fire, how spiritually remote we have become from one another, even within an hour’s drive from the front? Are the typical readers of Ha’aretz - which at times seems to take pride in its air of detached criticism - still part of the same nation as the settlers, or the readers of the local Russian press, or the residents of traditional poor neighborhoods, let alone the Bedouins in the Negev?

There will be much to think of, in this respect, as the hush of Yom Kippur settles upon the land: no cars (but plenty of toddlers on bikes), no radio, no TV, a true break from the crush of work and the rush of play, and for those who seek them, heavy “erev Yom-Kippur” editions of the newspapers, replete with discussion of the questions of atonement and forgiveness, as well as recurrent, nightmarish memories of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. At the end of the day, the answer is probably “yes, we are one,” although this must not absolve us of the need to work hard to make it so: There is enough of a “we” still out there to pull us together in time of need - through the power of a common, vibrant language, which will soon sweep the second and third generations of immigrants; through the robust institutions of a democratic state, which have withstood the test of time and the tumults of a violent history; through the new agents of voluntary integration offered by modern technology and an ever-creative culture.

At times of doubt, I go back in my mind to one golden moment in the recent round of “Kokhav Nolad” (“A Star Is Born”), the Israeli equivalent of “American Idol.” Two of the young women contestants - one a lithe Arab singer, the other an energetic performer of Russian origin - sang a duo and added verses of their own, in the two languages, to a song previously popularized by Idan Reichel, a “proper” Israeli of European roots, who some years ago created a music project in conjunction with a group of Ethiopians singing in Hebrew touched by Amharic phrases, which Maryam and Marina now rendered into Arabic and Russian. This was, of course, a manufactured, commercialized moment; I didn’t need to read the culture critics (they, too, are part of what sells their papers) to know that. But this is precisely the point: If the needs of the market, under such circumstances, lead to the creation of symbolic acts of integration (which no exhortatory calls by political leaders can do any more), then perhaps, as Tennyson once put it, “Though much is taken, much abides.”