NOVANEWS
By Jessica Apple
NY Times
SINCE Wednesday, when Israel killed Hamas’s military chief, Ahmed al-Jabari, in the Gaza Strip, Hamas had fired rockets and mortars only into southern Israel. So on Friday, when I heard an air-raid siren sound in Tel Aviv, I assumed it was a test. But just for a moment. Then I snapped to my senses, grabbed my phone and ran to my apartment building’s stairs. I began to make my way down, running at first, thinking only of my three young sons. Two were in a judo lesson. One was with his grandmother. I could not get to them.
On the second-floor landing, I paused. My heart was racing, but my legs wouldn’t. I was weighing my options, and none seemed good. And eight steps above the lobby of my building I came to a very somber conclusion: this is how life is going to be here, and I can’t change it. Hope for a peaceful Israel is diminishing.
We have no one to make peace with, says the voice on the street. That may be true, but so is this: In Israel, too, our leaders — on all sides — have failed to move toward peace.
Yes, peace negotiations with Hamas are questionable. But just a few weeks ago, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said that he would not allow a third intifada to break out, and that although he is a refugee from Safed, a city in northern Israel, he does not intend to return there as anything but a tourist. “Palestine for me,” he said, “is the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital; this is Palestine, I am a refugee, I live in Ramallah. The West Bank and Gaza is Palestine, everything else is Israel.” The office of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, responded by saying, “There is no connection between the Palestinian Authority chairman’s statement and his actual actions.”
Mr. Netanyahu has been ignoring the peace process for most of his current four-year term. For the first time since Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands in 1993, and as Israel prepares to elect a new Knesset in January, its political leaders are not talking about a two-state solution.
When I moved to Israel 15 years ago, the picture was very different. There was never a question of whether Israel and the Palestinians would make peace, only of when. The dream of peace inspired me, and even after an intifada, scores of suicide bombings and a war, I stayed in Israel. I remained hopeful.
But today, as the missiles get closer to Tel Aviv, I think of leaving. It’s not the missiles that are breaking me. It’s the lack of an alternative to them.
Mr. Netanyahu has avoided the Palestinian issue while enabling and encouraging settlement building; he has ignored the Arab initiative and focused solely on the threat of Iran. Late last month he struck a coalition deal with his ultranationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, to have their two parties run one slate in the next elections in January. It signaled that Mr. Netanyahu would have no plans to make peace if he were re-elected.
Now Mr. Netanyahu has chosen to enter into a conflict that ensures that the vote in the upcoming elections will be about security — something he says he can provide. There is no great surprise in that. The surprise is that there is no opposition to Mr. Netanyahu’s policies — a signal that Israelis are resigned to living indefinitely with the threat of war.
Israel’s Labor Party — Yitzhak Rabin’s party — which has traditionally stood for peace, has, instead, been quiet on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Under the leadership of a journalist turned politician, Shelly Yachimovich, Labor has reshaped itself into a social democratic party focused on social justice, the cost of living and the middle class. Last year, demonstrations touched off by the rising cost of cottage cheese drew half a million Israelis to the streets to protest the high cost of living. Ms. Yachimovich seized social justice as an issue and became its political face.
But she skirted the Palestinian issue. She has not promised to stop settlement building and has never acknowledged the hypocrisy of calling for social justice within the Green Line, which marks the limits of Israel proper, while ignoring the lack of it in the Palestinian territories beyond. If you were to define today’s Labor, you might say it’s the party that represents Israelis’ right to fairly priced cheese. Some Labor figures still press for peace negotiations, of course, but their voices don’t get through.
And as Israel pummels the Gaza Strip, there is no Israeli political leader saying, as Rabin did, “Enough of blood and tears.” Ms. Yachimovich has, in fact, supported the government’s actions as just, without questioning whether they are wise.
How the situation in Gaza plays out is likely to determine the outcome of Israel’s election. I feel safe in saying that this January, Israelis will be casting a vote for peace or war. Will Israel bury the two-state solution once and for all, or can it somehow retain a hope of being a Jewish democratic state living in peace with its neighbors? Last night as I said good night to my older sons, I set their flip-flops in front of their beds. “If you hear a siren,” I said, “slide your feet into your shoes and run downstairs.” I would grab our 3-year-old, I said, and be right behind them. “Don’t wait for me. Just go.”
There aren’t too many years before today’s flip-flops become tomorrow’s army boots, and I do not want my sons to grow up to a never-ending conflict that Israel accepts as immutable. I do agree that Israel has the right to protect its citizens. But I condemn Israel’s current leaders for failing to recognize that the best defense is peace.
