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Jewish World Review Sept. 23, 2003 / 26 Elul, 5763 Impossible Routine By Martin Peretz
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
TEL AVIV — I came to this beautiful, tortured land because my friend Leon Botstein was conducting the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, freshly taken out of bankruptcy, in a performance of the Dvorak Requiem at the amphitheater on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. It was the night of September 11, a commemoration of the murdered men and women exactly two years ago.
A nearly full moon rose over the desert, framed by two shafts of light recalling the Twin Towers, as the orchestra and chorus, composed mainly of Jews, performed a Christian mass in memory of the 3,000 extinguished souls of all religions, including, of course, innocent Muslims. Dvorak's great mass is not often performed, but it is a reflective and thrilling piece, calling to mind that the requiem is a plea for peace for the dead and, on this night and in this country, also for the living. The dead have haunted this place for decades. On my drive up to Mount Scopus, past an Arab neighborhood now abutting Jewish ones, I recalled that, on this very road in the spring of 1948, 77 doctors, nurses, professors, and students were going up to the then cut-off campus of the Hebrew University. There, they were massacred one by one, while a British garrison waited nearby for the bloody deed to be completed.
The killing continues — and with the same savagery. On my way here, I had just stepped onto an El Al flight to Ben Gurion Airport when a friend called from London to tell me there had been a bombing outside Tel Aviv (eight people dead). When I landed, I picked up a newspaper: a second bombing, this one in Jerusalem, in the kind of smart café where you and your hip children take your daily macchiato. (Seven people dead, including a legendary emergency room doctor and his daughter on the day before she was to be married.)
I didn't travel all the way around the world to deride Thomas Friedman. I can do that at home. But it was here that I read a column datelined Tel Aviv, published in The New York Times on September 11, in which he observed, "Suicide bombing is becoming so routine here that it risks becoming embedded in contemporary culture." It is important to understand why such a sentence is so silly. Yes, the Israelis have been living with their own Al Qaeda-like enormities once or twice a week now for more than two years — and only a little more sporadically before that, which is really ever since Yasir Arafat and his henchmen took over the Palestinian movement nearly 40 years ago. And, yes, Israelis are remarkably resilient. Ultra-Orthodox volunteers, acting in accordance with Jewish law, painstakingly pick up the severed limbs and shreds of skin scattered on the sidewalks. The survivors pick up their lives and move on.
But all this does not mean that the massacres are becoming routine for Israelis. They may be commonplace for the monstrous organizations that plan and perpetrate them, but for Israelis every bomb feels almost like the first bomb. Israelis are being murdered, but they are not being deadened. And, if suicide-bombing risks becoming embedded in contemporary culture, it is the culture of one people, not two. What is routine among the Arabs of Palestine is the joy that more Jewish blood has been shed, that their revenge has once again been visited on a liberal society that is not entirely indifferent to moral thinking about its deadly enemies. (Even the reviled settler movement doesn't go around killing Arabs.) You can see it in photographs on the telltale faces of Palestinian children, ecstatic over the deaths visited by Hamas twice in one day. There is no cultural prestige to killing Palestinians among the Israelis. But the cultural prestige of killing Jews suffuses the culture of the Palestinians. Recall for a moment the lynching of two Israeli soldiers gone astray into Ramallah early in the intifada. They were taken to the police station, and there they were lynched by policemen — one of whom placed his bloodied palms on the windows — and the mob below cheered. It is through such mobs that Palestinian political culture now speaks, and routinely.
Friedman writes, "I was in a trendy Tel Aviv sandwich shop the other day and my young Israeli waitress had a fun little tattoo on her shoulders. Jews with tattoos — you don't see that every day." Actually, tattoos are probably on their way out. The rage in Tel Aviv is body piercing — an odd practice for a nation picking up body parts, or maybe not so odd. Body piercing is not exactly a great cultural achievement, but in this punished place it is certainly a triumph of normality. These Israeli youngsters are ready to fight for their country not only because they are Jews, but also because, in their country, they can read and say and pierce what they want. But the state of Palestine, which Friedman craves (and I myself support), is not likely to let any of these flowers bloom; it will not look kindly upon women's rights and gay rights and political dissidents. Crimes of honor, by contrast, may be indulged: Look at any Arab country and tell me different.
After September 11, 2001, Friedman was among those sane enough to grasp that U.S. policy toward Israel was not the decisive factor in Al Qaeda's war against the United States. But he now seems to think otherwise. He believes that, unless the United States pulls off a peace agreement in the area, our country will be facing the same terrorism that Israel faces. "A credible peace deal here," he writes, "is no longer a U.S. luxury — it is essential to our own homeland security. Otherwise, this suicide madness will spread, and it will be Americans who will have to learn to live with it." Is Friedman blaming the Jews? If so, among reputable people, this is a distinction he shares with no one.
Since Israel's society is strong and resilient, "what better time for Israel to try something new?" But remember that Ehud Barak tried exactly these new initiatives and was rewarded with a macabre intifada. And, besides, would the United States — it too, after all, is culturally strong — ever respond to terrorism with new peace initiatives? When terrorism hits us, we instinctively understand that it cannot be bargained with, talked to, or appeased. We know that to do so represents, in some deep way, an affront to the dead and those who survive them. Why, two years and countless suicide bombings after September 11, 2001, is it so hard to understand that Israelis feel the same way?
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. JWR contributor Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief and chairman of The New Republic. Comment by clicking here.
© 2003, Martin Peretz | ||||||||||
