I have lived in Israel for 36 years, and never have I experienced what I am going through now. It’s as if I’m drifting on an ice floe, not really expecting rescue, not even scanning the horizon for rescue ships, my bottom frozen, my hope a low flame that refuses to warm me.
I’m sitting in the home of my son and daughter-in-law. It’s Friday afternoon, and she’s turning the pages of a newspaper. There is an article on our Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, and the protocol he has been secretly creating with the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, for the upcoming Mideast Summit. I watch her glance at it briefly, then flip the page.
The protocol, which is to set the agenda for President Bush’s November meeting, is the diplomatic equivalent of the Iranian nuclear bomb. In the privacy of his own home, without public debate or Knesset approval, the weakest and most unpopular prime minister in Israel’s history has been coming up with a “to do” list that includes dividing Jerusalem, giving up Jewish sovereignty on the Temple Mount, uprooting hundreds of Jewish towns and solving the Arab “refugee” problem—a euphemism for the demise of the state of Israel as we know it. If leaks in the press are accurate, all his ideas have forged well past the faint traces of red lines that still exist in Israeli policy.
And yet here is my son’s well-educated, politically savvy, idealistic wife giving it hardly a glance.
“Anat, why don’t you read it?” I ask her.
“I don’t want to know,” she says.
She’s not alone.
Columnist Michael Freund recently asked in the Jerusalem Post: “Is anyone out there awake? By any standards, the headlines of the past few weeks should have sparked a furious public outcry, accompanied by stormy demonstrations, irate parliamentary debates and massive protests and letter-writing campaigns. But there has been none of that.”
I agree. I have lived in Israel for 36 years, and never have I experienced what I am going through now. It’s as if I’m drifting on an ice floe, not really expecting rescue, not even scanning the horizon for rescue ships, my bottom frozen, my hope a low flame that refuses to warm me. Along with me are the majority of my fellow Israelis.
The country seems in a torpor, unable to accomplish anything. Take, for example, the city of Sderot.
There have been 1,300 missile attacks on Sderot since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza. On May 29, Israel’s High Court ordered the government to fortify Sderot schools to help withstand rocket attacks. The Olmert government first said it would comply. Then said it couldn’t comply. Then agreed it would partially comply. Then it said the solution was to build new, fortified schools in Sderot (which will only take a few years).
The minister of education, Yuli Tamir, demanded that the Ministry of Defense “vouch for the safety of Sderot’s school children.” To this, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna’i replied: “I’ll vouch for that if the education minister vouches for no violence in schools and if the transportation minister guarantees no more car accidents.”
Meanwhile, the advice given Sderot parents by their government has been to hold classes in underground shelters, which can only accommodate the school population in shifts, or to have the children run to shelters when the alarm sounds. Of the latter plan, Dr. Yitzchak Kadman, head of the Israel Council for the Protection of the Child, wrote, “It is admirable that the Israeli government want to institute a new physical education curriculum to see how fast children can run.”
To no one’s surprise, in early September a Qassam rocket smashed into the outskirts of a school, sending exploding glass over terrified kindergartners.
The malaise that allows this kind of outrageous government behavior to continue began, I think, with the Gaza disengagement.
Two years ago, I sat in my living room watching a full-scale Israeli security operation, which included 700 policemen and major military backup, remove a few teenagers from an abandoned hotel in Gush Katif, a bloc of 17 Israeli settlements in Southern Gaza. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had voted for a right-wing government whose agenda was security-minded and supportive of Gush Katif. And, in the end, they betrayed everything their platform had stood for, bulldozing the houses, businesses, synagogues and schools of the bravest citizens of Israel and handing them over to Hamas.
Around that time I wrote an article entitled: “You’ve Won, Mr. Sharon. I am Disengaged.” In the psychological sense of the word, I was detached, withdrawn, my ties and obligations severed. “Who are these people who are running my country?” I wrote. “I didn’t elect them…. I sent my son to the army to shoulder arms and risk his young life to protect his people, not drag them kicking and screaming out of their homes.”
The trauma of the disengagement, I believe, accounts for the present, and dangerous, public apathy about even its most vital, life-threatening choices. How many times can a government betray its citizens’ trust before they lose faith in the entire structure of their democracy? How many times can you vote, only to see the same group of do-nothing politicians turn up like bad pennies for yet another term or office?
How many times can you protest and rally and demonstrate, with no effect, before you decide to just stay home and watch the newest sitcom? After the massive demonstrations demanding Olmert’s resignation that followed the latest Lebanese war, it’s no wonder people have stopped taking to the streets.
What I did not know then was that this feeling of apathy was going to deepen and spread on a scale I could not have imagined. In fact, unless we can radically change the way Israeli democracy functions—allowing its citizens to vote for individuals who can be held personally accountable for their actions in office, instead of for political parties who keep reinstating the old party hacks—it appears that “disengagement” will become a permanent part of our lives.
Naomi Ragen is a novelist and playwright. She lives in Jerusalem.
