Read The New Middle East Online
Authors: Paul Danahar
Israel’s shared boundary with Gaza is tiny. Its border with the Sinai is huge. Strategically speaking everything has now changed for Israel after the Arab Spring. Over the last forty years, since the 1973 war, the Egyptian and Syrian borders were quiet. Israel was fighting against either armed Palestinian militants in the West Bank and Gaza, or the militant group Hezbollah on its northern border with Lebanon. All these battles were over turf. All these groups were created as resistance movements against Israeli occupation: Hamas and the PLO for the Palestinian groups; Hezbollah was created and funded by Iran after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982.
The PLO has renounced violence. The Israeli military sees the security threat from the West Bank as merely ‘an area of inconvenience’. Hamas and Hezbollah are still militarily strong but they both now have some statehood responsibilities. When battles take place between Israel and these groups it is more likely to be a short brutal fight stemming from a gradual escalation than a sustained, preplanned event. After years of conflict each side now understands the other, and that brings an element of stability to the hostilities. The US-funded ‘Iron Dome’ anti-missile system that Israel now possesses has neutralised much of the offensive capabilities of these groups.
The previously quiet borders of Sinai and Syria are where Israel feels the greatest threat. For the first time it is not from militant resistance groups fighting against an Israeli occupation but from jihadists fighting about religion. The battle over land is being replaced by a battle over God. This is a fundamental change for Israel. Unlike America and Europe it has never faced a serious threat from violent Salafists before. By definition there is no reaching a compromise with those people. ‘We know we are the next target for the jihadists in Syria. First they want to take care of Assad, then they want to use this huge place against us,’ the senior Israeli military strategist told me.
The Palestinians are hoping, now that the leaders of the new Arab democracies have to listen to their voters, that their cause will move up the agenda. The Gaza conflict of 2012 did present the Brotherhood with a choice. It could assume the mantle from Syria of the activist champion of the Palestinian cause, and thus alienate the US. Or it could show that on issues Washington cares about it could be hard-headed and sophisticated. It chose the latter, and for the time being will continue to do so.
This suggests that while Palestine will remain an emotional draw for the people of the Arab world, until they have got their own house in order it is not a cause they are able to make great sacrifices for. If Israel has never been more isolated, then also for the time being the issue of Palestine has rarely been less important to the lives of its core supporters in the region.
That doesn’t mean the cause is lost. Once the Arab world surfaces from the turmoil of the next few years it will come back to the issue. And when it does it may find that some of the Western nations that once stood firmly on the opposing side have changed too. The sense of self-assuredness felt by much of the Israeli political establishment, the belief that it doesn’t need to worry that much about ‘The Problem’, will be short-lived. When Israel is forced to seriously confront ‘The Problem’ again it may find that the Islamist militants in Gaza are even stronger. Hamas’s will then be the voice Egypt listens to most.
But by then the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank is likely to have grown more politically militant too. Once the ageing and ailing Mahmoud Abbas finally departs the scene, chances are that he will not be replaced with a similar moderate figure, ready to wait for an elusive breakthrough in the peace talks. The leadership will pass to someone like the Fatah commander Marwan Barghouti, who is serving several life sentences in an Israeli jail. Mahmoud Abbas is probably as good as it is going to get for Israel when it comes to finding a partner for peace negotiations. If they do not do a deal with him soon, they may end up dealing with two much more hostile and more politically united Palestinian movements in the West Bank and Gaza. Mahmoud Abbas may turn out to be Israel’s missed opportunity. The Palestinians want a state. The countries transformed by the Arab Spring want that too. ‘The Problem’ is not going away.
A few weeks before the 2012 Gaza war started, a European diplomat who considers himself a friend of Israel told me privately that he feared Israel was increasingly losing the sympathy of the outside world:
I genuinely believe the opinion polls, the opinions in parliament, the opinion in the media is perceptibly, incrementally, becoming less warm to Israel. With foreign policy there is often a lag [but] when public opinion begins to move in a direction, policy normally follows . . . [and the public is] less tolerant of the status quo and increasingly see this as David and Goliath, where Israel is no longer David.
The Palestinians today trace their problem back to the creation of the state of Israel on 14 May 1948. Since 1988 every 15 May is marked by Palestinians and Arabs as al-Nakba, ‘the Day marking the Catastrophe’. The defeat of the huge Arab armies by the tiny Israeli one, which led to the first Egyptian revolution and then to Nasser’s Pan-Arabism, took place in a seminal period for the region matched in significance only by the Arab Spring. It was an incredible period for the Jewish people too. After centuries of persecution, followed by the horror of the Holocaust, they finally had a home. They had a place on earth where they could feel safe, where they trusted the strangers living in the house next door not to turn on them. But in order to get that homeland, the secular Zionists, the people who pushed, cajoled and lobbied the world for the state of Israel, had to make some compromises that in the following century would begin to tug at the complex fabric of Israeli society.
Egypt had a fast and noisy revolution in 2011 that has left it wrestling with issues concerning religion and the state. Israel has been involved in a much longer, quieter revolution, but it centres on the same issues. The advance of political Islam has been felt in the Palestinian territories and changed the balance of power. The rise of religious Zionism has done the same, as Jewish settlements are built in the belief that they are an expression of God’s will. Egyptians are trying to work out now where the writ of religious law should begin and end. The expansion of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community has left Israel with the same question. After the Arab uprisings very little unites Israel with the Arab states, but there is one thing they share. They are both struggling within their societies to reach agreement over the role and reach of religion in their lives.
4
It was a bright spring morning and thousands of Israelis were wandering through the fern and pine-tree forest on Mount Herzl. Today was a national holiday and many of the men, women and children were dressed casually, in T-shirts, jeans and skirts, even though they were about to observe one of the most important occasions on their calendar. Israel is a country steeped in traditions, but for most of the population that rarely extends to their clothing. So relaxed are Israelis about their appearance that friends of mine who were married in Israel – one an Israeli Jew, the other a British Christian – printed two versions of the invitation to their wedding ceremony. One was in English. The other was in Hebrew and included the additional line ‘No shorts and flip-flops’. But the relaxed dress code does not mean that Israeli traditions are taken less seriously, and on this day, for the people slowly walking up the gentle rocky slopes of one of Jerusalem’s most famous landmarks, it did not make the moment they were about to mark any less solemn. Mount Herzl is dedicated to the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, who is considered to have fathered the modern Israeli state. It is the most iconic of the nation’s war cemeteries. Every spring, on the fourth day of the month of Iyyar in the Jewish calendar, the families of the fallen make their way to the graves of their relatives who are among the thousands of military servicemen and women killed trying to create or fighting to defend the state of Israel.
I was invited to the Remembrance Day ceremony by two Israeli friends. One of them, Avi, was himself a reservist combatant in the Israeli military. Several of his army colleagues were buried in the military cemetery and he was there to honour their memory. As the top of the hour approached the crowds began to settle, huddling around the neatly arranged graves, which rose knee-high and were bounded by flagstones. They were, like most Jewish graves in Israel, simple and sparse. Even the inscriptions held just the barest information. I stood slightly away from the grieving families on a ridge above a section of the cemetery. Below me, an elderly woman, surrounded by younger members of her family, wept into her handkerchief. The gravestone in front of her gave simply the name of the young man who lay beneath it, and that he had died at the age of twenty-two in Lebanon. It did not say how much he was loved or missed, though that was obvious. And it did say not say how exactly he had died in one of the regular conflicts Israel has faced with its Arab neighbours.
At eleven o’clock exactly a siren began to wail and the people in the cemetery, and Jewish people across the nation, stopped everything for two minutes of silence. Cars on highways were parked in the middle of the road as their occupants stood by, their heads bowed. Shopping malls were hushed and schools were silent. After the siren ended and prayers were said, the voice of the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, crackled over the speakers in the cemetery. He was there as the nation’s leader, but also to mark the death of his older brother Yoni, who was killed leading the 1976 rescue of Israeli hostages at Entebbe in Uganda. Yoni Netanyahu is one of those buried on Mount Herzl. Mr Netanyahu delivered a very personal message to the nation in which he talked first about his own loss and then about the nation’s. He told his countrymen:
I know they say that time heals everything. That is not true. The years go by and the pain remains, but over the years that moment of sharp pain is mixed with other moments, with memories of the good times we have known with the people we love the most. Dear families, this is the pain we feel daily, but on this day, on Memorial Day, our private pain turns into national grief.
Avi had invited me, a non-Jew and non-Israeli, to attend this memorial because he wanted me to see ‘a moment when all the Jewish people are united’. But what this ceremony displayed to me was not the unity of the nation but the deepening divide within it. Because among the thousands of people marking the sacrifice made for their country I saw just one member of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in the entire cemetery. The vast majority of them had no need to make the slow walk up the hill to pay tribute to friends and family who had died in defence of the nation, because they had no war dead. Ultra-Orthodox Jews describe themselves as ‘Haredim’, which means ‘those who tremble in awe of God’. They were almost entirely exempt from the compulsory military service enforced on most other Jewish families in the country. And on this day few of them would even pause at the sound of the siren, because they consider Memorial Day to be an adopted Gentile tradition and they want no part of it. Binyamin Netanyahu described it as a moment of ‘national grief’. It was not.
‘If Israel has any holiday or mourning day it means nothing to a religious Jew, because a religious Jew thinks that anything that is made by the state of Israel was not made for the benefit of the Jewish people,’ Yoel Weber told me. His ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood of Me’a She’arim is the largest and most conservative in the country. It was created in 1874 and was built just outside the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. Its narrow alleyways and cobbled streets have barely changed since the time they were built, and that is not by accident or neglect. This is a community that reveres the past. And it despises much of the present because it considers the state of Israel to be an insult to God. The divine redemption of Israel was to be brought about by the Almighty, not by men. For men to have pre-empted God’s will by creating the state of Israel is for them the ultimate blasphemy.
Yoel was a bear of a man. He rattled through his words with a strong New York accent. He had long curled ‘peots’ or sidelocks, which hung down from his temples framing a wide bearded face. At his most animated he leant forward on his thick arms, and where his square glasses trapped his peots they waved gently up and down to the rhythm of his voice. We had met in the street on a hot summer’s day and he walked me up a flight of stairs to his very modest apartment. He offered me a glass of water and apologised for being a few minutes late, which had kept me waiting in the heat. He took off his black wide-rimmed hat and his long heavy black coat. Underneath he was wearing a waistcoat, his prayer shawl and a white shirt. It was 28C outside, but regardless of the weather the Haredim continue to wear the clothing of their forefathers, designed for the weather of nineteenth-century Europe. Every Sabbath I would see, near my home on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Haredi men struggling up and down the hill through the stifling heat to the synagogue in their formal clothing of knickerbockers, a long cloak and an enormous fur hat. All this clothing is cultural not religious attire, but the ultra-Orthodox consider it an important part of sustaining their beliefs. The fur hat is said to have been originally forced on Jews as an act of anti-Semitism in Europe. It was later adopted as a defiant statement of their faith.
Continuing to wear clothes so completely at odds with the environment around them is both an internal and external expression of their deliberate separation from the less religiously observant Jews around them – people they do not consider to be Jews at all.