Focus on Israel / Hatred disfigures Promised Land
The Manchester Guardian Weekly

Hatred disfigures Promised Land

By Matthew Engel

Seven months ago Matthew Engel paid his first visit to Israel and found it heading towards grudging acceptance of a state of Palestine. But on his return he finds a country split in two, extreme orthodoxy on the march, and fears growing of a new Middle East war

IT IS Monday morning, the time when 13 year-old Jewish boys come to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem for their bar mitzvah. The scene is probably more bewildering to anyone whose experience of these rituals has been confined to synagogues in London or Manchester than it is to a complete outsider. In Britain the bar mitzvah boy reads out his portion of the Torah in a nervous gabble amid a decorous hush. Here, at Judaism's most solemn and sacred place, there were a dozen competing ceremonies a few feet from each other.

The boys' thin voices never stood a chance. Their male relatives were alongside them chanting far louder and more confidently. And their mums and aunties -- barred from the temple confines -- were leaning over the fence, singing, cheering, throwing coins. From a distance the sounds merged into a general ululation, like an African funeral. Close to, the scene was more like a football match: joyous, fervent, irrational. Twenty-four hours later, another group appeared. These were the Women of the Wall, who -- far more quietly -- exercised what they believed was their right to worship. They did not attempt to penetrate the men's section, which would have been an obvious provocation. However, a number were reportedly wearing kipot and tallitim -- skullcaps and prayer-shawls -- which are normally only worn by men.

They were ambushed by a group of Orthodox Jews who hurled chairs at them. The police ignored the attackers and threw the women out. "You can't pray like that," said one policeman. Later, a government minister told the women they were crazy and said, if they wanted equality, they could go to the beach or the disco. Welcome to the New New Middle East. This is not the New Middle East promised by Shimon Peres before the Israeli election last May. Peres envisaged an Israel living in peace alongside an independent Palestine. This was specifically, if narrowly, rejected by the electorate. They chose Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister instead.

For months Netanyahu has been saying that he is on the brink of achieving what might be regarded as his first success: an agreement for a partial withdrawal of Israeli troops from Hebron. This is a city where the normal difficulties of Middle Eastern politics are complicated by the presence of a few hundred militantly anti-Arab Jewish settlers in the heart of the city -- among the people Israel conquered in 1967 and whose fathers and grandfathers massacred Hebron's original Jewish community in 1929. But for many of Netanyahu's supporters this would not be a triumph but a betrayal. And in terms of his own mandate, it is not another step on the way to an independent Palestine, as it was meant to be, but a piece of unfinished business on which he could not renege. Assuming the withdrawal happens at all, it is not obvious when or, even if, the next step towards peace might come.

More than 12 months have passed since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and seven months since the vote that brought Netanyahu to power. When I paid my first visit here just before the election, the road seemed open to a future of prosperity and, if not brotherly love, then at least a grudging coexistence between Israel and the incipient state of Palestine. Now the landscape is transformed utterly. Israel's new rulers were elected to abort the idea of Palestine and to construct a different vision for their own state.

The nations of the world are united in their distaste for the new government. There are endless stories of the prime minister's technical incompetence and crassness, like his meeting with the head of the World Bank, who was obliged to listen to an hour-long economics lesson. Last month the Jerusalem Post, the new government's most reliable cheerleader, ran a major piece describing the appalling relationships between the prime minister and the military establishment and claiming that he no longer had any adviser who could give him accurate information about Arab thinking. As for his character, the most telling detail may be that after the election Netanyahu insisted he should no longer be known by his nickname of "Bibi", used by family, friend and foe since he was a baby. He thought it undignified. This was not the action of a man comfortable in himself.

Israel's enemies have always found it easy to make unjust comparisons with the old South Africa. But it gets easier when you read that the government is preparing plans to corral Israeli Arabs in the Galilee into blocks of flats to prevent them having a majority of the land; when you understand the reality that Orthodox groups, backed by American money, are buying Arabs out of the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem in a systematic attempt to Judaise the area; when you witness the casual contempt with which Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem deal with Palestinians; and when you hear that, as in Britain, the government has lately revised the gun laws. This one, however, has been making it easier to carry one.

More often, though, Israel seems to be turning into Iran. Extreme orthodoxy is on the march, partly because people are turning to religion, partly because migration of Western, non-religious Jews is drying up, and partly because Orthodox Israelis breed like nuclear reactors: the 20 religious party MPs, for instance, have an average of six children each. Incidents like the one at the Wall and bizarre rabbinical pronouncements are now routine. It still comes as a shock, though, to visit the Jewish West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, just outside Hebron. Inside the gates there is a piazza leading to a beautifully-tended grave which is treated as a shrine. Bearded figures can be seen praying there regularly. It is the grave of Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Arab worshippers in Hebron in 1994. This is not Judaism; this is barbarism. The government does not formally condone the veneration of Goldstein, any more than it condones the powerful undercurrent of sympathy for Yigal Amir, the fanatic who murdered Rabin. But the tone of the administration is one of lingering hate.

While Israeli negotiators were talking to Yasser Arafat's officials and trying to put together a deal on Hebron, I was talking to David Bar-Illan, the prime minister's policy director and -- some say -- his eminence grise. He is an urbane and pleasant individual. What he says is extraordinary. Had Netanyahu, I wondered, learned anything from his time of office, particularly from the debacle over the opening of the temple tunnel in September, when rioting led to 75 deaths? "Yes," said Bar-Illan. "He's learned you can't trust the word of the Palestinian Authority. Before we worried about the violence from Hamas. Now we are worried about the Palestinian police.

"We expect Arafat to try it again. He doesn't like having to worry about book-keeping and garbage and that sort of thing. He loves tumult and turmoil and he thrives on it. One of the greatest crimes against Palestinians was getting him and his gangsters back from exile instead of democratising Palestinian society."

This does not sound like an administration serious about the possibility of peaceful coexistence. What is so astonishing is that, 49 years after the state's foundation, Israeli leaders are still unable to empathise with Palestinian resentments or to understand why Arafat has been such a successful articulator of them. Judaism is based on endurance and tradition and symbolism, not on rationality. Yet Israel expects the Palestinians to behave rationally, without regard to their own symbols or what is left of their dignity.

This incomprehension within the government is matched by the despair and bafflement of the defeated forces within Israel about their own failure. Peres's Labor Party -- and this may be unique in the democratic world -- represents an alliance between the business and the intellectual communities. A member of the Tel Aviv middle classes could spend years without meeting socially anyone who voted for Netanyahu's Likud. The most coherent psephological explanation lies in the huge group of recent Russian immigrants, who voted for Rabin in 1992 and switched sides, partly in response to the bus bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem which unhinged the promise of peace, and partly because their leader, Natan Sharansky, allied himself with Netanyahu.

But there is a vast mass of people who would have voted Likud anyway. Sederot is a town barely three miles from the Gaza Strip. Fifty years ago it was desert. Waves of migrants poured in from the countries where Jews were persecuted, first from North Africa, then from eastern Europe, to work, among other places, in the Osem chicken soup factory. Just after the election, the local chief rabbi blocked the path of a funeral procession and forced the family of a two-year-old boy, who had been crushed by a car, to leave the cemetery and bury him in unconsecrated ground outside. He said the mother was insufficiently Jewish. This is not exactly the equivalent of Middle England. It is more like what the French call La France Profonde, the country's deep and secret heart.

Yet it is not an old-fashioned place. Sederot is still expanding; new homes are going up everywhere. Just a few miles away there are almost a million Palestinians desperate for work. But here they import contract workers from Turkey and Romania and fear the Palestinians more than they need them. "Do people in Sederot want to make peace with the Arabs?" I asked the felafel seller in the main square. He looked up and down the street then shook his head. "Naah," he said. Sederot voted more than two to one for Netanyahu over Peres. But they still may not get quite what they bargained for. When they see a foreign journalist, opposition politicians seem inclined to reject the most damning interpretations of Israel's situation. As one put it to me: "Bibi's a stupid idiot, but he's still our stupid idiot."

Most believe that if the worst did come to the worst the country would rally round as it always has done and that everyone would obey orders. But they also believe the worst will not come to the worst and that the Bar-Illan view may not, in the end, prevail. "I think Bibi really believes you can't trust those Arabs," said Uri Dromi, who was chief spokesman for the Rabin and Peres administrations. "But I also think he's trying to buy time. Buy time till what? Till the Arabs change and become someone else? Even if the government doesn't want peace, they can't go back."

"I think the peace process will continue," says Michael Keren, professor of political science at Tel Aviv University, "because Netanyahu is the product of the modern, democratic Israel. All the pressure -- from the White House, business, the military, the technocrats, the media -- is towards peace. I don't think he will be able to escape his destiny." It will be a familiar sort of irony if one day Netanyahu joins his Likud predecessor, Menachem Begin, and Arafat himself on the list of unlikely winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. For the moment we have to content ourselves with the irony that a government elected to talk tough to the Arabs has found itself so globally reviled that its negotiating position has been immeasurably weakened. It is Netanyahu who needs the Hebron deal most urgently to prevent his government's international credibility disappearing completely. It is Arafat who suddenly and improbably seems the reasonable man.

The hope is that Keren is right and that Israel and Palestine's joint destiny has been postponed, not canceled. The alternative is still too horrific to contemplate.

The Guardian Weekly, Volume 155, Issue 26, for week ending December 29, 1996, Page 5