Tel Aviv
A week ago I arrived here, and already the atmosphere was a bit surreal. I would sit outside in a beachfront restaurant, enjoying a warm summer breeze, music, and delicious grilled fish, as scores of young people walked the boardwalk. You felt that this half of the country at least was at peace. Tel Aviv’s large white-sand beach was packed by day. But in the evening it was hard not to notice the military planes that passed overhead every few minutes on their way north. Israel was surely at war.
I’m here cohosting a group of European journalists, writers, and broadcasters from a half dozen different countries, all of whom are visiting Israel for the first time. Conventional wisdom early in our trip was that certain places in the north would be exempt from the violence. We had planned a trip to Tiberias, with a dinner on the Sea of Galilee. That was until we heard from Yaara, the manager of the Decks restaurant, who told us a rocket had hit nearby. Windows were damaged, she said, but “God would protect us” if we still wanted to come.
Self-preservation concentrates the mind and turns you into a defense geek. The Katyusha has a range of 12 to 15 miles. The Fajr-3 and the Fajr-5 can sail approximately 25 and 45 miles, respectively. When we arrived, my sources told me that Hezbollah might have a number of long-range Iranian missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv. Within 48 hours, Israel had destroyed an Iranian Zelzal rocket with a range of up to 200 km. That would have brought Tel Aviv into range. Since then the Israelis have destroyed another 19.
I cannot say I have felt entirely safe in Jerusalem. The Israelis caught a suicide bomber near the Jaffe Gate just before we arrived. There has been much talk about the other side opening a third front. With rockets streaming in from Gaza and Lebanon, there has been little reason to believe West Bank terrorists would stay out of the game. A day after we left Tel Aviv, another suicide bomber was nabbed north of the city. As I write, yet another suicide bomber is said to be on the loose in the same area. For our tour through the old city, we hired two security men to accompany our group.
In Jerusalem, the King David Hotel has become, once again, a center of backroom kibitzing in a time of crisis. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman passes one way through the lobby; Israeli politician and former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, the other. E.U. foreign policy chief Javier Solana strolls down an adjacent hallway with former Mossad head Efraim Halevy. You have to wonder whether Halevy, a former ambassador to the E.U., can make any headway. In his recently published memoir, Man in the Shadows, Halevy says if you take European arguments to their logical conclusions, “then only the disappearance of the State of Israel would succeed in pacifying the insatiable desires of the Arab world.” This may sound a touch extreme, but Solana lives up to the caricature. When asked by a television reporter whether the axis of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah has been behind the current conflict, Solana replies by saying that he does “not want to mention names.” In another interview, Solana is pushed in vain to admit that Hezbollah belongs on the E.U.’s terrorist list.
I think Gideon Samet, the prominent liberal-left columnist for Haaretz, shocked our group a little. Samet is not exactly a hard-liner. He has a healthy European-style dislike of the American president. He has argued for dialogue with Hamas. Now he tells these nice European journalists that the current Israeli operations in Lebanon constitute a “just war.” This is difficult for the group to swallow. The European narrative seems to go like this: Hezbollah kidnaps two Israeli soldiers; Israel seeks revenge by bombing the hell out of Lebanon. There’s nothing more to say.
As a result of this blinkered view, much of the media coverage has been deplorable. A doctor treating children at a hospital in the northern city of Safed could barely control his frustration. His hospital, which serves Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Bedouins, was hit by a Hezbollah rocket last week, and this “soften spoken gentleman,” as one of my European colleagues put it, wants to know why the BBC is obsessed with legitimate Israeli action against Hezbollah. Europe’s pols seem to be reading from the same script as its media. Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has lambasted Israel for using “abusive force that does not allow innocent human beings to defend themselves.” After a public appearance in Spain last week, someone placed a Palestinian scarf around Zapatero’s neck. The prime minister allowed himself to be photographed in it.
There can be no doubt that Hamas set the stage for all this. Israel withdrew from Gaza, and the Palestinians celebrated their independence in the ensuing months by sending some 600 rockets into Israel. Hamas then raised the ante by kidnapping an Israeli soldier. As a somewhat liberal writer friend here puts it, “If you keep poking a lion, sooner or later you’re going to get swatted with a big paw.” As for Hezbollah, before nabbing those two other Israeli soldiers, it had already begun firing its own rockets into Israel from southern Lebanon, a detail many European commentators overlook. What’s more, the attacks began coincidentally at a moment when Iran was failing to respond to the rather magnanimous U.S.-E.U. proposal on Tehran’s nuclear file. Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton’s former envoy, sees a clear line to Iran. President Bush rightly names Syria, too. The E.U.’s Solana, however, is loath to mention names.
Israel and Europe can trade together wonderfully, but the dialogue about security is nearly hopeless. Israel wants to smash Hezbollah, a state within a state and a wholly owned Iranian subsidiary. Countries like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all aware of Iran’s regional ambitions, don’t seem to mind. Lebanon would surely be better off if the Israelis succeeded. But Europe wants an end to the conflict as soon as possible, regardless of the consequences. Some actually believe that a prisoner exchange–that was initially the Hamas and Hezbollah proposal–would end the “cycle of violence.”
The Israelis, goes the line, destroy families, imprison youths, and even hold young women in detention! According to a recent study by Shabak, the Israeli FBI, Palestinians are responsible for 24,000 assaults on Israeli civilians since September 2000. One hundred and forty three suicide bombers, the majority between 17 and 24 years old, have killed 513 Israelis. As for Palestinian women under Israeli lock and key, I like the story of Achlam Tmimi. In her early twenties, she is serving 16 consecutive life sentences for helping a suicide bomber blow up a pizzeria, killing 16. She says she would do it again. I am also fond of the story of another infamous young woman who had made a date with an Israeli teenager on the Internet. Two days later his body was found riddled with bullets. Five years later, the young woman, Amneh Muna, is a hero for many in the West Bank. Poverty and despair account for all this? I guess I am skeptical. I am not entirely convinced that putting these folks back on the streets is really the best way to lasting peace and reconciliation.
Jeffery Gedmin is director of the Aspen Institute Berlin and a member of the advisory board of Knowing Israel, a study tour program for journalists.
