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Falling asleep  on the watch
David Lisbona

"Lehiradem beshmira" (falling asleep on the watch) is one of countless expressions in colloquial Hebrew taken from the military experience. Almost all Israelis, male and female, do compulsory military service starting at age 18. The current period of compulsory service is 3 years for men and 21 months for women. Some become officers and the better soldiers and officers are strongly encouraged by their superiors to stay on in the professional army thereafter. At the age when kids in other countries are discovering their independence and studying or working, Israelis have to serve in the army in roles which may be boring, challenging or life-threatening. Young people are suddenly given serious responsibility, often for the lives of their colleagues, friends and civilians in the area in which they serve. Eighteen year olds who lived in the comfort of parental protection and had no more serious responsibility than doing homework and cramming for exams suddenly find themselves in situations of stress, exhaustion, danger or dilemma that would test any mature adult.

These are not mostly macho males venting Schwartzenegger fantasies (although some of them exist like in any society)- these are ordinary good kids like mine, Sarah's or those of friends. They are Daphnie who had computer and training jobs in her army service, Noam who was a platoon sergeant in basic training camp, Hadas who wants to go into a field role and Itamar who was at art high school and and will shortly be finishing 4 years of army service - 20% of his young life.

Every soldier in Israel must sometimes do guard duty, even those who have desk jobs in the army. Guard duty usually means standing guard (with a rifle, of course) or patrolling for several hours at the fence of some army camp or settlement either during the day or the night. It can be very cold (in the desert in winter) or excruciatingly hot (in the day in summer) and is usually deadly boring because 99.9% of the time nothing happens. A not uncommon lapse, therefore, amongst soldiers who are usually deprived of sleep anyway, is to fall asleep at guard duty, which, as you can imagine, is considered a very serious offence by the military .

Every soldier who has ever done guard duty (therefore almost every Israeli) knows the feeling of having to fight falling asleep while on guard and knows someone else who did, and was appropriately punished. From here "Falling asleep on the watch" has become a common idiom in Hebrew for letting something bad happen while one should have been awake and "on the watch". In this current difficult time for Israel (and the Palestinians) I am beginning to feel that "we," the liberals in Israel, fell asleep for many, many years in face of the consequences of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

I now remember that after the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 we liberals in Israel spoke frequently of "Hashtachim hakvushim" - the conquered territories - but the word "conquered" dropped out with time and we just spoke of "the territories" which sounds merely descriptive without any moral overtones. I believe (or the Israeli media led us to believe) that in the first years after 1967 the occupation was benign or even benevolent. The Palestinians were submissive and seemed to find the Israeli occupation no more oppressive than the Jordanian regime under which they had lived since 1948. On the contrary (so we were told), they were happy at the significantly increased standard of living, better infrastructure, social services and employment opportunities which grew out of connecting up to a much more developed economy than the one they had known.

But this Nirvana (if it ever existed) ceased to exist and in December 1987 the first Intifada (or popular uprising) by the Palestinians broke out and caught all of Israel off guard. It's like parents whose teenage son tells them suddenly that he intends to leave home. "But what's wrong?" they ask, "you have such a good home and loving parents". The point is that the parents, like Israel, do not realise that the son is growing up and wants more than his parents can ,or want to give him. The analogy, like all analogies, of Israel as the parent and the Palestinians as the son is not perfect but it does illustrate the patronising position that Israel adopted (and still adopts) towards the Palestinians. The Palestinians were (and still are) economically backward and the skilled, learned, enterprising and industrious Israelis looked down on these Arabs for the most as quaint peasants in a backward society. This is not much different to the way that America looks down at the Islamic world.

We Israelis who realised that we had conquered the territories in 1967 (unlike those on the right who consider that Israel "liberated" the territories) fell asleep while we should have been on guard against the corruption of occupation. As long as the Palestinians kept quiet we didn't spare a thought for them until they started to wake us up in ever more violent ways. Many, maybe most Israelis think it's just a bad dream and if we can "quieten" the Palestinians we can go back to life as normal and once again forget the existence of the Palestinians and their national aspirations. Some of us (as of now a distinct minority) feel differently.

The waking up is very painful. Painful to see the suffering and stress on both sides. Painful to see how desperate many Palestinians feel to lead them to perform barbarous acts of terror as the only way they can express their existence. Painful to realise that we, the Jews, who have known so much prejudice and oppression have now become oppressors ourselves. Painful to realise that the return of the Jews to Zion was not, after all, a marriage made in heaven. The early Zionists used to talk of "A people without a country and a country without a people". It's difficult to wake up and realise that there was and is another people in this small strip of land. The early Zionists bought land from the Arabs and thought that they had acquired ownership over the whole country. But the Palestinians have grown from disenfranchised peasants toiling the land to a people that wants independence, and that right must be acknowledged and fulfilled.

Sharing one's house with a people whom you thought were either servants or nonexistent is not easy but is unavoidable. We, the Jews in Israel, need help in readjusting, and the Palestinians need help in realising that both sides have a right to peace and security in this house. Even if and when the Israelis come to some arrangement with the Palestinians, I seriously doubt whether we will have peace. Israel is but one aspect of the humiliation and the anger that many of the 1 billion Muslims feel against the Western world, and Israel - the successful, rich, Westernised democratic country - is in their throats right here at the apex of the Middle East. The Arabs would certainly feel better if Israel were to be wiped off the face of the earth but that's an indulgence that I'm not prepared to grant. It's going to be very, very tough to give the Palestinians enough of a state they can live with in peace and prosperity, and Israel enough of a state for it to survive and prosper in security.

Postscript: Sept.11 was also a wake up call. For G. W. Bush it was a call to protect the USA from the dangers (and murderous consequences) of global terrorism. For some of the rest of us it is also a call to re-examine the superiority and hegemony of Western over other civilizations.


Democracy In Action
David Lisbona

On Sunday night, March 10, 2002, Israel's right-wing held a mass demonstration in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. This is the same plaza in front of the Tel Aviv City Hall where Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin was assassinated in November 1995 at the end of a peace rally.

Between 60,000 - 100,000 people attended that rally (compared to 15,000 who attended the left-wing peace rally 3 weeks earlier). The left-wing press reported 60,000, the right-wing reported 100,000. Whatever, say 80,000,  I believe the proportions 80,000 to 15,000 fairly accurately represent the current split in Israeli public opinion between the right and the left. The right-wing is better organised, more mobilised and more motivated than the left and it shows in the results i.e. how many people they can get out on the streets to demonstrate. There are few more direct indicators of the democratic will.

In brief, the positions of the right and left are as follows: Right:  We have to be strong, we are in a war, we are not moving (out of the territories), we will not dismantle Jewish settlements, we should encourage and support the army to do whatever is necessary [even killing innocent Palestinians - my parentheses] in order to stamp out terror, Arafat is a murder who cannot be trusted, the Palestinian Authority should be destroyed or dismantled. Left:  We recognize the Palestinians' aspirations for a national home, we abhor the repression and humiliation inflicted on the Palestinian population by the Israeli army, we believe both Israelis and Palestinians have the right to peace and security, we consider the Israelis' oppression of another people morally repugnant and unacceptable, we call for either separation or withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories and for the dismantling of the Jewish settlements.

The politicians are, of course, well aware of the numbers on the street and therefore it's not surprising that there are very few left-wing voices heard in the Knesset (Israel's parliament) or in the corridors of power. However frustrated the Western world may be at Israeli government actions or inaction, they are a reasonably accurate reflection of the current will of the Israeli people. Israel is still the only democracy (with free elections and freedom of expression) in the Middle East. You and I may disagree with the majority of Israelis but we have no right to supercede the democratic will.  The best we can do is to change it or to hope for outside (American and maybe European) intervention to impose a compromise solution on Israel and the Palestinians.


Don't Just Stand There

American Policy in the Middle East - An Israeli View

What Americans Can do for Peace the Middle East - A Palestinian View

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