Nathan Shachar
Palestine’s new US-trained policemen at a ceremony in Ramallah in 2008
It was in April this year that my old friend Kan’an called me. “Something is happening here. You must come and have a look. Rafidiya is coming alive again.” The Rafidiya quarter is part of Nablus, the largest city in the northern West Bank. The quarter is home to its upper classes, its budding bourgeoisie and one of the largest universities in the West Bank. Before the lights went out in spring 2002, Rafidiya’s boulevard was the best shopping and dining stretch in the whole of the Palestinian territories.
To get there I had to pass an Israeli checkpoint on foot and squeeze into a yellow collective taxi on the other side. I introduced myself to my fellow passengers: “Please tell me what has been happening here lately, with you and with the economy.” The first time I dared to make such a declaration, many years ago, I winced with embarrassment. In Sweden, where I live, a request like this from a stranger would be met with awkward silence. But in Palestine, within seconds I was in the midst of a heap of complaints, tragedies, rumours, and pleas for help, while the cab rolled and spun wildly along the teeming road. The detachment of the young driver was impressive. To him the children, fowl and donkeys in our way seemed no more real than the obstacles in a computer game.
Such reckless driving is a hot issue in Nablus. Frequent taxi accidents often lead to clan blood feuds, and it is a measure of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s fearlessness that he has begun to set up speed traps. Fayyad is a strange politician in this part of the world, seemingly not content with siphoning public assets into his relatives’ bank accounts. He believes in changing things, one student tells me with awe. In Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital further south, the government is routinely cursed, but its leader is usually exempt, and even called bayad, the term for a chicken that lays many eggs.
Fayyad’s competence is much resented by the old-school, pocket-stuffing, back-door dealers of the Fatah movement. But the effect he has had on Nablus is remarkable. The town’s revival, and in particular the overhaul of its police force by the US general Keith Dayton, has been little reported in the western media. But it is a giant step forward for the people of this region and the first move to reverse the devastating effects of the violence that derailed the peace process in 2000.
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Joy Lo Dico
Imagine this: a steel staircase planted in the middle of a field, surrounded by rolling hillocks and swaying grasses, a fire escape going nowhere. If it were in London, it would be an art instillation. But it’s in the southwestern tip of Israel. I am standing on a deck at the top of the staircase with four fellow journalists and two Israelis, surveying the countryside. Looking over to where the sun is beginning to dip from the horizon, the countryside stops abruptly. Where there should be a horizon, there is instead a wall extending as far as the eye can see and behind it a blur of crumbling tower blocks and smog: the Gaza Strip. I recall recent television pictures of Israeli tanks surging towards the Hamas-controlled enclave. It must have happened around here but from the stillness you couldn’t tell.
Three months ago, I was stood outside the lsraeli embassy week after week, protesting over the Gaza war. Yet now I’m in Israel. I was invited on a trip organized by BICOM (the British Israel Communications and Research Centre), a gentler version of America’s AIPAC, whose mission is to improve our understanding of Israel. It feels the country has been getting a bad press lately.
The timing of this BICOM trip is no accident. When dusk falls this evening, 28th April, it will be the Israeli Remembrance Day. For 24 hours, Israelis commemorate the servicemen and women who have died for their country. A couple of years ago, it was expanded to include victims of terror. The BICOM team rolled out a map of the area, showing where the rockets and mortars being fired out of Gaza were landing—there have been 2,500 since Hamas took control—and what they were targeting, including the nearby Kibbutz Kfar Aza. This Remembrance Day they will also be remembering the 13 soldiers killed in the Gaza war and the 28 Israelis who were killed by rocket or mortar fire over the last eight years.
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Jo-Ann Mort
While February’s parliamentary elections in Israel signalled a move to the right by the Israeli population, the results have been tempered by the manoeuvring of incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By persuading the severely weakened Labor party (they came in fourth behind Likud, the centrist Kadima party headed by Tzipi Livni, and by a Russian-émigré dominated right wing party, Israel Beitenu) to join his government, Netanyahu has taken the right-wing gloss off of his party. But whether there is anything beneath the sheen, and indeed whether there is any real hope for the middle east peace process, could depend on outside forces.
This new government is a triumph for two men: Netanyahu and his incoming defence minister, Ehud Barak, who dramatically brought his Labour party back to government, even though it endured the worst electoral showing in the history of the state.
There’s a saying in Israel that a politician “doesn’t want to give up his Volvo”—the car usually offered to government ministers. In Labor’s case, this was certainly the reason for arguing their way back in. Barak and the older half of his party—ministers like “Fuad” Ben Eliezer and Matan Vilnai—are men who have nothing to do outside of government and see their roles as ministers as their own private full employment policy.
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Sara Wajid
No other single action on the world stage has mobilised second and third generation British Asians as quickly or fiercely as the invasion of Gaza. Not Iraq, not 9/11, not the de Menezes shooting, nothing.
Within hours the call to join demonstrations started, by text, email and Facebook. My invites came only from British Asian friends—mainly, but not exclusively, from “cultural” Muslims like me; often from the normally politically inactive, even from politically dormant suburban young mums. Old family friends who hadn’t contacted me for years, and who couldn’t possibly know where I stood on Palestine, got in touch, secure in an unspoken assumption that any right-thinking Asian would be on their side.
Although I was shocked by the civilian deaths in Gaza, this assumption quickly rankled. I stopped opening the bloodied baby corpse attachments. The unsubtle antisemitic undertone of calls for a Donna Karan boycott didn’t help.
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Jonathan Tel
Rhyming Life and Death
By Amos Oz, translated by Nicholas De Lange (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)
Amos Oz is a grandfather, both literally and in terms of his status in Israeli literature. He has published 31 books, 19 of which have appeared in English. Born in Jerusalem in 1939, of eastern European parents, he grew up on Amos Street—proof, as if children need such proof, that the world is coextensive with the imagination. He became left-wing during his teens, moved to a kibbutz and changed his surname from Klausner to Oz (which means “strength” in Hebrew). He now lives in Arad, a small desert city, and spends his weekends in the “so ugly it’s beautiful” city of Tel Aviv, where this latest novel is set.
Rhyming Life and Death was written a few years ago—although it is set in the early 1980s—and is excellently translated, as usual, by Nicholas De Lange. Whereas most Israeli novels are translated into American English, De Lange is British, and this affects the tone: the third-person narrator comes across as ironic and prone to understatement, the ranginess of his voice less apparent than in the original Hebrew. The novel’s protagonist, meanwhile, is identified throughout only as “the Author”—a (moderately) famous writer in his mid-forties, similar but far from identical to Oz. Whereas Oz is deeply connected to Israeli society, both as a public figure and through his family and friends, this fictional Author is detached, striving for connection. It is this provoking tension—the difference, distance and similarities between Israel’s grandest and most public man of letters and his isolated, struggling creation—that animates this obliquely autobiographical fiction.
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Keith Kahn-Harris
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Over the past couple of decades, the Jewish community in Britain has been enjoying a cultural renaissance. Yet despite this—indeed perhaps because of this—many prominent Jewish leaders and institutions now claim that Anglo-Jewry is in unprecedented danger.
The British Jewish community’s cultural lethargy used to estrange many of its leading intellectuals. As Stephen Brook wrote in The Club, his perceptive study of British Jewry in 1989: “scan the cultural pages of the Jewish Chronicle and weep.” But since the early 1990s there has been a concerted attempt, both within the mainstream institutions of Anglo-Jewry and at its more radical fringes, to change this. Jewish Book Week, which concluded on 2nd March 2009, drew in over 5,000 people this year, rivaling Cheltenham and Hay. The new Jewish Community Centre for London puts on a consistently exciting and often quirky programme of events; the annual Limmud conference (Limmud.org) brings together over 2,000 Jews for a festival of Jewish learning. There’s been a huge expansion in Jewish day schools which, even if you disapprove of faith schooling, cannot but be seen as evidence of a community willing to invest vast sums in its educational future. And on the other end of this ever widening spectrum, there’s the iconoclastic collective, Jewdas (jewdas.org), which puts on events in squats that mix radical Jewish learning and wild klezmer-DJing, and whose website viciously lampoons the Jewish great and good.
But this cultural flowering, typically a sign of a self-confident and energetic community, has run in tandem with a vocal campaign to convince the public that Britain’s Jews are under threat as never before. British Jewish community leaders, from Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks to novelist Howard Jacobson, have repeatedly and publicly expressed their alarm at what Sacks called in 2006 “a tsunami of anti-semitism.” Since the start of the second Palestinian intifada in autumn 2000, they claim, anti-Jewish feeling in Britain has visibly grown; disproportionate criticism of Israel, they say, masks a resurgence of Jew-hatred, manifested in everything from violent attacks against Jews by radical Islamists to campaigns to boycott Israel from the left.
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Bernard Avishai
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President Obama may be surrounded by experts, but no one seems to be telling him what he really needs to know about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: that both sides are divided peoples.
Most people know, roughly, that Palestine is two entities: a West Bank majority, nominally led by the Palestinian Authority—but really by a secular business and professional class in Ramallah—and an Islamist minority, centred in Gaza, run by an arguably pragmatic but unarguably totalitarian Hamas. What we have yet to learn, however, is that Israel is two entities also.
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Adam LeBor
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Away from the war in Gaza, another story is unfolding in Israel. Subtler and more nuanced than the conflict with Hamas and so far largely unnoticed by the world’s politicians and media, it has potentially far more serious implications for the future of the Jewish state. Israel’s Arab minority is becoming increasingly radicalised.
Tens of thousands of Arab citizens took to the streets of Sakhnin, in northern Israel, in January to protest against the Israeli army’s incursion into the Gaza strip. Some Arab activists claim that it was the largest protest of its kind since 1948, the year that Israel declared independence, which Palestinians call al Nakba, the catastrophe.
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John Lloyd
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In December, I was one of a handful of foreigners at a gathering of the Israel’s leading political scientists at the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI). This wasn’t a group of left-wingers; indeed, some of the most senior had served in cabinets of right-wing governments. Yet many were arguing that, 60 years after its bloody foundation, the state of Israel was no longer politically viable.
Yehuda ben Meir, a security hawk and a deputy foreign minister in the Begin and Shamir governments of the early 1980s, spoke of a “grave crisis of confidence which… extends to almost all major national institutions and organs of the state.” Exacerbated by second Lebanon war in the summer of 2006, the crisis had now reached “dangerous and almost catastrophic proportions.”
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Antony Lerman
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There were Jewish opponets to the war in Gaza. Yet the main body of Jewish opinion still backs Israel with few qualms, while there is little evidence that the protest letters, demo placards and signed adverts have been remotely heeded. Is Jewish dissent, therefore, a lost cause? Not quite.
In Britain, the number of Jewish groups opposing Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians has grown in recent years. They increasingly draw support from mainstream Jews, and provoke reaction from the Jewish establishment. In February 2007 the launch of Independent Jewish Voices, a group which urged a solution to the conflict based on human rights, was greeted with abuse from Jewish commentators, leaders and Zionist organisations—abuse so extreme that it betrayed signs of panic. This is a subtle but significant shift.
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