Frank Viviano Writes     Search for Peace Israeli politics a war casualty Young apathetic to terror battles Jerusalem -- Once, Lital Bar'on might have been the very portrait of a young Israeli political activist. Bright, serious and articulate, she is a graduate student in biblical studies, imbued with a deep sense of Jewish history. She was even raised on a kibbutz -- the defining experience for most of this nation's leaders from its birth in 1948. Yet Bar'on, 25, said: "I would never attend a political protest. I've stopped reading newspapers and watching television news." Her chief political sentiment, she added, is despair.   In interviews with young people across Israel, such expressions of alienation were repeated again and again. At a moment when the bloody, unresolved conflict with the Palestinians -- and the U.S.-led military campaign against terrorism -- have made Israel's future seem ever more precarious, many of the nation's best and brightest are opting out of politics. Israelis cite many reasons for the phenomenon, among them a pall of youthful political apathy that fell over much of the developed world in the booming 1990s. But most often, they echo Bar'on's allusion to despair, the psychological burden of reaching adulthood in a society that has been continuously at war, or preparing for it, for more than half a century. "I can't stand hearing about these things anymore," said a 28-year-old waiter at a Haifa hotel restaurant. "My parents are obsessed with politics, and look where it's gotten us -- nowhere. So my friends and I shut it out. It's the only way to remain sane in this country."   REPERCUSSIONS FROM '73 ATTACK Gilad Ben-Nun, 29, research director of the lobbying group Peace Now, believes the alienation originated with Israel's disastrous 1973 war with Egypt and Syria. Although Israel eventually mounted a successful counterattack, the surprise Arab assault took an unprecedented toll in casualties and profoundly eroded the nation's confidence, he said, with repercussions that continue today. The casualties included Ben-Nun's father, who was killed in a badly planned action against the Egyptian army in the Sinai Desert. "I suppose, like a lot of people my age, I grew up feeling that the system betrayed me, that the political structure never accepted responsibility for the 1973 fiasco," he said. "The trauma of that event paralyzed many of those who might have become leaders. It embittered them toward politics, taught them not to go there."   OLD POLITICIANS, OLD IDEAS Stagnation at the top levels of Israeli government, others point out, has dulled its attractions for young people with fresh ideas. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, 73, shares leadership in the current ruling coalition with Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres, 78, who also serves as foreign minister. Peres entered the public arena as commander of the Israeli Navy in 1948 and became director general of the Defense Ministry in 1956. Sharon led an infantry company in Israel's 1948 war against the Arabs, and rose to command the army's elite paratroop corps by 1956.   It is as though major figures from the years of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were still exercising power in the United States, but without the decisive flair -- or popular consensus -- that characterized Israeli leadership when Sharon and Peres were young, rising stars in the political landscape. The coalition directed by Sharon's conservative Likud Party and Peres' left- center Labor Party would be unwieldy even if the two ruled alone. But it also seats Cabinet ministers from six other parties, including Shas, favored by religiously orthodox Sephardim of North African origin, and Yisrael Ba'aliya, rooted in a community of 700,000 assertively secular Russian immigrants whose legislators hold Shas in contempt.   BIGGEST PROBLEM IS INSIDE ISRAEL As Bar'on put it, "The biggest problem in Israel isn't between us and the Arabs. It is inside Israel, the divisions between right and left, between people who are secular and people who are religious, between immigrants and those who were born here. And our political institutions only seem to make these problems grow deeper and larger."   Meanwhile, Sharon and Peres snipe at each other constantly while their colleagues scheme to replace them -- all amid the year-old Palestinian uprising, the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism, and Israel's military and diplomatic responses to both. "There are only two people who interest the (present) prime minister -- Benjamin Netanyahu and Bush," former Labor Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said, referring to Sharon's bitter Likud rival and the U.S. president. Ben-Ami is locked in a struggle with Peres over whether Labor should remain in the government at all. If it does, Ben-Ami flatly said, the party will wind up "in the political trash can."   Briefly, in the wake of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, there was a "fresh breeze of openness and pluralism blowing through the corridors of a hitherto stagnant establishment," said Haifa University political scientist Ilan Pappe. But the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin -- followed by the failed peace efforts of Prime Minister Ehud Barak, waves of Palestinian suicide attacks and the election last year of Sharon -- brought change to a shuddering halt. "It would take a very imaginative and determined visitor nowadays to find any trace of that openness and pluralism," Pappe said.   Observing from the sidelines, young people wonder when Israeli politics will focus on matters other than the Palestinian conflict or party infighting - - such as an unemployment rate that reached 8.9 percent in September.   'BARELY SCRAPING BY'   "Everything is connected," said Valery Gurevich, an immigrant hydroelectric engineering graduate from Ukraine who said he "is barely scraping by" as a carpenter in Tel Aviv. "If we spend money on a war against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, we can't do anything to improve the lot of our own people who need help."   Hirsh Goodman, a veteran political analyst, believes there are younger activists, on both the left and right, who are ready to replace the aging, increasingly ineffectual men who have been on the scene for Israel's entire life. But their chance to broaden the political debate and reinvigorate political life, he said, will only come if Israel moves beyond the conflict with the Palestinians.   "People feel that the challenge lies in getting there, in finding another statesman-soldier like Rabin" who is able to push the agenda forward, he said. The problem, Goodman added, "is that another Rabin has not been found." back to index page