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.”
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